On Teaching

An Autodidact’s Guide to Nomenclature

Because musical composition cannot really be taught, born composers are compelled by their condition to be lifelong autodidacts. Objective, quantifiable skills, on the other hand, can be instilled by a teacher. Because I never doubted that I had something to say, or the right to express it—any more than a hound questions its capacity to bay—I skipped straight to looking at scores and plundering theory textbooks for technical guidance and the sort of intellectual understanding that absolutely must underpin intuition.

My entryway into learning music was the Mills Music Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. When I returned there from the East Coast in the spring of 2026 to attend a reception celebrating the library’s acquisition of my archives, sketches, and papers—the place where I spent so many deeply happy hours as a teenager and undergraduate between the pages—the librarians can attest that I wept happy tears at the collection’s familiar scent. Sooner or later, hungry for tools, signposts, or simply ideas to steal, every composer finds the time to crack an orchestration manual, a theory book, or a volume of essays and memoirs.

I taught myself to notate music in 1973 by writing the letter names of the notes next to the noteheads in Scott Joplin piano pieces. I was teaching myself out of Vera Brodsky Lawrence’s famous 1971 scholarly edition, The Collected Works of Scott Joplin: Works for Piano, which my mother had ordered directly from the New York Public Library for me.

In 1976, I began learning orchestration from Rimsky-Korsakov’s great Principles of Orchestration at the Waldenbooks in the Brookfield Square shopping mall. While its utility is lessened because all of the musical examples are drawn from his own music, the first fifty pages—about how to score chords and balance the interplay between orchestral choirs—remain the gold standard for me.

In October 1976, while visiting my brother Kevin, I bought a used copy of Materials and Structure of Music from a guy on the street in Madison. It was written by an Indiana University-based team of scholars that included Christ, DeLone, and Kliewer. I wrote all over that one—particularly in the chapter on Sonata-Allegro form. My favorite remembered pleasure is scribbling, “C is home in a literal sense—all changes coincide with intentional thematic development.” I liked that this view of Western tonal theory treated melody, rhythm, and harmony as equal components. They weren’t generated from a set of core principles that left you “wrong” if you didn’t hear things the way the author did.

In 1978, I began theory lessons at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. At the behest of Judy Kramer, I plowed through Arnold Schoenberg’s Fundamentals of Music Composition. I still have the thing, heavily dog-eared and highlighted. However, because I spent most of my time listening to music written after 1930, the book’s reliance on standard repertoire—mostly Beethoven and Brahms, if I remember correctly—weakened its utility for me.

Walter Piston’s Orchestration remains a treasured old friend. I bought my copy second-hand at the Harry Schwartz Bookshop on the way to a double bill at the Oriental Landmark Theater in August 1979—I know this because of a note I wrote to myself on the flyleaf. It is now so well-thumbed that the spine is reinforced with packing tape. To me, it reads like a diary. Here, at random, are some marginalia: on page 181, “Amelia, 5/2008, high B-flat on E-flat clarinet!” Lower down on the page, “10/92, Ed’s aria, Shining Brow.” On page 144, next to a passage about the alto flute, I’ve written, “Flüg. Concerto, 4/94.” Or, on page 105, next to an explanation of contrabass harmonics, “6/87, Fresh Ayre.”

In 1981, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, I devoured Arnold Schoenberg’s idiosyncratic Structural Functions of Harmony—I should have cracked Harmonielehre instead, I suppose—from a copy bought at the University Bookstore. I gathered that more or less all the harmony that happened in a piece was to be heard in relation to a central pedal point that never went away, even if you modulated. That made sense, especially since both books used traditional Roman numeral notation to label harmony.

I was immersed in Bruce Benward’s Music in Theory and Practice books because I was studying with him. If the Christ/DeLone books were Hindemith-y in their rugged practicality, and Schoenberg’s doggedly traditional, Benward’s offered a versatile, no-frills set of tools that could be used with equal success when approaching broadly different genres and eras of music. His harmonic analysis was lead-sheet-based rather than Roman numeral based. His ear training manual skipped solfège—which was presented as “moveable do” in some books and “fixed do” in others—and instead used scale degrees to identify pitches and pitch class sets.

At Curtis, all of Benward’s jazz-font amiability was swept aside, and Schenker’s “hierarchy of layers” was settled upon my shoulders like chainmail on a cherub. Edward Aldwell taught (magnificently) using the book he had written with Carl Schachter. Formidable Aldwell protégé Mei-Mei Meng taught ear training in a curriculum that included blessedly welcome forays into resources like Lars Edlund’s Modus Novus. Ford Lallerstedt used the panoramic-view blue Counterpoint in Composition book—which I worked out of as a student in Philadelphia until it literally fell apart, and out of which I taught for nine years at Bard.

I had integrated so many different systems of nomenclature that, after working my way through Vincent Persichetti’s highly practical Twentieth-Century Harmony: Creative Aspects and Practice a few weeks before the Juilliard placement exams, I tested out of the theory sequence entirely. After that, I was beholden only to the finest ear training teacher I have ever known: the legendary Nadia Boulanger protégé Mary Anthony Cox. In her amazing class, I sang “veri simile est” in the house of “es muß sein” for six semesters. Like conductor Catherine Comet, another Boulanger student, I found Mary Anthony dazzling, inspiring, and terrifying in equal measure. It was Mary Anthony who urged me to sing my own song by leaving Juilliard—a wise and humane bit of advice for which I will be forever grateful.

Ultimately, every notational system is just a tool for control—an attempt to standardize the subjective. There is no ‘correct’ way to create or experience music; the best teachers know that systems are merely imperfect maps for a boundless art form. For me, it all finally clicked in a dream: I stood in a ring of howling wolves that were also my theory teachers. There were the corporeal ones—Aldwell, Benward, Lallerstedt, Loeb, Kramer, Cox—and those whose books I’d digested—Schachter, Schoenberg, Persichetti, Piston, Rimsky-Korsakov. There was such certitude in those howls, each so right in their own rightness. So, I lifted my head and howled right back. And guess what? Even if my command of their particular nomenclature was imperfect, not one wolf questioned the validity of or my right to howl, or claimed mine was any less howly than theirs. I fit right in.

Head

I had been serving as an adjunct at NYU for Louis Karchin—first as his assistant and then as conductor of the NYU-Washington Square Chorus—while juggling a dozen other piano and coaching gigs in Manhattan and attending Juilliard. Scarcely had I escaped a decades’ worth of theory instruction when Fran Richard from ASCAP called. She told me that Joan Tower intended to offer me a job at Bard College and that I had better say yes.

While my partner, Gilda Lyons, is a gifted professional educator who balances a stressful academic career with her work as a performer and composer, I have always approached pedagogy as a form of artistic citizenship rather than a profession. Ultimately, I’ve come to see every notational system as a tool for control—an attempt to standardize the subjective. There is no “correct” way to experience or create music; the best teachers recognize that systems are merely imperfect maps for an inherently boundless art form.

I benefited from this “protégé effect” while starting my teaching career at Bard, where I was barely older than my students. With department chair Benjamin Boretz’s encouragement, I taught composition and the entire theory sequence as a creative process, which compelled me to reconcile years of conflicting analytical methods. Distinguishing between ascriptive and descriptive discourse finally freed me from allegiance to any single compositional system or set of aesthetic expectations.

