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.

On Music Copying

May 4, 2025

Movement I (Allegretto)

Along with the obsolescence of the two-thousand-year craft of copying music by hand, technology has rendered notation itself obsolete, as composers lean into DAW — digital audio workstations. For that matter, as studios like Lionsgate partner with artificial intelligence firms, giving them “access to the company’s large film and TV library to train a new generative model,” A.I. is threatening film composers themselves with obsolescence.

American folklore tells us that the locomotive, what Indigenous Americans called the Iron Horse, made the horse itself obsolete. For some. But not for cow punchers. And certainly the art of riding remained. Eadweard Muybridge’s series of six cabinet cards, titled “Horse in Motion,” captured in stills the illusion of the horse’s movement, but not its essence. Not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a person and their steed.

Streetcar locomotives began replacing streetcar horses around 1850; by 1900 electric streetcars had replaced them both as a method for the conveyance of flesh and bone. And then, as the automobile swept across the land on ribbons of concrete, those parallel ribbons of steel that survived did so mainly because they remained useful, at least, for the conveyance of freight.

Hand copying of “scores” with quill and ink on paper for publication gave way in 1851 with the first use at scale of hand (or “plate”) engraving of music on thin sheets of lead. Music typesetting became a thing, and the 1930s brought the Keating Music Typewriter. All these were used for the creation of the scores to be published and sold to consumers. Hand copying of “performance materials,” that is, the individual note-covered piece of paper from which each instrumental performs their “part,” as extracted by a copyist from the full “score” (or “partitura”) for commercial music, music theater, and symphony concert works continued to flourish well in to the twentieth century.

The beginning of the end came in fall 1988, when the software notation program Finale was released. In other words, notation software captured in ones and zeros the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence. For some. And certainly the art of composing (and of hand copying) remained.

The end of the end began in 1993 when the software program Sibelius outflanked its competitor, called Score, by being more “intuitive” as a creative tool for composers. Notation software made possible in ones and zeros a graphic representation so good that it looked better than most hand human copyist’s work: the illusion of the copyists’ job, but not its essence, had been successfully duplicated. For most people. But not for fine art composers. And certainly the arts of composing and of hand copying remained. But not its beauty. Not the mutual respect and trust between a composer and their copyist.

Of course, it is all part of the dialectic relationship between creation and destruction. Old ecosystems are destroyed; new ones emerge. I put my quill and India ink aside in 2002. Though some hand music copyists still ply their trade, the craft and art of it are now relegated to history.

Movement II (Andante)

I had the skills. I had a clear, attractive hand. I was fast and accurate. Because I worked for a living, I needed the money to buy the time to compose the music I wanted to compose (and it is safe to say that I composed a lot); and some of my peers had the money to buy my time. It is ironic that, even though composers once had to come and go through the back door, certain composers were happy to look down upon their colleagues who copied music to make ends meet. As though commercial viability of the music or personal financial security were a measure of artistic success! How composers and conductors treat their copyists reveals everything about them as people.

My life as a music copyist began in 1975 with nights spent copying the parts to my teenage opuses at the kitchen table in New Berlin, Wisconsin as the sun rose. By 1982, while a composition student at the Curtis Institute, I was working as a professional copyist for the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia. When I moved to New York City to go to Juilliard, I began fifteen years as a professional freelance copyist with heavy concert music private clients (including my former teacher, Ned Rorem, whose copyist I was for nearly a decade), before serving a final stint as a union copyist on Broadway.

For several hundred years, serving as one’s mentor’s copyist was an integral component of one’s training. I do recall learning more about how Leonard Bernstein made the “Profanation” of his Jeremiah Symphony go in spring 1981 at the University of Wisconsin Madison by hand copying the parts for my turn on the podium as a member of Catherine Comet’s conducting class (I could not afford to rent the parts at the time) than I had in my conducting lessons with Comet. For, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is “playing” the composer’s process the way a pianist “plays” a composer pianist’s piece — one’s brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when they wrote it.

While a composition student at Curtis, I was able, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Philadelphia Orchestra Associate Conductor William Smith, to connect with the orchestra’s librarian, Clint Nieweg, to attend rehearsals of the school’s orchestra with the PO’s library copy of the piece in hand. Bill collected autograph facsimiles of scores and sometimes brought one for me to follow; and the school’s librarian (my work study boss, as I served as his assistant) Edwin Heilakka used to let me follow in Leopold Stokowski’s score (the school had just been gifted his papers). What a marvelous way to learn the repertoire.

I guess it is true that I have copied every kind of composer for every musical genre — from pop to film, opera to symphonic, academic incipits to television cues, chamber to salon — and a wide array of composers: Rorem, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, Ezra Laderman, Enno Morricone, Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Diamond, Gian Carlo Menotti, George Delerue, John Kander, George Perle, Virgil Thomson, Joan Tower, Disney, Really Useful, Radio City Music Hall, and more of my peers than I’d care (or am able) to recall. I just looked at that list and thought of a dozen more but cannot make myself go back and add their names, as it feels unnerving, the way that seeing my handwriting on a set of orchestral parts when visiting an orchestra performing something of mine and not even remembering having done the job does.

In the callouses I still have on my fingers and the damage I did to my vision between 1984 and 2004 as a professional hand music copyist, I have in many ways far more in common with Atticus’ literate slaves than I do their master’s friend Cicero. There’s a lot to unpack there, and it has a lot to do with both earning humility and having it thrust upon one.

My first full scores (ambitious 25 minute long juvenaliæ for chorus and large ensembles called Pastoral Mass and The Creation, 1978) were copied with black felt tip marker and black ball point pen (!) back in Wisconsin on that famously canary yellow Passantino 20 stave (Pad 23) and 24 stave (Pad 25) Since first buying a quire of it at Carl Fischer’s beautiful store on Astor Place in 1984, 20-stave King Brand and writing Trio Concertante, my favorite sketching paper has been King Brand. We used Judy Greene vellum from Los Angeles at the Fleisher Collection in Philly, if I remember correctly, but once I landed in Manhattan I became a denizen of Associated Music Service at 333 West 52nd Street. They sold Aztec vellum, which I used for all of my private clients. It’s closed now, but I remember Eileen (it was a family business) behind the counter — always kind, writing up every sale, as there was no cash register — certainly no computers!

There is still some hand copying to be done, but, overwhelmingly, it is done on the computer now. Many composers’ own workflows have come to include writing in digital audio workstations and the young composers who clean up the notation and format the “midi dumps” for composers who don’t notate have taken the place in the ecosystem copyists once occupied. Soon A.I. will do that job as well.

Movement III (Minuet)

Titus Pomponius Atticus (later Quintus Caecilius Pomponianus Atticus, 110 BC – 32 BC) was a Roman banker, editor, and patron remembered for his correspondence with and (at his own expense copied by the hand of and distributed by his educated slaves) support of the philosophical and oratorical writings of his friend Marcus Tullius Cicero. The letters between them are an incredible testament to their friendship and moving in their candor and agape. The name Atticus is familiar to most people nowadays as the name of the father in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. As attorney Finch protected and lifted up his children in the American South in Lee’s book with his stalwart moral courage and sense of justice, the historical Atticus lifted up Cicero.

Authors like Lee name their characters’ with precision, alluding to the characteristics of historical figures to instantly summon an array of associations on the part of the reader. Some parents do, too, when a beloved progenitor doesn’t automatically command commemoration by way of passing along their name. Do they do it hoping that their child will take on those worthy traits? Names and the narrative weight that they carry are important. I am, for example, named after a brother who died in infancy just before me. In any event, moved by the lives of both of these men – one historical and the other fictional — my spouse and I chose Atticus as the name of our first son.

What father doesn’t dream of a better life for their son? My attorney father, reading Mockingbird to me as a child, voice breaking in the final pages — who’s voice wouldn’t? — lived long enough to see his son live the life of an artist, a Cicero to his Atticus, if you will. Reading Mockingbird to my son when he was small made us both feel the power of names, the sense of belonging and continuum, of history and struggle. I will live to see my son burst into the world as an Atticus.

Would we know today who Cicero was if Atticus had not had his writings copied and carried to the far ends of the Roman Empire? It is impossible to forget that the Gospels were copied by hand — as was every scroll in the Library of Alexandria. The knowledge that survived the Dark Ages did so in manuscripts that were hand copied, mainly by monks.

While I have trouble visualizing Atticus’ literate slaves, it is easy – perhaps thanks to Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs – for me to conjure the image of a portly friar, his faithful cat at his elbow, a quill in hand, an illuminated manuscript before him awaiting his ministrations.

The years spent as a music copyist have helped me to understand the sense in which the monk’s work was more than a job, more than a sort of literary ablution, more even than a calling. From the modern perspective, the illuminated manuscripts might seem to be more a mandala — a testament to impermanence, an attempt to extend into another dimension the ineffable truth of (in a monk’s case) faith. The manuscript in a music copyist’s hands has as its purpose to facilitate a live performance. Perhaps, afterwards, its existence represents what remains when the animation of human actuation is gone, like a plan for a house built of soundwaves.

As the Bible’s words strive to convey the mystery of faith, musical notation strives to convey the effect of song. “From whence cometh song?” asked Theodore Roethke. “They should have sent a poet,” observes the scientist in the film Contact, realizing that scientific language alone cannot explain or describe something that inspires awe. Composer Slavko Krstic once pointed out to me that his mastery of higher theoretical physics and math were one way to commune with the Divine, but that he had concluded that picking up his guitar gave him a clearer signal.

Notated music serves as an imperfect mirror through which the performer steps to enter the world of the piece itself. The performer turns around and faces outwards, from whence he came, and performs what he has discovered for those of us listening on the other side of the bars, the other side of the mirror. I am amazed that anything comprehensible, let alone moving, results.

I think of my priest declaiming the liturgy on those occasions when, Ad Orientem (celebrating Mass facing away from the congregation), the words of the Mass land differently, the performative, ritualistic nature of the recounting of the Holy Thursday story simultaneously more abstract and requiring of one’s imagination because the congregation, deprived of the facial expressions of the celebrant, is compelled to listen harder.

Movement IV (Finale, Allegro con brio)

Iron horses and fleshly ones; hand copyists and engraving software; composers and “music generator apps” like Soundraw; musicologists and monks. There are mathematician fathers finding bliss by striving to number the stars and sons numbering the stars by finding bliss with a guitar. For every bull a matador; for every scientist a poet. Bring on the Ecclesiastes 3:1.

But before a final goodbye to all that, how about a working song, a roundelay about the joys of the work itself?

