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Daron Hagen

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prose

Hagen in Philadelphia lecturing and give masterclasses as a faculty member of Ghenady Meierson’s Russian Opera Workshop at the Academy of Vocal Arts. In this photo he is lecturing on “The Queen of Spades” on 23 July 2012. (p/c: Leonard Meierson)

On Teaching

July 27, 2025

Beginnings

I’ve wondered aloud why and how dogs howl at the moon, described with admiration the raw power of Kurt Cobain shredding “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” described what I feel is the noble sadness of Maria Callas, the rugged craftsmanship of Haydn, the ebullient time-bending of Steve Reich, the timeless idiosyncrasy of Satie’s Socrate, the emotional brutality of Richard Wagner, the insouciance of Gershwin, the unknowability of Bach, the happy-sad of Mozart. (As if the preceding list of a few Western artists begins even to scratch the surface of what music is and can and will be.) For forty years, giving masterclasses, lessons, teaching courses, and offering coachings, I’ve corrected notation, passed along oral history, encouraged creative risk, and asked what I’ve thought were good (or at least pertinent) questions. I’ve cautioned against pleasing aesthetic role models and railed against the way that young composers are often encouraged to put leashes around their own creative spirits. I’ve tried to share the puzzlement and ennobling essence of music’s conundrum — how it is an abstract art that nevertheless channels emotion; how, while being about nothing at all, music is about love.

I am twenty-six years old, sitting cross-legged in a circle with my Bard College undergraduate composition students in October 1988, wrapped in sweaters, drinking coffee sheltered by the leaves at their zenith against an aquamarine sky, making musical instruments out of objects we’ve collected in the surrounding woods. Three don’t read music; one senior has already spent three years studying with Joan Tower and wants to write an orchestra piece; one is a gifted cellist studying with Luis Garcia Renart; one is a singer-songwriter, the son of a famous folk musician; one is a visual arts major thinking about changing majors. “What are we going to play first?” asks one. “We’re going to arrange the first 25 bars of Stravinsky’s Dans Sacral from the Rite of Spring for us to play together.” “When do we get to compose something?” asks another. “We create solo pieces for ourselves first, then perform them for each other; then we each write something for the entire ensemble.” “Do we write them down?” “Yes, this time, but maybe not the next time. Notation isn’t everything. I’ll show you how,” I answer, taking a pull on my coffee and feeling really, really good. Their serious faces intent on their busy hands, as they create their instruments. And me talking to them about the basics — melody, harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, narrative — as we work the way that Mother and I used to when she washed and I dried, not looking directly at one another, but communicating directly while focused on something else, like looking out the window at the trees resuming green.

The eminent New York composer Louis Karchin and I had met at Yaddo, and he needed an assistant conductor. In time, he passed along the role of conductor to me. So, from 1988-90 I conducted the NYU-Washington Square Chorus. It wasn’t really a teaching job, but it remains the first entry on my CV. At the same time, Fran Richard at ASCAP called to tell me that Joan Tower was interested in offering me a job teaching at Bard College. I told her I wasn’t interested, and that I was too young to teach. I’d only just left Juilliard. She told me to do what I was told. I told David Del Tredici about Joan’s offer and he grimaced. Palms extended out and down, he exhaled explosively: “God, how I hate teaching,” he said. “It causes me physical pain. But Aaron [Copland] told me to take the job at Harvard, and I’ve taught somewhere ever since.” Another great American composer pianist, Michael Torke, related to me recently how his mother insisted that he “share his gift” as a child by teaching piano lessons, a task he detested. As though these two extraordinary artist’s musical compositions alone were not gift enough to the world! Michael rightly points out that some artists, like Leonard Bernstein, simply cannot help themselves: they are born teachers compelled to teach.

When Joan’s call came, like David and Michael, I wasn’t interested in teaching, but I agreed to take the train Upstate to Poughkeepsie for an interview. Nobody came to meet me. Vastly relieved, I called Fran and told her that I had been blown off and she said where are you and I told her and she said you got out a stop early, Bard is the next stop, so call them. I called Joan, who told me not to worry, come back next week. I did, and ended up teaching at Bard from 1988-1997, ending my stint as an Associate Professor, having taught the entire undergraduate theory sequence, counterpoint, ear-training, orchestration, score reading, and chamber music. Leon Botstein, Bard’s polymathic president, conducted several graduating seniors’ orchestral works each year in concert with the American Symphony Chamber Orchestra, providing a powerful incentive to the more artistically ambitious students and their composition teachers to get cracking.

“As for the Princeton Atelier, I’m learning more than I’m teaching!” I jot in my journal in January 1999. “8 composers, 8 singers, 8 writers, Paul Muldoon, and me in a room equals magic: I talk about art songs; Paul talks about poetry and reads some; I talk about pop song forms and sing some; we both talk about prosody from opposite directions (very cool); Paul shares lyrics; the composers set the poets’ words; the singers sing the new songs; I coach; Paul critiques —it’s a crazy-effective format I called From Art Song to Parola Scenica and it’s the most fun I’ve had teaching since the 80s.” Sighing, I turn to the 802 invoices coming in from the copyists for the performance materials, and the printout of the news that I am going to have to hire a baritone at my own expense to sing the role of Kane in the upcoming premiere of Bandanna in Austin. “Well,” I write, “the money I get paid for teaching the Atelier will just about cover these costs. But this is what I signed up for.”

During the 1993-94 school year, and again during the 97-98 school year, I guest taught as a Visiting Professor at the City College of New York for David Del Tredici during his sabbatical years — private composition students, of course — but also orchestration and analysis. From 1996-98 I joined the Curtis faculty, giving composition lessons to “non majors” in what was described to me by Gary Graffman as a sort of holding pattern until Ned retired.