We would sit cross-legged in the woods, building instruments from found objects and composing first for solo performers, then for the ensemble. Notation became optional. I spoke rather than professed about harmony and rhythm, encouraging students to learn the technical “lingo” only to forget the names once they began to create. I always felt more like an artist-in-residence than a professor. While my colleagues were supportive, my unconventional approach had its limits. When a college committee asked for a curricular document, I submitted a passionate, rather peculiar thirteen-page screed that was promptly (and better) consigned to a drawer.

By the late 90s, I was teaching simultaneously at Bard, the City College of New York—covering David Del Tredici’s private students and orchestration class during his sabbatical—and at the Curtis Institute, where Ned Rorem had asked me to teach his students occasionally for several years. In retrospect, it is all a bit of a blur; I was going through a divorce and, in a florid gesture of personal reinvention, I quit all those jobs at once and moved to Europe.

Returning in January 1999, my first teaching engagement was as a guest artist for the Princeton Atelier, invited by my operatic creative partner Paul Muldoon. It was a room of eight composers, eight singers, and eight writers. I’d lecture on art songs and popular forms while Paul shared poetry and lyrics. We tackled prosody from opposite directions in a crazily effective format I called From Art Song to Parola Scenica. It was the most fun I’d had in a classroom since the early eighties.

After the aesthetic high of the Atelier, I returned to my desk and the financial reality of the music business: invoices from the copyists for the performance parts of Bandanna, and the news that I would have to hire at my own expense Paul Kreider to step in to replace the singer whose disappearance had jeopardized the world premiere. Financially, it was literally a case of “working for Paul Muldoon to pay Paul Kreider,” the sort of sleight of hand at which in order to survive nearly every fine artist I’ve ever known becomes adept. I’m afraid that never really did “solve the money problem.”

Beyond fulfilling the usual master classes, I’ve been brought in to to serve as a guest faculty at institutions like UNLV, Miami University, the Chicago College of Performing Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and Baylor, among others. These were prestigious opportunities to coach my own music and work intensely with a cadre of young composers, unencumbered by faculty meetings and curriculum committees. In fact, I came to understand that my role was often that of a disruptor—invited to be a foil for, or an example of, a composer who views themselves first and foremost as an artist. It is a role I’ve always felt comfortable playing; being disarmingly subversive is basic stuff for a man who learned early how to charm an alcoholic parent.

During my first three years of teaching, I learned that fleshing out a student’s technique beyond their current understanding was often just a display of my own arrogance. The same applied to creating opportunities for which they weren’t yet prepared. While I never saw myself as a gatekeeper, my desire to keep the authority-versus-power dynamic “pure” often led me to over-praise mediocre work. I also mistakenly assumed students understood that my stories weren’t self-congratulatory name-drops or time-fillers, but precious oral history. Most didn’t. A couple of them did.

Body

From 2005 to 2013, I served as the artistic director and faculty chair—or perhaps “ringmaster”—of the Seasons Fall Music Festival in Yakima, Washington. It was a whirlwind: twelve faculty members overseeing three symphonic concerts, eight chamber programs, and a jazz series featuring titans like Chick Corea and Branford Marsalis. Alongside the administrative heavy lifting of fundraising and scheduling, I performed, coached chamber music, and taught composition.

Working with Pat Strosahl and Brooke Creswell, I helped build a festival ethos designed to dismantle “stylistic ghettoization.” Jazz and concert music were programmed in equal measure, with new works woven throughout. The curriculum relied on immersive partnerships; we paired each conductor with a composer for the duration of the festival, even having them room together.

Boundaries between disciplines were kept porous. Composers conducted, and conductors composed. Everyone bonded over a shared dread of early morning movement classes, dissected scores by Adams to Xenakis, Sondheim to Korngold, and attended wine tastings curated with local Yakima cheer. Whether it was the American premiere of Bernard Jacobsen’s retelling of The Soldier’s Tale or Michael Wimberly’s roof-raising percussion ensemble, the goal was a non-competitive space where creative risk was the only requirement. As critic Doug Ramsey noted in Rifftides, we weren’t just programming diversity; we were fostering a mutually supportive ecosystem.

Not all the seeds bloom. Most students eventually pursue other paths, but they leave having felt the spark of the creative process, equipped with better communication skills and an appreciation for how a problem-solver thinks. The goal is learning how to ride and guide inspiration—transforming the jangly hubbub of a beginner’s trot into the experienced artist’s blissful gallop. While academic programs have an understandable need for empirical proof (subjectively determined or not!) of intellectual credibility, to me, rubric has always taken a back seat to living an artist’s examined life. Teaching is for me the privilege and responsibility of artistic citizenship.

“Shame,” I told the workshop participants at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia on a golden September afternoon in 2012, “is the nuclear reactor that powers the libretto of Pique Dame.” I paused for emphasis. “Of course, that appeals to this Lutheran boy.” After the chuckles subsided, I sang the word—Sha-a-a-m-e—shaping the air with my hands. “Life is a game. But that doesn’t mean life is light; it means games are as brutal as death.”

As I lectured, I recalled Virgil Thomson’s warning to me back in the eighties. “Marc [Blitzstein] gave lectures for money,” he had said. “You shouldn’t do it. It’s part of the ‘associated skills racket’ and too easy for a fellow with your gift of gab. You get a taste for the attention and then it’s all over.” Yet there I was, lecturing for a fifth year as a guest of the Russian Language Workshop at Ghenady Meierson’s invitation. I realized then that I was learning as much as I was teaching. Ghena hadn’t just hired me to speak; he had hired me to internalize Tchaikovsky—to grow as an opera composer through the sheer labor of earning familiarity.

Ghena once quipped over dinner, “For someone who isn’t an ‘educator,’ you sure do teach a lot.” He was right. By the time I accepted a position at the Chicago College of Performing Arts in my fifties, I had come to accept that my most valuable role was not as a permanent fixture, but as a visiting artist strewn in the students’ path to invigorate debate, encourage critical thinking, make a bit of “good trouble,” and then—crucially—to move on, having both sown and grown.

This philosophy culminated in Chicago in 2018. “But I’ve never called cues before,” my composition student whispered into her headset. It would have been easier to hire a professional, but there she was—learning like mad—perched between a professional lighting designer and a production manager in the cavernous Studebaker Theater, helping me film my operafilm, Orson Rehearsed. “You’re doing a great job,” I told her. And she was.

In that theater, the “New Mercury Collective” team and the students worked side-by-side. They weren’t just observing; they were empowered by the work itself. “Here are the tools,” I told them. “Now, make something.”

Watching them—intent faces focused on dramaturgy, digital audio, and the complex protocols of the stage—I realized I was back in the kitchen with my mother. I was “washing the dishes” again, focused on the task at hand while looking out the window at something larger. As the house lights dimmed, we were no longer in a classroom; we were reenacting the parable of the Cave, teaching and learning the basics through the shared light of the art itself.

Tail

Whether his audience was a single student or millions watching a Young People’s Concert, Leonard Bernstein could not help but teach. Oscar Levant once ungenerously called him a “great popularizer of commonly accepted truths,” but Bernstein’s generosity was a profound force for good. When he taught me, he was direct, collegial, and affectionately brutal. It was through his joyous, occasionally over-sharing love for music that I realized I, too, was a born teacher. It was Bernstein who once admonished me: “Howl like a dog if you must, because you can.”

