On Performing

Beginnings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Middles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time and David Del Tredici (1937-2023)

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Orchestrating a Psychological Landscape -- Interview: Fullshot Cine Mag

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.

Cathedral of Dreams: Milwaukee's Oriental Landmark Theater

Summer 1978

Father was plastered. Around seven, he had called, slurring, from the Clock, a cocktail lounge downtown, and demanded a ride home. Mother had taken too much Valium to drive. Learner's Permit in hand, I headed downtown to pick him up. Double parked on Wisconsin Avenue, I waved him down. He sloped to the driver's side, in no condition to take the wheel. “Slide over,” he commanded, pounding heavily on the window. Oh, he was mightily pissed. His face was flushed; his mouth was twisted into a snarl. He'd jeopardize both our lives if he got in. For the first time, I had the nerve to refuse him the keys. I drove us home. I was sixteen. It was as though Father, who we had been surrendering as a family to drinking and depression by dribs and drabs over the course of my childhood, had finally made himself into the Man Who Lived Downstairs.

Music alone couldn't yet fill the emptiness I felt, and I was too sheltered a suburban adolescent to adequately come to terms with the wild, impractical, somewhat lurid thoughts and desires my brain was generating. That night, without asking, I simply took the keys, and drove my friends Brian Anderson and David Merkel to the Oriental Landmark Theater, a Grand Prewar Temple to Cinema in downtown Milwaukee. It was only a 25-minute drive from 13014 West Needham Drive to 2230 North Farwell Avenue. For the next two years, I practically lived there. I have had a profound attachment to the place since the first moment that I entered it.

Diane C. Doerfler in 1979. (Photo credit: Cilento)

I’ll never forget how the place smelled. Freshly popped corn and stale cigarette smoke filled the lobby with its fragrance. Onstage, the wet dog musk of moldy fire curtains combined with the ancient aroma of long-settled dust. The air, high up in the huge balcony that yawed heavily over the orchestra like a sumo wrestler’s ceremonial sash, had the arid taste of steam-heat in the winter, and the slight tang of refrigerated moisture on sultry late summer evenings.

The Oriental provided us with a refuge, a chance to see grown up movies, of which many our parents would never approve, a place to dream, to share Communion in the Dark, to play. It was the crucible in which I first began ginning up what Gore Vidal calls one’s “sacred story.” Hormones and an unshakeable belief that in some specific way I had something unique to offer the world provided the cocktail of raw material. Our English teacher, Diane C. Doerfler provided the catalyst. Doerf, as we called her, was an inspirational teacher, a planter of seeds. I recall her now as I saw her then—tomboyish, a lovely combination of Katherine Hepburn and Jeanne Moreau, seemingly something of a Transcendentalist, personally elusive. She began the year by etching in a quick rat-a-tat-tat of chalk on the board LIFE = ART. Then, she paused, turned back to us grinning like a Siamese cat, scanned the room, purred, “Well, what do you make of that?” Thanks to the movies I saw at the Oriental and the books that Doerf gave me, my world was enlarged at the expense of myself, enabling me to grow into and desire access to, the world at large.

Designed by Gustave A. Dick and Alex Bauer, the themes of the Oriental's decor are in fact East Indian, with no traces of Chinese or Japanese artwork. It is said to be the only standard movie palace ever built to incorporate East Indian decor. Opened to the public on 27 July 1927 on the site of Farwell Station, a horse and streetcar barn as the flagship of a chain of 47 movie theaters operated by John and Thomas Saxe, Irish brothers who began as sign painters at the turn of the century, the 1800-seat Oriental incorporated elements of East Indian, Moorish, Islamic, and Byzantine design. It included three eight-foot-high chandeliers adorned with images of the Buddha, eight gleaming black porcelain lions flanking a massive tiled ceremonial staircase to the balcony, hand-painted frescoes of Turkish scenes, dozens of custom draperies, and literally hundreds of elephants—elephants everywhere, from the bathrooms to the 1920s smoking lounges to the remotest corners of the balcony.

The Oriental Landmark Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo credit: Landmark)

Failing, after fifty years of continuous operation as a traditional movie palace, it came into the hands of Robert and Melvyn Pritchett, Milwaukee brothers and electricians who acquired it in 1972. They chose the films that they showed themselves until 1976, when they agreed to a proposal by the Landmark Theater (then Parallax) chain to take over programming.

There were six enormous Buddha statues—three on each side of the broad orchestra—adorned with glowing “rubies” in their foreheads, smoldering green eyes, and dim orange pools of light that warmed their ample tummies from below that remained on until the marquee was shut off, the work lights extinguished, and the lonesome ghost light turned on. The Pritchetts clearly loved the palace, and tolerated my adoration to the point where, on several occasions just before locking up for the night, they allowed me to perform the ritual.

The Oriental also boasted a shallow orchestra pit suitable for a vaudeville-circuit-sized ensemble of about 25 players, access tunnels, storage rooms, dressing rooms (with smeared autographs of now forgotten, once nearly-famous performers still on the walls), and a spacious stage with the original rigging still in place, and an organ's pipe loft. During my day, the organ was in disrepair. Now restored, every Friday and Saturday before the 7 PM show, the plush sounds of the Kimball Theatre Pipe Organ—the largest of its kind in a theater in America and the third largest in the world—introduce the film before the instrument sinks into the pit.

For a while, after its vaudeville years had long passed, the Oriental occasionally served as a live performance venue. I saw Laurie Anderson there. The Violent Femmes got their start by standing in one night as the opening act for the Pretenders. When I knew it best, the Oriental was still a calendar house, a place where adult things happened. It had danger implicit in its darkness, its genteel shabbiness, in the avant-garde and erotic films on its monthly bill of fare. In 1978 a double feature set you back $2.50—well within the budget of a teenage refugee from the suburbs in possession of a probationary driver's license and his mother's ‘75 Ford Granada.