I’m thirty-one, teaching Ned Rorem’s students for him in the Barber-Menotti Room at Curtis in 1992, playing and singing through their one act operas and offering feedback. In my diary on the way down to Philadelphia to teach, I write, “I am only about ten years older than they, and I fastidiously eschew Ned’s “Ex cathedra pronunciamenta” as only a middle class, Midwestern Lutheran can. It’s entirely possible that my young charges might interpret this – as David Diamond predicted they would a few years ago – as a lack of stature.” When I arrive, I learn that one of them has musicalized (as had I a decade earlier when I sat where he is sitting) a playlet by a famous playwright friend of our teacher’s. “Did you get the rights?” I ask. “No.” So I launch into a long monologue about the importance of, and the process of, acquiring rights. Immersed in my spiel, I fail to read the room. The prosody is awkward, but the music is brittle and interesting. Feeling pulled off center, I forget to praise the work before I critique it. I make a few comments about strong syllables on weak beats and line readings and then come up for air. I am entirely unprepared for the lesson to have been a flop, but it is.

As for teaching musical skills, I admit to having benefitted from the protégé effect during my first few years on the Bard faculty, when I was essentially only a chapter ahead of my students, unsnarling musical theory nomenclature in order to figure out a way to teach it myself because I had tested out of having to take the courses myself in graduate school at Juilliard, having taught myself theory as a kid from Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, and then again – differently — having learned Bruce Benward’s theoretical system at the University of Wisconsin, and then Felix Salzer and Carl Schachter’s books (heavily into Heinrich Schenker), which were made to make sense — to me, at least — by the brilliant musicians and theoreticians Edward Aldwell and Ford Lallerstedt, at Curtis. The same went for teaching ear training, which I had learned by singing using “moveable do” as a kid at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, then scale degrees in Madison, then “fixed do” at Curtis. What a mess.

Can composition even be taught? Ned’s article, “Learning With Daron,” in the April 1993 issue of Opera News, addressed the question excellently. He pointed out that I teach reflexively, the way that I compose and breathe. I find craft easy to impart, and the process of fostering creativity practically impossible. One can go down a thousand rabbit holes through self-indulgence — abusing the use of parable as a teaching tool by sharing stories whose meaning exceed the pupil’s comprehension; allowing practical advice to devolve into cod psychology and so-called “life lessons.” (Mistakes I made for years.) I know that the student must desire to learn, as I desired to learn from Ned, and that good teaching is bespoke. “I’ve never been a parent before,” I admit to my sons occasionally — usually after a particularly spectacular paternal fail. I am still learning how to be a composer myself, still trying to figure out what composing is. That’s a start. It’s been nearly thirty years since I’ve sat through a faculty meeting, despite having been delighted to have served as a guest lecturer, composer in residence, artist in residence, swashbuckler du jour, or whatever, at over a dozen educational institutions, not to mention masterclasses all over the place. Increasingly, I find myself feeling when I teach composition not as though I am singing so loudly that I cannot hear other peoples’ voices, but that the societal din through which I am trying to express myself is almost completely drowning me out. All that is left are unanswered questions.

I am forty years old, doing double days during the sweltering summer of 2001 in Manhattan—jury duty during the day, composing and practicing in the evenings—when the symptoms of appendicitis present: severe pain in the lower right side of my abdomen, taut belly, and cold sweat. Like everyone without insurance, my only recourse is the emergency room. Fortunately, we wrap up jury deliberations that day, and Doctor F., the retired doctor who composes with a passion usually reserved for Byronic heroes, is scheduled for his weekly lesson. He has me stretch out on the Monk Bed. Tapping my belly like a cantaloupe, he asks, “How long?” “A few hours,” I reply. “Probably early enough to address with Cipro,” he says, shaking his head doubtfully. Handing me the prescription, he says, “We will walk to the pharmacist together. If it doesn’t clear up within six hours, go straight to the E.R. You’re taking a grave risk, Daron.” “Why now?” I ask him. He sighs. “I believe you have brought this on yourself, Daron,” he says. “People can make themselves sick. That’s what you have done.” I look at the floor. “Why do you want to die?” he asks, quietly. I look up at him sheepishly. The score of Pierre Boulez’s Répons is spread before us on the table. I am supposed to be teaching him, but he, thirty years my senior, teaches me. He motions at the notes meticulously etched on the oversized pages like maps of neurons in a brain. “You understand these notes. I understand some medicine. The notes add up to more than their sum. Your life decisions do the same. Change your life.”

Middles

From 2005-2013 I served as the festival artistic director and chair of faculty (ringleader?) for the Seasons Fall Music Festival in Yakima, Washington. The two-week festival consisted of three symphonic concerts, eight chamber concerts, three recitals, and three jazz concerts (visiting artists like Karrin Allyson, Gary Burton, Chick Corea, Branford Marsalis, Bill McGlaughlin, and Marvin Stamm). In addition to the administrative service of overseeing the activities of our twelve-member faculty, I performed and coached chamber music and taught composition. I delighted in the creation, with Pat Strosahl and Brooke Creswell, of an overall festival ethos that programmed  jazz and concert music in equal portion, and interspersed performances of new works throughout to eliminate stylistic ghettoization. The curriculum itself centered on the pairing, for the duration of the festival, each conductor with a composer (they even roomed together). The entire cohort attended every masterclass by visiting artists, scholars, and faculty. I programmed films whose scores were then discussed, Pat curated shows by Washington visual artists and emceed wine tastings of local Yakima cheer, and I booked poets to give readings.