The walking into the theater, any theater, and delivering parts, getting a feel from the music team how it is going, the showing up at the reading of a new show, or the bonhomie of showing up for the backer’s audition of a Genuine DOA Flop anyway because you copied the reed books.

Leaning over the orchestra pit’s rail, tapping fifteen, squinting to identify the handwriting of the copyist who extracted the parts as a trombone player reads a paperback novel during the intermission.

The music for a show coming in over the fax machine from London with just lyrics, a melody, a bass line, and chord symbols and the directive to make it go, the cigarette smoke, the diazo machine spitting out ammonia fumes, the electric eraser shavings in your pockets.

Reluctantly giving a pre-performance talk at the insistence of the producer to patrons in an empty opera house in Arizona and looking up to see in the back row for the first time in years my librettist for the show, who, possibly between flights and on his way to somewhere else, has decided to see for himself if the old thing still has legs.

The arrogance of “heavy client” copyists, the gratitude of newbies from the provinces, the surprise of residuals, decades’ worth of canary yellow “Local 802 Music Preparation Invoice” sheets lolling like iris tongues from the file cabinets. And the stories: the stories told by the copyists already in their 70s about Garland, Sinatra, and copying music for the networks: Mutual, CBS, NBC, and ABC….

Six of us laughing and cross-talking in a cab on our way to Manny’s with the just-completed and printed instrumental parts of Kander and Ebb’s sizzling new chart for Liza Minelli’s new Vegas show and spilling out onto the sidewalk across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal like pilsner into a tulip glass.

Copying Lion King parts for the Mouse, who stationed a guy by the front door of the office who looked like he was a member of the Blues Brothers Band who we were pretty sure timed us when we went to take a leak. The Case of the Missing Lucky Electric Eraser that began when Brian Fairtile left his go bag in the Winter Garden pit and ended in laughter and tears when, retrieving it, we read the graffiti on the pit wall that said, “They’ll never get the Cats smell out of this pit.”

Drinking coffee and listening to the Portuguese cast album of Company, wondering how all those syllables could possibly be flying by at the rate that they were while trying to identify who the composers were in some of the older black and white pictures of clients on the walls, the beat-up spinet where emergency songs got written, and, as at Fleisher down in Philly, stories about WPA copyists, hard drinking, and the blacklist.

Atticus commissioned. Cicero orated. The monks illuminated the manuscripts. Those of us who were members of the Local 802 were Teamsters. My copyist colleagues were the most resilient, humblest, kindest, smartest, and wisest musicians I’ve ever known. I am proud that I was accepted by them as a colleague when I finally landed in Gotham. We were more than the batmen to our composers, far more than assistants to our employers. People like Mathilda Pincus and Arne Arnstein were legends for a reason.

For years Brian kept a copy of Wine Connoisseur atop his satchel at the office where we worked until, over seder, he and his brilliant spouse told Gilda and me how he intended to quit music copying and become an import-export buyer, like our friend, composer Stephen Dembski. His personal reinvention, from Broadway horn player to copyist, had now been from copyist to wine expert. The best all-around copyist I ever knew.

We were part of traditions that stretched back to the age of Christ. We were the angels witnessing the act of creation and — when it needed a hand, giving it one. We all remembered every piece we ever worked on until we didn’t. And, you know, even though we were all entirely aware of exactly who our clients were as people and as musicians, and of how little we mattered, and who our clients sometimes thought they were in relation to us, none of us ever ran them down. After all, we all become obsolete eventually. It was an honor to serve. Write on.

Dinner at Yaddo, summer 1988. p/c: Unknown

On David Del Tredici (1937-2023)

March 18, 2024

It was always time with David. He bent it; he warped it; he turned it around back on itself; he lived outside of it; he could practically stop it with music; in life, he ran with it until he ran out of it.

The day in March 2019 that my memoir was published and offered up to the crickets I put all my handwritten diaries—over thirty years’ worth of scribbling—into banker’s boxes and sealed them up. I traded the false specificity of reportage for the even more subjective truth of memory. Now I must pour, as Ned Rorem and his teacher Virgil Thomson used to, through the index of my book to fix events in time. I recall reading the words that I wrote about David to him over the telephone and asking whether he thought they were okay before sending off the manuscript. (He did.)

So, on this March 2024 morning I tried to find my letters to David (and his to me) and discovered that I’d have to move two portable air conditioners, a box fan, and two suitcases to get to the file drawer in the storage closet in which letters from all the D’s in my life ended up so I gave up. They’re in there—all the postcards with Mad Hatters and March Hares stamped on them, words jumping off the page limned in multiple colors (he always had a glass or peanut butter jar filled with different colored pens and pencils on his desk at whatever artist colony or home he was working) with little, crazy asides added in at the last moment. Anyone who received a letter from David knew they could expect an illuminated manuscript of sorts. He took time to write them. They were vibrant, gossipy, funny, and sweet. His communications were always labor-intensive; details mattered: sometimes a sentence would march on in blue ink and end with a single bright red exclamation point.

Since I no longer particularly trust my own memory, I paged through my “Work Log and List of Themes,” a notebook I’ve kept since July 1976 (and which, ominously, is entirely filled up, with no more blank pages to accommodate new work—a nightmare scenario for someone as superstitious and obsessive as me), to determine which artist colonies (and when) David and I had had overlapping residencies over the years (since I always finished something and made note of where I was when I finished it) to fix some dates in advance of a chat with his biographer the other day. So, the chronology of this Mad March through Time is underpinned by the several vignettes that I included in my memoir and the (many more) exactly-dated marginalia (“Sang through this with DDT in the music room,” or “Bowings revised per DDT,” and the like.) from my “Work Log.”

The central pillar of our relationship was our shared love of Yaddo, the storied artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, at which we met during June 1984. I was between studies at Curtis and Juilliard, footloose, fueled by an entirely impractical sense that it was my time. While being shown around the place by painter Nancy Brett, who was serving that summer as a Special Assistant to the President, I was led into the mansion’s Great Hall to the sound of a Mendelssohn “Song Without Words” wafting out of the spacious music room. I had arrived just before dinner and David, as was his custom, was relaxing by running his fingers through the piano repertoire for the pleasure of our, as he announced when Nancy introduced us, “fellow inmates.” That infectious, unforgettable smile! The mischievous grin. A sparkle in his eyes second only to Otto Luening’s. Nancy left us, and David, reaching for a well-worn edition of Haydn symphonies reduced to four hands, asked archly whether I wanted to be on the bottom or the top.

Photographed by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 1990.

I was, as so many other musicians were, enchanted. I took the left side, hoping that hitting an occasional bass note properly might keep me in the game, and we were off. After a few minutes, I realized that he was gradually speeding up and that his left hand was dropping down between mine and adding bits of my right-hand part that I was leaving out to (let’s face it) survive. It was an exhilarating, joyous display of raw talent. My heart began racing. For a few more minutes I survived on adrenaline until, suddenly, he simply began playing everything up a step. That was it: I was thrown from the horse. He’d exceeded my keyboard skills and, laughing so hard that I teared up, I got up and told him that I had to unpack. “Welcome to Yaddo,” he said, laughing.

Former president of PEN, poet and author Richard McCann, filmmaker Sharon Greytak, painter Michael Flanagan, David and this young composer immediately became constant dinner companions. Over the years, David, Richard, and I remained close friends, and served for decades together on the board of Yaddo. It turned into quite an important summer for me, as I also met poet Gardner McFall, who graciously allowed me to set her poem, “Sonnet After Oscar Wilde,” which I sang immediately upon completion, with David accompanying. Twenty-three years later, Gardner, who was also by then a board member, bravely mined her own life story when she wrote the libretto of our opera Amelia for Seattle Opera.

David and I overlapped several times during the 80s at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and MacDowell—always the four hands, me sight-reading through whatever song he was working on and ending up laughing with joy; him sightreading whatever song I was writing and me singing them. “Why do we have to write for singers?” he would ask, “We know they can sing it beautifully; but isn’t it more fun to hear someone who can’t sing perform it?” (I couldn’t help but notice that the thought had come to him after accompanying me.) In 1990, David was serving as composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic, and, although he never took credit, likely made possible my music’s debut with the Philharmonic—a piece called Common Ground, which had recently been awarded the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize.

The Tower Studio at Yaddo, where David Del Tredici often worked. p/c: Daron Hagen

When David went away on sabbatical during the 90s I’d teach for him at City University of New York. Composition lessons, of course; but also counterpoint and orchestration. I was also on the faculty of Bard College at the time (and for a couple of semesters, the Curtis Institute), and he enjoyed, I think, the fact that I, like him, didn’t consider myself an academic. “Teaching gives me physical pain, doesn’t it you?” he once asked as we packed his station wagon—he off to another colony, and me back to the Upper West Side and a semester of filling in for him. He was only partly serious. David could be a superb teacher. And when he went to artist colonies he—like me—always worked like a dog. We’d run into one another raiding the refrigerator either very, very late or very, very early—the only two “inmates” still awake and working and ask one another how it was going. “I can’t tell you or it will turn to shit,” I would say. And he would say, “I know. Hide the erasers.” If there was cheesecake or dessert of any sort to be had, we’d finish it together. Always, the next day, I’d be jogging it off; David would be pumping iron at the local gym. I sent him five or six of my students when it was their time to move on over the years and don’t regret it.

Time together at the keyboard was something he shared with lots of other musicians, and I am sorry if I give the impression I was the only one who enjoyed the privilege. I loved him for the force of nature that was his talent, the grace with which he carried it, and the super-hard work that he did, year after year, to honor it. He modelled a working composer to me more than Ned or Virgil because he kept revising and improving everything. Like everyone who knew him, I am devasted by the irony that a man who exulted in the lifelong physicalizing of his music at the keyboard became afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease.

During a visit to Sag Harbor in the mid 90s, I recall him playing the entirety of his opera Dum Dee Tweedle and experiencing more keenly than ever how his obsessive use of melodic and harmonic sequences (either telescoping them to run faster through diminution, or more slowly through extension or metric modulation) skewed one’s perception of time. My memory’s a little foggy, but I think that when he finished, I felt as though he had been playing for about forty minutes only to look at my watch to see that 90 had elapsed. Repetition was talismanic for him as a composer, I think; it could summon emotional lightness or darkness. If tonality was redemptive to him, then his compositional apotheosis came through such a profound compression of harmonic and melodic movement that it felt dissonant—Liszt on steroids.