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The Oriental was a "calendar house," which meant that its offerings changed every couple of days. These are monthly calendars from the period described in this essay. (Photo credit: Legend)

Communion in the Dark, the sitting around a campfire telling stories to explore the unknowable, remains one of the chief reasons I compose operas. François Truffaut's La nuit américaine explores the theme of whether making art is more important than life for the people who make it. First seen at the Oriental, this film led me to a comprehensive engagement with Truffaut's films over the years, which climaxed in meeting him at the end of a retrospective of his work at the Regency Cinema, a second-run house on Broadway near Juilliard, in 1986. When I began Shining Brow, which explores this, I asked Paul Muldoon to make this one of Frank Lloyd Wright's foremost concerns: “Can a man be a faithful husband and father,” asks Wright, “and still remain true to his art?”

Suspending the audience’s disbelief being the first step in making art, I made conscious note of the strategies filmmakers used to do it. During those years, I assembled the psychological and emotional skill set required for coping with life as a creative person. I couldn't help watching films critically; I was keenly aware of the artifice, and loved it. The venue was a refuge, but the films were not an escape.

The August 1978 evening that I fell in love forever with the Oriental the double bill was Casablanca and To Have and Have Not. Although it would be years before I understood that is only a single step from Max Steiner to Richard Strauss, from the moment Steiner's grand Warner Brothers Fanfare began, I was enthralled—more by the music than the images and narratives. Steiner's godfather had been no less a musical force than Richard Strauss; his piano teacher was Johannes Brahms, and he took composition lessons from Gustav Mahler. These men took their work seriously: as the saying goes, “there was also a movie going on.”

The large and appreciative audience knew the film, hissed the villains, and cheered the great lines. It was the first time I ever felt surrounded by an audience so in tune with the rhythm of a script and set of actors that they literally sighed in unison. A few folks mouthed the dialogue along with the actors. Men wept openly during Rick's breakdown scene; people stood up when partisans at Rick's began singing La Marseillaise to drown out the Nazis singing Die Wacht am Rhein; couples consoled one another when Rick and Ilse parted.

It transported me. During the intermission, I began prowling around the theater, which already felt like home. (The only other place that has affected me in exactly this way is the artist colony Yaddo—more about that later.) My parents were on their own Revolutionary Road in the suburbs, their lives together unspooling. Mine was rapidly expanding here, in the semi-darkness, among the threadbare velvet seats, the mildew-perfumed draperies, the dicey wiring, illuminated only by “emeralds”, “rubies”, and a shaft of light slicing down from the projection booth to the broad, off-white screen with a blemish in the upper left hand quadrant.

The second feature began: Ernest Hemingway's story, adapted by William Faulkner, directed by Howard Hawks, with Humphrey Bogart and ... Lauren Bacall. “You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? Just put your lips together and ... blow.” The frisson I experienced was real. Seeing the film thirty-five years after it was made, I could not in my wildest dreams have imagined that I would one day meet Bacall—well, fall at her feet, anyway—on a stairway at the Dakota.

Twenty-six days later, I brought friends to see Toshirō Mifune in Hiroshi Inagaki's great Samurai Trilogy. There were only about thirty people scattered around the theater. The first of countless games of hide-and-seek was played out in the soaring balcony; the illusion that we were alone in the vast screening chamber became, during the third hour, a reality. No doors were locked and we got into everything: the dressing rooms, the tunnels, and the service closets. I watched Musashi's duel from behind the screen, lying onstage on my back with a sand bag beneath my head, my fingers interlaced at the nape of my neck.

That October, I was given a tour of the projection booth during the screening of Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits and 8 ½. My epiphany came during the latter, when I realized, watching the screen through the same hole (the “fourth wall”) that the powerful projector was throwing the image through, that all the settings in Fellini were intentionally artificial so that they would appear on film as hyper-real. Opera.

The next week West Side Story continued to counterpoint my evolving young thoughts. I'd seen the film on television, of course, and had spent fifth grade walking to and from Linfield Elementary School singing the tune of Maria, substituting Jean’s name. However, I had never seen the Jets swoop across a three-story tall movie screen. The boys leapt; so did my heart. The hair on my arms stood up. We were being invited not to buy into the idea of a bunch of tough street kids dancing but to witness their spirits fly through the air.

The Oriental provided my first introduction to serious camp. The double bill was Humoresque and Johnny Guitar. (Truffaut famously referred to it as a “phony Western.”) The film was to me like Weibbier with a slab of lemon in it: all the roles, from Joan Crawford to Sterling Hayden, were clearly gender-swapped. Paired with an even higher-camp classic starring a beautiful young prizefighter of a James Garfield, a leonine Crawford, an exquisitely rumpled Oscar Levant, and Isaac Stern's hands, it made for a swampy, soupy, delightfully sentimental evening at the movies—an impossible film to forget, and one I’ve seen a hundred time.

Lower camp was also on the bill. The Oriental is the world record holder for a current and continuing film engagement. The Rocky Horror Picture Show has played as a midnight film since January 1978. I was one of the original regulars. I dressed the part for a dozens of showings, danced the Time Warp, brought bags of rice, toast, squirt guns, newspapers, and so forth, knew my lines (“Dammnit, Janet!”) and delighted in the lovely community of genuinely joyful people that has made the Oriental the U.S. record holder for a continuing engagement of the film.

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Group portrait of the Legend staff in 1979. (l. to r.) Channing Hughes, Joseph Puchner, David Merkel, Ann Hallanger, Daron Hagen, Max Sanders, David Puchner, Chris Hughes, Marybeth Hughes, Brian Anderson, Jeffrey Ripple, Carol Hallanger. (Photo credit: Hagen collection)

On 8 December 1978, during a double bill (East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause), I held hands with a date for the first time. Leonard Rosenman's sophisticated modernist scores (he studied with Arnold Schoenberg, Luigi Dallapiccola, and Roger Sessions) for these back-to-back knockouts moved me more, I'm afraid, than the crisscrossing of young fingers in the dark. Eleven days later, more film noir—I saw The Third Man for the first time and immediately determined someday to turn it into an opera. In fact, I pitched an updated adaptation of the Graham Greene screenplay in 2006 to Speight Jenkins, Intendant of Seattle Opera, who nearly went for it.