I believe we pay a karmic debt by passing forward the oral history and personal stories of our craft. These undocumented traditions are the heritage of generations who have answered the call to serve music. I believe that with every fiber of my being.

In the late summer of 2023, at sixty-two, I stood in the Virginia night air and listened to a sound that was equal parts Dublin pub, campus protest, and primal scream. Wintergreen Music Festival director Erin Freeman was leading us all—composers, conductors, stagehands, and faculty—as we sang through the instrumental parts of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite. For the students, it was a revelation; for the rest of us, it made us feel like teenagers. We were building empathy, leaning into the “howling at the moon” nature of the experience and loving it.

For the first few years after she came to us, our hound, Peanut, was silent. As she has grown older, she has found her voice. Her howl is a deep, zesty, joyous thing; she yelps at cars, postal carriers, house guests, and things unseen. After our Stravinsky “howl-fest,” as Gilda and I walked her up the mountainside toward our lodgings, Peanut cocked an ear and looked back at us with a Rita Hayworth hair-flip. It was as if she were saying, Now you two are finally onto something. I thought of Auden: “In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.” A tale we can wag.

When I was a child, my brother Kevin told me he loved opera because the singers howled their emotions with the unbridled freedom of wild animals. How to howl is something I can teach with confidence because I live it. I will not be leashed, and I certainly won’t teach anyone else how to wear one. I can, however, teach the process of becoming music—provided we understand that music is the vessel, not the final result.

An examined life is the goal; communication is the challenge; music is the howl. I have learned to modulate the amplitude of my own howl and to respect that its ferocity is not for everyone. But for the wild, joyous abandon of it, this hound howls as howl I must.

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On Montage

Director Giuseppe Tornatore’s Salvatore weeps alone as he gratefully receives the unexpected gift of a lifetime of edited-out kisses unreeling at the end of Cinema Paradiso (1988); Noah Baumbach’s Jay, accompanied by his agent, vacillates between cool, professional self-critical appraisal and straight-ahead narcissism, seeming almost to struggle to succumb to tears as a lifetime of his performances unreels in Jay Kelly (2025). Both directors’ montages are brave, highly poetic visual quodlibets that appear to be aiming for the elevated emotional reverie of the sustained and examined single emotional state at which opera is particularly good.

From my Amelia (2010) work notes I can see that I was already reaching toward operafilm from the direction of music the way that Baumbach and Tornatore were reaching toward it from the direction of cinema. I conceived of the a capella cadenza featuring the entire company at the end of the opera as the doctor held her newborn aloft in the delivery room with Tornatore’s masterful montage in mind. In the sketches,  even marked the passage “Unspooling like a montage of kisses.” My vocal ensemble brought together the eponymous heroine’s souls — family both quick and not, imaginary mythological characters, and the professional medicos just doing their jobs — to sing “Anything is possible.” The sequence has always been staged as a tableaux in the opera house, like most operatic scenes of its type. If we had had dancers in Seattle I would have composed the same music and called upon the choreographer to execute Amelia’s stylized memories — reaching toward operafilm. Honor is due Ennio Morricone’s eloquent underscoring of the Paradiso montage, and Curtis’ use of Brian Wilson’s immortal God Only Knows to underpin the closing Heathrow montage of Love, Actually. How keenly I’d like to complete the transition I began at the end of Amelia from opera to operafilm composer by going back and transforming that big ensemble into what it so clearly (in retrospect) wanted to be — not by changing a note of the music, but by integrating the images and live movement that I held even then in my head as I wrote it.

Composed in the late 80s and early 90s during a period when a number of “great person” – sometimes called “CNN operas” – were being written, including Nixon in China (1987), Harvey Milk (1995), Rasputin (1988), and Marilyn (1993), the human cost of unbridled self-actuation was addressed by “me generation” Boomers. Paul Muldoon and I elected, when treating Frank Lloyd Wright’s life in our first collaboration, Shining Brow (1993), to take Wright to the point in his life immediately after the deaths of Mamah Cheney and her children — the point at which he is about to make the choice between his own self actuation and others’ as described by Hermann Hsse: “Ich meine, man könne eine ziemlich scharfe Grenze zwischen Jugend und Reife ziehen. Die Jugend endet mit dem Egoismus, die Reife beginnt mit dem Leben für andere.” (“I mean that one can draw a fairly sharp line between youth and maturity. Youth ends with egotism does; maturity begins with living for others.”) We ask whether leaving an artistic legacy is enough.

Jay Kelly watches as his life’s performances flash before him in what Bazin described as “veritable luminous impression[s] in light” not in Byronic solitary contemplation like Salvatore but accompanied by his manager, with whom he has an exploitative, transactional relationship. Is Ron Jay’s Svengali or is it the other way around? Clips chosen (presumably by filmmaker Baumbach) from George Clooney’s wide-ranging in-real-life catalogue transform the Real-Life actor’s role into the film’s raisonneur, robbing the character he’s playing of agency. It’s a curiously unkind message that the scene is sending, particularly when both characters appear to weep. Ron’s tears are for himself: they mourn the failure to save a loved one from their own selfishness and the knowledge that he and Jay are consequently (and necessarily) quits. Jay’s tears are self-pitying, too: he (evidently) realizes that he’s alone and lonely because he sacrificed being a humane person for the sake of self-actuation. He, like our character of Wright, has all the trappings of adulthood – a partner, children, a career – but he has yet to commit to something larger than himself. “Can I go again? I’d like another one,” he bleats, radiating existential regret. But, whereas architect Wright – like composer Robbie in my operafilm I Hear America Singing (2025) – was a creator and the creator of his own reality, Jay is a re-creator, the executant (or, as Muldoon described Wright’s apprentices, “the pencil in [Wright’s] hand”) of other artists’ visions.

Director Tornatore fashions a dithyramb in the spirit of ancient Greek theater to cinema’s representation of romantic and carnal love. The power of the “kiss montage” sequence in Paradiso is only partly in the order and choice of the strips of celluloid cut from the films by the censorious priest, Father Adelfio. The montage cuts away again and again to track Salvatore’s emotions as we watch him in medium closeup from a nearby seat watching the film unspool. There is an emotionally accessible, plangent love being passed from the blind projectionist (ha!) Alfredo to Salvatore through the years which Salvatore seems to be accepting as an example of the lost past that his own films have tried to replicate, but that now he has come to realize is agape — corporeal, human, messy, tear-streaked, and happy-sad. He’s brave (and mature) enough to allow himself to be vulnerable, taken for a sentimental fool, knowing that, in the final result, it is the real kisses, not the ones on celluloid, that matter — even though his greatest love may well have been film.