Composers mounted the podium; conductors composed. Everyone bonded over their shared dread of movement class first thing in the morning together and were subject to the same expectations. Every participant attended every Yakima Symphony concert, and received lessons from our composers (Gilda Lyons, Miles Hankins, Alberto Demestres, and me) and the conductors (Brooke Creswell, Donald Thulean, Lawrence Golan, and Robert Frankenberry), as well as chamber music time with the Finisterra Piano Trio and guest ensembles like the Imani Winds and Kairos String Quartet. At the final orchestral concert, each conductor led the premiere of their partner composer’s work; the conductors also led movements of standard repertoire. So many premieres. The festival also presented the American premiere of Bernard Jacobsen’s own retelling of the Stravinsky Soldier’s Tale, conducted by Lawrence Golan, with Bernard, glass of local Yakima wine in hand, providing the witty, erudite narration; Michael Wemberly blowing the roof off the place with an enormous percussion ensemble; Seattle Opera’s David McDade discussing vocal preparation; an elegant cabaret night sung by Rob and Gilda for which I arranged and played a setlist that bounced from Weill to Raposo, Mancini to Blitzstein, Rorem to Gershwin to Sondheim to Eisler, Bernstein to Brel,  and on and on. It was fun. Writer and critic Doug Ramsey chronicled it all on artsjournal.com in his column Rifftides, providing context reviews, and a national audience to what we were achieving. The commitment was not just to diversity in programming, hiring, and the choosing of festival students, but to the creation of a mutually-supportive, non-competitive space where creative risk

The function of teaching composition in music’s eco-structure is like sowing wildflower seeds in a fallow field to nurture the soil. Not all of the seeds will grow. Most, in fact, will go out and do something else, having developed a better understanding of what being creative feels like, enhanced communication skills, and an appreciation for the way creative problem solvers think. Learning to grow is the point, not learning to grow like one’s teacher. I was aware in the mid-eighties when I left Juilliard before completing the doctorate that academia was a square hole and I was a round peg. The academic world’s entirely understandable need to require of its citizens (at least semi-empirical) proof of intellectual credibility seemed less important to me back then than immersing myself in an artist’s examined life. I didn’t suppose that I couldn’t be bothered to teach, or that I viewed an academic position as a Plan B, but I knew that my growth as an artist was being hindered by further institutional supervision.

“Shame,” I tell the thirty or so workshop participants and audience of about 200 at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia on a gorgeous September afternoon in 2012 as part of the Russian Language Workshop, “is the nuclear reactor that powers the libretto of Pique Dame.” Pausing for emphasis. “Of course it appeals to this Lutheran Boy.“ A few chuckles. “Sha-a-a-m-e,” I sing, sizing the air in front of me as the audience. Rolling laughter. “’Life is a game.’ Now, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that life is light pickings. It means that games are brutal, like death.” “Marc gave lectures for money,” I recall Virgil Thomson telling me back in the 80s when I worked for him at the Chelsea as I continue to lecture for the next hour. “You shouldn’t do it — it’s part of the ‘associated skills racket’ and too easy. You get a taste for the attention and then it’s all over.” Yet, here I am, lecturing for the fifth year at Ghenady Meierson’s invitation, and learning as much as I am teaching, for how lucky am I to have been paid to spend all those days learning and internalizing Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades — a piece I ought to know? Can it be that Ghena has engaged me to lecture on it partly because we’ve known one another from the beginning and he feels I will grow as an opera composer through familiarity with this work? Yes.

As Ghenady quipped to me over dinner at the Art Alliance following one of the lectures for his program, “for someone who isn’t an educator, you sure do teach a lot.” By the time I accepted in my fifties a fascinating position at the Chicago College of Performing Arts from 2017-2023 (during which I composed, mounted, and directed my first two “operafilms”) I’d already done stints at Baylor University (Artist in Residence 1998-99), as the Sigma-Chi Huffman Composer in Residence at Miami University (1999-2000), Artist in Residence at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (2000-2002), as the Franz Lehar Composer in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh (2006-2007), and as a Master Artist in Residence at the Princeton Atelier (1998, 2005). I have come to accept that the most valuable ongoing role I’ve played as an educator is as a visiting artist, not as a faculty member. A flinger of wildflower seeds himself strewn by the resident faculty in their students’ paths in order to invigorate debate, encourage critical thinking, shed light, make good trouble and then, importantly … to leave, having myself grown immeasurably through the process.

“But I’ve never called cues before,” my composition student says, headset on, already learning on the job, perched between the professional lighting designer and production manager at the worktable in the cavernous old Studebaker Theater in Chicago’s Loop sometime in September 2018 as I direct the staging and filming of my operafilm Orson Rehearsed around her. “You’re doing a great job,” I say because she has risen to the challenge and is doing a great job. They all are — all the Chicago College of the Performing Arts performers, all of my composition students, working side by side with my New Mercury Collective team — learning by doing, empowered, faces intent. “Here are the tools,” I say to each in turn, “make something.” I look at the stage, still happily washing dishes and looking out the window and teaching the basics — dramaturgy, using Cubase, taking and giving production notes, balancing a live orchestra with pre-recorded sound, theatrical and operatic protocol and tradition — as the house lights dim and together, we reenact the parable of the Cave.

Ends

Whether it was for an audience of one, as it was when I was lucky enough to receive a lesson, or millions, as it was when he presented his Young Peoples Concerts on television, Leonard Bernstein couldn’t help but teach. His generosity of spirit as a teacher (despite Oscar Levant’s ungenerous but still funny characterization of him as a “great popularizer of commonly accepted truths as insights”) was a great force for good not just in others’, but in his own life. When he taught me he was direct with me, and collegial, and affectionately brutal in his criticisms. If I felt that, in his joyous love of music, he sometimes over shared, I acknowledge with gratitude that it was in working with him that I learned that I, too, couldn’t help but teach. He it was who admonished me to “howl like a dog if you must, because you can.” I would add that one pays a karmic debt and truly joins history’s musical continuum by  “passing forward” to the most deserving the oral history, the intensely personal “family stories” that are the undocumented but priceless artistic heritage of the generations of human beings who’ve answered the call to serve, and have given their lives over to, music. I believe that with every fiber.

