Torke in Tahiti

This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 14 November 2014. Click here to read it there.

Daron Hagen and Michael Torke. New York City, fall, 2009. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

“Maybe music is a refuge for me: it’s not for me to say, but people might find more of a generosity of spirit in the music, than they say they are missing in my person. Who knows? The music is like, ‘Here’s a phrase. You know what? I’m not ashamed; I’m not winking,” said composer Michael Torke.

The ear-splitting bellow of a truck’s horn, five floors below, on Broadway, made the window rattle and drowned out his last words. A few snowflakes eddied outside. It was an afternoon in January 2012. We sat chatting in my studio in Hamilton Heights about his latest CD, a self-produced project called Tahiti, released on his own label, Ecstatic Records.

Michael laughed. Deep dimples bore into his cheeks. He repeated himself: “What I said was, ‘Here it is. This is who I am’.”

I noted the broad, intelligent forehead, the intense, probing eyes — one moment warm, the next as cold as a shark’s — intense, perhaps wild, emotions kept under strict control. To me, he was still 22, the other young Wisconsin-born composer winning a BMI Student Composer Prize at the Warwick in 1984. 

The truth is more interesting, and tougher: Michael Torke has walked the maverick’s path. He’s an original, and he’s a true artist. He dropped out of Yale in order to stay on top of a white hot career kicked off by two of the finest concert works of the ‘80s — Vanada and Ecstatic Orange. 

His early pieces concerned themselves with a fistful of techniques with which he treated dissonant, often octatonic, suitably “modern” sounding pitch groups — cellular development, Minimalist repetition, “abstract” melodies, punchy, arresting post-bop rhythms subdivided at the sixteenth note. 

But then — an artist to his core — he began deploying the same techniques to the less dissonant, “tonal” sound worlds of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. Works like Ash and Bright Blue Music disappointed some colleagues, even as they delighted civilians — particularly ballet audiences. He peeled away from his prestigious publisher, Boosey and Hawkes, years before other independently minded composers of his generation did so with theirs. 

During the past decade, Michael’s been seriously involved in vocal works. His opera Strawberry Fields has gained a secure place in the repertoire. Since opera’s my favorite wheelhouse as a composer, this latest part of his career has fascinated me even more than the previous phases. Like most composers, Michael derives instrumental concert pieces from their operas and musicals.

Fiji, the largest piece of the new release, was composed around the same time as a theater work called called The Listener. I asked Michael if the two shared any ideas.

“Some of the themes [for Fiji] did come from the failed musical I wrote with Craig Lucas, called The Listener, for the Juilliard Centennial,” Michael agreed. “The show was produced with their senior drama class of sixteen hotshot actors, all very good-looking, none of whom could sing. Music was just not emphasized in their training. Craig wrote the lyrics and the book. Mark Wing Davey was our fearless English director. It was a musical with a rock band in the pit. At the time it was very exciting. But it was deemed controversial: there was nudity on stage, and it was a bizarre story about a virus that gets into your brain and makes you behave irrationally. Joe Polisi, the President of the school came to opening night and pronounced it the worst travesty in the hundred-year history of Juilliard! Our scheduled tour to Chicago and LA was promptly cancelled. And then soon after, Craig and I parted ways. Craig wanted to refashion the whole thing, but I had run out of steam.”

“Well, we’ll always have Fiji,” I quipped. “You know, Tahiti as a record has an unusually highly produced sheen, even for your releases, which are always aurally impeccable. In fact, it sounds like the Burt Bacharach mixes from his great instrumentals during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. How hands-on were you during the recording process and especially during post-production?”

“Well,” Michael replied, “the magic of this album was in post, and the producer I worked with, Mike Maguire took more of a pop rock approach to making a master tape than the classical models that I was used to. I’m glad you mentioned Bacharach, because after hearing the first edit, that’s what I said to Andrew [Cornall, at the time about to named head of worldwide A & R for EMI], ‘What I want to do is something that sounds like those famous late ‘60s recordings that Bacharach did.’ That was the model.”

“One of the things I find most gutsy about this release,” I opined,” is that you are so compositionally ‘open’ about the ‘70s sounds we grew up with. Frankly, I love them, but they also give me panic attacks.”

Michael laughed. “Great! I love it! Another LA friend of mine said ‘Well, Michael, you write muzak for intellectuals’.” 

The dimples pierced his cheeks. There blossomed a crimson blush, and he put up his fists like a prizefighter for an instant before dropping them. “It’s more complex than that, though. For example, the music for the movement called ‘Farewell’ comes from the climactic moment from the Craig Lucas musical when the three murderers — who have suffered the brain damage — which causes them to commit their crimes, sing a trio of their misdeeds.” He sang, “‘the headlights shined on me and I stuck the knife into the body.’ The music was all about murder with the most heinous details. In the musical, it’s supposed to be this dramatic moment because they’re singing this very romantic song that is about killing. This was Craig’s vision. But to me it was a kind of elegy. If you remove that dramaturgy, it actually sounds like a reflective farewell. I thought it would work at the end of Tahiti.”