The bookending montages of embraces at the beginning, and the literal splitting up into thousands of embraces at the end, of Richard Curtis’ Love Actually (2003), celebrate in their Brené Brown way the same urge to connect, but they aren’t staged like Tornatore’s, or abstractions of their own experience, like Baumbach’s. The ending “Heathrow montage” mixes (as love mixes fantasy and reality) the characters in the story with footage of real passengers at London Heathrow Airport whose unrehearsed and unscripted reunions frame the artifice of the parallel narratives that make up the screenplay. I emulated this approach by surrounding / framing my characters in 9/10: Love Before the Fall (2023) with “real” diners given only a single instruction — to not look at the cameras. My operafilm Orson Rehearsed (2021), of course, is a multi-layered collection of montages operating at different speeds and levels, sometimes from left to right in time, and sometimes simultaneously in what I think of as “Vertical Kuleshov.” (The “Kuleshov” Effect — named after Lev Kuleshov — is a film editing principle where the audience derives more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation.) Combining the “Kuleshov Effect” with “Fosse Time” at least begins to suggest the complexity of the way people understand experience.

In fact, the concept of “Vertical Kuleshov” defines the heart of my pursuit in “operafilm.” By extending the classic Kuleshov effect into a vertical, audiovisual dimension, I weave layered images and precisely correlated musical ideas into a unified expressive whole. Yet, the true resonance of this work lives in the alchemy of the spectator’s gaze; it is the audience who performs the final, essential act of creation, fusing these independent streams into a single, shimmering emotional reality. Just as melodic lines in counterpoint retain their autonomy while blossoming into a richer harmony, these interwoven threads of sight and sound function as a living audiovisual counterpoint. Vertical Kuleshov is more than a metaphor — it is the formal grammar of a work that is fully authored from score to screen yet only finds its ultimate completion in the mind of the viewer.

Through “Vertical Kuleshov,” Orson Rehearsed blends Welles’ real biography and his fictional roles as his life unspools as a “memory palace” of beats. Through traditional montage, Jay Kelly replays key scenes of the eponymous actor’s life as he makes his way to the tribute event at which he then completes his inner journey by replaying key scenes in his filmography. Cinema Paradiso is about the restoration of memories, while Orson is an exercise in the censorship of self, a creator’s fixation on refashioning experience to the very end. While in Paradiso and Kelly Alfredo and Ron sacrifice themselves for their proteges, we are invited to witness Welles’ destruction of Self (like Robbie’s and American Music’s in I Hear America Singing). Robbie views his life as a perpetual cosmic audition, with his narrative leaping mid-sentence from apartment to theater to park bench. This fluid movement mirrors Baumbach’s Kelly, where the protagonist sits in an audience watching his own life—a fulcrum between art and artifice. It evokes the way the film clips in Paradiso bridge Salvatore’s past and future, or how Love, Actually uses its sprawling locations to suggest that Shakespeare’s stage is, truly, “everywhere."

On Vocal Scores

On a shelf in a hallway connecting the chorus and band rooms at Pilgrim Park Junior High School in Brookfield, Wisconsin in spring 1976 dwelt 30 copies of the vocal score of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. Wallace Tomchek, our charismatic, terrifying, wildly gifted, somewhat mad chorus teacher, told me that he intended to stage it one spring, “if ever I have the voices.” An opera? I asked, dazzled. “Possibly the best,” he answered briskly, pulling a score off the shelf and tossing it to me the way that, three years later, literature teacher Diane Doerfler would toss to me a copy of John Cheever’s short stories with a mischievous grin, singing, “Here, read these; he mainly gets it right.” I don’t think that the biology of mustering enough teenage choral students to mount Carmen ever worked out for Wally, but I already intuited that I would be an artist, probably a musician or writer, when he told me to keep the score only a year or two before my brother Kevin gave me the vocal score of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd for Christmas, thereby cementing my love affair with opera. I treasure both vocal scores to this day.

That year, Wally required that our parents all purchase for us copies of the beautiful 1970 gold-covered Williamson edition of Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. Wally had (rightly) determined that I was at best supporting actor material and had cast me as Max, a role so integral to the show that they cut his songs when the movie was made. “Piano Reduction by Trude Rittman,” I read on the title page.

Over time, I came to know (in my heart and in my hands both) and love the smoothly schmoozy feel of playing Frank Loesser vocal scores; the cooly precise, Ravel-like fussiness of Stephen Sondheim’s; the gnarly, saturated chromatics of Richard Strauss’ own piano reductions, with all the heavy lifting in the thumbs and index fingers of both hands; Kurt Weill’s flinty, Hindemith-y piano reductions to his own (European) scores, followed by the more Gershwin-y feel of his (American) scores; Jack Beeson’s scholarly, sensible reductions of his own shows — especially Lizzy Borden; the richly pianistic vocal scores of Marc Blitzstein for his own shows, which feel as though one should be singing them at the piano whilst playing. Things begin to run off the rails with George Gershwin’s own piano reduction of Porgy and Bess, which requires a real pianist — ironically, the hardest music to play is the transitional stuff, which gets all Gaspard de la nuit and requires real chops — to pull off.

Then there are the vocal scores executed not by the composers themselves but by associates: the practical, uninspired, not particularly singer-friendly Erwin Stein reductions of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes and Billy Budd, which I love, but which do not feel good to play; the noble piano reduction by composer John McGinn of John Adams’ Nixon in China — a real achievement — both playable and fun; Noel Coward’s marvelous, splay-fingered vocal scores executed by Elsie April, which always made me want to have a martini at hand; the co-blended vocal score of West Side Story, which is harder to play than it needs to be, and requires the pianistic athleticism of a keyboard jock to get through.

One of the most inspiring things about the lyric theater — by which I mean live theater or film in which people start singing now and then or all the time — is its compulsively collaborative nature. “Composer” can mean the person who wrote the tune, supported by an arranger who either adds chords or serves as an amanuensis to a composer playing by ear, as well as a “dance music arranger” who takes the tune and develops it for a dance sequence. Robert Russell Bennett used to write the overtures to the shows that he orchestrated for Rogers, and for Cole Porter (despite having the chops, having studied orchestration with Vincent D’Indy), for example. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights score was powered by Bill Sherman and Alex Lacamoire, who transcribed, arranged and orchestrated the show.

Musical departments gather and congeal based on time constraints and trust: John Williams and Conrad Pope, because of the speed at which musical materials must be generated for film; Leonard Bernstein and Irwin Kostal / Sid Ramin, who were given detailed “short scores” for execution as a 27 piece pit arrangement for West Side Story, freeing up Bernstein’s time so that he could be “in theater” and able to make changes quickly to a rapidly evolving, choreography-heavy show. Or Sondheim and Jonathan Tunick, whose signature sound is as recognizable as was Robert Russell Bennet’s and as important to the success of the shows on which he works. Which brings us back around to the queen of them all: German composer Trude Rittman, whose Sound of Music reduction was just the tip of the iceberg of her involvement in some of the greatest scores in the American Musical Theater.

In fact, the core piano vocal score documents — disciplined, vocally-supportive, easy-to-play while following a conductor’s stick or coaching a singer — of the American MT repertoire are nearly all Trude Rittman’s superb handiwork: Rogers’ great scores (Carousel, South Pacific, Sound of Music, The King and I); Frederick Loewe’s (more ornate, harder to play) Camelot, My Fair Lady, and numerous orchestrations, dance arrangements. What a treat it was to run into her handwriting, and to learn the handwriting styles of all the great orchestrators when I used to hand copy music at Chelsea Music back in the day.