I am sixty-two years old, listening to the sound floating through the late summer 2023 evening Virginia air. It seems comprised of — in equal parts — Dublin pub, abattoir, campus protest, primal scream session, and revival meeting. Wintergreen Music Festival artistic director Erin Freeman is leading all of us as we sing — six composers, six conductors, a couple of stagehands, and the faculty (that’s Gilda and me) — through the instrumental parts of the chamber version of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite. For the students who’ve never sung, or played in an orchestra, it’s a revelation; for the rest of us, well … we feel like teenagers again. Nothing bad (and every joyful thing) can come of this empathy building and group bonding experience — everyone is well-aware of how we sound and we’re all loving it, leaning into the dogs howling at the moon nature of it. Afterwards, when Gilda (who finished her doctorate and, with grace and mindfulness, enjoys a flourishing career both as a composer / performer and as a tenured professional academic) and I walk our hound Peanut up the mountainside toward our lodgings, she cocks one ear at us as and looks over her shoulder in that Rita Hayworth hair-flip way she has as though to say now you two are finally on to something.

When I was a kid, my brother Kevin told me that he loved opera because when singers perform it they howl out their emotions freely, and with the unabashed natural freedom of wild animals, at the top of their lungs. How to howl is something I can teach with confidence because I understand and live it. I can teach about the process of becoming music, provided that there is an understanding that music is the vessel, not the result. Living an examined life is the goal. Communication is the challenge; music is the howl. I can teach how to howl. Composition as a howl into the night sky. I’ve learned to modulate the amplitude of my howl; I’ve learned to slightly dampen its ferocity; I’ve come to respect that times change, and that howling’s not for everyone. Nevertheless, for the wild, joyous abandon if it, this hound must howl and howl I will.

View fullsize Academy of Vocal Arts Masterclass, 2006
View fullsize Cameron Dammann, 2023
View fullsize Seasons Festival, 2009
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View fullsize Juilliard, 2018
View fullsize November, 2017
View fullsize Princeton, 2005
View fullsize With Former Pupils, 2019
View fullsize Wintergreen Festival, 2018
View fullsize UW-Madison, 2017
View fullsize UNLOV Masterclass, 2017
View fullsize Westminster, 2017
View fullsize Chicago, 2022
View fullsize Ball State, 2018
View fullsize Chicago College of Performing Arts Masterclass, 2018
Tags Bard College, Joan Tower, Luis Garcia Renart, Igor Stravinsky, Leon Botstein, American Symphony Orchestra, Paul Muldoon, Bandanna, David Del Tredici, City College of New York, Curtis Institute of Music, Gary Graffman, Ned Rorem, Pierre Boulez, Seasons Festival, Imani Winds, Finisterra Trio, Gary Burton, Chris Brubeck, Branford Marsalis, Marvin Stamm, Bernard Jacobson, David McDade, Donald Thulean, Brooke Creswell, Mary Anthony Cox, Ghenady Meirson, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, Queen of Spades, Sigma-Chi Huffman Composer in Residence at Miami University, v, Princeton Atelier, Orson Rehearsed, Erin Freeman, Rita Hayworth

On Performing

May 24, 2025

Beginnings

A prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 sings Norman Dello Joio’s 1948 setting There is a Lady Sweet and Kind accompanied at the piano by his fearsome teacher, a man named Wallace Tomchek, at some rural high school in Wisconsin for three non-descript oldsters checking off boxes without looking up until the end when it is revealed that one is weeping.

In the beginning, performance is what you make of it. In the end, when you finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument. In between comes the performing. And the bear. More about the bear later.

Public Performing: the ritual for which one dresses up (or not) in concert blacks, hits the deck, and participates as performer or auditor in a transformative exercise facilitated by music-making, is undeniably an opportunity to enjoy and explore peak human and aesthetic experiences that, in their rightness, touch peoples’ souls and enrich their lives.

Christmas 1978, as a tenor in the choir during a recording session of, among other seasonal pieces, Holst’s Lullay My Liking I am moved to secret tears of gratitude and joy by the sudden, staggering understanding of how very much I love all the people with whom I am singing, that we are good and that, no matter where everyone’s paths will take them after graduation, we can take gentle, youthful pride in our performances; that our conductor Kay is excellent, and that she and Tomchek have taught us well; that this is a memory, a peak moment, if I can hold on to it, an instant that, if correctly remembered and left unadorned, might help carry me into the future.

Listening to the recording just now, I can still identify individual voices in that long ago chorus, and I am transported in time to who I was then, able to examine the skein of memories that ties the man I am and the boy I was in a way that consoles and admonishes, celebrates and memorializes.  Memory is what makes us human; it is the Madeleine. But it is performance that activates memory and compels us to act.

Private Performing: composer (and former chef) Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez observed to me during filming of the operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall (in which he sang the role of Tony) how alike Family Meal in the restaurant world, chamber music with friends, and ensemble building in the theater are. I have leaned into that with my New Mercury Collective.

I am with stolid deliberation working my way through a new French language edition of Marcel Proust’s À la recherché du temps perdu — a gift from the Camargo Foundation’s resident director, Michael Pretina — side by side with my mother’s nicotine-stained 1934 English language edition. It is November 1989. The Mistral is marching stiffly down the Alps and sweeping across the Côte d’Azur on its way to North Africa, so I am wrapped in jeans and a shocking pink woolen Benetton sweater purchased a few weeks earlier in Venice with money I don’t really have and in which I have sweated. It still looks good, but it smells a little funky. A few days earlier I had set Paul Muldoon’s poem Holy Thursday to music, and have volunteered to perform it, along with a few other songs—some Barber, Rorem, Bernstein, and a couple of my own—at a soiree Michael is throwing for some donors. I can hear the rhythmic crashing of the waves on the limestone cliffs below the villa and, on a lark,  synchronize to them the thrumming chords of the piano part of my setting of Paul’s poem. As I play for an instant I realize the moment for what it is.