DDT 80th Birthday Concert, Joe’s Pub, New York, NY March 2017. p/c: Tevi Eber

By the late 90s, we were performing fundraisers together for Yaddo—he would be paired with the extraordinary, luminous John Kelly; I’d pair off with Paul Sperry, or whomever was singing in whatever opera I was working on. I recall an event at Harold Reed’s, for example, where he performed his Acrostic Song (literally all over the keyboard) and I followed by accompanying myself in some simple, tender settings of Paul Muldoon’s poetry. “How can you be so simple?” he asked. “That terrifies me.”

When Muldoon and I underwent the premiere of our opera Bandanna in Austin in April 2000, David wept afterwards, told me that he knew what it had taken to summon so much darkness in the final scene. “Of course, nobody is going to get it,” he said. I was astonished when he said, “Tonight, you are my hero.” Stephen Sondheim is said to have decreed that, on opening night, one should simply note that a work is “brilliant” to the author. “Criticism later,” he is supposed to have said. I agree. I was touched that David stood by his assessment of Bandanna. I recall—listening together to the entirety of my latest opera, A Woman in Morocco at his apartment in Westbeth—David pointing out exact measures that I had forwarded musical arguments begun in Bandanna fifteen years before. “Diminished seventh chords are very dangerous because they can go anywhere,” he observed. “Yeah, either they can go Salome or Salome at the Super 8 Motel,” I replied, which made him giggle.

One of my treasures remains the fragment of manuscript that he gave me after a particularly athletic read-through of a song in 2002-ish that he subsequently dedicated to me called "Now You Know" during which I had broken down, laughing with tears of joy & disbelief. I think that he wrote "pre-Hagen sketch” on it because I told him that he was absolutely nuts to ask a singer to do something. Over dinner: "Do you DARE to accept the dedication of this song?" he asked. It is my ardent hope that he didn't change a thing on my account.

I began to sense time beginning to run out on us as early as July 2005, when Gardner and I were at Yaddo working on Amelia and David accompanied me in the music room where we first met as I sang our first, trial aria to see how it landed with the other guests. In the aria, a father pictures himself as looking down on his loved ones from the stars after his demise. By the time the aria had been folded into the opera and premiered, my first son had been born. Came along another, and a move from Manhattan to the country. David and I saw one another less frequently. He still went to concerts—what a champ! But I had stopped. They didn’t feed my work the way that they did his. Ours became primarily a relationship of letters and telephone calls.

Still, Gilda Lyons and I would catch up with David every year at Yaddo’s annual meeting. Lord, how David loved Gilda, and how deeply they intuitively understood one another. We performed a version of David’s Acrostic Song together for him on a concert in Gilda’s Phoenix Concerts series in New York (alongside the world premiere of “Emily’s Aria” from Ned’s Our Town) that I had confected and he observed, with mock horror, “Now that you have had your way with my music, shall we continue to speak?” “Was it okay?” I asked. “It was wonderful, but why did you reharmonize me?” “Because I could,” I replied. The twinkle.

At the premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Herrick’s Oratorio” in New York City, 20 May 2023. p/c: Tevi Eber

I am still having trouble coming to terms with the fact that David is not down in the Village, pulling reams of notes out of his piano at Westbeth, or making little forts with walls comprised of different sorts of jelly jars and vitamin bottles at the breakfast table at Yaddo, or jogging in the woods at MacDowell, or lurking by the driers at VCCA in the wee hours looking for leftovers in the fellows’ refrigerator. When Cantori premiered his Herrick Oratorio in May 2023, it was a chance to say goodbye. David, a Catholic, ever the subversive, had woven Martin Luther’s Mighty Fortress into the finale of what was effectively his final public statement. I had driven in from the country for the premiere and was shocked, but not surprised, by the toll that Parkinson’s had extracted. As ever, his talent dazzled, and I told him so. “You’re up to your old tricks, messing with my sense of time,” I said. He had been, but the path we had traveled together, our shared Mad March, was running out. Nothing between us had changed, but everything around us had. He pulled me in close and said that he loved me and that I should take care of myself and Gilda and the boys. The twinkle was still there.

If I had not been walking out of the church with a friend I would have had to have stopped to steady myself, because, for the first time since hearing David play Mendelssohn before meeting him in June 1984, I felt that David’s time had run out. I was gutted. It wasn’t until an hour later, driving up the Palisades to the country, that I was able to reconnect to the fact that I am blessed to actually have some more time in front of me, with skinned knees and tree forts having given way to basketball and girlfriends for my sons, and mid-career engaging Gilda. Music remembers absolutely everything, I thought, and it has its own relationship with time. Messiaen knew it; David lived it. To me, a talent like David’s is evidence of the Unseen. And now it is time for me to learn how to let David go. Because there are among us many more forces of nature like him who can use a hand: some of them are very young not just in spirit, but in fact. Help them; lift them up, I thought, the way that the simple fact that talent like David’s existed lifted me. I’ll close with that.

On Composing "Shining Brow"

December 6, 2023

In 1989 I began composing Shining Brow, an opera in two acts and a prologue about architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It explored the intersection of Life and Art, self-actuation and selfishness. At the time, I asked my librettist to make this conundrum one of Wright's foremost concerns. Consequently, our Man asks a question that the actual One may never have asked himself: “Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still remain true to his art?”

My librettist Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. The Times Literary Supplement described him as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.” From 1973 to 1986, he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987, he has lived in the States.

Robert Orth and Brenda Harris as Wright and Mamah Cheney in a concert performance by the Buffalo Philahrmonic released by Naxos. p/c: Chris Lyons

I met Paul at the Saratoga Springs artist retreat Yaddo during summer 1988. He was brilliant, ambitious, quick to skewer pretension, and impatient with mediocrity. Already it was obvious that he had every intention of becoming a celebrity poet. His hair back then looked as though it were trying to escape. He did not speak English; he produced it. You could practically hear him listening to himself as he talked. Paul was and is a virtuoso performer of his own poetry. He could read a list of names, or ingredients, and, through line readings alone, move an audience in any direction he pleased.

In summer 1989 I received a call on one of the MacDowell Colony pay phones from conductor and artistic director of the Madison Opera Roland Johnson asking whether I might consider composing an opera about Wright. Paul was reading the newspaper a few feet away. Without thinking, I leaned out of the booth and quipped, “Say, Paul, do you want to write an opera?” A beat later, he replied, “Sure.”

When Paul and I began Brow, we first read everything we could lay hands on about Wright. We reconvened a few months later to co-author at Paul's home in Amherst, Massachusetts a filmic treatment consisting of a dozen pages describing what would happen in each scene.

I then determined how long each scene (and each section of each scene) would last, and the sort of musical form I would use to underpin the action of that scene. Giving the outline to Paul, I asked him to create a number of core images and literary motifs that I could then graft to musical ideas, along with some “parallel” poems for related characters, so that when I shared their music, the words would be easier to adapt. At one point I needed a straightforward hymn, and he responded by creating his beautiful Goethe gloss, Hymn to Nature.

Carolann Page, creator of the role of Mamah Cheney.

Over the course of eight weeks that winter at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I composed the music for the first act. I wrote the most important sections first, beginning with the last three minutes; then the music that would be associated with the four or five most important dramatic spots (what I call the “emotional nuclear reactors”) in the act; after that, I wrote the connective sections, which could and should be the least musically interesting. Each character existed in a “home” key: Wright in B-flat major; Mamah in E major; Edwin and Sullivan in A minor; Catherine in C major. The lovers’ keys were associated, of course, by the tritone, the “forbidden” interval, and the harmonic fulcrum on which modulation depends.

The most affecting, emotionally expressive tool in an opera composer’s kit is the ability to modulate. Aside from being crucial to maintaining large formal structures, it unlocks “gateways” to new emotional states and signals emotional evolution. I did not really learn how to modulate fluidly until I composed Brow, each of whose characters needed to interact with one another harmonically. I have used the modulatory practices used by Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner in their operas ever since I realized just how eloquent they really are, no matter what the surface style of the piece.

When composing opera, my compositional process has changed little since the early 80s. I retype and reformat the libretto to reflect the underlying musical form in which it will be carried, storyboard it on the wall, and illuminate it with various colored pens and pencils—say, red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I want to “track” also get colors. Standing before the entire opera tacked up on the wall and dreaming on its entirety is as close as I’m likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.

Kevin Kees as Wright in the "Fallingwater Brow."

Once the entire opera is “on the wall” I decide what the most important dramatic moments (the “emotional nuclear reactors”) are in each scene; I specify what the climactic moment of the opera is, work downwards in triage fashion to the least important moment. I do not compose “from left to right.” I compose the music for the most important half dozen moments in the opera first. The music for the rest of the piece then spreads outwards from these key moments like concentric ripples.

Paul and I accepted an invitation from Richard (Dick) Carney, Wright protégé and then managing trustee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, to stay at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a few days. After lunch with members of the Fellowship (during which Wright’s recorded lunchtime conversation from decades previous played on a boom box), Paul and I settled into the little house Wright built for his daughter. The sun set as we traded impressions and prepared for a formal dinner at which I sat beside architect and Wright protégé Wes Peters, with whom I had a long, intense conversation about Wright’s relationship with Olgivanna. “Was Mamah Cheney the love of his life?” I asked Wes. “She must have been,” he replied, “but I can only say that after her death, for the rest of his life, he never allowed her to be discussed in his presence.”

After dinner, Dick and I took a long walk in the desert and discussed the sort of opera I intended to compose. A fatherly bear of a man, he gestured to me to sit down on a boulder with him. Sighing, he said, “Well, Daron, I don’t think any of us here want you to compose a dishonest piece. Mr. Wright could be a bastard. Promise me you’ll try to convey his essential ‘greatness’ along with the rest.” I didn’t tell Dick that anybody who sings is rendered sympathetic. Instead, I shook his hand. “A promise, Dick.” He picked up some dirt and threw it. “Fine. Come and stay with us as long as you want to. Soak up the feel of the place. Make Mister Wright sing. I promise you that we’ll not stand in your way.”

Daron Hagen and Stephen Wadsworth at the premiere of "Amelia" by Seattle Opera in 2010. (Photo: Alan Alabastro) — Daron Hagen and Stephen Wadsworth at the premiere of "Amelia" by Seattle Opera in 2010. p/c: Alan Alabastro

Shortly before Christmas, I finished the vocal score of the first act. I needed a “green light” from the Madison Opera board before beginning the second. The next step was to present it to the commissioners in Madison.

“Just two hours ago,” President Bush began, “allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. Ground forces are not engaged.” It was 16 January. The United States had just invaded Iraq. In a huge rehearsal hall customarily used for symphony rehearsals, halfway through playing and singing the first act of Brow for the members of the Taliesin Fellowship and the board of Madison Opera, conductor Roland Johnson asked me to stop at 5:45 so that we could all gather around a portable radio to listen to our President address the nation. “Tonight, as our forces fight, they and their families are in our prayers.”