I didn't just visit or even inhabit the Oriental, I infiltrated it, climbing into the organ loft, sleeping on the stage, haunting the projection booth, canoodling in the balcony, and spelunking the tunnels. Any movie would do in my Cathedral of Dreams, because, if the media can be the message, sometimes the venue is the vision.

Christmas 1981

It was snowing lightly—little feathery, inhibited flakes that seemed shamed at having arrived as too-early guests, when Mother met me at the airport. I’d returned to Milwaukee for the Christmas Holidays. “Here,” she said, handing me the keys, “you drive. I have some news for you.” Once in the car, she broke into a fit of deep coughs that drained her. “That’s a bad cold,” I observed. “Yeah,” she agreed, “bad.” I turned the key in the ignition, and guessed, “You’re finally going to leave Dad and move to Paris?” She twisted her head toward the passenger window and looked out. The window was steamed up. “No.,” she said, and turned back to me, giving me that sudden, dazzling smile. It always killed me. “There’s a Hitchcock double feature at the Oriental tonight,” she said, brightly. “Let’s go.”

That night, during intermission, Bernard Herrmann’s music for the final few minutes of Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 played. Mother reached for my hand and, as we both stared at the blank screen, she told me that she had been diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of inoperable lung cancer. First, there would be chemotherapy. There would be a rally. Then she would “get bored of dying,” she predicted, “get on with life, and die.”

“I’ll come home to take care of you,” I said. “Christ, no,” she said. “Do. Not. Come. Home. I want you to get on with your life. Get. Out. Of. Here.” The music stopped. The lights dimmed. We held hands as the Main Title for The 39 Steps began. We watched the entire thing, holding hands like high school kids. She’d obviously chosen the Oriental, of all places, to share her news because she knew that I felt safe here; she’d timed her news to coincide with intermission so that I’d have the entirety of the second film to begin digesting it. By the time the lights went up after the second feature, I had recovered enough to ask, “What’s next?” Pulling on her coat and arranging her scarf around her neck, she looked pensively into the middle distance. “Ice cream, I’d say,” she said.

The proscenium of the Oriental in spring 2018.p/c: Daron Hagen

Spring 2015

In town to direct a new show for the Skylight Music Theater, I took my wife Gilda  for the first time to a matinee at the Oriental. The old place's magic coursed through me as we stood in the lobby and breathed in its faded, funky, faux opulence. As an organist fumbled loopily through an awful medley from Carousel, I shared without embarrassment the precious treasures of my youth. I introduced her to the golden-eared onyx lions flanking the broad staircase as we climbed to the low-slung, sweeping balcony, the Buddha’s, the stage area with its massive dimmers, the dust hanging in the air just as it should. “I can’t explain it, I just can’t,” I said, as we walked, hand in hand, up the main aisle. “I love this place the way I love Yaddo. It’s what Allan Gurganus wrote … you know, ‘some essence quorum of our souls’ intensities’.” Gilda nodded. “This place,” I continued, “is in my spiritual DNA. I feel as though I spent entire hours here suspended in that ‘chanceful,’ formative state where anything could still happen, safe, but questing; still a child, but on the cusp….” I stopped. She smiled. “I know, honey,” she said. “It’s what you and Gardner had Amelia say to her baby— ‘Anything is possible’.”

The organist stopped playing. “Show me where you and your mother sat,” she said, tenderly. Gilda had led me to within a few rows of where Mother and I had sat that cold winter afternoon in 1981. “Um,” I said, looking away from her slightly so that she wouldn’t see the tears that accompanied the smile on my face and gesturing. “It was just … over here.” I placed the fingertips of my hand under her elbow, indicated with the other hand a nearby spot, and walked her the few feet. “We’re here,” I said, not believing it. “Well,” I laughed, “if this isn’t exactly the spot, then it should’ve been. How about here?” My God, I thought, as Gilda sat down and shook her hair in just that way and my heart leapt up and I couldn’t help it I just choked and smiled and shook my head with love and awe and gratitude as she turned and flashed me the same sudden, sunny, dazzling, lopsided smile Mother used to. Gilda was more glamorous than Rita Hayworth, every bit the artist Mother had been and more. A vibrant, powerful woman in her prime, Gilda turned to me and—moving far, far past transference to transforming sorrow into joy in a heartbeat—remarked, “Honey, it’s like your mom said: ‘It’s a poem about rebirth’!”

There’s a splendid, self-sufficient egoism in being young. Closed about with unearned affection from parents who will love you no matter how selfishly or casually you behave, you’re free to indulge independence and individualism.

Becoming an adult is realizing alone-ness, understanding how tenuous the integration of lives really is, and facing the unpleasant necessity of having to earn affection. You’re not born into other people’s lives, people who will love you immediately and irrevocably; pamper your whims and love you for them or despite them. This is a sober fact that’s shattering to comprehend, but it makes an individual sooner than the cocoon-like, womb-like protective existence of adolescence.

Love is lost so easily: you can’t strangle it by putting it on a golden chain, expecting it to understand it’s free to move only a few feet in either direction. Nor can you pick it up and fondle it only when your fancy so pleases. You treat it gently because it is volatile, owes you nothing except if you prove there’s been a continuous effort to earn it. Then you’ve crushed out ‘selves’ into one ‘self’ that’s the basis of all sympathy and human understanding. Love is selfish-but you must never be, for fear of losing it.

This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 6 December 2013 in an earlier iteration. You can read it there by clicking here.

Remembering David Diamond

David Leo Diamond (July 9, 1915 – June 13, 2005) was an American concert music composer and one of America's great mid-century symphonists. He was also my teacher. He was tough on me, and often cruel, but I always felt that he believed in me, and wanted me to be a better person and artist than I was. He had known the best minds and talents of his time, and I relished the challenge his aesthetic and intellectual expectations represented. Over the course of many years, I think that I grew to understand him. By the time that he died, I think that we had become friends.