Cultural reference points in Torke’s music are always deftly alluded to — as subtly and as tellingly as Strauss’ in his operas. But Michael limns these artifacts without rancor, condescension, or (particularly in the case of Tahiti) irony. More to the point, he does so without shame, without post-modern winking. In this I feel a great kinship with Michael. 

I recall vividly Ned Rorem, opening night of my opera Vera of Las Vegas at Symphony Space warning me that some people would call the score “cheap” because they didn’t understand it. As Tim Page wrote of my opera Bandanna, “It is neither fish nor fowl — as fierce as verismo but wrought with infinite care.” More time will have to pass before this sliver of the American repertoire is given its proper due. I do believe, however, the current generation of emerging American composers who’ve managed to free themselves of the voices in their heads that are not their own—happily eclectic, what-you-hear-is-what-is-there, benefit from the aesthetic groundwork done by Michael’s work.

When an artist has consummate craft, as Michael does, the ability to say anything he needs to say in any way under the sun, and the courage to say, “Here it is. This is who I am,” attention must be paid. Honor is due.

Bernstein's Seemingly Simple Song

In 1971, the year he became the first music critic to receive the Pulitzer Prize, Harold Schoenberg wrote of the premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS: “So this MASS is with it — this week? But what about next year?” Bernstein, though lavishly honored during his lifetime by those who admired and respected his music, his music-making, and the comet-like intensity of his life force, was never awarded the Pulitzer, and it wasn’t until 1981 that the American Academy of Arts and Letters invited him to become a member.

When I was eleven years old, my brother, who two years earlier had turned me on to Jesus Christ Superstar, played me MASS. He was old enough to be worrying about the draft; we watched the numbers climb under the little black soldier and the little white soldier just over Walter Cronkite’s shoulder with horrified fascination. I brought the big, floppy LP’s of  MASS with me to Linfield School, taught “God Said” to my classmates, and led them in a rousing rendition of it on the playground during recess, prompting a call home from the vice principal (who had not one ironic bone in his body) to my mother, who, laughing, no doubt told him to get “with it.” 

My MASS, the one spinning away in 1972 on the turntable in my parents’ den, began with self-consciously complex, Internationalist “new music” babbled away in Greek — the furthest thing from the traditional classical music, show tunes and rock-n-roll to which I, as a Lutheran kid from Wisconsin related. It was exotic, but it didn’t make me feel anything. That the Celebrant should clear the air with a single swipe on the open strings of his guitar expressed clearly what this MASS was going to be about: modernist music would express “Life After the Bomb,” decadence, agnosticism; tonal music would express innocence, faith, rebirth. There would be no attitudinizing, no proselytizing; no value judgments made on different styles of music in this score; as Bernstein famously pointed out at the Grammys decades later, there would be “only good music and bad music.”

With joyous, Rock God open G’s and D’s on the guitar, the Celebrant cuts through the quadrophonic Modernist cocktail party of the cacophonous pre-records that serve as a prelude, spelling out “G-d” in music with the middle left out in the traditional fashion, just as Bernstein leaves the third out of his chord. It’s an innocent, pre-musical place; a chord that anyone who can pick up the guitar can strum without knowing how to play. So begins a supposedly “simple” song that is a textbook example of what a composer can do when he has the craft to conceal his craft. It’s Matthew 21:16. And, to the annoyance (and exquisite embarrassment) of so-called subtle thinkers like Tom Wolfe and Harold Schoenberg, Bernstein actually meant it.

The Celebrant enters on the fifth in G major with the word “sing.” The C-sharp that follows is both the Marc Blitzstein / Bernstein signature interval, the one used to poison the harmonies in Blitzstein’s opera Regina and to organize the drama in West Side Story and anything but simple: the word “God” has been placed on the “forbidden” tritone, rife with ambiguity and harmonic instability, ready to modulate into any key; it’s a note of many colors, but, in the event, serves as a “passing tone” to the words “simple song,” which pass in four beats through iii, and a feint toward the dominant of A minor before settling on the relative major of A, C major, the subdominant in G major, for the word ‘lauda,’ and a tender plagal cadence back to G.

And so it continues, sounding like a pop song and functioning all the time in the way Bernstein himself did, on several levels at once, a semiotician’s dream: entertaining and illuminating, clever and heartfelt, knowledgeable, but filled with disarming wonder, revealing the obvious without embarrassment or cynicism because the most important things bear repeating. 

