Introduction to the 2012 Edition

by Carol Kimball

Dear Youth for soprano, flute, and piano was composed in response to a commission from the trio Sonus of Baltimore. For texts, Hagen chose to set prose—excerpts drawn from letters and diaries of women written during the American Civil War. Hagen, a Civil War enthusiast, composed the piece in the Virginia Center for the Arts in Sweetbriar, a spot quite near some of the most horrific battles of the war.

The texts of Dear Youth present compelling images of the war, beginning with Hagen’s musical adaptation of the well-known Civil War song, The Bonnie Blue Flag. The words are by Annie Chambers Ketchum, a writer and poet from Kentucky. The last phrase in its chorus became a rallying cry of sorts for the Confederacy: “Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag, That bears a single star!” This song functions as a “curtain raiser”, setting the stage for the scenes in the songs to follow. 

During the Civil War, fifes and drums often urged regiments into battle, and Hagen’s addition of a flute to the ensemble is a telling choice. Throughout the cycle it serves as a wordless Greek chorus, commenting on the text and helping create the emotional aura surrounding the drama. We are immediately drawn into the dramatic moment, and the work unfolds like a series of faded sepia images viewed through an antique stereograph. Each image has its own emotional intensity; the voices of each woman ring with fervent emotion, tenderness, and resignation.

Looking at the format of Dear Youth, we notice that Songs 2 and 3 are paired, as are Songs 5 and 6, each pair written by one author. Both pairs loosely resemble each other in format: they begin with a short recitative-like piece, then immediately segue into the song that follows. The result is analogous to a recitative with aria, but these are the smallest of dramatic scenas, quasi-operatic but highly compressed. Songs 4 and 7 act as breathing places in the listener’s journey, each providing a different sort of relaxation – one comic, one quietly touching.  Song 8 completes the arc begun with Song 1, using some of the musical material from the beginning song to tie the cycle together.

Dear Youth is formatted as a strong narrative arc in which emotional impact is regulated as well: Songs 1 and 8 which share similar musical material, stand like sentinel bookends at either end of the cycle, framing Songs 2—3, Song 4, Songs 5—6, and Song 7.  The heart of the work reveals itself in Songs 5 and 6.

The Bonnie Blue Flag opens the cycle on a stirring note; the vocal line is straight-ahead and uncomplicated, despite being in seven-four time. But it is the musical texture that gives an indistinct quality to the song. Russell Platt has called it “Ivesian distance.”9 and Hagen’s manipulation of harmonic and rhythmic materials is similar in mood to Charles Ives’s “Tom Sails Away,” another wartime memory swimming in hazy recollection. We are given warning that something is amiss here, and that all will not be right with the coming conflict.

The text of I Stop Again is taken from a letter from nurse Hannah Ropes to her daughter Alice. Ropes was Head Nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C., where she worked with Louisa May Alcott. Hannah’s letters and diaries contain absorbing, poignant pictures of the war. Here, she pauses in her rounds to close the eyes of a dead German soldier, a boy who will be laid to rest with only a number to mark his resting place. The Picture Graved Into My Heart is excerpted from a long description in her diary. Ropes is at the bedside of a fatally wounded soldier. She has held his hand for many hours, and as she mourns his passing, she describes his youthful, handsome features lovingly, much as a mother might. Flute and voice share an intimate duet crafted in linear lines that expand in range and intensity, but eventually return to the quiet resignation of the opening.

The Trouble Was Tom… skips by gaily, its mood just short of being frenzied. Three young people, a boy and two female twins, form an untidy love triangle; each one is in love, but not happily nor neatly paired with the right partner. In this song, the flute is replaced by a piccolo, which helps perpetuate the effervescent atmosphere. The poem should be attributed to Hagen’s grandmother, who told him the story. At the time, Hagen was against setting his own words to music, so rephrased it as “Anonymous.” 10 The song’s fast tempo, changing meters and almost nonsensical text provide a much-needed release from the intense mood of the two songs preceding it.  

The Lord Knows and O, For Such a Dream introduce Ann Smith, who writes to her husband David, a volunteer soldier.  The words for both songs are taken from the same letter. In The Lord Knows (marked Freely effusive) Ann muses alone, her voice unaccompanied, her frustration apparent in several vocal phrases that ascend to the same note, G. Her loneliness is below the surface, held in, but is palpable. Her last vocal utterance is a held note that is almost immediately joined by the flute, entering on the same note an octave higher. This intersection creates a seamless transition to a new mood, in which flute and piano join Ann and transport her into O, For Such a Dream. Here is the center of the cycle, overtly lyrical and romantic. Ann recounts a dream of walking with her husband in a cold, moonlit landscape, both wrapped in his greatcoat. As her reverie progresses, her mounting excitement is encased in a thicker musical texture that modulates frequently. The mood soon dissipates as she realizes her vision is a figment of her imagination. 