###

“Yes,” I read the letter, astonished and trembling in our rural Wisconsin kitchen in 1978, “your son is the Real Thing, a born composer. I think he should come to New York and study at Juilliard with my friend David Diamond.” It was from no less than Leonard Bernstein, to whom my mother had sent some of my music with a plea for guidance. Astonished, mother sent this man Diamond, of whom we had never heard, a letter. He wrote back to her, “Helen Coates did deliver your son’s score to Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Bernstein sent it on to me here with his reactions which were enthusiastic. He clearly feels your son should study with me here [at Juilliard]. … Above all, though, the composition jury will need much more music to consider.”

David Diamond studied at the Eastman School with Bernard Rogers, in New York with Roger Sessions and in France with Nadia Boulanger; while living in Paris, he also befriended Andre Gide, Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky. He was a superb artisan whose Neo-classic compositions grafted intense lyricism with a neurotic and deeply felt hyper-contrapuntal compositional style. He became a star in the compositional firmament quite young, and spent the rest of his career beguiling and reviling performers and colleagues. 

Bernstein famously referred to him as “a vital branch in the stream of American music,” while Virgil Thomson (for whom—like Ned Rorem, like me—David briefly worked) wrote, “Composers, like pearls, are of three chief sorts, real, artificial and cultured. David Diamond is unquestionably of the first sort; his talent and his sincerity have never been doubted by his hearers, by his critics, or by his composer colleagues.” Posterity was important to him: he left behind meticulously crafted ballets, eleven symphonies, concertos, ten string quartets, numerous chamber works, and many admirable songs.

But I knew none of this then.

I also wrote at that time to Lukas Foss, John Harbison, and Dominick Argento and asked each for guidance. All three wrote kindly letters advising me to enroll in Madison for a year. I wrote to Diamond that I had decided on Wisconsin for a year, at least, before coming to the coast. After admonishing me for not putting my return address on the envelope of the letter, he concluded, “If you have been accepted into the Wisconsin school by all means go there and see how you fare. … Make your application next year.”

I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The next winter, I sent some more music to Diamond. His response was brutal: 

“Certainly, I hope you will make a good impression in all the entrance exams required. After all, Mr. Bernstein’s recommendation to me matters, but it will not matter that much to the jury unless they agree. I say your potential is large. But you are very young and art is very long, and it takes many years, even decades to develop a strong technique, an individual style. As of now I sense enormous facility, no interesting thematic ideas, and little self-criticism. So you see, there is the goal to set for real achievement in a very difficult art form. And I am willing to help you reach that goal. So let us hope for good results from the jury, the exams, the Deans.”

Demoralized, I applied to Juilliard as instructed. My parents fought bitterly over whether to spend the money on the airplane ticket, Father capitulating only when Mother said, “If he is turned down, then maybe it will convince him to go to law school the way you want him to.”

I arrived at Juilliard preceded by my scores and a mediocre letter of recommendation (I steamed it open) from my composition teacher in Madison that read, in part: “Daron’s music operates within a narrow and highly derivative framework excused perhaps by his inexperience and youth.” 

It was evident to me the moment I entered the room that I was to be sent packing. The men who were to determine my future—Diamond, Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, and Vincent Persichetti—sat at a long table on one side of the room. I seated myself in a straight-backed chair on the other side, facing them. The scores I had submitted sat in a neat pile in front of Diamond. 

“Lenny wrote to me about this young man,” began Diamond. A flicker of interest—or annoyance—flitted across Babbitt’s face. “Why do you want to be a composer?” asked Persichetti. “Because,” I replied, “it is the only thing I have ever done that I know I will never be as good at as I want to be.” My bravado met with cool disapproval. Diamond moved to the piano and, moving from low to high, stabbed at six or seven pitches. “Kindly sing the pitches back and name them,” he said. I started to sweat as I sang the first three or four and then trailed off. “Your ear is not your strong suit,” he clucked.

Next, Persichetti moved to the piano. “I am going to play a little medley for you of various themes. Just call out the name of each, if you can, as I play, and I’ll move on to another.” I recognized the unmistakable pungency of the Tristan progression.

“Good,” he smiled warmly. I was dazzled as he seguéd directly into a Gershwin tune whose name I didn’t recall, “That’s fine,” he said, continuing. Then I missed two, and he played something that was clearly Mozart, but what I didn’t know. I tittered nervously. “What’s that?” asked Persichetti. “I’ve never seen someone do that before,” I effused. “That was wonderful!”

“Yes, well,” said Diamond. “Evidently the repertoire is not your strong suit either.” Carter looked out the window. Babbitt looked at the table in front of him. Neither made eye contact with me or said a word. Diamond reached for one of my scores and flipped it open. After paging through it idly, he pushed it over to Babbitt, who didn’t look at it. “Mr. Hagen,” said Diamond funereally, “it is felt that you should … return to Wisconsin and … develop your technique.”

Clammy with cold sweat in my Kermit-green leisure suit with a round-trip airplane ticket in the pocket, I thanked the men who had just passed judgment on me, excused myself, went to the nearest bathroom, and vomited. Seated on the toilet, I wept with humiliation, fury, and frustration. They had been clear: I was not good enough. I returned to Wisconsin a day early. My parents, who didn't know that I'd be arriving that night,  were asleep when I got home.

I returned to Madison, and began lessons with Homer Lambrecht. I also practiced the piano and composed obsessively. I took a flier and applied to the Curtis Institute, and was invited by Ned Rorem to study with him there. Over the course of three years there, I composed “one of everything”—nine hours’ worth of music (three hours worth was symphonic), and either performed it myself, or coached and conducted it. 

“I am writing to you,” I began in my letter to David in January 1984, “because I feel I’m finally ready to come to Juilliard. Studying with Mr. Rorem has been a revelation, but,” I wrote, telling him exactly what I knew he would want to hear from a potential student, “I realize that my facility can still get ahead of my self-criticism and honestly feel that you are the single best man to help me with that.”

Did I really believe that David was the right teacher for me? I don’t think that I cared. I intended to move to New York, and I needed a place to hang my hat. When I told Ned that I wanted to finish my training with David, he looked alarmed, “Are you sure? What makes you think you’re not ready to just go out and start?” I told myself then that learning from David’s command of large-scale forms (symphonies, string quartets) would perfectly compliment the grounding I had received from Ned by way of his virtuosity in small ones (song cycles, suites). It turned out to be true.