The next section frankly “comps” the way a novice guitarist might, or like a cocktail pianist in C major, disarming the listener but keeping things unsettled with an E-E flat cross relation (the “happy” major third alternating with the “sad” minor third) and the insertion of a tritone again, like a little musical question mark, on the word “praises” before adding a Pan-like flute, in G minor, playing a “fill” on the melody to which the words “sing God a simple song” were sung earlier over “All of my days.” Deft touches that only a composer who knows the repertoire and who knows that the mass has always been the best show in town would think of abound, like having the strings enter to halo the words “Lord” and “God.” There is in this opening number the allusiveness of Richard Strauss as Bernstein taps every high, medium, and low cultural reference point rattling around in his overflowing imagination in an ardent desire to land with everyone in the Congregation.

I intuited this at eleven, spent the eighties learning how composers like Bernstein did it, and the nineties coming to terms with something (learned) in me that felt that it was all somehow too facile in its execution. I can’t help comparing Bernstein’s virtuosic compositional display to most of the theater music I hear these days being passed off as visionary and shake my head.

Ned Rorem told me once that my music was most effective when it was simple, stipulating that writing complicated music was a lot easier than not. I was too young when he said it to me to understand what I know now: he meant that my music was best when it appeared to be simple. It is more important to be understood than it is to be loved. Or respected. Now I understand that it required a sort of courage for a man of Bernstein’s sophistication and time to drop in that little soft rock “boom-chick,” in the B section, to gently touch on the jazzy major seventh with a grace note on the word “help,” to push the jazz gesture just a trifle harder on the “sting” beneath the final “laude.” What critics like Schonberg deemed self-indulgent lapses in taste are revealed, in hindsight, to be the unapologetic gestures of a master.

The other shoe drops during the Sanctus, when the Celebrant plays two open E’s on an acoustic guitar, thinks out loud the solfège syllable “mi” on the pitch E, to which it corresponds, and then freely associates that “Mi alone is only me. But mi with sol,” he continues, moving to the G, “Me with soul,” continuing the pun, “Mi sol Means a song” and he uses a commercial pop release into C major, but equates God with C major as he has throughout the piece, unfolding into a delicious C major triad, then building on it, using more sophisticated compositional tricks like a sprung bar of five beats on the word “grow” for text painting, climaxing on a high G (a “sol”) on the word “soul” before, unable to restrain himself, he is absolutely compelled to launch into “Kadosh! Kadosh!”

I experienced a frisson at eleven, as I sang along in my swimming trunks on the floor of our den, and just did, when I sang and played through it at the piano a few moments ago, aged fifty-three, my seven year old son, across the room, building with Legos, singing along.

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I couldn’t have felt more validated when Catherine Parsonage wrote about my opera Bandanna, “Hagen’s style encourages audiences to be actively involved in constructing their own meanings from the richness of the textual and musical cross-references in his work,” for I believe this is exactly the sort of open mind Bernstein penned MASS for. Performances at the Vatican and around the world have guaranteed its place not just in people’s hearts, but in the repertoire. Most emerging composers in their thirties — the pitched battles between the modernists and the traditionalists long since over — consider the prim reviews MASS received (if they consider them at all) with detached postwar amusement.

Over the years, I have turned to Benjamin Britten for his cool, brutally elegant characterizations and the finest personal lexicon of articulation markings of any opera composer. I’ve reached out to Richard Strauss for the emotional and psychological subtlety that his quicksilver and quicksand-like chromatic harmonies convey. And I turn to Bernstein when I need a reminder of how a composer must not leave anything on the field.

Composers tell one another the story of Paul Simon asking Bernstein for lessons and Bernstein turning him down, telling him that lessons would “ruin” him. Writers and amateurs (bless them) are permitted to feel otherwise; composers, having learned how the spell is created, are not. Instinct and talent will carry you just so far. Even though you don’t have to be able to read music to write a great tune, one of the lessons that Bernstein’s “Simple Song” teaches is that you need more than just a true heart and a clever mind to compose music of a calibre equal to the finest visual and literary art. One needs the craft to conceal one’s craft.

Bernstein, at his best, reminds me that you have to know what you’re talking about before you shake your fist at the Man. He reminds me that, as a composer, one must take the risk of really being oneself, how one must view musical and professional authority figures with a critical gimlet-eye, take the risk of having people whose opinion you admire wonder aloud why you seem to need to be “with it,” so that, if everything aligns, music might just carry one up to that celestial high G-D.

• This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 17 March 2015. To read it there, click here.

• An abridged version of this essay has also been reprinted in the Leonard Bernstein newsletter Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs.

Against Two-Tap Opera

Part One: Play the Clarinet in the Room

The dazzling young opera singer portraying Lizzy, the eponymous writer in my opera A Woman in Morocco, which I was in Louisville at the Actors’ Theatre stage directing for Kentucky Opera, sat down at the portable Remington, fed paper between the rollers, looked up, and asked, “Now what?” I offered motivation. “No,” she laughed. “Not why. How. How do I work it? I’ve never use a manual typewriter before.” 