"Shall we continue this another time?” I asked Ann Stanke. She looked to Dick, who asked me, “Do you have a problem with moving ahead with this presentation?” It seemed absurd to me, under the circumstances, but I needed the money, and would not get paid unless, by pulling off this presentation, I fulfilled the terms of the commissioning contract. “No,” I lied, resuming my seat at the piano and picking up where I had left off.

Dick then pledged that the Fellowship would support my creation of the opera, and Roland “green lit” my moving on to the second act. It was my first taste, at twenty-nine, of what the life of a viable opera composer might be like, and I relished it.

The cast and production team of Urban Arias’ chamber version, “Usonian Brow” in Washington, DC in 2017.

I spent some time at Taliesin, in Spring Green. Edgar Tafel, the best known of Wright’s disciples, decided that he was going to see to it personally that I experienced what it was like “really to live in a Wright House—to duck when you pass through doorways, discover your feet hanging over the bottom of the bed at night, feel the rooms flowing from one to the next in the dark.” He conjured for me the poetry that Wright seems to have been able to spin for clients. His impersonations of Wright’s speaking voice were—aside from being incredibly funny—crucial to shaping my vocal characterization—particularly Wright’s stilted line readings, and what David Diamond, in a letter to me, described as “…the pontification, the affected dress-ugh-y, like Stieglitz.”

My friend photographer Pedro Guerrero’s reminiscences of Wright’s gentler moments also helped me to firm up the conviction that part of his appeal must have been the ability to project immense vulnerability in private. Dick Carney's descriptions of the tenderness that Wright could display also informed my decision to create the gentle music that underpins Wright’s soliloquies. Dick was a humane and generous man. My treasured former pupil and copyist Christopher Hume had a degenerative spinal condition that required his settling in a town with excellent medical facilities. I suggested Madison. I asked Dick to look out for Chris. He took him under his wing. They remained close for the rest of their lives.

Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon attend the Arizona Opera revival in 2019. p/c: Stephanie Weiss

The following autumn, in a tiny efficiency apartment at the corner of Amsterdam and 74th Street just off Verdi Square on Manhattan's Upper West Side, over the course of a few months, I wrote in one long delicious stretch the second act. Darynn Zimmer, the soprano who years later recorded the role of Mona in Bandanna under my baton for Albany records, was kind enough to sing through the role of Mamah for me as I composed it.

Like baseball pitchers, most composers have rituals. Mine consisted then of making my world very small and simple when I was writing so that I could keep all of the various motives and ideas suspended in my mind. My scrupulously maintained routine began with morning coffee and a chocolate chip scone from the Korean Market just below my apartment at 303 Amsterdam while reading the New York Times seated on a particular bench in Strawberry Fields. While composing—for exactly four hours by the stopwatch—I drank two bottles of San Pellegrino. Then I would run around the Central Park reservoir (twice: 3.2 miles), and then drink a bottle of San Pellegrino afterwards while walking home. I’d devour two slices of Freddy and Pepper’s pizza (an excellent joint in the basement which is still in business) sitting in Verdi Square, and then spend the evening making a fair copy of the sketches I had made during the day.

Robert Orth as Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago Opera Theater's revival, directed by Kenneth Cazan.

I've written elsewhere about what it was like to consult with Leonard Bernstein while I composed parts of Brow. One example of how he “got” the musical rhetoric of the opera merits repetition, I think. During Wright’s Act 1, scene one pitch to his future mistress, I quoted the New York, New York rising fourths motive that he had first used in Trouble in Tahiti, and then in On the Town, on the word, “suburbia.” Bernstein chuckled appreciatively. “Nice lift,” he said, “very Strauss. But you followed it up with stuff that sounds like Ned’s [Ned Rorem] little Frank O’Hara opera. Did I steal that from him for Tahiti or did he steal that from me? I can’t remember. In any event, I know you’re talking about theft by putting stolen music in his mouth, so you should come up with something else there.”

Tim Petty as Wright in the Tulsa Opera revival.

At some point, I pointed out that I had been modeling the character of Wright musically on him, and the relationship between Wright and Sullivan on him and Blitzstein. He got it: “That’s Maria. No, it’s the orchestral play-in to the first scene of Marc’s Regina,” he mused aloud. “Well, yes, I stole it from Marc.” Silence. Sudden grin: “But he stole it from Aaron!”

The Madison Opera had asked me to suggest a stage director for Brow. I asked Bernstein to suggest one. He suggested Stephen Wadsworth, with whom he had just written an opera called A Quiet Place.

The Fallingwater premeire by Opera Festival of Pittsburgh in 2013.

“I’ve written an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright,” I told Stephen on the phone. “I’m looking for someone to bring it to life on the stage. Lenny says that you’re that person. Would you like to come over for coffee and talk about it?” I knew that would get his attention.

That April, we sat cross-legged on the floor of my tiny studio more or less under the piano and in front of the six linear feet of opera scores on the bookshelves and began sounding one another out by pulling scores at random from the shelf and discussing them.

It helped that we both had been compelled to figure out how to work with Bernstein—Stephen as collaborator, me as pupil. Stephen could survive (even enjoy) Bernstein's intellectual death marches; I thrived on his musical pop quizzes. We shared an appetite for conversations that functioned on multiple levels.

Michael Sokol as Wright in the 1993 Madison Opera production.

I know now that our first meeting was typical of Stephen’s special way with everyone—warm, clever, completely at ease, and intellectually competitive. His probing eyes habitually sought out mine; his compassionate face was extraordinarily expressive. His long fingers moved restlessly when he spoke. I found charming his ability to italicize what he was saying by giving you a hard, quick stare, and then releasing you. He was fun.

At first, it was the confidence and maturity of his opinions as we stuck our thumbs into scores and played “what’s the most important moment in this scene” that impressed me most. In time, as we grew to know one another better, I realized that what I had interpreted as competitiveness was instead an urgent desire to understand: if an idea intrigued him, he reflexively craved an explanation.

The talents that have served him so well in his illustrious career were already in full play as, over the course of six very long work sessions at the apartment in the Village he shared with baritone Kurt Ollmann, I played and sang through Brow’s score. I was defensive, and needed to be “sold” on every one of the dozen or so alterations to words and music (I had to my mind “finished” the score months previously) that he suggested. I’m not certain now why I fought him so hard—especially since I knew even then that his criticisms were always spot on. Possibly, it was because I wanted to see just how right he thought he was.

For the workshop, the cast and company of Brow gathered at the Bernstein family’s apartment at the Dakota to give for Madison Opera’s donors and staff a workshop performance (piano and two dozen singers) of the complete score. Ann Stanke, The company's founde and the driving force behind the commission, worked the room as Roland powwowed with the singers.

Daron and Arizona Opera revival director Chas Rader Shieber in 1993. p/c: Stephanie Weiss

At my suggestion, the company had capitalized upon the New York press’ interest in visiting the apartment one more time to fill the room with eyes and ears (particularly the national press) that might not otherwise have had any interest in a commission, however laudable, of an unknown composer by a small Midwestern company.

The boundary between life and death blurred in a familiar—even comforting—fashion as I listened to the music I had provided for the character of Wright—consciously referring as it did to Bernstein’s music at key points—was performed in Bernstein’s home. It had been impossible, strolling around Taliesin with Dick (like me, an insomniac) in the wee hours, not to feel Wright’s presence. It had been impossible at Yaddo not to feel the Trask family’s. It had been impossible to walk through the Common Room at the Curtis Institute as a student without feeling the benevolent spirit of Mary Louise Curtis Bok. And it still felt, at the Dakota, as though Bernstein slouched still in the chair in the den, sipping a scotch, pulling on his plastic cigarette holder, growling one of the last things he said to me: “Play and sing that part again, baby—the part that sounds like Marc.”

Everyone involved with the April 1993 opening night of Brow knew that it was going to be a success. 25 years and 7 operas later, I now am acutely aware of how rare that is. That night, at “the rail” of the house, behind the audience, where authors traditionally are allowed to pace, fret, enjoy, and suffer, performances of their work, with Stephen, as the tragic ending of Madison Opera’s première production unfolded.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s final aria. Arizona Opera 2019 revival.

Stephen said, “Look!” “Eh?” I said. “Look at them,” he said, sweeping a hand over the audience, who were experiencing the last few minutes of the opera. “They’re all weeping.”

“Yes, that’s where we want them,” I said. “No,” he said. “That’s where they want to be. You did it. I did it. Paul did it. The performers did it. Communion. We all did it. Together.”

The next morning a telegram from Ned arrived at my hotel, saying, “I always said that you would arrive at twenty.” The reviews were strong, and the consensus was that my career had begun.

"Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still be true to his Art?” In the years since I've come to my own conclusion about the Life vs Art paradigm. Art is to my Life as the MacGuffin is to a Hitchcock movie. While I have become music, my family is my Life. So much so, that I've experienced a parting of ways with most of my colleagues who’ve concluded otherwise. Perhaps Wright came to that conclusion sometime after the point at which our opera left him, pledging to rebuild Taliesin in Mamah Cheney’s memory. Perhaps not. In the long run, it shall probably only have mattered to the people he loved and who loved him.

First published in the Huffington Post on 8 August 2016. Read it there by clicking here.

Ned Rorem and Daron Hagen at Rorem’s apartment in fall 2018. (Photo: Mary Marshall)

On Ned Rorem's Our Town

July 12, 2022

When Thornton Wilder’s 1938 meta-theatrical triptych of portraits of American Life Our Town (which, no matter when it is staged, always takes place in 1938) was produced at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, twenty years had passed since the American Dream had been convulsed by the “War to End all War.” That which burns away any Rockwell-esque nostalgia and powers the drama of the play is the “Damoclesian sword” that was the rise of fascism and the impending outbreak of World War II—only months away. The audience was invited to grieve for the characters from the moment that they met the omniscient, fourth-wall-piercing character of the Stage Manager. It was in the air: Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, (with Blitzstein and Orson Welles on stage essentially splitting the role that Wilder would transform into the Stage Manager for his Our Town) had electrified the American theater during summer 1937. Louise Talma (the only composer besides Hindemith to convince Wilder to pen a libretto, in German, no less—for her earnest, turgid Alcestiad—in the ’50s) told me at Yaddo during the ’90s that “Thornton certainly knew Marc’s opera. The Depression was winding down. We saw Hitler coming to power. People were mourning Good Old Days that never were.”[1]

Arguably, Wilder’s “continual dryness of tone”—as he described it in the introductory note to the 1938 “acting edition” of the play—found its ideal composer in Aaron Copland’s seminal 1940 musical score (dedicated to Leonard Bernstein) for the original film.[2] Copland, according to Vivian Perlis, stated, “For the film version, they were counting on the music to translate the transcendental aspects of the story. I tried for clean and clear sounds and in general used straightforward harmonies and rhythms that would project the serenity and sense of security of the story.” Rudolf Bing, then general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, approached Copland in 1951 with the idea of expanding his score into a full-length operatic version. Wilder, according to Perlis, quashed the idea, responding, “my texts ‘swear at’ music; they’re after totally different effects.”[3] What was required, as Wilder wrote in his introduction to the play was, “the New England understatement of sentiment, of surprise, of tragedy. A shyness about emotion ... a sharpening and distinctness of the voice.”