The number of composer executive chefs in the kitchen, the number of sous-chefs, line cooks, and pastry chefs is dizzying and — if one has a taste for playing in a pit or singing on a stage — pretty cool. (The role of composer is entirely different in commercial MT than it is in opera. For example, when Burt Bacharach got the flu and ran behind in delivering songs for Promises, Promises the producer threatened to take on another composer to finish the score.) With all the different crews crafting performance documents in the living theater, there are bound to be myriad variations on what constitutes the best sort of piano reduction for a show. Usually, they come to us like love letters left after the end of a love affair, sitting in a box at a place like Chelsea Music in Manhattan, founded by Don Walker and Mathilde Pinchus, with the name of the show stamped on the side and a big “piano conductor” score bound archivally, leaning hard either to the left or to the right, there to stay until Broadway’s lights (or the office lights) are extinguished for good —  or until the creative teams’ heirs transfer the papers to some university’s archives. Otherwise, they sit, awaiting the next revival.

Piano conductor scores consist of a playable piano part and other lines that contain meaningful countermelodies and “fills” that can be assigned to whomever has been hired for the production at hand. They’re sometimes conducted from (Boosey and Hawkes only brought West Side Story’s conductor score out a few years ago, for example), but, usually, the show’s producers have spent just enough on the music to get the cast album in the can and then — man, I’ve seen shows where the “p/c” and the orchestra parts were just left on the stands at the recording session and then … lost, because the show’s impact was so ephemeral and nobody thought it would ever be revived. Anyone who has played a semi-professional community playhouse production of anything has played out of these books (which have gotten pretty slick — particularly when an outfit like Disney owns the copyright), and which often have the name of the player and the city where the “bus and truck” tour last ended. It is such great insider theater lore.

In the musical theater, pianists accept as a matter of honor that their vocal book is itself a malleable, living, evolving thing, and that errors and inconsistencies will crop up during production(s) over the years as changes for various situations are made and unmade. Cuts are made and sewn up, transitions massaged, songs added and dropped.

American opera composers sometimes emerge from the musical theater tradition and are abashed when pulled up short by opera repetiteurs and rehearsal pianists, who typically expect their scores to have been “frozen” and edited. Opera pianists can’t really be blamed for feeling taken advantage of, since they’re being pulled out of their professional comfort zone if they have never ever coached or played a musical. Their default stance is often (though not always) that the composer didn’t have enough common sense or experience to simplify their short score, either by simply supporting the singers the way Rittman’s scores did or leaving them to their own devices and simply presenting the orchestra parts, as Stein’s did. They can hardly be blamed for feeling that, not only do they have to watch the stick, coach the singers, but also piece together an idiomatic part to play.

There’s a lot to sort out here. Full disclosure: It should be obvious by now that I grew up playing shows and operas from all sorts of scores and truly enjoy coming to terms with the different ways that they come to us. I began my opera career fourteen operas ago by crafting my first piano reduction based on the Britten / Stein model with a dash of Rittman. I’ve come at each score with a fresh ear, hoping to capture the psychology of that opera, but — for better and for worse — I have never “coddled” singers by doubling them in the orchestra unnecessarily and I don’t do it in my vocal scores. Because I have always loved browsing the stacks and learning repertoire from the page, I’ve loved crafting the vocal scores myself to my theatrical works.

I do not use arrangers or orchestrators. It’s just not my way. I have always composed into full (or, if rushed, a detailed short) score, even when the commissioning agreement calls for a piano reduction first to facilitate workshops. Perhaps, one day I will leave making the piano reduction of one of my operas to someone else, because it is a lot of work, or maybe just to see how it feels. It will probably be done better than I could do it. Maybe when I write an opera without words.

In any event, here are a couple of anecdotes that illustrate the level of mutual forbearance, respect and trust required of opera composers and opera coach / repetiteurs to get the work done.

I remember the conductor of an early revival of my opera Shining Brow who added thirds and (often) unresolved 7ths and 9ths to the piano reduction I had made when coaching. He explained that it helped the singers to find their pitches (I had followed the Britten / Stein model). At the first orchestral read-through, the singers had trouble finding their pitches because they had relied on the extra notes he’d been feeding them.

Another time, during a revival of Amelia, for which the original commissioning contract had stipulated that there would be two pianists for rehearsals, the pianist took me aside and said, “With all due respect, you could have given me a piano reduction instead of a short score to coach from.” The next revival, the pianist, playing out of the newly simplified score, admonished me to put in instrumental cue names so that he could tell the singers “what to listen for” when coaching. (In musical theater scores, such cues are common, and I often put them in, but, for that generation of the vocal score I had removed them.)

Coaching the original cast of Vera of Las Vegas from the keyboard (as I had my previous shows) in Las Vegas, I had delighted in getting every articulation right, every musical style just so, every mannerism notated. Twenty years later, during a European tour, I laughed with the band over beers when they said, “Jesus, you were specific. We know what you want. Trust us. Take them all out.” Too late, the score had been “frozen” years previous.

Some operas, like Orson Rehearsed, are modular, and incorporate lots of un-notateable electronica. Imagine my brilliant conductor’s consternation when the otherwise beautiful vocal score he was using to coach his singers didn’t capture exactly what the electronics were doing. “Once I figured that out, I was fine, but before that, it was touch and go.”

The vocal score of The Antient Concert was, first and foremost, a document of the string quartet arrangement with which the work was first premiered. Jocelyn Dueck, the coach and repetiteur for the original workshop at the Princeton Atelier, was comfortable “dropping” phrases when she needed to so that she could support the singers. The result was that she played an opera score like a musical theater score. She really “got” what I gave her, and I was grateful. When the score was published, I wanted to make sure that the fact that it was not a piano reduction was made clear, so I placed on the title page “Vocal Score by the Composer,” which some clever librarian somewhere catalogued as “Vocal score by [sic] the composer.” Everyone’s so smart.

Recently, I returned to the 2013 piano reduction of A Woman in Morocco to transform it into a Rittman-style score that could be used by traditional opera coaches. In my original development score I found notes given to me by Kathleen Kelly during a developmental workshop of the piece years ago in Texas. An extraordinary pianist, coach, and conductor, she had done such an excellent job preparing the singers before I got to town that, when she asked me about some of the French that I had set in the score, I trusted her enough to ask her to “fix” my French prosody as she saw fit and to teach me afterwards what she had done. I remain grateful.

The musical director (conducting and playing out of a “piano / conductor” score) of a revival of Vera of Las Vegas revealed to me that he had had no problem cueing the drummer in one city, but that the current drummer had sworn that the part was unreadable because several of the instruments were on different lines than he was used to. (He was fired and another person engaged.) “He came to look at his part in the piano / conductor score, laughed, and said, ‘this isn’t an opera, it’s a cabaret. I shouldn’t have to play exactly what’s written!’”

One time, during staging rehearsals of another show, I was asked to step in to accompany a staging rehearsal in which the conductor was consistently behind the beat. I took it as long as I could before (I was younger then) started accompanying the singers and ignoring the stick. The scene, which had been slow and aggravating, sprang into motion like a racehorse. I was thrilled. Finally, I had to admit to myself that I was doing the production a disservice because the conductor had just started following me; as soon as I resumed my place on the sidelines, the old tempi returned.

What have I learned? That every vocal score should be accepted on its own merits because it is the result of the development process by which it was wrought. There is no correct way to execute a vocal score, though a “piano reduction” should be idiomatic and only go to three staves when there’s no other recourse. If a pianist is looking at a “piano conductor” score, then they should know going in that they’ll be required to make a lot of decisions about what to play and what not to. There’s no blame to go around.