The opera’s conductor laughed when I told him. “I recall teaching one of my protégés how to use a rotary phone; he kept looking for buttons to push.” “Boy or girl?” I quipped. “Ah, it was not a ‘princess’ phone, if that’s what you mean,” he replied. Now, on our iPhones, smaller than the communicators Shatner and Nimoy once brandished, we can assign Siri not just a gender, but an accent. The telephone in my hotel room blinks, but I don’t bother with it, since who would even think to call the hotel’s switchboard to reach me?

Composer-Director Hagen with the stage manager, lighting designer, and sound designer of A Woman in Morocco during production in Kentucky. (Photo credit: Barbara Grecki)

After six hours working in the darkened Jory Theatre with the three gifted young women lighting, stage managing, and sound designing the opera, we took a break. Asked one, “Do I pronounce your name Hay-gen or Haw-gen?” I laughed, and answered the latter. “I’m sorry,” she was quick to respond. “Not at all,” I said. “Here’s a quiz: how do you pronounce the name of the guy who wrote ‘West Side Story’?” “Easy,” said another, “steen.” “Nope,” I said, “stein.” “No way,” said the third, incredulous. “Way,” I replied. “I remember how much it used to aggravate him that people messed it up.” Silence. Quietly, the stage manager remarked, as though I might perhaps be a reanimated denizen of Jurassic Park, “You knew him?”

In the opera, in order to flesh out the doomed, touching fantasy self-image based on Bette Davis constructed by one of the men in their final love scene together, I had the character quote lines from the final scene in Now, Voyager where Davis and Paul Heinreid say goodbye over cigarettes. I saw it in a grand old movie palace as a teenager and wept not just for the characters in the story but for the actors’ understanding of camp, modulated to the the very highest degree. Directing the scene, I asked the men if they’d ever seen it. No. “Dial it up on YouTube as soon as you can,” I enthused, you’ll love it; it will make this scene totally pop.” I hope that they did. 

“How much history we pre-internet types must seem to carry around in our brains to the Millennials,” observed the conductor. “Now, that which fizzes in social media and art on the surface is enough for them most of the time. If they need to know more, they can Google it.” I volunteered how Maurice Abravanel (whom spellcheck helpfully just corrected to “sabra engel,” by the way) used to stroll around the grounds of Tanglewood, a sort of peripatetic Groves Encyclopedia whom young musicians (including myself) with a passion for oral history plied with questions, which he understood it was his role to answer with dignity and wisdom. 

The other night, I stood in the middle of the empty stage of the darkened theater alone, a cup of coffee in one hand, the vocal score of my opera in the other, and reflected again upon not just how much accelerated the loss of our memories has become as a species, but how much more important the acting out of sophisticated, grown up, adult stories that reflect the multiple layers of meaning, intention, motivation, and memory has become, now that the Internet offers a pat answer for everything within two taps of an index finger. 

Like education, opera is one of the “magic bullets.” How quickly we are no more. Indeed, we are no more more quickly than ever before. The stories we tell, live, replete with mistakes, and wreathed in the inherent risk of live performance, vividly engage peoples’ mature hearts and help to grow the poetic memories of folks starving, if only instinctively, for more than “two tap” answers. 

America now leads the world in the development of opera. Our country needs opera companies more than ever to not simply spend their time rushing through development easily marketable one-offs by rookie composers. We must encourage the composition of subtle, emotionally and psychologically verifiable original stories told with sophisticated music that does more than reveal commonly known operatic tropes, as the saying goes, to our current condition. Otherwise, the Two-tappers win, and we should all hand our clarinets to someone who will play them.

Part Two: That High G

In rehearsal  just before the running of the Kentucky Derby, I realized just how much opera singers and thoroughbred racehorses have in common.

Perched on my director’s stool with the score of my opera before me like an eagle on the ramparts of Tara, a few feet to the right and behind my conductor, I observed as a fistful of young opera singers (accompanied in what is called a “piano dress” rehearsal by a valiant woman attempting to recreate the sound and activity of a full orchestra on an out of tune spinet that belonged in a saloon scene out of an episode of “Gunsmoke”) enacted a scene in which the soprano (lover of the tenor), drugged with kief, is delivered by same tenor into the waiting arms of the villain (the baritone, of course, lover of the tenor).  

The conductor’s baton swished from side to side, up and down, impatiently, like a lion’s tail, pushing the drama forward through complex, churning music counted out in rapidly-shifting meters. The singers, their peripheral vision noting from whence the conductor’s next cue was coming, their ears tracking the ebb and flow of the music, listening to their colleagues’ voices for their entrances, for clues toward line readings (remember, they’re also expected, during ensembles, to make chamber music together), also executing the “blocking” instructions I’d given them that stipulated where they should stand, and what they should do, hurled themselves into the moment. They did this while singing incredibly loudly, requiring the physical stamina of athletes and the calculated madness of stunt pilots. And, yes, they were also acting.