The riskiest performing of all, the ultimate gift that performers can offer one another, is the sharing of unfinished drafts or unpolished performances. Complete trust and inclusion of others in one’s creative space. As a composer who performs, mine is the music room at Yaddo, the artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Sitting next to David Del Tredici, giddily charging through Mozart Symphonies four handed arms like spaghetti on a summer afternoon in the early 90s; David accompanying me as I roughhouse my way through Now You Know — a song with words by Antler and dedicated to me about, among other things, how male babies in the womb get erections, and how many, and how often — to a roaring audience of guests in summer 1998; David’s exquisite accompaniment as I sing my setting of Gardner McFall’s Amelia’s Song in September 2005 for the rest of the guests after dinner while composing the opera; accompanying Gilda Lyons myself in my arrangement of the hymn Angel Band before dinner during an annual board meeting sometime during the aughts; weeping, a few days after Ray Charles’ death in 2004, while singing and playing my setting of Stephen Dunn’s Elegy for Ray Charles (were Stephen or David aware yet that they had Parkinson’s?) for him in the middle of the night.

I may have thought that I was a pianist, singer, or conductor before I landed in conservatory, but that nonsense was knocked out of me the first time I walked down the second-floor hallway at Curtis lined with the sepia-colored group graduation photos (of Gary Graffman, Jorge Bolet, Leonard Rose, Jaime Laredo and…) to the sound of kids younger than me crushing repertoire that I’d never have the technique to perform. From that moment on, I thought of myself as “a composer who plays the piano,” despite all the piano lessons and some really terrific teachers, with whom I am grateful to have studied — beginning at 7 with a stern Polish Holocaust survivor named Adam Klescewski; then Duane Dishaw at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music; and then Jeannette Ross at the University of Wisconsin; ending with Marion Zarzeczna, a pupil of Horszowski’s, at Curtis, who taught me finally how to not play “like a composer.”

Just as composing requires a safe, secure space from whence to create, performing requires that you feel safe onstage. Every one of my teachers observed with wonder how comfortable and at ease I was at the keyboard. It was because, when I was fifteen my mother made my father promise that, if I were at the piano, then he could not summon me to perform any of the numerous random tasks that he demanded of all three of his sons when he was home in what we decided was a conscious desire to keep us from relaxing. For me, the result was that the moment I took to the bench I felt safe. In performance, charged with lifting up and protecting a singer, I was always and have remained, entirely in command of myself as a performer because I’m not there for me: I am a man on a mission.

I made the most of the technique that I had. I performed on hundreds of concerts as a collaborative pianist, made records, coached, and put over from the piano a dozen operas to collaborators, producers, and colleagues. I’ve always acknowledged my place. After hearing me premiere some songs with Douglas Hines, Vladimir Sokoloff told me, “You’re a fine collaborative pianist. Soloist not so much.” I am grateful for that.

Middles

Procedural memory is a crucial aspect of being an effective performer. That’s why one practices scales, which, aside from keeping one physically limber (more about that later), create a wealth of repetitive motions that can be executed without conscious management, increasing suppleness of execution, improving one’s technical precision, and even storing history itself in the retained motor skills.

Teachers transfer their muscle memory to their students by passing along to them their personal fingerings. This practical aspect of the oral tradition has a lot of history and poetry to it. Consider that Tchaikovsky was assisted by his composition student Iosef Kotek (a violinist) who provided practical advice that helped his teacher make the solo part more idiomatic. Tchaikovsky offered the piece to Leopold Auer, who rejected it (a ding the piece had to overcome in order to get legs), so the premiere went to Adolph Brodsky; but then Auer picked it up later and passed along his fingerings and interpretation to his students—Elman, Heifetz, Milstein, Shumsky, and Zimbalist, among others.

Hmmmm, that’s nice. No wonder the celli sound so plump there, I muse, hearing a bass clarinet doubling hitherto buried in the orchestration. Looking and sounding good during a rehearsal of Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm Variations with JoAnn Falletta and the Denver Chamber Orchestra in 1987, I’ve relaxed just enough during some passagework to let my mind wander. Up I go, my fingers rattling on by muscle memory, hearing things I’m not supposed to be hearing because I am not listening to myself. Even in the moment I am thinking “this is so cool” until I notice JoAnn glancing at me and I plunge back down into my own brain.

In the operafilm I Hear America Singing I have the composer wonder, “Where do people go when they go ‘up?’ Is it heaven?” If the moment of silence between the final sound and the first clap is where the bear lives (more about him later), then I think that the spirit of whomever composed the piece might live “up there,” with angels like Wenders’ Damien and Cassiel, observing and remembering. That’s why I’ve never “gone up” while performing my own music. If I ever do go up playing my own music, who will I meet there?

Sometime in the aughts a pianist colleague who had never heard me play turned to me just as I was about to go onstage to perform some songs with Paul Sperry on a benefit concert at Alice Tully Hall and said, “Please just don’t play like a composer, okay?” Performers aren’t angels; colleagues can be real stinkers. On the one hand, the legitimate criticisms that recreative musicians have with creators arise from the fact that, when we perform, we’re not listening critically. We’re too used to filling in the blanks, to imagining the stuff that is missing; too interested in the sweep of the argument to be careful about the notes. On the other hand, the anecdote reminds me that, over the course of three decades, Paul taught hundreds of singers at Aspen, Juilliard, Manhattan School, and elsewhere, how he and I preferred (with great exactitude) to perform the dozens of songs that I wrote for us. So I guess I am part of a tradition, after all.

Afternoons every couple of months with Paul Sperry over the years in his studio at the Majestic on Central Park West in New York City reading through the stacks of song cycles that composers sent him, enjoying the adventure, the challenge, the overview of what was happening in the art song world, the bits of wisdom imparted, the thumbnail critiques of the vocal writing, the laughter, the wine, quite simply … the playing.