March is the month that most conservatories hold auditions. Juilliard was no different. On the way to the interview, I passed the bathroom in which five years earlier I had vomited. The door opened, and David, in a zippy blue pin stripe suit, poked his head out. Rain fell straight down. I straightened my tie, shot my cuffs, and sidled past him, into the room. I scanned the table set up before the windows, through which the Hudson could be seen like a gray stain, and recognized Babbitt, Carter, and Persichetti.

“Mr. Hagen,” he drawled. His thin lips and pale face were dour, but his eyes shone. “You may sit down.” So serious! I stripped off my raincoat and dropped the copies of the New Yorker I’d brought to catch up on during the train ride from Philly. They slid to the floor. I flapped my arms.

“Oh, for the love-a Mike!” I hissed. I looked up into Persichetti’s kind eyes. He had been trying to see what I was reading. “Hello, Mr. Car—,” I said, lunging at him. “No, he’s Roger Sessions,” piped Babbitt. “That’s not funny, Milton,” scolded Diamond. My head swiveled to respond. I opened my mouth like a koi. “We all remember you from four years ago, Mr. Hagen. And, looking at the number of scores you’ve sent us …well … it seems as though you have been working very … hard.” Diamond offered the observation as a question, his eyebrows rising. “You’ve been very … prolific … haven’t you?”

I returned his gaze steadily as he fingered the American Academy of Arts and Letters pin in his lapel. Was it a trick question? This time, telephone conversations had been had, arrangements been made: Ned had spoken with Bernstein, and with Diamond. I had made hay at Curtis, acquired some connections, and managed a couple of minor achievements. Was Diamond inferring that I had been too prolific? Shrugging, I looked out the window at the Hudson River over the roof of the LaGuardia High School. Through the gauze of rain, I could see the sun setting. There were gulls.

“Let’s see,” Diamond continued. “Vincent, will you do the honors?” Persichetti stubbed out his cigarette, scrunched his eyes up behind his glasses, and slid onto the piano bench. He winked at me. This time when he launched into his mad medley, I was ready for him: “Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov!” I said. An insane modulation and he was playing a Chopin Mazurka. “Chopin: don’t remember which one,” I said. He began the Tristan progression, and I said quickly, “Tristan, of course.”

“Nope,” he said. “Trick question.” He continued. “Of course, it’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk.” “Uh huh,” he smiled. He played one, unmistakable crunchy chord. “Rite of Spring!” I laughed. Something pointillist, lovely, but stylistically diffuse. “Pretty,” I mused. “I don’t recognize it.” He stopped. “Something of my own,” he smiled. “Neat!” I said.

“Mr. Hagen,” Diamond began, “I have no doubt whatsoever that you will be, or plan to be, as prolific as ever. I would say that is a blessing which must be haloed by the development of more severe self-criticism and a larger awareness of structural invention.”

I looked from one face to the next.

“Okay!” I said. “When do I start?” Laughter.

“Well,” said Carter, looking at me and speaking for the first time. “David will work out the details of your scholarship. That’s that.”

The following fall I began studies at Juilliard. To my way of thinking then, I was there for one reason: my composition lessons with David. I worked hard to please him. I thought that all of my peers were dynamic, impressive composers, but I instinctively kept to myself—so much so that many thought that I still lived in Philadelphia. 

Every few weeks, the composition department held a composition seminar at which we either presented our new works, or a visiting composer presented theirs. The faculty attended, as well as all of one’s colleagues. I found the seminars desperately dry. After my first presentation, Diamond pulled me into the hallway and chewed me out: “Never, ever do that again. Your piece is brilliant. You are brilliant. What you said was brilliant. How you said it was unacceptable. You’re a better composer than most of the people in that room. If you don’t treat yourself with respect, how can you possibly expect your colleagues to?”

Like Witold Lutosławski, David wore excellently tailored suits. He occasionally rouged his cheeks. His shoes were always shined. He enjoyed sincere flattery. A serious drinker when he chose to be, he preferred very cold, very dry champagne and excellent vodka, if it was available, followed by brandy. David was fun to drink with. He enjoyed the fact that I could hold my liquor. He loved good food, arguments, and books. The pretentious infuriated him, though he seemed to appreciate people who could pull it off. It seemed to me that he felt that Society had short-changed him; it had contradicted his hopes. While his default mien was grave, he could be pixyish and ebullient. 

Our every conversation ultimately circled back to the three intertwined things we had most in common: anger, depression, and chronic insomnia. Were the causes chemical, or the result of pathological narcissism? Were they darker, more Nixon-ian?

“When I was younger,” David told me once, “I rarely slept, always worried about money. My anger and my hostility drove me to extremes of behavior that must have seemed theatrical to some. Sessions, for example, when I confessed to him in a lesson that I intended to kill myself by jumping out of the balcony at Carnegie Hall, admonished me to jump from the second tier, as jumping from the first would leave me with broken legs, while the latter would guarantee a split skull, or at least a broken neck.”

A superb raconteur, David’s reminiscences of the 30s and 40s were peppered with vivid character sketches of Greta Garbo, Clifford Odets, Carson and Reeves McCullers, Copland, and Blitzstein, among others. A compulsive diarist, the shelves in his Rochester home contained dozens of books filled with his graceful, athletic handwriting. He confided to me over the years—usually in dark asides after some perceived slight—that he was writing an autobiography that would settle this or that person’s hash. 

After David’s death, Gerard Schwarz, who genuinely loved him and continues to champion his music, loaned me a copy of an unpublished manuscript, which I read. I understand now why he chose never to complete it: the first fifty pages ring with his feisty voice, and promise a memoir as pleasurable and captivating as an evening spent drinking champagne with him, listening to him tilt at windmills, and lacerate colleagues. Sadly, the document loses its way, tells rather than shows, never progresses far beyond the 60s, and becomes a circular argument, exactly the sort of self-justifying document that David, as an avid and careful reader, disliked. Perhaps another, more polished, manuscript is out there somewhere, awaiting the hand of an experienced editor. I hope so: the world deserves to hear his version—whatever that may have been—of things.

