I was fourteen years old in 1975 when my brother Kevin introduced me to Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip. Along with newspaper clippings, mental health records, and oral history, Lesy collected in this extraordinary book a number of photographs made from glass plate negatives burned by a turn-of-the-century Upstate Wisconsin photographer named Charles Van Schaik. My ancestors immigrated to Upstate Wisconsin from Norway during the 1800’s. I was at first shocked, and then deeply moved by the fact that the people in the pictures looked exactly like the ones in our family’s photo albums; the stories in the book were eerily similar to the family stories I had been growing up hearing. Here were stories to tell about the sort of people I knew in my genes. (One, in particular, is my namesake and ancestor Dorn, a Lutheran pastor who, after a stint as an inmate at the Mendota Asylum for the Insane in Madison, hung himself.) I began teaching myself to notate music a few months later, determined to one day write an opera on the subject.

In 1982, during the last few months of her life, my mother began writing a libretto for me inspired by Schaik’s photographs and Lesy’s book. It featured four characters: a mental patient, a psychiatrist, a town gossip, and the editor of a small town newspaper. They lived on farms and in small towns at the end of the nineteenth century. Mother died before contributing more than a scenario and the words for a single aria, so the opera became a memorial to my mother as well as the many other unsung farmers and laborers from whom I am descended. It’s the task of a lifetime. That is why Songs of Madness and Sorrow is the self-contained torso of a much larger stage work - an opera that I am still working on as I pen these lines during the winter of 2001.

During the summer of 1996 my marriage ground to a hostile halt. I had quit my teaching job of ten years, had learned that my brother Britt was dying of cancer, had no commissions, and there were no prospects for future work. Clinically depressed, I was grateful for the job I had as a coffee-jerk. All things prideful were burning away; my identification with my namesake, Dorn, was frightening in it’s acuity. It is possible that Paul Sperry saved my life when, out of the blue, he called one afternoon to commission a new piece: 'Anything you need to write right now, Daron. For pity’s sake, you should be composing.' I never picked up my last Starbuck’s paycheck.

Instead, I immersed myself in the composition of Songs of Madness and Sorrow. The piece addresses the two main responses to the childlike feelings of helplessness, panic and rage created by the inhuman ravages of simple bad luck (Acts of the Market Economy) and epidemic diseases (Acts of God) in small Wisconsin towns at the end of the nineteenth century. These two responses are both paranoid in nature. One manifested itself in obsessive-compulsive behavior (which can make every person, from butcher to candlestick maker, more productive); the other was simple paranoia which arose from the realization that things hadn’t turned out, in reality, the way that everyone, even the newspapers, had said it would. This is the interesting point, because this normally abnormal reaction was caused by the discovery of truth, not the creation of delusion. While composing the piece in New York City during July of 1996 -- the AIDS epidemic raging on and my life in a shambles -- it seemed to me that things hadn’t fundametally changed since 1896.

I sought comfort and guidance by surrounding myself with the strangely familiar, late nineteenth century dignity that runs through the “found” texts that I, like Lesy, culled from period newspaper articles, advertisements, fiction, mental health records, and oral history. I spun these texts into an opera without a plot -- a dramatic cantata. In place of a traditional narrative, the piece moves through a series of emotional landscapes. There are four characters: a Newspaper Editor, a Psychiatrist, an Advertiser of the “School of Magnetic Healing,” and a Lutheran Pastor (Dorn?), who opens the piece with an Invocation and closes it with a Credo (the only stretch of the libretto that my mother managed to complete before her death) and a Blessing. The tenor soloist portrays all the roles. Superficially, these characters may seem merely eccentric, but embraced compassionately for who they were (ordinary people, mainly) and the sort of world in which they lived, their humanity shines warmly, inspiringly through.