“Playing like a composer” is one thing. Among serious composers and pianists both there is a stigma attached to the ability to “put a song over” at the keyboard — what composer Tevi Eber reminds me is dismissed as playing like a “theater pianist.” It happens that I am very good at it, though I stopped doing it when arthritis made performing more painful than it was worth. When he first landed in New York City in the early 40s, Leonard Bernstein did some work arranging, transcribing, and notating jazz improvisations for Harms under the pseudonym Lenny Amber. (I did the same thing, for another publisher, during the late 80s.) Distancing oneself from “hack work” is one thing, but LB was a super-practical musician, and proud of the fact that he could “put over” his shows “the way that Marc [Blitzstein] did.”

Putting over Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Balsam fir” aria from Shining Brow for Lenny on his beautiful Baldwin at the Dakota in 1990, knowing it was good stuff; the absolute I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening thrill of hearing him channel my compositional voice and manipulate it without corrupting it, singing and playing through the same material in his gravelly-schmoozy voice, and by doing so, teaching.

The only way I can perform my own music effectively is to convince myself that I didn’t write it. If I can manage that, then I derive tremendous satisfaction from performing with musicians who are interesting to listen to, who never sing or play anything the same way twice, and who require my backup because they are all in and anything could happen.

Orson Welles captures perfectly the effect that performing the same piece in different venues and for different audiences either on tour or over the span of decades feels like to me in the funhouse mirror sequence of The Lady from Shanghai. “Of course, killing you is killing myself,” says Everett Sloane, aiming his pistol at Rita Hayworth, who he sees in reflection with her gun aimed at him, along with his own face. “It’s the same thing. But, you know, I’m pretty tired of both of us.” Every shot that rings out causes another reflected version of Sloane, Welles, and Hayworth to shatter into a million pieces. I’ve had this experience in my own small way with songs like Holy Thursday, which I’ve played, sung and accompanied hundreds of times in different situations. I can’t imagine how Anne-Sophie Mutter or Joshua Bell feel performing the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the hundredth city, or Paul McCartney performing Hey Jude, but I’d make an operafilm about it in a hot New York minute.

Because I came to music first as a singer — that prepubescent boy of 12 bathed in dazzling stage lights in 1973 — I’ve always been entirely at ease as a choral conductor. Hartzell, Tomchek, and Robert Fountain were excellent role models, and I’d been doing it without effort for years by the time Louis Karchin engaged me as his assistant with the Washington Square Chorus at New York University (an interesting bunch comprised of NYU students and community members) during the late 80s and early 90s. When I took over as music director, we had a run of several years during which I joyously deepened my appreciation and love of exploring the rapturously singable part writing of  Monteverdi and Gesualdo by teaching them, week after week; picking up the stick to conduct Mozart — all the great repertoire I had been gifted to sing growing up.

Like most composers, I’ve been called upon to serve as conductor for various reasons, with ensembles large and small, fairly often over the years. I had excellent teachers: Catherine Comet was both terrifying and inspiring; and the help that I got from Lukas made me a respectable technician. Because I’ve only conducted when I needed to, I cannot in good conscience consider myself a conductor.

Stepping off the podium in Milwaukee and shaking the concertmaster’s hand after conducting Suite for a Lonely City— music that, via Bernstein, landed me on the east coast — in 1978 and intuiting that it was the beginning of something; bowing to Norman’s grieving parents in the little balcony in Curtis Hall after conducting the one and only performance of the memorial symphony I wrote for Norman in 1983, crushingly aware of the callow impertinence of my gesture; the feeling of disenchanted vindication I had when stepping off the podium in Las Vegas after having gotten my opera Bandanna in the can in 2000; thirty-eight years after looking down into the faces of my teenage contemporaries and feeling atop Mount Pisgah at the beginning of my story in Milwaukee, leading my fifty-something contemporaries and Gilda Lyons — in music that Bernstein once wrote as a young man for Tourel  — on my birthday in 2016 in Philadelphia, relieved that it would probably be my last time on the podium.

Ends

Once Tin Pan Alley gave way to broadcast pop, songs usually ended by repeating the chorus or the hook while the music faded out, facilitating crossfades on the radio and enabling the band to improvise solos on the “ride out.” Odd how songs just end again in the Internet era. Most importantly, fade outs avoided the dreaded “full stop.” Full stops are downers. Full. Stop. See what I mean?

Transitions are where development and drama happen. Anybody who spins a narrative on some sort of timeline fusses with the transitions between set pieces, the reasoning being that, if you allow an audience to applaud, they’ve been released from the moment and must be pulled back in and their disbelief resuspended. “Exit, pursued by a bear” — the all-time greatest stage direction.

Concert music generally comes to a full stop (either it ends “up” or “down”) when the piece is finished. As a performer one hopes to have been so much in the moment that one’s behavior at the double bar is too crass a thing to consider, just as composers suppose — correctly or not — that the audience will be moved to reflect on what has just transpired and that their anticipation of the opportunity to express their appreciation will mount during whatever silence follows the last note. In that space lives the bear.

Seated at the piano in Curtis Hall in Philadelphia in April 1984, finishing the world premiere of a big song cycle called Three Silent Things, the performance of which would mark my last appearance as a student on that stage, looking up from my finger on the A key as the pitch decayed first at Rob’s face, hearing the B of his cello, then at Lisa’s face, hearing the D of her viola, and then Michaela’s as she held the F# on her violin, and finally at Karen as she sang, “this shallow spectacle, this sense,” on the tonic, I understood for the first time that Wallace Stevens’ poem A Clear Day and No Memories, which I had read as an elegiac, innig meditation on mortality, was in fact a clinical description of existential emptiness, the loss of love, and the end of memory. After I nodded the final cutoff of that simple Gmaj9#7 chord, it felt as though the silence that followed stretched on and on. I hadn’t until that moment had the conscious self-awareness to accept that we were all basically quits, and that, although our narratives would of course continue, they would diasporate.