David could transform in a heartbeat from needy to imperious. This made him numerous enemies. Not just his enemies questioned the accuracy of his memory. I believe that he tried hard to be truthful, but that he was more the Don than de Passamonte, more Pierrot than Pedrolino—in other words, the extraordinary intensity of his feelings (he was as ruthless with himself as he was with others) sometimes distorted the way he perceived not the truth, but the world. 

Lessons could be grueling, especially if he had gotten it into his head that you had somehow betrayed him. I used to write music reviews for EAR, a downtown new music magazine. For a (rave) review of David’s Symphony No. 10 (premièred a few weeks earlier by Bernstein with the American Composers Orchestra), I had created what I thought was a pretty spicy lead: “Diamond’s Tenth looms over the audience like an enormous tombstone.” Someone had gotten a copy into David’s hands.

“You have a deep-seated subconscious desire to destroy me,” he bellowed. “Get out of my sight!” It was my first taste of his legendary temper. In my case, at least, it was always as fleet as it was quick. His apologies, when they did come, were always sincere. I admired him, and I always accepted them.

For Ned I composed three art songs each week for three years—one on a poem of my choice; one on a poem of his choice; one of a poem he had set. For David I constructed two fugues (each more elaborate than the last) a week for two years—one on a fugue subject of his choice, one on a subject of my own devising. Ned’s regimen helped me to learn how to access my emotions and express them fluently with musical notes. David’s regimen helped me to learn how to explore the relationship that those notes have with one another on the abstract, purely musical level.

David’s obsession with fugue as a compositional procedure mirrored his lifelong effort as an intellect to make sense of the world in which he lived. When Bernard Rands without malice wondered aloud during a composition seminar what the point of writing fugues was at the end of the twentieth century, David was apoplectic. Bernard was calling into question the very method by which David fashioned his sanity.

Inspired by the Copland-Sessions Concerts, I produced during those years several dozen recitals in Philadelphia and New York featuring my own, and colleagues’ music. I called them Perpetuum Mobile concerts because, at the time, constant movement was my way of life. My intentions were good, but I see now how naïve I was to have mounted them—particularly at my own expense. I wanted colleagues to like me, yes; and I thought that working together, we might all benefit professionally. I was genuinely surprised and hurt when several of the Juilliard composers whose music I featured treated me as though I was hitching my star to theirs. Diamond explained to me that I didn’t really care about other people; I just wanted to look as though I did:

“Daron,” David’s letter began, continuing a conversation begun a few days earlier on the telephone, “You are confused by my use of the word selfish. I refer to self-absorption, pre-occupation with self, self-advertisement, a certain exhibitionism and charm at the same time being generous in your Perpetuum Mobile concerts for young composers is not the inner you, it’s the outer man saying, “look gang, I’m for the other young’uns.’ Giving in this way is not altruism of the spirit."

###

“Fugue subjects,” David said, briskly sketching one on the sheet of music paper on the piano rack in front of us on a winter morning in 1986, “are like snakes.” Over his shoulder, I could see snowflakes whirling outside through a tall sliver of one of Juilliard’s slit-like windows. “Every one of them has a head, a body, and a tail.” Chop, he slashed a line between the head and the body. Chop, he slashed another between the body and the tail. “Or like people,” I replied, “with a head, a body, and a tale.” He laughed pleasantly. The Regency Theater just around the corner was in the middle of its three week Truffaut retrospective; Marc Blitzstein’s Piano Concerto had just been performed at Carnegie Hall for the first time in fifty years.

“Or a Life,” he frowned, leaning over the keyboard, “with a memorable Beginning, Middle ripe for development, and an End….” He stopped writing and straightened up. “Now sketch a counter-subject.” I took the pencil from him and began adding my squiggles to the line above his. He pursed his lips. A sharp intake of breath: “Something memorable,” he said, “not ... mechanical.” I tried again, but all I could think was that Life, like “a Pretty Girl, is like a Melody.” 

I looked at the oil of Pierrot he had painted that hung over the piano. It wasn’t very good. Clowns frighten me. I giggled nervously. “What’s so funny?” he asked. “If Life is a Melody, then Energy must be the human compulsion to organize sound into Song,” I rallied, half-serious.

“And Force is the application of creative energy,” he smiled encouragingly. “And composition is Birth?” I asked. “And pulse is Gravity,” he answered. “Which makes entropy, or the lack of pulse, Death,” he said, taking the pencil. “Look,” he circled the head of my counter-subject, “this is memorable, so why not just take the tail of the subject, invert it, and use that as the head of the counter-subject?”

Chop, I thought: the snake devouring its tail. Chop. “In my beginning is my end. Eliot,” I risked. He chuckled. “Right. The Ouroborus. My end is my beginning. Mary, Queen of the Scots. Earlier. Better,” he replied with finality as through the door the three light knocks of his next student indicated that my lesson was nearly up. I carefully placed the enormous pages of my manuscript into the elephant portfolio in which I had brought it.

It took me twenty-six years to understand what David said next: “Mr. Hagen—,” he admonished gravely as I reached for the doorknob. I turned around, and his voice softened. “Dear One,” he began again, “Don’t let gravity win.”

###

As inspiring as studying composition with David was, dealing with him as an employer was an exercise in sadism. I copied the parts for his Flute Concerto, commissioned by the New Haven Symphony for Jean Pierre Rampal. Rampal, while in every other way professional, urbane, and musically sublime, had been too busy to learn his part before the first rehearsal. As copyist, I was compelled to attend rehearsals and to correct any errors that might need fixing. It was snowy and nasty that week, and I disliked intensely the train ride from New York to New Haven. (I did manage to compose a Suite for Viola during them—so at least I have that to show for the commute.)  Murry Sidlin vented his frustration when three or four errors that had eluded my proofreader’s eye became known piecemeal because the orchestra, in order to save money, had excused certain players until the last minute.  