Our mission from the piano bench is to prepare the singers, protect them, and support them as best we can. We can’t afford to get lost in the weeds. Our job is stressful and for the most part thankless, but we’re working out of living documents created by people in the thick of creating. Mistakes in vocal scores rarely occur out of ignorance; usually they occur because of lack of experience or time. As a retired Teamster copyist, I’d be the first fella to simply blame the copyist — everyone does. As Lukas Foss used to tell me, “Daron, the ink is wet until you die.” Play on.

An Affair of the Heart -- Interview: Toronto Film Magazine

 TFM:  How did you start making films and what was the first film project you worked on?

 DH: Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a congenital, degenerative heart defect. I began looking for a story to tell in which I could explore reconciling my own mortality: what issues run through the mind of a fully expressed artist conversant with the relationship between art and life seriously facing the prospect of death? I chose Welles as my subject because he was an artistic polymath—writer, visual artist, actor, director, filmmaker—and a deeply-committed social activist who also strove to live a complete and fulfilling personal life. I have always believed as a theater person that (as architect Louis Sullivan posited) “form follows function.” 

 Consequently, it seemed obvious to me that Welles’ ebullient creative generosity and aesthetic range, intellect, and art required a many-layered dramatic treatment—one that fused images and sound on a deeper than usual level, wedded electro-acoustic and live music, live performance and film, opera and music theater, and jubilantly mashed-up musical and visual languages. I determined to build a multi-media piece that used the “bardo odyssey” of the great filmmaker Orson Welles (the film takes place as he lay dying of a heart attack) to do this.

 I knew that this deep dive was going to require more than a love of movies, an acquaintance with the writings of André Bazin, and access to some video equipment. The editing process is so important to any life, but it is central to a writer, composer, or filmmaker. I had scored some films, so I was conversant with that end of things; but my subject in Orson demanded that I not just imagine but feelhow it feels to edit film month after month. I had directed my operas professionally, conducted them, written their libretti, knew the ropes of live theater; but I had never directed a film, or managed a film production team. It turns out that the opera and film worlds are astonishingly similar. That’s how I came to start making films, beginning with Orson Rehearsed.

 TFM: Which musical genre and which genre of filmmaking fascinates you as an artist and why? 

 DH: I feel most comprehensively expressed as a composer of music interwoven with some sort of dramaturgical narrative. I’ve written eleven operas, yes, but I’ve written an awful lot of music for the concert hall—five symphonies, a dozen concerti, reams of chamber music and hundreds of art songs. Although I am a passionate collaborative artist, I admit to really liking the highly centralized and subjective control of the auteur model as defined by François Truffaut in his essays because it comes closest to the way that composers used to function in the opera world.

 TFM:  How does it feel to write, direct and then compose music for a personal style of indie film?

 DH: Absolutely wonderful. I have savored every second of the Process of making Orson Rehearsed: from discovery with the actors during the rehearsal and staging of the live component of the film, to learning how to live the life rhythm of a film editor; from the familiar process of scoring to film, to the unfamiliar process of shooting film myself to music already scored and seamlessly switching alternating between the two. My goal was not to document a live performance, make a music video, or an Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but to create a pathway toward a new genre which is not a hybrid but something more personal, more resistant to categorization—a film about opera, an opera about film.

 TFM:  What is the most challenging aspect of being an independent filmmaker in the film industry?

 DH: I don’t have an answer for that yet. My process as an artist is driven forward by continual reinvention and discovery, and I am just now learning the challenges of being an independent filmmaker. 

 TFM: How difficult is it to fund indie films?

 DH: To the extent that the world of an opera composer is similar to that of an independent filmmaker, I am familiar with the process of bringing producers and presenters to the table, hearing their vision, collaborating, making art with the artists and resources in the room instead of the ones in my head, and letting projects either unfold or evaporate, depending on things I can’t control. Funding is always a problem, of course. On the other hand, technology has made it cheaper to make films; so long as you have access to the tools and the skills to wear a bunch of different hats, you can arrive at the end with something that looks and sounds pretty good.

 In the case of Orson Rehearsed, the Chicago College of the Performing Arts served as a production partner in exchange for their students shadowing me as composer, director, and independent artist, as well as being cast in productions that combined both seasoned professionals and emerging artists. They shared costs with my New Mercury Collective, which is basically my sandbox, or, as Welles would say, train set, in which I build little sandcastles and operatic locomotives. I have more creative control than I do when I work with an opera company, but less money. 

“These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film.” Daron’s editing notes detailing the synchronization of images in the three simultaneously-projected films-within-the-opera-within-the film for the “Everybody’s Shakespeare” sequence. At this stage, these took the place of storyboards.

TFM:  Tell us about the process of the production for Orson Rehearsed? 

 DH: First, I threw spaghetti at the wall for six months in Logic Pro. I created about twenty 3-6 minute long “think pieces” about specific events and elements in Welles’ life that he might think about while dying. These dramatic beats combined manipulated snatches of recordings of my own acoustic works stretching back to the 80s, sound effects, brief snatches of Welles interviews, loops, and newly-composed vocal lines—most performed by my wife, vocalist/composer Gilda Lyons, and some by me—and mockups of what would become acoustic instrumental lines.

 I chose to divide the character of Welles into three avatars: one young, one middle-aged, one dying. This allowed for ensembles and multiple points of view. They sang a libretto that combined newly-written material by me with words drawn from public domain sources and repurposed—Shakespeare, Welles himself, Emma Lazarus, and others. Gradually, these spaghetti-throwing sessions generated a core of about a dozen musical ideas that held the entire piece together.

 Simultaneously, I filmed dozens of high-def video scenelets that would serve as visual equivalents to the musical motives being tossed up during the work in Logic—a man’s hands typing on a manual keyboard in New Haven; a woman’s hands gliding over piano keys in New York City; a child blowing out candles on a birthday cake, or tracing the letters carved into tombstones in a graveyard; hail falling in Paris; waves breaking and the sun setting in Nicaragua; an elevated train passing by overhead in Chicago; the desert outside of Albuquerque, and on and on. These images ended up unifying the films projected onstage during the live production component of production, and also served as raw material to be edited into the final film.

 During the next six months, since the film was taking place in someone’s mind and would unspool in real time in the theater, I gradually arranged the essays into a sequence, dropping some, adding others, in order to create a psychological and emotional narrative that would take the place of physical action. I edited together all the footage into three sixty-minute films that would accompany the three Orsons in live performance. These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film. I edited into this mix some licensed stock footage of a red silk scarf, film leader, the Statue of Liberty at sunset, some protestors, and a poignant skein of footage culled from a 40s newsreel of a boy walking away from the camera on a country road. This boy ultimately became a rather important “ghost character.”

 Once I had synchronized the electro-acoustic soundtrack to these films, I composed the acoustic chamber orchestra component that would be performed live by the Fifth House Ensemble at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago in conjunction with the electro-acoustic score, conducted by Roger Zahab. A trusted and admired colleague who generously (and bravely) agreed to my request that we eschew the standard “film to image” gear that is used for screenings of Hollywood films when orchestras show them, Roger (who had access only to a click track) marvelously coordinated live singers, an orchestra, and pre-recorded sounds in a theater entirely by ear. I asked him to do this because I wanted the risk, the excitement, and the flexibility of live execution that I have grown to feel as a conductor myself is the secret ingredient to great opera performance.