At that moment, I was eaten by the bear. I was genuinely unprepared for the emptiness, the sense of loss, of, well, what Karen had just been singing about, to feel so viscerally awful. In this place a performer hears not one beat of applause, one word of congratulations; feels not one hug, smells not a single flower in the bouquet that has appeared in one’s hands. Stage Managers are the caretakers of this liminal space, guiding otherwise capable people past the bear and into and out of the wings, gently but firmly telling them to walk slowly or to rush. The bear has a huge repertoire: the imposter syndrome, performance anxiety, the fear of being deemed unworthy, judged, all the feels; for some performers, the hardest part is never having come to terms with the fact that there will never be enough applause, and that the Real World is still out there past the bear, waiting.

Making myself as small as I can at the piano in Philadelphia, sometime in fall 1982, I am aware that I am not here to perform, but to witness. Periodically, I am called upon to play a few measures of accompaniment, but otherwise I am superfluous. I try to commit to memory everything that Szymon Goldberg is saying to my violinist friend during her lesson. He isn’t just passing along fingerings, bowing, style, bow speed and pressure, and tradition, he is summoning the aesthetic world in which Debussy lived for her and gently referencing for her the way that a half dozen other great violinists have played the piece — some for Debussy himself — so that, as she commits the great Sonata in G minor to memory she will inscribe it in her own poetic memory. As she puts her violin to her neck, the spirits of Gaston Poulet, who premiered it, David Oistrakh, who recorded it, and more join her.

“The Germans were advancing on Paris,” I recall Goldberg observing, “and you can feel the end of the world in it.” Like Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, the Debussy Sonata captures in music some essential quorum of understanding of the actuality of the end of time. Even in my early 20s I appreciated the coolness of her hand in mine as we walked home together that fall evening, and how superficial my grasp of Debussy’s last piece was. Understanding it would require a lifetime of study and experience. “To think he died only a few months after writing it,” she mused. “But he left us some breadcrumbs at least,” I replied.

Ned and I have finished a couple of games of backgammon at the red dining room table in January 1999 the day after Jim died and I say, “I’ll throw together something to eat” and he pushes the board away, saying, “I’m going to play something.” His retreating back. I move to the kitchen. When I hear him playing and singing a Hoagy Carmichael song in the living room, I stop what I’m doing, bow my head, weep stupidly, and listen.

Performing is praying, lullay-ing, baying, and kyrie-ing. Sometimes it even involves playing. In the beginning there is the swaddling band and the infant’s reflexive whimper; then, the Whitmanesque song of oneself; at the end there is the winding sheet and the survivor’s keen. Or is it the other way around? William Blake’s “piping, loud” arrival; Dylan Thomas’ raging “against the dying of the light;” T.S. Eliot’s ending “with a whimper.” In the end, when you’ve finally become what a lifetime of performing has made of you, you’ve become a means of transmission, an instrument.

Thanksgiving 2017, I tease out the first few notes of Copland’s dignified, soulful setting of the great hymn Shall We Gather at the River, look up at my partner Gilda Lyons and wait, contentedly, for her to begin. She raises her hand slightly as she often does when she begins a song. I think of the countless times I’ve held that hand; I think about the anticipation of restoration, and how her love and acceptance has transformed my sorrows into joys. Together we perform.

Tags Norman Dello Joio, Wallace Tomchek, There is a Lady Sweet and Kind, Marcel Proust, Michael Pretina, Paul Muldoon, Holy Thurday, Samuel Barber, Ned Rorem, Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, Gian Carlo Menotti, Adam Klescewski, Duane Dishaw, Jeanette Ross, Marion Zarzeczna, Mieczysław Horszowski, The Curtis Institute of Music, Douglas Hines, Vladimir Sokoloff, Gustav Holst, Lullay, Iosef Kotek, Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, Leopold Auer, Adolph Brodsky, Mischa Elman, Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, Oscar Shumsky, Efram Zimbalist, George Gershwin, Denver Chamber Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, I Hear America Singing, Wim Wenders, Paul Sperry, Lenny Amber, Frank Lloyd Wright, Shining Brow, Kay Hartzell, Robert Fountain, Louis Karchin, Claudio Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Catherine Comet, Suite for a Lonely City, Norman Stumpf, Bandanna, Jenny Tourel, Gilda Lyons, Michaela Paetsch, Lisa Ponton, Karen Hale, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez, Aaron Copland, Gardner McFall, David Del Tredici, Ray Charles, Stephen Dunn, Wallace Stevens, A Clear Day and No Memoires, Claude Debussy, Olivier Messiaen, Quatuor pour la fin du Temps, James Holmes, T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joshua Bell, Hey Jude, Paul McCartney, Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, The Lady From Shanghai, Hoagy Carmichel, Jorge Bolet, Leonard Rose, Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Tevi Eber, Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, Aspen Music Festival

(l. to r.) Omar Mulero, Robert Frankenberry, and Robert Orth as Orson Welles. (Elliot Mandel photo)

Orson in the Bardo -- Interview: Wellesnet.com

November 7, 2020

Mike Teal of Wellesnet: Despite the fact that the pandemic has taken a heavy toll on the entertainment industry, Daron Hagen’s filmed opera, Orson Rehearsed, has been playing at movie festivals around the world and has won laurels in the Los Angeles Film Awards, Chicago Indie Film Festival, Cinefest India, and the After Hour Festival in Brazil, among others.

The film is based on a stage performance of the work, held in Chicago two years ago, which itself had incorporated filmed material into the show (much as Welles had done several times throughout his theater career).

Now the tables are turned and the new film has incorporated a lot material from that stage performance.

Hagen is a highly respected composer who has written twelve operas, and whose orchestral works have been performed by major orchestras around the world.