The penultimate song in the cycle, Christmas Night is for voice and flute. Martha Ingram, a woman in rural Texas, writes to her husband George, who has been away from home for an extended period. A glance at the labored text with its touching misspellings, shows Martha to be uneducated. The full letter from which this text is taken also shows her to be anxious as to how she will provide for her family while George is away from home fighting the war.  It is Christmas night 1862; she is alone and afraid, and her words are heartbreaking. The interaction between voice and flute is almost improvisatory (Hagen again marks Freely effusive). A recurring rhythmic cell in the flute unifies the song and mirrors Martha’s loneliness.  

The last song, …Silently Dispersing reveals the last woman in the cast of characters, Mary Boykin Chesnut.  In striking contrast to Martha Ingram, Mary Boykin Chesnut was a well-educated woman with social standing, married to a United States Senator from South Carolina. When Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the Chesnuts left Washington, D.C. to join the secession movement in South Carolina. James Chesnut became a brigadier general in the Confederate Army, and Mary often traveled with him on his military assignments. Her diaries, written during this time, provide a politically astute picture of the war.  This text is excerpted from a conversation with General John Preston, CSA. The war is drawing to an end; as Mary watches at the window, soldiers silently pass by, as if in a trance. Their exhausted figures are numb and emotionless, drained by what they have seen and done.

We have come full circle from the irrepressible excitement of Song 1.

Dear Youth is a dramatic microcosm of moving images from the American Civil War, the worst military conflict in our nation’s history. The cycle is a tour-de-force challenge for the singer, who must become five women during its performance. The work requires a singer with innate theatricality who can inhabit its emotionally challenging texts and meet its musical challenges as well. Singers preparing this work for performance would do well to research the entire letter, journal/diary entry, or poem from which these texts are taken.11

© Carol Kimball, December, 2010

Introduction to the 1997 Recording

by Russell Platt

Hagen is a confirmed Civil War buff, and after considering and rejecting the prospect of a cycle on a war poet like Whitman, decided to set excerpts of letters by American women of the era who were directly or tangentially involved. (Significantly, Hagen composed the piece at the Virginia Center for the Arts, a short distance from some of the largest battles of the Civil War.) In some ways it is an idealized family parlor piece of the time -- Cousin Ann joins in on the flute -- simple and polite. But the expert musical treatments of the texts give them a layered richness they could never have had originally, and the result is a work of generous humanity, comforting and wise.

The second and third and fifth and sixth songs are two deliberate pairs, each of a prelude and concert scena, linked by common authors; the fourth song is an intermezzo, the seventh a nocturne; and the eighth, a scene from the last days of the war, is an understated but powerful finale which redevelops the first song's material. That song is The Bonnie Blue Flag: it uses a patriotic text by the lyricist Annie Chambers Ketchum, who presumably roots for the Confederate side. Hagen himself has called its text a 'rabble-rousing recruitment song,' but his setting gives it a hazy Ivesian distance, not only in the stacked fourths and fifths of the piano's harmony but in the way Hagen makes a collection of discrete compositional elements sing with a single voice. The vocal part is straightforward enough to almost be a popular song of the time -- something true of most of the tunes in the cycle -- but contradicts the stated seven-four time signature by being clearly heard in four-four. The song's second half has a softer, gentler tone, but still lets the singer 'rally' up to a high B flat, the vocal apogee of the cycle. The result is a song which lays the groundwork for the whole set by undercutting the optimism of the text and preparing us for a more realistic treatment of the war.