I recall standing at the lip of the stage score in hand. David sat in the audience, my former lover seated beside him. Wheeling around and pointing at me from the podium, Sidlin shrieked, “Copyist! I thought you corrected these parts!” It was the copyist’s and the composer’s worst nightmare. Humiliated as a man and as a copyist, I answered, “I’ll correct them during the break, Maestro. “What?” bellowed Sidlin. “The break,” I said. “During the break.” Sidlin writhed with frustration. I looked at Rampal. Holding his flute like a scepter, he stared out into the empty hall. I looked at my former lover. I looked at David, who appeared to know a whole lot more about what was going on than I did. 

After the premiere, I accepted an invitation to join Rampal, my ex, and David for a late dinner. I found it impossible (as, flirting with the waitress, he drew an American Express Black Card from his jacket pocket as fluidly as one would a handkerchief from one’s sleeve) to dislike Rampal. Feeling like a spider caught in a web, I drank. A kindly Yale coed took me home with her. Back in New York, David commanded me to make corrections to every one of the seventy or so printed parts by hand, using whiteout, India ink, and an electric easer. I suppose he thought he was teaching me a lesson.

Not long after, at my final lesson, he said, after observing that I had never brought him a vocal piece to look at,  “I was speaking to Lenny the other night about you. He says that it’s a shame that you never showed me your vocal music, because I could have cleaned up your prosody problems.” I was astonished. A year later, at my first lesson with Bernstein, I was saddened but not surprised when he told me that he had never said that.

The school year ended, and with it my time as a student of David’s. A colleague threw a party at his stylish Lincoln Center apartment. My colleague—David’s favorite student—was handsome, ambitious, intelligent, blandly elitist, and highly accomplished. Diamond adored him, and called him, as he called me, “Genius Boy.” I admired his craftsmanship and work ethic. His bookshelves were stocked with well-thumbed volumes. Good literature, in good editions. One wall was covered floor-to-ceiling with orchestral scores. A gifted pianist, his grand piano dominated the living room. Tasteful objets d’art were carefully placed here and there. An inscribed portrait of Diamond hung between the bedroom and bathroom.

The liquor was expensive. The conversation was interesting. The fond farewells to David were sincere. He’d be stepping off the Juilliard faculty in a few weeks, and this party was both a birthday celebration and a sendoff. Supine on the couch, vodka martini cradled on his chest, David held forth about Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges to a ring of attentive upturned faces. I poured a scotch. Seen through the heavy tumbler, the tableaux looked like a Caravaggio. Uneasy, I put the glass down without drinking from it.

Virgil Thomson called what I did as a copyist to make money “working on other men’s music,” and fiercely disapproved—except when I worked for him. Vincent had only recently told me to do anything but. Scholarship notwithstanding, I was self-supporting, and I needed the dough. I fingered the frayed cuff of my Brooks Brothers shirt, knew the lining of my jacket had long since begun to sag, took note of my scuffed, cheap shoes, and remembered that I was broke. 

I had been taught at the back of Father’s hand to never, ever, ever give the impression that I thought highly of myself. Indeed, I thought of myself with my ass in the air in my pajamas at the age of seven along with my brothers, scrubbing the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, Father hissing, “You all think you’re smarter than me.”

I gave David a letter, and left. 

For the next few weeks I copied music in order to make some money on which to live while composing at an artist colony. July rolled around. I put my books and papers into storage, gave away the furniture, and hit the road again, my knapsack on my back. On my way out of New York, I checked the mail one last time and found a letter from David:

“I have read the very touching letter you gave me on leaving [the] party several times and treasure the feelings expressed in it. It is good to know that I have contributed something of value to you as a teacher during your Juilliard years.”

I still had a year of studies to complete at Juilliard. I met with Joe Polisi, who told me that I would work for a semester each with Joseph Schwantner and Bernard Rands. This seemed both interesting and agreeable. Consequently, in between fulfilling commissions and working as a freelance pianist and copyist, almost by accident, I completed the coursework for the masters’ degree. As it had become time to discuss whether I would remain to pursue my “terminal degree,” I was summoned to the same room in which I had first auditioned. Diamond, Babbitt, and Persichetti were already there. They sat in a row on the other side of the room. It was hot for June, but a familiar icy remoteness gripped me. I became hyper-aware of my surroundings. When we met seven years previous, I was an annoyance to them, a fly that deserved to be swatted—no, flicked—back to Wisconsin. I remembered the ridiculous green leisure suit I'd worn to that audition. This time I wore a Juilliard sweatshirt and blue jeans. I had a clear idea of where I stood, professionally. Now I was competing with them for commissions.

During their lifetimes, composition programs had sprung up around the country; the doctorate (which had barely existed in composition) had become an exclusionary degree: if one wanted the financial safety net of a career in Academe, one now had to have one. I smiled at David, who was scheduled to return to the faculty. He gave me a schoolmarmish scowl in return, and began, “Despite my objections, Daron, you have continued to accept commissions while engaged in your studies here at Juilliard. You produce concerts, you accompany dance classes, you copy music, you conduct a chorus at NYU, and every time I talk to you you have a new amour. I think that you should take a year or two off to consider your life choices before returning to complete your degree. Perhaps then you’ll be prepared to concentrate on your composing in a more disciplined fashion.” 

“You need to decide,” David decreed, “what is really important to you.” At that moment, he reminded me of my high school trigonometry teacher Max Hilmer, sincerely baffled that I didn't want to be like him. I thought also of Diane Doerfler, the literature teacher who had taught me that “making art is more important than teaching about it.” Finally, I thought of Ned Rorem, who had once mistakenly mischaracterized my fear of being thrown out of school as “a seething desire to please” him. I felt as though David was trying to manipulate me, and life with my mercurial, emotionally-manipulative father had taught me to become emotionless (that familiar icy remoteness), and capable of brutality when I felt that I was being subjected to manipulation. Oh, I was seething now, all right, but not with a “desire to please.” You spend your time, I thought, or you are spent. 