Fast forward. Wilder said no to many composers during his lifetime, though he did permit Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart to turn The Matchmaker into Hello Dolly and, in 1965, did grant rights to Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green to adapt The Skin of Our Teeth into a musical. Musical theater collaborations are fickle—everything’s got to fall into place or the producers bolt and the soufflé falls. Everything didn’t, and the project collapsed. When Lenny returned to Wilder, seeking operatic rights, Wilder shut him down. We are the poorer for his decision.[4]

I studied with composer Ned Rorem during the early ’80s while a student at the Curtis Institute, and served as his copyist for half a decade after that. I knew his music from the inside out, and I knew particularly well his short operas. Art song composer nonpareil, he and Kenward Elmslie had adapted August Strindberg’s Miss Julie in 1965 with mixed success, and many thought him not suited to the demands of large-scale lyric theater. But Ned persevered, and garnered universal praise from opera stalwarts when, in 1994, he returned to Miss Julie, trimming it into a “taut and persuasive” 90-minute one act, according to James Oestreich in the Times.[5]

J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy, the svelte poet, erudite editor, and versatile librettist for Little Nemo in Slumberland (Daron Hagen), Miss Lonelyhearts (Lowell Liebermann), 1984 (Lorin Maazel), Dolores Claiborne (Tobias Picker), and A Question of Taste (William Schuman) among others, and I met when translator William Weaver commissioned me to compose some songs in memory of James Merrill—Sandy was Merrill’s executor. I admired his libretti and told him so. He said that Tappan Wilder had agreed to loosen the bonds on the Our Town rights, and that he, Sandy, was looking for the right composer. How, he asked me, would I proceed if I took on the job? I don’t recall now what I said, but I do recall ending the conversation by saying, “You know, the man you’re looking for is really Ned Rorem. Ned’s Quakerism provides the proper emotional repose; his age the appropriate cultural reference points. Most importantly, he’s entirely secure in his own voice, and will be comfortable letting Wilder’s play take the lead.”

I doubt that Sandy chose Ned because of what I said, but I knew then (and now) that I was right.Our Town the opera was premiered by Indiana University Opera Theater with student singers and orchestra on February 25, 2006. Its professional debut was at the Lake George Opera on July 1, 2006. Intended from the start to be a chamber opera, the orchestration is small, and the scoring is light and transparent throughout—consistent with a work best suited to young voices. The formal structure follows Wilder’s play closely. Minor deviations from the original play seem to have been made (the fleshing out of the role of Simon Stimson, the creation of choral numbers, for example) to provide opportunities for musicalization. Rorem moves in and out of speech and utilizes more elevated recitative (parlando) than in his previous theatrical works.

Playing through Ned’s first manuscript vocal score with Gilda Lyons shortly after he finished his first draft, we pounced upon the opportunity of giving the concert première of the (now classic) aria for Emily. (Notably, the opera’s only freestanding set piece.) In it, the ironic union of opposites that make the opera Our Town the immediate American classic that it is were on full display—economy of construction, absolute, unwavering resistance to unnecessary emotionalism, frankly open textures, wisps of Poulenc at his driest, and the sort of stunning Protestant hymns that only an atheistic alcoholic Quaker whose life partner was a church organist can pen. Everywhere in the music there is a sort of cool, self-contained regretfulness—the regret so central to the play’s initial impetus, a regret so intense as to border on dread—that perfectly underpins and undercuts the sentimentality of the portraits.

Rorem uses three compositional strategies to hold the opera together structurally, track the story’s narrative, and to keep his musical rhetoric coherent.

First, he manifests Wilder’s “emotional shyness” with abrupt stylistic cross-cutting (in mid- thought, sometimes in mid-musical phrase) between Americana (Thomsonian faux-Protestant hymns, plush sustained cinematic strings, Copland-esque woodwind solos, Ivesian collages), transatlantic modernism (the tartly-scored “sting” chords, jagged, off-kilter ostinatos in close- canon, denatured melodic fragments in place of memorable tunes), and Gallic lyricism (rapturous string obbligatos, sudden snatches of emotionally-vibrant melody, Debussy-esque orchestration).

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The first sixty seconds of the opera deftly arrays all three techniques. The pungent bell-tone chord that strikes 5AM declares that Our Town is part of a continuum of American operas that frankly destabilize traditional harmony by thrusting, like a billy to the ribs, an unresolved fourth into the triad. Blitzstein’s poisoned capitalists, Bernstein’s tragic suburbanites, my tormented architect, and Rorem’s dread-filled citizens of Grover’s Corners all inhabit the same American operatic landscape. Ned immediately crosscuts to another of his favorite tropes—the faux Protestant chorus underpinned harmonically by parallel unresolved sevenths in the bass—before overlaying a sudden, Gallic, sensually-arresting obbligato in the high strings. When the action begins, the parlando (passages of elevated speech that do not quite rise to song) section that follows is typical of the handling of dialogue throughout the opera: The characters unpretentiously skitter halfway between speech and recitative over a plush, comforting pad of sustained, Copland-esque strings.

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Second, throughout the opera, beginning in the background during the first moments as a woodwind obbligato like a nettlesome foreigner, is a “deedle-dum” figure that unmistakably evokes the falling motif associated with the doomed nuns in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites[Fig. 5]. Rorem’s personal association with the motif inspired him to quote it in his own song, “For Poulenc” [Fig. 6], and, over the years, a dozen instrumental works, large and small. In the score of Our Town, it completes its transit (in Ned’s life as a composer and in his catalogue) in his characterization of Emily [Fig. 7].

The motif evolves inexorably over the course of the opera, generating tension the way that someone playing with their hair during a serious conversation is at first slightly distracting and, over time, enervating. It begins to take on a life of its own as the second act unfolds, the curling of melodies in the background behind the characters’ parlando turning in on themselves in an Ouroborus-like way, transforming the fragments into slowly unraveling ostinati that are both claustrophobic and comforting—like the family life Rorem’s music limns. Characters begin taking on the background ostinati and incorporating them into their parlando in odd melismatic passages that heighten words in a baroque fashion. As the second act closes and the young couple marry, the dread given us by the first acerbic chord of the opera returns, literally underscoring the fragility of their happiness. A violin solo gives another fleeting taste of sensual pleasure before Rorem snuffs it as, again, “too much” to close with an anything but comforting, dread-filled, Ives-ian mash-up of the “Mendelssohn Wedding March.”

Pedal points in the strings, quizzical quasi-chorales in the winds and brass, the “deedle-dum” curling wind obbligati, all return in the third act; the opera continues to unfold, but all the vocal lines are heightened above parlando (they’re taken closer to “song” and effusive tunefulness by making their tunes less abstract and more traditionally singable and giving the phrases more melismas) in a way that they weren’t in the first two acts. This “gradual emotional warming” manifests Ned’s third, and most subtle, strategy for giving the opera emotional depth, the character of Emily emotional verifiability, and the piece a satisfying emotional trajectory.

This is how he did it. Gradually, Rorem invests the chorus with more and more emotional warmth so that they—in death, but not in life—create the sort of musico-emotional landscape into which Emily can step. The apotheosis of the opera is, of course, Emily’s aria, wherein Rorem combines at proximity all the musical gestures laid out in the first two acts. In this, the “eleven o’clock” spot, he gives Emily the only unabashedly rapturous music in the opera, and on the most regretful sentiment: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” The composer’s self-control in finally allowing us to “feel” is masterful; the effect is devastating. His obvious identification with Emily, Poulenc, and the nuns is an astonishing personal revelation for a composer so famously public in his prose and yet so resolutely private in fact. Emily concludes, as Ned (a writer who eschews exclamation points and composer who famously hates repeating words, breaks his own rules) sums up a world-view, “That’s all human beings are. Blind!”

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But why did Our Town need to be made into an opera? Just 80 years have elapsed since the 1937 premiere of Wilder’s play, yet a 1938 audience’s dread is like that felt in many quarters in 2017. Spring 2017 may find Americans in greater need of the sort of narrative that Our Town provides than they have been since the ’30s. The “Damoclesian sword” of rising fascism has returned with a vengeance; we’re told that we’re not experiencing a Depression, yet unemployment isn’t being measured in a way that considers how many people have simply stopped looking for work, or the fact that retired people are working at Walmart to supplement their pensions. The Peterborough, New Hampshire, that Wilder used as a model for Grover’s Corners had faded to the margins by the time I began visiting the MacDowell Colony during the early ’80s. Nobody in Wilder’s play could afford to live in the Peterborough of today.

Ned has told me that Satie’s Socrate may be “the greatest of all operas.” Certainly, he exploits in his score for Our Town the same kind of baroque cantata textures and affects as Satie did in his 1920 masterpiece and that Wilder (according to Mabel Dodge)[6] most preferred. But the Rorem and McClatchy Our Town also contains—in the propulsive, off-kilter ostinati percolating uneasily beneath the Nantucket matter-of-factness of its musical surfaces and its stubborn unwillingness to wear its heart on its sleeve—an astonishing undercurrent of unanticipated, and highly effective dramaturgical fury.

This article originally appeared as the liner notes to New World Records 80790-2 [2 CDS] world premiere recording of Ned Rorem and J.D. McClatchy’s opera Our Town, based on the play by Thornton Wilder.

Footnotes

Louise Talma in conversation with the author at Yaddo, summer 1995.
Thornton Wilder’s “Some Suggestions for the Director” from the 1938 “acting edition” of the script.
Vivian Perlis quotes Aaron Copland in a letter to the New York Times, January 31, 1998.
Tappan Wilder, program notes for “Thornton Wilder and Music,” a program by the American Symphony Orchestra, December 19, 2014.
James Oestreich, New York Times review of the Manhattan School of Music production of the revised Miss Julie, spring 1994.
Mabel Dodge is quoted by Tappan Wilder in his American Symphony Orchestra program note.

On Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)

April 15, 2022

ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The bit was in. I had spotted bliss—far off in the distance still, but real enough to enthrall. Fifteen years old, summer of 1976, body vibrating, ablaze with youth and hormones at the kitchen table at three in the morning with the radio on listening to Ron Cuzner’s overnight jazz show on WFMR and copying parts to Together, the musical I was writing for my friends.

Cuzner introduced the six-minute-long 1971 Polydor recording to his listeners as though disclosing classified information over whisky to a fellow agent in a smoky bar near Checkpoint Charlie. I remember the words clearly: “He hails from California. (beat of silence) Marlene Dietrich (again, the silence, to let the enormously important intelligence land) is reported to have (beat) loved him. He married a glamorous movie star (beat), Angie Dickinson. But he was a student of Milhaud, and Cowell (I knew who these guys were and was impressed) who, shall we say, went off the railswith the likes of (he paused, as though about to invoke a Holy Trinity) Warwick, Jones, and Alpert. This (Cuzner’s ultimate seal of approval) very cool orchestral work describes the moment you first see (long beat) her.”

Five years earlier, my brother Kevin had brought the Columbia LP’s of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS home and I had scandalized my fellow ten-year-olds by playing “it was goddamn good” (listen to Alan Titus sing it here) in class at Linfield School to the horror of Principal Buege (pronounced “Biggy,” of course) and to the delight of my mother. (Kevin had provoked similar outrage by bringing Jesus Christ Superstar to school a year earlier.) But my mom also adored Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, and Frank Sinatra—the exquisite Nelson Riddle arrangements of the Cole Porter songbook especially. I was immersed in the Beatles songbook, of course; I had read Twilight of the Gods, Wilfred Mellers’ terrific book about their songs, the previous summer. My brothers and I had wept in 1970 when the announcer introduced the first local broadcast of The Long and Winding Road on WOKY by revealing that the Beatles had decided to split up.

Intuiting that something interesting was about to happen, I slipped a cassette in to tape it, missing the first few bars. I would listen to that recording of And the People Were With Her a hundred times that summer. I still have it.

My literature teacher, Diane Doerfler, knew that the one thing I was sure I was going to do was leave Wisconsin for the coast at the very first opportunity. Which coast was very much up in the air. My father favored the west coast: he recorded movie soundtracks by way of a jack he had installed on the back of our television. I’d spent a lot of time listening to dozens of them—particularly to Elmer Bernstein’s majestic Great Escape, Magnificent Seven, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Doerfler was in favor of the east coast: she had tossed me a copy (which I still have) of John Cheever’s collected short stories about life in the Hudson Valley and quipped, “Here. Read these. They will help.” (They did. Doerf was right; after decades in Manhattan, I now live in the Hudson Valley.)

From the moment that And the People Were With Her (listen here as you read this piece) ended, my “Killer B’s” for the rest of summer 1975 became Beatles, Bernstein, and Bacharach and the west coast became a real contender. John Williams’ pealing orchestral main title to Star Wars in summer 1978 hit me like a hammer, and I was certain — according to my diaries — that I would move to Los Angeles and start work as an orchestrator, perhaps even graduate in time to scoring. The decision was made when mother sent my orchestral Suite for a Lonely City to Helen Coates and in return received a letter — a sort of unexpected musical golden ticket — from Leonard Bernstein which she would open a few feet away from where I was sitting. East it was.

In a few months, Kevin would put Britten’s Billy Budd on the record player, and my future as an opera composer would be set: Bacharach was supplanted by Britten. By the time I graduated high school, the earthy authenticity of Bartok supplanted the Beatles. College in Madison brought Homer Lambrecht’s influence; he introduced me to the Italianate suavity of Berio, and my musical trinity became Berio, Britten, and Bernstein. When I finally landed at Curtis, Lukas Foss got me into Stockhausen — a needed antidote to the polishing and professionalizing I was receiving in my lessons with Ned Rorem — and my world was turned inside out. I dedicated myself to Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach as far as the school and my peers were concerned — heaven knows I had enough to learn about that repertoire! — and holed up at the Free Library with Stockhausen and the eastern bloc modernists in the afternoons. Though I toyed with a career in LA during summer 1988, I ended up moving to Europe instead, returning to New York City for good in 1990.

Being a pianist and devotee of the American Songbook helps one to truly credit the subversive power of Bacharach’s music. Gershwin, Arlen, Kern, Rogers, Porter — the lot of them — were only a few years past. Like Bernstein, Bacharach’s chord choices could be deliciously “classical” (I hear the harmonic choices of Bill Evans), with modulations, shifting meters and phrase lengths. Some of his bridges (my favorite is the wandering and wonderful, take-that-Kern-and-Arlen bridge to A House is Not a Home — listen here) are pure bliss. Like Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein, his tunes could be tricky. But during his Warwick-Alpert years, I sense that something in him led him to craft surprisingly memorable (though, again, deceptively simple yet more than quirky and smart, I’d say inspired) tunes.

I have read that Bacharach will be remembered compositionally as a transitional figure bridging the methods perfected by the 50s Brill Building bunch and rock and roll. Or maybe as the American Michel Legrand. Maybe, but I think that takeaway unfairly diminishes his accomplishment. He was a master of instrumental MOR. (“Middle-of-the-road,” a commercial radio format that includes “easy listening” and can even cover cool genres such as Shibuya-kei and show tunes and not so cool ones like Countrypolitan.) MOR makes musical snobs crazy—particularly when a gifted composer writes it. I love that. It’s subversive, and musical chauvinists just don’t get it.

Bacharach brilliantly subverted commercial music clichés and practices by marrying them (thereby freshening classical tropes and supercharging pop music tropes) to classical chops and compositional procedures not to accompany the dissipation of the valium and martini hazed Greatest Generation, but to underline their societal disillusionment. When James Coburn steps into William Daniels’ den (watch it here) in The President’s Analyst (1967) and Daniels’ character (a gun-toting “liberal”) flicks a switch, filling the room with “total sound,” the music supplied by Lalo Schifrin captured the essence of what I have described elsewhere as that which is “heard in the waiting room of a dentist’s office while awaiting a root canal.” It’s MOR, it’s the seamy underside of the American Dream, and it is glorious.

When Cory, a 35 year old arbitrageur who works at the World Trade Center, arrives and lets rip with a big aria in my operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall, he’s characterized by the sort of virile Mike Post television theme (here, or here, or here) from the 70s-90s he’d have grown up with—who knows, maybe watching LA Law as a teenager was what inspired him to become a lawyer! When Bibi, a 21-year-old singer brought up in Los Angeles, remembers her childhood there, she swings into music that could have been lifted wholesale from Nikki (listen here). MOR had served as the background music to their suburban childhoods as much as shag carpeting had comforted their bare feet in the den—one on the east coast, the other on the west. It is my honor to characterize them with the music with which they would have identified. Editing the film, I’ve watched again and again (as only one strapped to a moviola must) as people in the room reacted with everything from delight to contempt to these musical moments, depending on who they think they are or what they think music ought to be.

Bacharach was who he was, and his honor — whether it be in South American Getaway (listen here, where he out swingles the Swingle Singers and puts a pin in Berio’s magnificent Sinfonia), or Pacific Coast Highway (listen here, from 1968) in which he captures the dread-filled determination to be carefree that I still picked up on while driving on it during the 90s to Stinson Beach — was to contextualize his time.

To me, though, the most incorruptible facet of Bacharach’s compositional gift remains the gleaming horizontality of his melodies from which the chords seem to hang like icicles from the eaves of an irregular roofline. Hal David’s lyrics were middlebrow — another thing that made the songs easier to digest than Sondheim’s — but heartfelt and soulful. I was never crazy for the collaborations with Bayer Sager. Elvis Costello’s verse — smart, dark, and probing, was a great foil for the late Bacharach as a songwriter. Bacharach set lyrics as an art song composer would poetry (or as Elton John treats Bernie Taupin’s words, though he is liable to override the lyrics entirely for the sake of a good hook or tune) — permitting the rhythm of the unevenly proportioned lyric lines to generate melodies more like those from an art song than a popular song.

Perhaps, if he had been the sort of man who could have been contained by the eastern seaboard, he would not have toured with Dietrich, courted commercial success, or married Dickinson, or encountered his singer muse Warwick (his Leontyne?) and created I Say a Little Prayer (listen here to it as not just a love confection but as the cri de coeur of a woman whose boyfriend is in Vietnam and you get how his songs can be simultaneously winsome and wise) and a host of other great Motown-influenced gems. Maybe he would have surpassed Alec Wilder’s expectations and created a new American art song repertoire. Maybe he would have been America’s other Samuel Barber. Maybe he did. Maybe he was.

Orchestrating a Psychological Landscape -- Interview: Fullshot Cine Mag

December 7, 2020

FCM: Let us go back to the beginning. What made you fall in love with cinema? How did you start making films and where did you learn how to make films?

DH: I fell in love with cinema because of my father, with whom I used to watch old black and white movies—the Late Show, and then the Late, Late Show—on broadcast television in Wisconsin when I was a child during the early 70s. I still remember—having fallen asleep during the second feature—waking up to the hiss of white noise and the eerie bullseye of the wavering test pattern in the dark and being led to bed. This was before videotape recorders were commercially available. Father mounted a jack on the back of the television and recorded the soundtracks on to cassette tapes, which I’d listen to over and over again, like radio dramas.

At 16, “learner’s permit” in hand, I began driving into Milwaukee from the suburbs with my friends to the magnificent old Oriental Theater. It was operated back then by the Pritchett brothers, who ran it as a calendar house. (This was before Parallax, and then the Landmark Chain took it over.) The programming was astonishingly eclectic. I practically lived there after classes in high school between 1977 and 1980, viewing (and, afterwards, over coffee or drinks at Von Trier’s across the street, reviewing critically with friends) hundreds of films. That was when my crush on cinema turned serious.

When I landed in Philadelphia and conservatory (where I dared steal little time for anything but composing and practicing the piano) at the Curtis Institute of Music, I began reading serious film criticism, devouring Truffaut, Bazin and the rest. Landing a few years later in Manhattan to complete my musical training at Juilliard, I was fortunate enough to have access to the Regency Theater, a fabulous calendar house at 67th and Broadway that showed old films, during its last few seasons. I even met Truffaut there at the end of a festival of his movies! Sometimes I think that leaving my composition lessons (which could be intensely stressful) and heading straight to the cool darkness of the Regency preserved my sanity. I was among the protesters out front when they closed it in ’87; the Thalia uptown closed the same year.