MT: The word “bardo” is used to describe Welles’s state at the moment he lies dying. Is this a Buddhist interpretation of Welles’s life and death?

DH: Orson Rehearsed takes place during Welles’ transition between life and death. He is, in effect, both the scorpion atop the frog’s back and the frog in mid-river. What we call it is a matter of convenience. In truth, I have been fascinated by this transitional zone for decades—inspired, probably, by the fact that my mother died of cancer in my arms when I was a young man. I have been treating this subject for decades. For example, in 1998, I recast Shakespeare’s Othello as a large two act opera on a libretto by Irish poet Paul Muldoon called Bandanna, set it on the Texas-Mexico border (yes, it dealt with the issue of immigration, among other things) on the Day of the Dead in 1968, and treated the Rio Grande as a River Styx. The debt to and homage to Welles and his Touch of Evil was overt—the corrupt labor organizer in Bandanna was named Kane. He, along with all of the characters in that story, straddled the liminal zone between life and death, love and hate, innocence and corruption, good and evil, and so forth.

Now Welles serves as both Orpheus and Eurydice in Orson Rehearsed. During the film, he crosses from life into whatever it is that comes after. In other words, no, the film is not a Buddhism-inspired speculation about what Welles might have been thinking, but rather a secular humanist yarn that conveys the narrative not through external stage action but through internal action as his thoughts proceed through a sequence of emotional, psychological, and philosophical states. What Welles thinks we audience members see on three movie screens; we also see his thoughts given physical form in the staged actions of three figments of his imagination—opera-singing avatars who interact with one another. And in the final film we see a melding of the three films, a live performance, and another semi-opaque set of ghostly avatars who interact with both the films and the avatars.

MT: With the instrumentalists onstage with the singers, it struck me that it might be more accurate to consider this a kind of oratorio or cantata instead of an opera. How would you describe it?

DH: From the start, Orson Rehearsed was intended to be sui generis. As such, one can interpret it any way one pleases — it’s an opera or a cantata, a musical or a play with words, a set of critical essays or a song cycle, an art film or a music video. There is but a single step between Max Steiner and Richard Strauss, who believed — as I do — that a great work of art should entertain the neophyte, intrigue the well-informed, and enthrall the expert. That sleight of hand, from what I’ve read, delighted Welles as an artist and man. As a technical and artistic goal, it certainly delights me. So, if Orson Rehearsed must be called anything, I’d choose “prestidigitation,” as it captures both the high, medium, and low of it all.

MT: The word “Edit” is repeated by the singers frequently, almost like a mantra. What is the significance of that?

DH: The recurring line is a cri de cœur. As a man with a congenital, degenerative heart defect, I consciously monitor my heart more than most folks probably do. In Orson Rehearsed, Welles is dying of a heart attack. The recurring, juddering cries of “Edit. Edit. Edit,” are not just the sound of his own heart coming through to him through his imagination, but they are the essence of an artist’s life—as Meister Eckhart said, “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.” Welles spent a lot of time editing scripts, film; we know also that he was repeatedly devastated when other people recut his films—when people edited him. That is why I edited the film myself: I wanted to feel (granted, using Premiere Pro software, not a moviola) what Welles did. Orson Rehearsed is my twelfth major operatic work, so I’m no stranger to the tender mercies of the editing bay.

MT: There are more than a few references to political matters, with Welles at one point saying that the only good acting is political. I was also struck by your quoting of Roy Cohn, the infamous right-wing lawyer who helped Donald Trump rise to power in the 1970s. Do you see any kind of parallel between Welles’s death in 1985 and the rise of the kind of far-right politics currently described as Trumpism?

DH: Welles wrote speeches for FDR, took a year off to campaign for him, and is widely revered as a man who stood up for what he believed in. All of the biographies I’ve read of Welles—including Simon Callow’s sprawling, epic treatment—show him to have been a man of fine character. It is too on the nose to posit that the diabetic Welles died of a broken heart, but how could he have missed—as someone who had lived through HUAC and McCarthyism—the effects of Reaganism and the already rising tide of the fascism we’re facing today? Who of us in our darkest moments has not been beset by devils? I chose both fixer Cohn and his tweeting protégé—reverse anachronisms yanked out of chronological time—to serve as Welles’ devils.

MT: I remember the video screens during the live performance all showing a sunset at the end. The ending on the video is different, with everyone gradually leaving the stage, as in Welles’s Moby Dick Rehearsed. Was there a change, or am I not remembering correctly?

DH: The screens do show a sunset throughout the last scene of the staged iteration as the orchestra gradually drifts off; but then they give way to black and white film leader and the word “Fin” as the Youngest Welles places his beloved Hamburg hat on the pianist’s head and exits. The film is true to this. As you point out, the reference is to Welles’ Moby Dick Rehearsed.

MT: When will this video version be available to the public?

DH: This is my first film, so it was a surprise to me that, after one is done, the entire thing gets mastered the way audio recordings do. So it is in Digital Cinema Package format and meant for theatrical projection. At present I am submitting it to festivals and learning about distributors. It is an art film for which there is a minuscule market; I never expected it to be commercially viable or “popular.” Still, it is garnering laurels (for which I am grateful and honored), and it might get some legs, however humble. After it has been shown at festivals, I imagine it will be broadcast. After that, who knows?

This interview originally appeared on the Wellesnet.com website on 4 November and may be accessed here.

Tags Mike Teal, pandemic, Orson Rehearsed, Los Angeles Film Awards, Chicago Indie Film Festival, Cinefest India, After Hour Film Festival, Wellesnet, Paul Muldoon, Bandanna, Touch of Evil, Othello, Day of the Dead, Kane, Orpheus and Eurydice, Max Steiner, Richard Strauss, Meister Eckhart, Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, FDR, HUAC, Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, Cohn
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