The stage manager, directly to my right, her finger poised over the return key of her laptop, counted down to the pre-recorded electro-acoustic music I had created months before that would begin exactly at the moment the tenor’s knife touched the baritone’s throat, mixing with the voices and orchestra to yield a filmic sound-web of electronic effects, acoustic instruments, and voices.

The other villain of the piece (another baritone) paced back and forth off to the left prior to bursting “onstage” at the appointed moment, working up his energy like a batter just off the baseline preparing to engage the pitcher.

The stage manger’s finger fell, the tenor pressed the knife to the first villain’s throat. The woozy soprano slumped to the bed. The second baritone hit the stage like a prizefighter entering the ring. The conductor’s baton slashed downwards like a machete on a coconut. The piano jangled. Unable to control myself, I whooped for sheer joy.

At that instant, the first baritone, a big, handsome guy aware of his looks who had so far done a perfectly good job during rehearsals, behaved professionally, and received direction civilly, began singing the rush of words that would culminate in a suitably high note to end the scene. As a composer who’d been to this circus a fair number of times before, I’d chosen a note of sufficient altitude to showcase the singer and to close the scene with a bit of the musical “special sauce” that opera lovers attend the opera to enjoy. My eyes narrowed as I prepared to enjoy the moments at I had created.

At that moment, everything shifted, and the hair on my arms stood up. Instead of the sensible note I’d chosen for him, he reached for a high G. And, instead of “cutting off,” or stopping, after the duration I had judiciously crafted for his character, he turned to me, looked me right in the eye, and, with a matador’s gesture of flicking his cape before a bull, he just held the high note. And held it. And held it. Like a horse running for pure joy, he opened up and just Blew us all away. 

Perhaps I was put in mind of it because I was in Louisville on the day before Derby Day, when the women draw from boxes on the top shelves of their closets, or from under their beds, the glorious hats that they don for Churchill Downs. In any event, I suddenly thought of those mornings when, as a young composer at Yaddo thirty years ago, in Saratoga Springs, on property adjacent to the famous Saratoga Race Course there, I’d pack coffee in a thermos, and bagels in a basket, and meet a composer friend named Louise Talma before dawn and walk to the (then) waist high fence that separated Yaddo from the track itself, droop our arms over, and watch as as, the sun rising, the steam rising from their backs, the Great Animals’ trainers led them around the track.

No spectators. No jockeys. No owners. Just the track, the lively morning air, and a palpable sense of wild, free, physical, and pre-spiritual happiness.

I thought then of the morning Louise and I watched as a horse, a Famous Horse with everything to lose, for sheer joy, the cold morning air causing his breath to come out as steam, the sun a sliver of gold behind him, no trainer, saddle, bit, or jockey in sight, sped toward us on the track, as silent and as weightless as an eagle soaring off the ramparts of Tara. He swept by us in near silence, and continued off into the mist. 

I was 22 years old. The world was just opening up before me. That High G.

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Learn more about the opera A Woman in Morocco here.

This essay was syndicated in the Huffington Post, which published it in two parts on 14 May 2015 and 8 May 2015 . You can read it there by clicking here and here.

My Rosebud

This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post, which published it on 1 September 2015. You can read it there by clicking here.

Gwen Hagen, in a publicity still from her years as an actress.

I’m writing a libretto about Orson Welles right now. Searching, as so many have, for Welles’ Rosebud has made me think about my own. So I wrote to a trusted friend and asked him what he thinks has inspired my life’s work. “Loss,” and “endurance,” he replied. “In the true midwestern spirit, living through what comes.” 

Not surprisingly for a composer, sound figures centrally in my memories of childhood. At age eight, during the summer of ‘69, one of the most comforting sounds I knew was the sound of Mother’s manual Royal typewriter. The telegraphic patter, a rush of keystrokes followed by the thud of the space bar; the zestful (or pensive, or trepidatious) winding sound followed by a sharp click as she pulled on the return lever and hauled the carriage back to begin a new line. The whirr (or whine, or snarl) as a sheet of paper was pulled out; the stuttering sound as a new sheet was fed to the beast.

I could tell how her work was going just by the sound of her typing. Even when it was going badly (longer pauses, more cigarettes, the sound of her chair as it screeched when she got up to look out the window) it made me feel safe. She nearly always cooked at the same time. For some reason, I remember the smells mostly of cabbage, roast beef, baking bread and stews. She listened to the Paganini violin concerti, one after the next, or the local classical radio station, WFMR or Frank Sinatra singing Cole Porter. 

I worked hard not to disturb her, but I was only eight, and, if it was summer, I’d inevitably ask her one too many questions, derail her train of thought and pull her out into the sunshine, where she’d set me a task pulling weeds as she tended her magnificent irises. The hotter the sun beat down, the more intense the smell of the cocoa bean shells that we used to pick up in great sacks for free at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company in the Menominee River Valley and spread on the gardens like mulch. Massive broods of cicadas sang, their husks mixing in with the cocoa bean shells when the nymphs burrowed up out of the ground, moulted and reached maturity. 