That opera world opened to me with the 1993 premiere of my first major opera, Shining Brow (on a libretto by Paul Muldoon about the tragic murders at Taliesin and the early career of Frank Lloyd Wright). I spent a little time in Los Angeles during the early 90s, met with some people, and made some connections in the film world. Had I not been fortunate to enjoy such relative success as a young composer in New York at the time—a commission from the New York Philharmonic, prizes, other opera commissions, a teaching job at a liberal arts college called Bard—I would have probably pursued film work then.

Instead, over the next twenty years I composed a dozen operas, a slew of symphonies, reams of chamber music, and hundreds of art songs. I became immersed in the east coast concert music world and fully embraced my life as a Manhattanite. A few years ago, my wife and I moved to the country to raise our children. Gradually, I began accepting invitations to serve as stage director for my operas. During production by Kentucky Opera of A Woman in Morocco at the Actors Theater of Louisville, it was pointed out to me that my theatrical staging was clearly filmic and that it was too bad that we weren’t making a Playhouse 90 out of it. Frankly, it had never occurred to me not to stage it cinematically. In hindsight, moving into film directing—making films—was my logical next move.

FCM: Orson Welles once said, 'The enemy of art is the absence of limitations". In Orson Rehearsed, you limited yourself to the stage and music. What kind of freedom or creativity did it bring?

DH: Welles’ comment echoes a paradoxical observation that Stravinsky makes in Poetics of Music: “My freedom consists in my … moving ahead within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.” Generating a rhetoric is my way of making a “sandbox” or “narrow frame” in which to frame narrative. Orson Rehearsed takes place in Orson Welles’ mind as he crosses through the bardo between life and what comes after. My challenge was to come up with a rhetoric with which to coherently explore the inner workings of one genius’ mind.

Since Welles worshipped Shakespeare, who described the world as a stage in As You Like It, I chose to have the stage of the Studebaker Theater in Chicago stand in for the interior of Welles’ mind. Analyzing Welles’ films from a Freudian standpoint (they were born on the same day) is something of a cottage industry among film-buffs; it occurred to me that dividing up his self-image into three avatars would be a sensible story-telling strategy: one would be the residual self-image of his rollicking youthful self; another the fully engaged artist of his middle years; and the third his present self, dying.

I needed a visual rhetorical language for expressing numerous layers of consciousness. Consequently, every one of the (repeated and recontextualized) images in Orson Rehearsed is synchronized to specific words, concepts, and musical ideas that are treated the same way. Consistent use of foreground, middle-ground, and background action in the frame allowed for having at least three things going on simultaneously much of the time.

I determined to express Welles’ ego by documenting the onstage action. I am indebted to filmmaker H. Paul Moon for suggesting that I wash out all the onstage footage—present it all in black and white. This really helped me to clarify the visual rhetoric of the film.

Stream-of-consciousness images generated by his id were displayed as three sixty-minute (full-color) movies projected above the heads of the three onstage avatars. These images would be treated as visual motives that would recur and develop over the course of the film—scraps of film leader, the wing of a jet flying through the night, playing cards, waves, hands at a manual typewriter or a piano keyboard, a boy’s hand tracing letters etched into a gravestone, candles on a birthday cake being blown out, a woman running her hands through her hair, waves transforming into clouds transforming into white static, an eye superimposed over the lens of a camera, a spastic puppet dancing, a red satin scarf that transformed into Rita Hayworth’s tossing hair, and so on. Depending on the focus of the narrative at any point, the images would come to the fore (as in the overture and several scenes), be intercut with other images, or confined in tightly framed boxes.

Welles’ “real-time” coming to terms with his imminent demise by way of his super-ego would be overlaid as semi-opaque images (screened either red, white, or blue and including an important bit of 30s stock footage of a boy walking away from the camera that stands in for Orson as a child) during the process of editing the id and ego narratives together for the filmic iteration of the work.

The musical rhetoric was derived from (and strictly synchronized with) the visual rhetoric. The electro-acoustic component of the score represented Welles’ id. Acoustic orchestra and the singer avatars were his ego. The composite soundtrack, recorded live in the Studebaker in performance (as I feel that live performance before an audience is the lifeblood of music-drama) so that the electro-acoustic and acoustic (id and ego) mixed naturally, manifested his super-ego.

The libretto, or script was organized in a similar fashion. Welles’ super-ego was expressed as old-fashioned “explanatory” onscreen intertitles framing the following scene, as scrolling text (the interview with Merv Griffin), the heartbreaking cri de cœurfrom Henry IV (“the true and perfect image of life”), and as a crucial revelation presented almost as an after-thought: “I had forgotten to wish for something.” His ego is expressed by the text sung by the onstage avatars, who sing mainly repurposed pertinent snatches of Shakespeare, (mis)remembered fragments of his interviews, radio broadcasts, and dialogue from scripts. His id erupts in samples of his own voice mixed into the electro-acoustic soundscape—from anguished utterances like “they destroyed Ambersons; the film destroyed me” to tender lines from a 1946 radio broadcast in which he gallantly compares Rita Hayworth to Helen of Troy.

FCM: Beside the screenplay, your film also has music and arias, and they must have taken you a long time to compose. How did the idea for the film come to you? How long did it take for the screenplay to take its final shape?

DH: The screenplay began as a collection of dramatic beats (I eventually created 52 of them, like a deck of cards). The twelve scenes that comprise Orson Rehearsed the film I chose in an organic fashion based on the forces I had on hand in Chicago only months before shooting. This process of throwing spaghetti at the wall (shooting about thirty hours of film for the onstage films, reading, collecting bits of dialogue and creating musical, visual, and textual material) took a year or so. I didn’t start to storyboard until I knew which “beats” I was going to use. This took about four months.

At this point, I still didn’t know exactly which order the scenes would happen. Once I had all the “id films” cut and a rough mockup of the score, I shaped them into a psychologically verifiable sequence. This of course prompted adjustments. Richard Strauss teaches opera composers that the drama happens mainly in the transitions: just so with Orson Rehearsed. The transitions were the anchoring points for the “super-ego” layer of rhetoric that binds together the narrative as a whole.

There are still forty more in various stages of completion on my hard drive that involve, among other characters, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Oja Kodar, John Houseman, John Huston, and Marc Blitzstein, among others. There are some loopy, surreal dream ensembles in them that would have made for a very different film.

From (l.to r.) Robert Frankenberry, Robert Orth, Omar Mulero, and music director Roger Zahab during discovery. (Neil Erickson photo)

FCM: Tell us about your experiences of working with your actors. How did you select them and what were the rehearsal sessions like? How long did you work with your actors before the filming began?

DH: I’d known for nearly a decade that I was going to write the role of the dying Welles for the legendary baritone Robert Orth. Bob was a fiercely capable, emotionally brave intellect and performer who could suavely straddle the American Music Theater and Opera traditions. The “go to” baritone for an entire generation of well-known American opera composers, Bob and I had first crossed paths when the terrific director Ken Cazan had cast him in a revival of Shining Brow with the Chicago Opera Theater in the 90s. As it happened, Bob was undergoing chemotherapy during the staging and filming of Orson Rehearsed. His performance was nothing less than heroic, and he passed away a few months after production. For the middle-aged Orson, I knew beforehand that I would write for Robert Frankenberry, a prodigious musical and theatrical polymath (conductor, tenor, stage director, composer, pianist) who I had cast as Louis Sullivan in the Buffalo Philharmonic’s recording of my Frank Lloyd Wright opera Shining Brow and who had gone on to conduct the orchestra in a revival of the opera in a site-specific staging at Wright’s Fallingwater a few years later. As a faculty member of the Chicago College of Performing Arts, which co-produced Orson Rehearsed, I was able to cast the young Orson with Omar Mulero, a gifted tenor and graduate student there, then just beginning his career.

Discovery for Orson began with the eleven live musicians—members of the Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble—nearly a year before staging. As with the singers, I had no interest in crafting something avant-garde for its own sake, so I needed traditionally trained players who could stretch into new spaces. During several exploratory sessions, I learned how much creative risk each player could tolerate. One player, Eric Snoza, had acting training and slipped easily into the role of Jacaré’s ghost, playing his upright bass and interacting with Orth. In the end, I was able to ask the players to sing as a chorus of muses as well as play their instruments in a number of contexts; I asked for some minimal improvisation. In addition, they provided clouds of spoken dialogue that complimented and expanded upon phrases that they pre-recorded for me as a group and that I mixed into the electro-acoustic component of the score. I drew them as far out of their instrumentalist “comfort zones” as they were willing to go at the time.

Discovery for the Orsons, our musical director and conductor Roger Zahab, and myself, began a week before staging rehearsals and resulted in what I can only describe as the most fulfilling and honorable work I’ve done as an artist. On the most superficial level, it was a treat to “talk Welles” with them. They had of course done their homework and ascertained the sources of the real-life situations being dramatized/examined. On a deeper level, the technical exchanges—the relative ages of the instruments themselves and the cues and tricks the men shared with one another about how to manage vocal challenges, as well as the acting challenges inherent in singing opera and acting at the same time. The mentorship in rehearsal that Frankenberry and Orth gave Mulero was deeply moving to witness and a pleasure to transform into stage/film interaction. Still deeper, the fierce mutual trust and support that actors develop in order to shoulder the emotional trauma of their characters’ journeys. It was a great honor, for instance, to facilitate (as composer, librettist, and director) a process in which Bob, just arrived at rehearsal from a chemotherapy session, described an epiphany he had just experienced about how the dying Welles he was portraying may have felt.

FCM: Do you think there is enough space for experimental and independent films in the film industry today? How can these films reach a wider range of viewers? Are film festivals successful in introducing these films to the public?

DH: I don’t have an answer for that. I do sense that opera producers are all eager to make what they consider films now and to at least stream them. The “MET-Live in HD” success story is one thing: these are glorious documents of stage productions. With COVID having reshaped the entire idea of what constitutes live performance, opera companies in the States appears to now be seriously addressing the idea of creating productions staged expressly for the camera—as though we’d all been thrown back to 1951 and Amahl and the Night Visitors from Studio 8H, only on the Internet. Very exciting. The challenge for the opera folks is to do more than create more filmed stage performances. That is a new path forward that Orson Rehearsed is beating.

FCM: You have used many editing techniques in the film. The scenes get dissolved into the next ones, and double exposure seems to be used significantly. Did you shape the film into its current form during editing or did you have all of it in your mind in pre-production or during the shooting stage?