I Stop Again and The Picture Graved Into My Heart are both on texts from letters of Hannah Ropes, a famous wartime nurse. The first is a calm and intimate duet for the soprano and flute, taken up entirely with scalar transformations of a four-note motif heard at the outset; the composer gives the last three words an optimum of harmonic tension. The motif's shape persists into the opening of The Picture's accompaniment, which turns out to be a quote from Oh, I'm a Good Old Rebel to the tune of Joe Bowers, a popular ballad from the 1860's: its strands in the flute and piano start out in strict canon but free up once the melodic shapes become established. The scene is that of a nurse's bedside record, and the decorous modesty of the song aptly reflects the speaker's tone. The tempo quickens and the harmonies take warmth in the central section, as the speaker's heart moves, almost imperceptive, from pure sympathy to an admixture of sensual response: it is a measure of Hagen's humane musical reaction, as is the quick recovery to a more correct mood of mourning at the end. The Trouble With Tom provides some needed comic relief, using a Bernsteinian mixed-meter scherzo mood to tell a queer tale of three people inconveniently in love with one an other. The piccolo makes chirpy gossip, dovetailing in and out with the voice.

The fifth song is an introduction for the sixth, both on fragments of a letter from one Ann Smith to her husband David, 'Aug. 16, 1864'; they form a more dramatically intense counterweight to the pair of Ropes settings heard earlier. The Lord Knows is marked 'Freely effusive,' but as Paul Kreider has pointed out, 'strict adherence to the rhythm is vital' for effective performance. It quickens on 'restless,' gets kittenish with a naughty B flat blue note on 'I wouldn't care,' jumbles its rhythms confusedly on the next sentence, then waits out a bar before having the singer responsibly recover her social voice ('At least I hope...'): Hagen has truly caught the life of the words. It continues directly into O, for Such a Dream, perhaps the most moving song of the cycle. The lonely wife seems to accompany herself at the keyboard, with the flute playing the role of her absent husband -- it has a folk-opera mood. The harmonic idiom at the start couldn't be more basic, but becomes enriched as the singer's thoughts grow more intimate, with the flute quickening its pulse to a state of rapture, an imagined consummation. We then pull back from the brink to 'the reality of absence,' and to a tragic reinterpretation of the opening music.

In Christmas Night poor Martha Ingram writes to her husband George. The vocal part's tendency to sound out of tune by constantly changing key is most effective, as it communicates not only the lonely desolation of the speaker but her poverty as well (the text is full of pathetic but evocative misspellings.) The slithery, quasi-serial flute part, always finding its way back to the pitch D, sounds like a strange animal circling the house. In the last song, we come full-circle: the orgiastic promise of the first song has turned to bitter gall. The flute motif from Christmas Night has transformed itself into a melodic expression of the piano arpeggios of the first song, and the piano's right-hand thirds come back, too. They try to ascend into a weary, chromatically inflected C minor, as the voice part quits its sorry task. Surely the static form and ghostly tread of Der Leiermann, the finale of Winterreise, haunts this little scene.

Dear Youth was commissioned by the trio Sonus (soprano Robin Bourguignon, flutist Billie Witte, and pianist Randall K. Sheets) and premiered by them on 10 March 1991 at the Dumbarton Methodist Church in Baltimore.

— Russell Platt, 1997

Selected Reviews:

For texts, Hagen found letters and diary writings of women observers of the Civil War. Reading these snippets in the program, one is struck by the poetic contrasts between the poetic and the everyday, held together in delicate balance. The work's added dramatic element tips that balance.

--- Marion Jacobson, The Washington Post, 3/26/91

 These are often heartbreaking texts and Hagen is a composer who has a superb ear for catching the inflections of speech and supporting them sensitively with music. This was a real piece of chamber music -- the flute writing was impressive -- not merely songs with accompaniment. Yet, as any true song cycle must be, it was dominated by the singer with bursts of moving melody and [sic] it involved the listener with the individual narrative voices of the songs.

— Stephen Wigler, The Baltimore Sun, 3/13/91

There are patriotic themes here and prayers for the end of the war, but the most vivid material, not surprisingly, comes from those accounts of how the strife affected people on a personal level. There was much to be appreciated in [Hagen's] dramatic point of view. "Oh, for Such a Dream," the most stirring in the group, was placed thoughtfully as the sixth in the cycle -- a natural place to look for an emotional climax, leaving the audience with an emotional recovery in the final pieces.

— The Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/25/91

Hagen's sophisticated songs remind me somewhat of The AIDS Quilt Songbook and deserve to be heard just as often.

— Lovelace, American Record Review, Nov-Dec 97

[Hagen] is a confirmed Romantic, writing in a lush tonal idiom with the emphasis centered firmly on the often demanding vocal line. In addition to calling for considerable range, the vocal lines are often lightly melismatic and have a distant relation to hymns, at least to my ears. His prosidy is superb, and he is often an inspired melodist.

— John Story, Fanfare Magazine, November / December, 1999