She was beautiful, and she knew everything. I was her smart son, and I wanted to learn everything. I was adored. I could read just enough to make my way through a few paragraphs now and then. The language was grown up: adult dialogue about being unfaithful, or desperate or simply puzzled. I still recall fragments of stories about handsome young men standing at the screen door, restive wives left on their own with their children and a copy of A Room of One’s Own, moths throwing themselves at flames, and the folly of parenthood. I remember how the stack of manuscript pages grew and disappeared into large manila envelopes, which she sent to magazines in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.

That winter, dread-filled, Mother fielded a series of increasingly upsetting telephone-calls from her beloved brother. A sensitive fine artist and chronic alcoholic, Keith had taken commercial work as art director at the Chicago Tribune. During the last, he confessed that he intended to take his life. 

I was still too young to be left at home alone. I don’t know where my brothers were. There was no time to get a babysitter. My parents took me with them as they proceeded from one bar to the next, one hotel to the next, in downtown Milwaukee, looking for him. In the end, they found him in a room at the Ambassador Hotel on Wisconsin Avenue. He had washed down a lethal dose of chloral hydrate with vodka.

They emerged, holding hands, from the hotel. It was the single time I saw them touch affectionately. Frightened, I curled up in the back seat wearing my brother’s coonskin hat (Daniel Boone was our favorite television show) and pajamas. I watched through the car window as my distraught parents talked with the police. At that moment, I knew that tragedy had, for the moment at least, made me superfluous. Cold. The blood-clot-red rotating lights of the police car. The wondering why an ambulance was required to convey a dead person.

We drove home. In the front seat, in their own world, my parents spoke in subdued, strained voices. The words were indistinct, but the music was like a transmission heard from far off in space — little vocal jabs, sighs, murmurs and upward queries. Pauses, followed by a tumble of syllables met with another silence. The streetlights came on as we drove west towards the suburbs. The javelin-like flares of light hurtled across the hood of the car as, from under a blanket in the back seat, I watched them pass by overhead.

“Let it go,” I heard Father say to Mother. I listened to the “kuddah-CHUNK, kuddah-CHUNK” tattoo the tires made as they passed over seams in the concrete.

“Just let it go.”

Gwen Hagen at the age of 16.

Crackle of gravel in the driveway. The ticks and sighs of the hot engine as it cooled. The slam of the screen door as Father heaved my uncle’s suitcase into the foyer. He went to the kitchen, sat heavily at the table and poured himself the first of the only three drinks I ever saw him pour in our home. (Our second and third were the night Mother died.) I played with the horse track betting stubs that fell out as Mother, tears running down her cheeks, silently unpacked her brother’s clothes for the last time, throwing away, one by one, his suits, still smelling acridly of booze, aftershave, cigarettes and stale sweat.

As the years went by, Mother continued to write, to sculpt, to raise her children, to cope with her husband. Her rejected manuscripts were returned in big manila envelopes. Not one was accepted. In fifteen years, not one. She had stopped saving the rejection slips when I was twelve. 

How quaint, how ridiculous, her return address must have seemed to the clever kids in their early twenties culling submissions to The Saturday Evening Post, Dial, Saturday Review and The New Yorker.

The rejection letters (from the same magazines that I have friends and colleagues published in and working at today) that she used to read, standing in her Midwestern kitchen, surrounded by children, the smell of pot-roast and a self-medicating bipolar husband running to fat, could only have been devastating.

The other day, thinking about Rosebud, I thought not of a burning sled, but of a sheaf of papers being reduced to pulp.

Now, I am a reasonably successful mid-career composer of opera and concert music in a world changing so fast that it would have made Mother’s head spin. She’s long gone, of course. But she’d adore my children; she’d be so proud of them. And of me. She would love my wife, as do I, passionately. I take comfort in that. I do remember, with gratitude, on summer days at our home in Upstate New York, as I compose in the house and my boys, now the age I was then, sing in the backyard with the cicadas as once I did. Does the sound of my composing at the piano, counterpointing their play as once the sound of Mother’s Royal typewriter did mine, move them as once I was moved?

I also remember the summer day in 1976 when I stood in the rain in my swim trunks and watched as Mother dumped everything — her manuscripts, the rejection slips, the pretty letterhead and the Royal typewriter — into a garbage can at the head of our gravel driveway. Last went the clay and the tubes of paint. I stood there, watching the rain make the ink on the pages run, and then turn the paper into pulp.

I think about that rainy day when I sit on a committee judging applications for a prize or commission. How easy it was to dismiss her work, unread; I see it done sometimes by some of the people with whom I serve on panels.

I think about that day when, on occasion, I sit across the table from a smug, careerist, entitled punk with money, a degree and connections.