DH: The multiple exposures that run throughout the film were all storyboarded beforehand. The challenge was to find a way to wrestle the coverage I had on hand after the shoot into the hoped-for composite images. I was able to get about half of what I was after. The rest fell into place gradually, through exploration and gradual, deepening understanding of what the images were saying to one another. To me, the time spent editing film felt exactly the same as composing music does. That was a pleasurable revelation. Days before finalizing the project, I was still swapping out better shots in the “id” department as I stumbled on to them.

FCM: Was the music played live on the set or did you record it beforehand and singers sang over pre-recorded music?

DH: The singers sang over mockups during staging rehearsals. Once the live orchestra joined in (in the usual opera fashion, at the sitzprobe) the mockup was swapped out for the strictly electro-acoustic tracks crafted to combine with the live orchestra in performance. I have integrated pre-records for many years into my operatic scores, so I possess the specific skills required to craft something that didn’t require balancing and mixing in the theater. The singers did not wear lavalier microphones (this was important to me; I wanted to feel them fill the 1900-seat Studebaker Theater), and the orchestra was not close-miked. It was important to me that there be no recourse to ADR, and that there be no looping. What one hears on my final mix of the film soundtrack (and on the CD release forthcoming on Naxos Records in March) is very close to what the audience in the theater heard.

FCM: How long did it take to shoot the film? What were the problems or challenges you faced during the shooting stage?

DH: The films-within-the-film took about a year to shoot, assemble, and edit in tandem with the composition of the score. These were just a joy to create. Once we moved into the house, the onstage action was covered in four days: a dress rehearsal, a technical rehearsal, and two performances with stationary cameras moved around for various pre-planned shots, as well as two hand-held cameras getting close-ups and specialty shots. The principle practical challenge with getting the Studebaker Theater coverage was that I was serving as director of the staged production of Orson Rehearsed and had little time to manage the videographers. There was no DP, so I had to shape a lot of shots to as close to my original storyboard as possible after the fact in the editing bay on the fly from larger, lower-quality shots. There was simply no time to see what we had in the can and to reshoot, and there is only so much that one can fix in post. I will not make that mistake again.

FCM: In between the scenes on the stage, we see images of the space outside the stage area. The film marks a transition through these frames and yet it keeps its rhythm the whole time. How many of these frames were carefully constructed as a way of strengthening the overall ideas behind the film and how many of them were simply a mixture of abstract (or random) frames?

DH: The transitions between set pieces was where the super-ego and id narratives came to the fore, and were storyboarded only a month or so before shooting because I didn’t finalize the sequence of scenes until shortly before production began. I retained about half of what was preplanned when I finally edited the final cut together; sometimes a better way of moving things forwarded presented itself, so I swapped in that visual material instead. The rhythm of the film remained stable because I edited the images to the score, which was frozen in time first. So, yes, they were carefully constructed: just as in composing opera, transitions perform the most dramaturgical heavy-lifting and their rhythm is the hardest part to get right. They’ve got to seem improvisatory and inevitable, and one has to learn how to craft them so that they seem so whether they are or not.

FCM: Tell us about the reaction of those who saw the film. What did they think about it?

DH: Not very many people have seen it yet. I’ve been intensely grateful for the appreciative response I’ve had from admired colleagues like John Corigliano, and from film composer colleagues I’ve long admired and whose work I’ve closely followed. Aficionados of Welles’ work are invariably supportive. I’ve received invaluable advice from film editor Rabab Haj Yahya, director David Gideon, and others, and remain very grateful and moved for the staunch support of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts, on whose Artist Faculty I am proud to serve. I am thinking of this film the way that a poet thinks of a poem and a serious opera composer builds an opera: it is dense, highly allusive in its methods, and it benefits from repeated viewings; Orson Rehearsed delves with subversive lightness into some pretty dark and scary places. I am not expecting it to be “popular” in any sense of the word; it is an “art film,” that will land with people who bring an open mind and heart to it.

FCM: Are you currently working on another project? What will be your next film?

DH: I’ve got several projects already in pre-production that carry forward the methods (combining music and image, film and live theater) I’ve been steadily digging into over the past 20 years. I’m slated to direct a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate) next year. I’m also filming my next film/opera 9/10, set in an Italian restaurant in Little Italy the night before the Twin Towers fell, in Chicago, in spring 2022 in another Chicago College of the Performing Arts-New Mercury Collective co-production. I’m taking things as they come and scaling things in order to match vision and budget sensibly. My ultimate goal is to gain complete fluency in the idiom and to work at the highest levels with collaborators from whom I can learn the most.

Please visit Fullshot Cine Mag to read the interview in its original context here.

On Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-2007)

July 21, 2016

The Curtis Institute of Music, where Gian Carlo Menotti met Samuel Barber, ultimately joined the faculty, and where Daron Hagen went to school.

Gian Carlo Menotti’s operas were awarded not one, but two Pulitzer Prizes—the first for The Consuland the second for The Saint of Bleecker Street—in the 50s, when the award meant very different things than it does today. An Italian by birth who, despite retaining his Italian citizenship, proudly referred to himself as an American composer, he wrote for NBC the infectious Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, along with two-dozen other operas.

The attitude most “serious” musicians have towards Menotti’s music is neatly summed up by an exchange I spotted on a colleague’s Facebook wall this morning: “You’ve never seen my eyes roll more than when I had to, under contract, conduct that miserable Amahl,” wrote one person. The next comment in the thread offered a very, very dry response: “Well, Amahl is, for better or worse, in the repertoire, and you were paid, weren’t you?”

The Medium was the first opera I saw live. Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera sent its young artists out in a touring production to junior high schools. It was evident to me even at the age of fifteen that the money had been drummed up to bring them by my fearsome chorus teacher and guru, Wally Tomchek. The performance, on the school stage before the entire student body, was riveting. To this day I remember the haunting refrain, and the music to which it is pinned: “Toby, Toby, are you there?” A composer who can manage that feat deserves complete respect.

In fall 1981, fresh from Wisconsin, I began the happiest six months of my youth. My elation, following acceptance to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music to study composition with Ned Rorem, was generated by the wild knowledge that my childhood dreams were in fact coming true, that the sky was the limit. I possessed the nascent understanding that, with unstinting hard work and commitment, anything was possible. It was incredible; an Icarus-like high that, being my father’s son, carried with it a specific sort of dread that the bottom was going to fall out, and that everything would turn to bad—which it did, twelve months later, when I cradled my mother’s head in my arms as she succumbed to cancer.

That winter, Curtis invited Gian Carlo Menotti to come for a few weeks. During his time in Philadelphia, he coached performances of his music, attended a concert of his orchestral works (including the hauntingly beautiful ballet score Sebastian), and gave my best friend Norman Stumpf, me, and Robert Convery composition lessons. Norman and I took Gian Carlo to lunch at the once magnificent, still dustily opulent Barclay Hotel, then home to Philadelphia Orchestra music director Eugene Ormandy and his wife. The almond-mauve, curtained dining room was appointed like an interior from Visconti’s film of Death in Venice crossed with the funeral parlor in Tony Richardson’s film of The Loved One. “So what would you like to know?” Gian Carlo Menotti asked, taking a seat and wiping his lips delicately with a napkin.

“Opera,” Norman said, “we’ve got to talk about opera.” “Right,” I agreed. “Why don’t we talk about la parola scenica?” I asked. “Ah,” Gian Carlo smoothed the tablecloth with his long fingers as though creating a space, “you are referring to Verdi’s phrase—well, let me tell you….” He began with Verdi, pinpointing the key phrase of music in his favorite scenes; then he moved on to Richard Strauss. His description of collaboration was trenchant: “A stage director looks at a scene one way,” he began. “The composer looks at the scene in another way. The librettist sees it a third way. The composer must craft a scene so clear in intent that all three are compelled to agree.”

Dessert demolished, coffee drunk, Gian Carlo called for fruit. Eyes twinkling, he said, “Boys, I know that you invited me to lunch. But this is my hotel, and I have already told them to charge it to my room.” He raised his hand peremptorily. “Don’t spend your money on an old man; spend it on something fun.”

After making us promise to remain in touch, he rose gracefully from his chair and glided out of the dining room. Deprived of his gravity and glamour, we felt like men in a lingerie shop, surrounded by elderly Ladies Who Lunch poking at their salads and stout executives tucking into their steaks. I slipped a pear into my jacket pocket on our way out. Walking down Locust Street, Norman and I were pleased to have unanticipated mad money in our pockets.

Literally skipping down the sidewalk, I began, “I feel…” and Norman continued, “…As though the world…” patting first his tummy and then his wallet. “…Is our Oistrakh,” I completed.

Five years later, in lieu of enrolling in Arnold Arnstein’s hand music copying course at Juilliard (on to which I had moved after graduating from Curtis), I agreed to join his team of union copyists in preparing the performance parts for Gian Carlo’s Goya —his final, giovane scuola-style opera and, in the event, a star vehicle for the great tenor Placido Domingo. It was a harried, hair-raising project: music sometimes arrived from Gian Carlo on the day that a scene was scheduled for rehearsal. In November I travelled to Washington to attend the world premiere.

Scarcely a soul argues that most of Menotti’s later musical work (his libretto for Samuel Barber’s Vanessa is the equal of Onegin’s, in my opinion) was substandard, but New York Times music critic Donal Henahan’s astonishing cruelty in describing Goya as “a rather stupefying exercise in banality ... a parody of a Menotti opera” was, even then, so brutal that it shocked people. At the time, I found the review (slipping the word “rather” in like a shiv before the word “stupefying,” as though Menotti had failed even at being entirely stupefying) insolent. But I was still too young to understand how profoundly disrespectful Henahan was being, and how wounded to the core—after two-dozen operas and a lifetime of service to his art—Gian Carlo really was.

The pain in his voice on the telephone when I reached him at his hotel the morning it ran in the newspaper was heartbreaking. “He’s just a critic. You’re Gian Carlo Menotti,” I sputtered uselessly, unable to believe that somebody who had accomplished so much could be so hurt by someone whose opinion mattered so little in the end. I realized during the next three or four beats of silence on the line that I had overstepped. What did I know about life at his age, his level of achievement? What did I know about his art, his soul, really? Nothing. I was twenty-five and had accomplished little; he was seventy-five, had founded two music festivals, written two-dozen operas, and won two Pulitzer prizes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that what I say doesn’t matter.” “Ah, caro, someday you’ll understand,” Gian Carlo sighed.

Thirty-five years later, I do.

This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post, which published it on 7 July 2016. You can read it there by clicking here.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/rememb...