 Next, I stage directed the show with the immensely gifted and creative cast. Their performances were captured visually over two shows and a dress rehearsal by three stationary cameras and one roving closeup camera—sort of one step up from the usual archival video. The soundtrack audio was recorded in the house. I wanted the soundtrack to sound captured live in order to advance the dialectic of “live” versus “canned” and the combination of the two. Post-production, and live concert mixing can make everything sound so homogenous that nothing sounds “real” anymore.

 I left Chicago with about ten hours of audio and video and let it sit for nearly a year before diving back in. First, I ever-so-gently massaged the soundtrack and had it mastered. Then, I cut the performance film to the soundtrack. Next, I intercut the pre-shot films and the live performance footage (which I washed out into black and white to differentiate it from the pre-shot films) before adding a third layer of semi-opaque “ghost” images screened in red and blue that carried forward elements of both. I received important feedback from colleagues at this stage about what was and was not “landing”—Rabab Haj Yahya, H. Paul Moon, John Corigliano, and Todd Vunderink, among others. This last stage of the process slowly brought the film’s messages into clearer relief and allowed me to discover what the rhythm of the recurring images and music were trying to express. 

 TFM: What inspires you to work as an artist in society and what kind of impact would you like to have on your audience as a filmmaker and composer? 

 DH: Artists of conscience can speak truth to power and make a difference (for the better) by reminding people of their humanity and interconnectedness, the responsibility we have to one another. I try to do that. I am proud to serve on the faculty of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts of Roosevelt University because the institution’s values match my own. That generous, staunch support helps me to amplify my citizenship and hone my craft while sharing it with students.

 TFM: What is your next artistic project? 

 DH: I am directing a staged production of my opera New York Stories for Florida Grand Opera in the spring, and then directing a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate).

 TFM: What do you think about the distribution of indie films and what do you recommend to emerging artists? 

 DH: I don’t know enough about distribution to make any recommendations. At present I am submitting Orson Rehearsed to festivals and learning about distributors. It is an art film for which there is a minuscule market; I never expected it to be commercially viable or “popular.” Still, it is garnering laurels (for which I am grateful and honored), and it might get some legs, however humble. After it has been shown at festivals, who knows?

TFM: Why do you make films? 

 DH: Really, it circles back to process for me. I’m just feeling my way forward as an artist and as a human, learning, going deeper into truths, and working to connect, and to make the bit of difference I can, as I am able. I’m very lucky to have landed in a place where I can discover and reinvent while collaborating with extraordinary artists.  

 This interview originally appeared in Toronto Film Magazine on 23 November 2020 when Orson Rehearsed was awarded the “Best Composer” laurel at the Montreal Independent Film Festival. You can read it there by clicking here.

Orson in the Bardo -- Interview: Wellesnet.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Orson Rehearsed" Interview: Chicago Movie Magazine

Daron Hagen is an American composer, filmmaker, director, and author. He made his debut as a director mounting his own works at the Kentucky Opera in Louisville; he has also directed his works at the Skylight Music Theater in Milwaukee, the Chicago Opera Theater, and others. He is currently directing a film version of his opera Shining Brow for Ohio Public Television.

It was truly our pleasure to interview Daron Hagen for Chicago Movie Magazine.

1. What draws you to filmmaking, cinematic language and composing music for film?

I started watching films critically in my late teens at the Oriental Landmark Theater in Milwaukee at exactly the same time I started digging into music composition and its attendant commentary. The Oriental was a glorious, ramshackle calendar house that showed all sorts of films—from Fellini to Scorsese, Welles to Wenders, Chaplin to Kieślowski, Ford to Ford Coppola, Kurosawa to Lucas. Around the same time, I began reading film criticism and theory—beginning with Truffaut’s incendiary screeds. I am drawn to film because, setting aside the crucial component of live performance, it does everything that opera does and in much the same way.

Operatic scores and filmic documents convey narrative and control dramaturgy through manipulating time and fundamentally altering our perception of its passing. Film’s visual and sonic rhetoric creates the reality in which the narrative unfolds, exactly as opera sets forth an assemblage of gestures, timbers, moods, and sticks to them. As a composer cutting film, I feel the way that I do when I am composing and orchestrating music: one’s choices are guided always by the desire to clarify and illuminate the dramatic and emotional nuclear reactor firing the scene; rhythm is paramount, transitions are where the emotions shift. 

Opera composers have traditionally been treated, like auteur filmmakers, as the genre’s visionaries. The opera house is a vast mechanism filled with profoundly gifted technicians, directors, and craftspersons, all of whom are happy to spray Febreze on mediocre operatic product if they must, just as the artisans in a film production company do. 

In the US at least the opera world seems to have shifted away from the traditional idea of the composer leading a team of collaborators gathering together to illuminate and enhance the composer’s intent. In addition to the much-needed heavy-lifting being done by opera producers in terms of fostering a collaborative environment that reflects current ideas of racial and gender equity, there has been a systematic reevaluation of the composer’s role in the collaborative process: just twenty years ago, treating opera composers like commercial music theater composers still seemed to be at least a short-term path towards dismantling the 19th century “great man” model. For many of my colleagues, the opera composer’s role now is that of a member of a creative team led by the director or the producer.

As a lifelong learner and personal reinventor, I decided to move laterally into directing my own operas about ten years ago because I wanted to explore the similarities between stage and cinematic languages and directing. Although absolutely delighted as a composer to provide music for a film perfectly pitched to serve the director’s and music editor’s vision if required, I realized that I could only explore the territory between the two disciplines if I not only created the score, but also wrote, directed, and edited the film to the score, adjusting each to the other to form a more perfect dialogue between them. In order to maintain the frisson of live opera’s visceral appeal (and palpable risk), I needed to create a production process that allowed for there to be a live production as part of the progression towards the screen.

I formed The New Mercury Collective, a loose association of actors, singers, writers, and designers with whom I had made crossover projects over the previous thirty years utilizing both Music Theater, Opera, and Filmic staging techniques. This would be my sandbox, and the place where I would create Orson Rehearsed, which I knew from the very start would end up as a film and an open-ended music-theater piece that would constantly change shape depending on the circumstances.

2. Do you believe in film schools or does making a film teach you more than film school?

I did not go to film school, so I don’t know. Since I learned how to write operas by accompanying them, singing in them, writing them, conducting them, and directing them, it seemed sensible to me to learn filmmaking the same way—by taking on the genre’s constituent tasks and learning by doing. I did go to Juilliard and to Curtis to study music, so I have some pretty strong ideas about what I learned at those places, and what I didn’t. For example, I am astonished that student composers are not simply required to attend the rehearsals of their local orchestras. Critical listening (to actual performers in situ performing one’s own and others’ music) teaches more about composing than does any class because you can hear what works and what doesn’t—and when it doesn’t what the performers have to do to make it work. Perhaps I am projecting, but I imagine that nascent filmmakers encounter pretty much the same terrain in film school.

3. What makes cinema stand out more than the arts for you?

I could never relinquish live theater—making it with others and watching it has given me the most fulfilling personal and aesthetic experiences in my life. During my lifetime, technology has made it easier, faster, and cheaper to write film operas than staged operas. 