With fury undiminished by the passage of half a century, I think about Mother walking slowly back into the house and stopping when she saw me moving toward the garbage can, intending I suppose to fish some of the things out.

The fact is, Mother was a good writer. And her work with Mari Sandoz helped her to become an excellent one. But the truth is that that fact may not have been the deciding factor in the end.

“Leave it,” she commanded, her voice tired, and remote. “Let it go.” Rain fell straight down.

“Just let it go.”

###

Gwen Hagen with her brother Keith in Milwaukee.

Despite the fact that three act structures are out of fashion these days, my second act—my current career as a composer and my life as a man and father—clearly represents my mother’s third, and final act. 

The morning in 1976 after she dumped her dreams of being a fine artist (in the form of her Royal typewriter, art supplies, and manuscripts) in the garbage was a hell of a dramatic act break—a tableaux in which a young mother commanded the son looking on—in whose arms she would in six short years die—to “let it go” as the rain fell straight down and her discarded manuscripts were reduced to pulp.

What became, then, of Gwen Hagen, the “Rosebud” of my article exploring why I compose music, and why the career I have as a composer of concert music and opera has assumed the shape that it does?

Well, the next day she took a job cleaning toilets and changing bedding at a Ramada Inn hotel managed by her brother Garth.

In “My Lost City,” F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that we all live suspended between past and present, and carry the burdens of both. Proust reminds us that when we think we recognize something essential in someone we are, in fact, reaffirming our primal impression of them—an ultimately self-serving exercise that transforms them, in memory, into the person we need them to have been. Accordingly, when I limn the astonishingly quick climb up the “Mad Men” ladder Mother made during her second act, it is not from the point of view of the child I was then but of the man I’ve become. 

In truth, money forced Mother to get a job just as it compelled her sensitive visual artist brother to set aside his artistic aspirations to draw women in their underwear as art director for the Chicago Tribune. 

Father had left the service and earned a law degree, while fiercely courting Mother. Newly-minted a member of the bar, he had hit the lecture circuit for the American Bar Association, in Mother’s words, “part Atticus Finch, part Clarence Darrow,” admonishing nascent lawyers to remember their ethical responsibilities. He had also hit the bottle. 

When he left the Bar Association and entered private practice, our comfortable upper middle class lifestyle collapsed. Although my brothers and I were able to continue to attend the superb Elmbrook schools in which my folks had moved west of Milwaukee to enable us to enroll, our Frank Lloyd Wright-style modernist cedar home, situated at the end of a cul-de-sac (and smack-dab in the middle of a flood plain), became a financial Albatross around my parents’ necks. The dishing of Mother’s artistic ambitions coincided with Father’s return home from Chicago (where he had for years been living weekdays) full time. His sons, whom he disciplined brutally, didn’t like him much. 

After a few months changing linens, Mother landed a job at an advertising agency; she began a six-year hopscotch from one employer to another—paste-up artist to copywriter, layout designer to graphic artist, account manager to art director. In time, she landed a job as Art Director at a glossy regional ad-driven magazine called Exclusively Yours.

With Mother in the financial driver’s seat, my brothers and I watched Father gradually corroded by a toxic stew of narcissistic frustration and alcohol. The booze robbed him of moral authority with his children; our increasing size took domination through physical intimidation off the table. We were lost to him. Mother had long been the only reason any of us interacted: she became the only reason we ever interacted at all with Father, whose loopy orbit, as far as we were concerned, was taking him out beyond Pluto. 

She was by all accounts great at an incredibly stressful job. She took immense satisfaction in her career. That doesn’t change the fact that, like many children of folks who worked in advertising during the 60s-70s, I find the television series “Mad Men” excruciating to watch. It is, of course, dead spot on. If Father’s drug of choice was alcohol, hers was, alas, physician-prescribed Valium. That, and three packs of Pall Mall cigarettes a day at the office. 

Like my brothers, I encouraged Mother to divorce Father. Unfortunately, Wisconsin law at that time made it next to impossible for her to extricate herself financially from him. She was trapped. 

I am grateful to her for insisting, whether it was true or not, that she had not remained with Father during my high school years for my sake. I am aware of how fortunate I am to have come to know her for the wise, wry, brilliant woman she was. During those years, she and a treasured High School teacher named Diane Doerfler together molded me in such a way that, to this day, not only do I adhere strictly to the way of “the examined life,” but I still collaborate far more easily with powerful women than with powerful men.

With my mother and nephew Ryan, the morning of the day she died.

Ned Rorem invited me to study with him at the Curtis Institute of Music. I was, for better or worse, securely launched on the coast as a serious composer. Mother engaged a lawyer and prepared at last to leave Father. She even discussed with Ned plans to move to Paris and to begin painting and writing again—a third act!

A month later, five years after the Royal typewriter and the manuscripts went into the garbage, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. A year later, in 1982, she died in my arms. The opera composer in me recognizes that as being one hell of a second act curtain.