“May I have some time to think about this?” I asked. He became suddenly magnanimous: “By all means, Daron. Take as much time as you need to decide.” He clapped his hands together and then spread them before him like a blackjack dealer completing his shift. I smiled coolly in return, excused myself, and walked as slowly as possible to the door. Closing it with elaborate care behind me, I looked across the hallway at the door of the bathroom in which I had thrown up before retreating to Wisconsin. I walked briskly to the elevators. As I jabbed the call button, the remoteness dissipated, a sheen of cold perspiration slicked my forehead, and I began to feel again.

With a ping, the doors parted, revealing a flock of ballerinas in leotards clutching diet Pepsis and wadded-up packs of cigarettes. I took a deep breath, held it, and plunged into their midst. They unselfconsciously banged into one another and brushed up against me. I got an erection. Their voices piled atop one another like flamingos. I exhaled explosively. Their long pink necks and sweaty, gangling frames generated a miasma of musty leggings, baby powder, crotch, and cigarette-smoke. There was no air.

I felt hot. Then I felt cold. I poked at the first floor button, three, four, five times. My ears began buzzing; my reflection in the doors began to blur. I was going to pass out. I looked around at their rouged baby-faces and their hard eyes. My hands turned to ice. Another ping. Just in time. I tumbled out into the Juilliard lobby and down the stone-lined tunnel of the entranceway across from the (then) Chinese consulate on 67th Street.

I needed to sit. Looking for a bench, I saw my ear-training teacher, Mary Anthony Cox. As I passed her, she noted my distress and indicated that I should join her. I admired and trusted Mary Anthony. She was one of the best teachers I had ever had. She asked what was wrong. I put my hands out before me, palms down, and watched them gradually cease trembling. Then, I described my meeting with the composition faculty.

“Honey,” she sighed, “you are a round peg. Graduate school is a square hole. Of course you can make yourself fit in here, but you don’t belong. You’re a real composer. You write music. So, do it. Mozart didn’t need a doctorate to write his operas. You don’t need one to write yours.” 

###

Over the course of the next seventeen years, I made semi-annual visits to David at his home on Edgerton Street in Rochester. He never forgave me for not finishing the doctorate at Juilliard. “Twenty years from now,” he predicted, “you’ll need it. Tastes change. People forget who you are, what you’ve accomplished. A new generation denies you respect. It has always been that way.” I called him once a month to visit, to ask how he was, to gossip, and to ask him what he was working on. At one point, he asked me to orchestrate his opera The Noblest Game for City Opera, as he no longer had the physical stamina to execute it himself. (I begged off.) As the years passed and I remained staunchly supportive, grateful, and respectful, our correspondence took on a gentle mellowness punctuated by his flashes of caustic commentary on each emergent compositional saveur du mois. I learned only after he died that I was the one of the few of his numerous students to remain steadily in touch with him. In May 2005 I wrote to David:

“On the telephone just now you asked me why, after 26 years, I continue to write so much music. I think that I finally have an answer for you. I write music compulsively, reflexively. How could you expect me to slow down or to stop any more than you could expect LB to settle down and to focus his energies on composing? I write so much because I write when I’m sad, and when I’m happy, married or divorced; when I’m broke, and (even better, I’d like to believe) when I’m flush. I compose whether I’m paid to or not, and whether I want to or not. I compose as I always have done: as I breathe—because the alternative, cher maître, is unacceptable. …So please do come to Yaddo [the artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, NY] next month, where Michael Boriskin and I have put together a concert that will be performed in the Music Room at Elaina Richardson’s behest that will feature your early Flute Quartet. I miss you and long to see you.”

The late afternoon light on the main lawn of Yaddo in June was stunning. David and I stood on the back patio, arm in arm, looking down towards the Sleepy Naiad statue at the foot of the lawn. He had grown frail. “Before I forget,” he said, “I want to tell you that Marc [Blitzstein] used to like to sit over there.” He squeezed my hand and pointed at a spot far down the lawn near the rose garden. We turned around, and re-entered the grand hall. I guided him gently into the Music Room. Life-sized full body portraits of the Trask children loomed over us like gravestones. Late afternoon light streamed laterally through the leaded windows.

I looked at David: his impeccably tailored gray serge suit hung loosely over his diminished frame. His blue shirt’s collar was crisp. There was a large New Zealand-shaped liver spot on his scalp over his right eye. What remained of his hair was colorless. His skin was papery and luminous. His rheumy eyes brimmed with tears.

“Marc cared,” he whispered urgently. “When he wrote Regina here, he could sing and play every note. He knew words. You remember I told you once that he rewrote the entire libretto for Lenny's Trouble in Tahiti without needing to change a note of the music?”

I stood up, walked to the front of the little ensemble, and addressed the audience. Comprised almost entirely of local high school students enjoying a rare glimpse of the estate’s inner sanctum, they were attentive and excited. “A word about teachers,” I began my memorized introduction. “I have been a member of the corporation here for a number of years, am in the middle of my career as a professional composer, and have addressed many audiences and classrooms filled with students. It has been twenty years since I had a lesson with the amazing man sitting a few feet from me. Nevertheless, I am more nervous now speaking in front of him than I have been before any audience in the interim. Teachers that we admire and adore have that effect on us. That’s a good thing.” There was a sprinkle of laughter. I asked the audience to acknowledge David and they applauded warmly.

“Thank you, Dear One,” he said, sitting. “You know, I can actually see them all around us: Lenny, Aaron, Virgil, and Marc.” He meant it. More tears.

The concert over, I asked my wife Gilda to snap a few pictures of us.

“I think that it is an illusion that the dead have left us, David,” I ventured, as we posed. He smiled, squeezed my hand, and whispered, “Yes.” “How are you?” I asked. “Terrible. My heart, you know.” “But Jerry is doing your music.” “Yes, but he’s the only one.” We sat together for a few minutes. “They're all here, Daron,” he said, with conviction, “especially at Yaddo.” And then, voice trailing off, “I’ve driven so many people away; I’ve lost so many….”

At that moment, a dozen schoolchildren from the audience surrounded us. They had loved his piece. He smiled radiantly, sincerely enjoying the moment; he accepted their praise, and asked them their names.

A few days later, on 13 June 2005, David died of heart failure.

This essay has appeared in the Huffington Post. You can read it there by clicking here.