4. Did you choose a certain directing style for making this film based on the script? 

I have cool adoration for the subversiveness of Truffaut’s Doinel films and an appetite for the ethical earnestness of Rod Serling’s morality screenplays. My mother was a visual artist and took pains to explain Welles’ techniques to me when together we watched Kane when I was a kid. But my roots are in opera, so I warm to Fellini’s aesthetic of intensity: I like to create environments that are so fake that they create their own reality. Film is great at this sort of subterfuge—even better than live theater, but not better than a live magic show.

It was pretty early in my career as a composer of large-scale works for orchestras and opera companies when I really came to terms with the concept of strictly terracing simultaneously presented ideas. Composer Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov in his Principles of Orchestration lays out elegantly the idea that complex compositions should strictly hierarchize foreground, middle-ground, and background events for the listener through orchestration. Arnold Schoenberg’s string quartets are masterly in their painterly use of relief, chiaroscuro, and “deep action.” The violas in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier tell us clearly what the Marschallin is really feeling: either we hear them or we intuit them. Either way, we win. These precepts are no different from Welles’ framing of the father in the foreground, mother and banker in the middle ground, and Charlie and his sled in the background.

For Orson Rehearsed I shot about thirty hours of full-color video to create three 60-minute films that portrayed the internal thoughts of three onstage singers who portrayed Orson Welles inside his own mind. Into this I mixed about ten minutes of licensed and public domain archival footage. The films constituted the background images (all tied to musical ideas in the score, of course). The foreground images in the film are all in black and white and consist of the reality played by the avatars themselves as they sing. Between the two (like the violas in Strauss) flows a layer of ghostlike, semi-opaque single-color images drawn from the upper and lower layers of rhetoric that superimpose themselves like fleeting thoughts and then disperse. The Process was: shoot the background films, stage the foreground action, then, formulate the middle layer while editing together the top and bottom layers.

Omar Mulero

Robert Orth

Robert Frankenberry

5. How did you choose the cast and the crew of your film?

I had already created my Collective and intended to draw from them the team needed for this project. But I needed not one but three Orson Welles avatars: a youthful, middle-aged, and dying Orson. As a faculty member of the Chicago College of Performing Arts, I was able to cast the young Orson with Omar Mulero, a gifted tenor and graduate student there, then just beginning his career. 

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. 

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 receiving 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. 

Having these three men go through the discovery and staging process together, and serving as their composer and director, was really, really moving—the most fulfilling experience of my career in the theater. The give-and-take between them—Bob’s wisdom and experience, Frankenberry’s brave questing, Omar’s open, honesty—soaking it all up, glowing and growing in the process—amazing. It’s why I committed to the theater as a teenager and why I’ve remained so.

While staging my opera A Woman in Morocco for Kentucky Opera I had the good fortune to collaborate with lighting designer Victoria Bain, with whom I explored a lot of the Jean Rosenthal-inspired effects I wanted for that production. For Orson, she graciously jumped in to the Kieślowski-esque Red-White-Blue aesthetic I had in mind for Orson Rehearsed  (I first fell in love with this when composing the opera Bandana back in the late 90s—the vocal score is chock-o-block with lighting cues that most theatrical lighting designers ignore) and she nimbly avoided most of the pitfalls inherent in lighting a stage show that was going to be folded into a movie but still had to look good in the theater. There was an able young team in Chicago called Atlas Arts Media that were then just getting on their feet that was able to adroitly handle both the camera emplacements I needed for coverage and the live mix of sound for the soundtrack and CD-release of the score. 

Conductor Roger Zahab and Hagen during production at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. (Elliott Mandel photo)

6. How did you fund your film and what were some of the challenges of making this film?

The Chicago College of the Performing Arts served as a production partner in exchange for their students shadowing me as composer, director, and independent artist, as well as being cast in productions that combined both seasoned professionals and emerging artists. They shared costs with my New Mercury Collective. It is basically a sandbox, or, as Welles would say, a train set, in which I build my little sandcastles and operatic locomotives. I have more creative control than I do when I work with an opera company, but less money. On the other hand, technology has made it cheaper to make films; so long as you have the skills to wear a bunch of different hats, you can arrive at the end with something that looks and sounds pretty good.

The major challenge of production was the real-time coordination of my elaborately-crafted electro-acoustic tracks, the live onstage ensemble of eleven instrumentalists (the Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble), the three live singers in performance with the three sixty-minute films, and the three onstage sixty-minute films on a low budget. The credit goes to composer / violinist / conductor Roger Zahab, who held it all together from the podium. The team at Chicago’s Atlas Arts Media mixed the show in real time while also giving me basic camera coverage so that I could embark upon the next leg of production with hard drives full of soundtrack ready to be mixed, and shots ready to be edited together.

7. Do you consider yourself an indie filmmaker and what would most be the most difficult thing about being an independent artist?

I have been an independent artist all my professional life, so moving sideways into the creation of indie film has been a deeply pleasurable learning experience; one that feels like donning a familiar and much-beloved old sweater. Though I’ve served on the faculties of Bard College, Princeton, and Curtis, among others, they were always adjunct positions—however long-term, that helped to pay the bills so that I could make more art. I’ve been lucky, but I’ve always been a very hard worker, and I’ve been supported by a lot of really generous people, been given a lot of opportunities to learn my craft and to grow up in my chosen fields. The indie film world of makers, presenters, and festivals is on first take a more mutually supportive scene than the concert music world.

8. What is the distribution plan for your film?

Since I am learning as I go along, I am simply entering the film into festivals and finding out who actually watches it carefully enough to find value in it. If it lands with enough people it will get legs, just as operas and concert pieces do. I realize that “legs” in this case means a distributor. If it doesn’t, then, well, nobody got hurt: in the process of making it I lived my best life, and I made a piece of art about which I care passionately.

9. What is your cinematic goal in life and what would you like to achieve as a filmmaker?

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 CCPA-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.

10. What kind of impact would your film have in the world and who is your audience?

Chris Lyons Illustration

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.

11. Please tell us more about the Chicago College of Performing Arts and your involvement with the institution. 

Rudy Marcozzi, rock-solid Dean of the Chicago College of Performing Arts, and Linda Berna, Associate Dean and Director of the Music Conservatory, understand that my values as a citizen and as an artist are in synch with Roosevelt University’s as an institution. The school maintains Opera and Music Theater programs side-by-side. I am grateful to have been encouraged by the faculties of both divisions to work freely with their professionally bound singers on my compositions, which consciously combine the technical and aesthetic methods of both disciplines in our uniquely American way. With their guidance, I cast CCPA’s young artists in projects that also feature mid-career professionals that I draw from my Collective, from whom (as Omar did in Orson) they learn through collaborating and observing during production. In addition, I invite the composition students—who study under the strong, mindful leadership of composer / visual artist Dr. Kyong Mee Choi—to serve as members of my production teams, to assist me as director, and so forth, to be immersed as composers in the production of opera and film in a way that they cannot elsewhere. I can’t tell you how supportive the faculty at CCPA has been of this atelier / sandbox / train set nestled within the various conservatories that make up the school.

Official Trailer.

This interview originally appeared in the October 2020 issue of Chicago Movie Magazine and may be accessed there online here.