"I feel quite a kinship to composer Daron Hagen (b 1961) and this album. Both of us hail from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have Norwegian ancestors who lived in northern Wisconsin, and are alums of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where two of the three groups heard here are based. Perhaps my objectivity is tainted from the get-go, but I must say that this is an outstanding presentation of riveting music.

"The centerpiece of the program is Songs of Madness and Sorrow (1997), based on texts from Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip (University of New Mexico Press). This eye-opening book uses newspaper clippings and photographs to tell of the insanity and mayhem that seemed to sweep through rural Wisconsin in the 1890's — a time when the gap between the immensely rich and the grindingly poor grew ever larger, and when northwoods winters imposed terrible hardships.

"One of the texts Hagen chose appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal in February 1900: 'Mike Grazialny, an employee at the Menasha Wagonware Company, went violently insane while at work. He was taken with a fit of insanity and rushed out of the shop where he was employed. He began to yell most frantically. It was not long before every one of the thousand workers in the shop joined in with his yells. They just didn't know the man was crazy. The entire city was awakened by the din.' Another is from the log of the Mendota State Mental Hospital: 'Admitted June 20th, 1901. Resident of Jackson County. Age 34. American. Married. Seven children. Poor. Melancholia — fear of some injury by the devil or from some other person. Insomnia. Filhty. Emaciated. Extreme weakness — tremor — very religious.' And so it goes through hundreds of reports.

"Hagen's music fits this sort of thing perfectly, and I sense that he found plenty of inspiration when composing it. It is mesmerizing.... Tenor Paul Sperry does an excellent job of delivering the text clearly and changing characters for each, and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony supports him with sensitivity and conviction.

"Hagen had the fragile late-19th Century Wisconsin psyche in mind when he wrote his Serenade for Ten Instruments (1999), but he meant to portray how far we have come since then. 'I imagine it performed outdoors on a beautiful, cool, late-summer evening on the rolling lawn of a prairie-style home somewhere along the shores of Lake Mendota, the smell of grilling brats, newly-cut grass, lake water, and Leinenkugel beer in the air--perhaps with the now-abandoned Mendota Asylum for the Insane indistinctly in sight across the waters?' This image is conveyed quite nicely by the music, which has an out-of-doors atmosphere quite in keeping with serenade tradition. The playing by the Oakwood Chamber Players is graceful and expressive, especially in the lovely Intermezzo.

"And then there is Hagen's Concerto for Brass Quintet (1995), written for and performed by the Wisconsin Brass Quintet. The composer's notes describe in detail the five movement work's organization. I'll summarize by saying 'Sennets' is splashy and based on triadic pitch sets, 'Melodia' lyrical and wistful, 'Invention' syncopated in Torke-like minimalist style, 'Romance' darkened by flugelhorns and euphonium, and 'Tuckets' all blaring fanfares. This outstanding piece is given a bold reading that is full of variety, though my sense is that 'Invention' would have benefitted from a lighter, bubblier approach."

Songs of Madness and Sorrow, is a dramatic cantata created for tenor Paul Sperry which offers us a slice of the kind of music Hagen has become most known for. At first I was worried that the 19th century Midwest narrative might degenerate into mere nostalgic America, but through Hagen's keen text-setting abilities, a collection of historic Wisconsin newspaper articles and advertisements, mental health records and oral accounts, becomes a riveting one-man opera and a dialogue with a forgotten past that feels strangely familiar in our own time. Serenade for Ten Instruments, scored for wind quintet, trumpet, string trio and double bass, opens with a return to the fiery post-minimalist rhythmic energy of the brass quintet's third movement but soon morphs into more dramatic territory (much of this music derives from material originally composed for Hagen's opera Bandanna). All in all, this is music that will grab you on first listen and reward you further each time you return to it."

"Paul Sperry portrayed a large cast of characters that he brought to life with clear diction, subtle actions and expressive vocal inflections. Effectively supporting the vocal line was a vivid instrumental fabric of barely audible string noodling, melodious fragments for winds and perpetual-motion passagework for marimba [sic]."