Too Late to Take the Fifth

I’m guilty. I freely admit it. I still believe in orchestras and composing symphonies. As I write this, I’m flying to Phoenix to hear Michael Christie conduct a young soprano named Victoria Vargas and the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra in the debut of my Symphony No. 5.

What in the world is a symphony, anyway? Virgil Thomson, listening to my first symphony, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1991, told me that a symphony is whatever the composer says it is. My mentor David Diamond, whose tenth symphony I likened to “a massive tombstone suspended over the audience” in a review for Ear Magazine (He was far from amused; I was very young.), called my second symphony, premiered by the Oakland Symphony in 1993, “a brilliant, idealistic hot mess.” (He was right: it was an enormous aesthetic belly flop — but, oh, the splash it made!) My third, premiered in 1998 by the Wisconsin Philharmonic, as far as Ned Rorem was concerned, finally “got it right — but it’s no Aaron (Copland, not Kernis), Schuman (Bill, not Robert), or Harris third.” (One reason composers avoid using the term “symphony” is that critics still prostrating themselves before the classics come loaded for bear and who needs the hassle?) I was busy writing operas for the next decade. My fourth was premiered in 2009 by the Albany Symphony and included (as if only to make it that much more unlikely to ever be repeated) a huge chorus. The conductor, during a preconcert talk we gave together, wondered aloud “why composers bother to write symphonies anymore.” 

Why bother? Because, for better or worse, the symphony remains the greatest technical and aesthetic challenge and resulting statement that a serious composer can attempt outside of opera — and I’ve already written nine of those. 

Virgil’s quip notwithstanding, symphonies do tend to have a few things in common besides their composers’ lofty ambitions. Because symphonies tend to be long, they require of the composer a command of large-scale musical structure — form remains the great fascination of all mature artists. The moniker itself invites comparisons with the great symphonic works of the past and accepts the proposition that a serious composer is more than just a “visionary” unknowingly reinventing the wheel, but rather part of a continuum much larger than they, just as a parent is. In short, writing a symphony means that you still believe in them. And I do. 

The big, quasi-nationalistic, possibly “preposterously public” American symphonies of the 40s, written when such “Big Statements” were still “okay,” remain our country’s noblest contribution to the west’s musical repertoire, despite the long aria of denigration sung by the generation of modernists writing huge chamber works that followed. That generation, by and large, avoided writing them. Copland’s “uncommon man,” which he folded into his third symphony, and which he never intended in a gender-specific way, sings out with undiminished brilliance, the pilot fish commentaries upon it that have followed notwithstanding. 

“Why did you write this?” asked Leonard Bernstein when I played him a recording of the last movement of my second. “Because if I’m gonna fail, I want to fail big,” I responded. “Good man,” he said. I was in my 20s then, and the stakes then were so much smaller. I’m still amazed that so many composers and conductors think that it is “contemporary” to put wrong notes in or reckon that the inability to modulate from one key to another suavely constitutes anything but a musical handicap. 

Claude Debussy avoided the issue by calling his symphony “La Mer.” David Diamond, like Gustav Mahler before him, dreaded coming to the point at which he had to decide whether to exceed Beethoven’s nine with his own tenth. Composers can be pretty crafty in their avoidance: sometimes they sidestep a tricky number (not to mention potentially unflattering comparisons) by calling their new symphony “Das Lied von der Erde,” for example, or — like Rorem and Schuman — “String Symphony.” Bernstein, Copland and Rorem titled three symphonies by number each. In any event, Roy Harris wrote 18; Shostakovich 15; Vincent Persichetti and Peter Mennin composed nine. Brahms could not bring himself to exceed four. God bless Alan Hovhaness and his 67 (or maybe 73!). 

Victoria Vargas,  Michael Christie, and Hagen during rehearsals of Symphony No. 5.

There are many kinds of hubris to which a serious, ambitious composer can succumb. One is thinking that one has written a great opera the first time out. Another is undertaking the writing of a fifth symphony, knowing in your bones that Beethoven’s hangs, at once weightless and all-heavy, over you like an enormous tombstone. 

I recently read this truism, attributed to Curtis Institute of Music opera department head Mikael Eliasen: “I’m so often frustrated with contemporary music. How can one truly communicate through the arts after the devastation of the Second World War?” Re-creators ask this question. It made me recall that Witold Lutoslawski posed virtually the same question to me during a lesson in Evian in 1983 while looking through one of my pieces. Then, he closed the music, looked me in the eye and answered his own question: “The answer is to create works of art. Create. Or the bad guys win.”

That’s why I’m on a plane to Phoenix. I still believe in symphonies, the repertoire, the arc of history and the Big Statement. Guilty as charged. Too late to take the Fifth.

 This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post, which published it on 8 October 2015. You can read it there by clicking here.

Fourteen Questions Answered Off the Cuff

The entire article can be read by clicking here.