Song Cycle for 2 Sopranos, 2 Mezzo-sopranos, Tenor, Baritone, and Piano

Duration: 65’

First Performance: (Philadelphia) 4 November 2019 / Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, PA / Lyric Fest and the Brooklyn Art Song Society / Laura Ward, Michael Brofman, piano. (New York) 3 June 2022 / Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, NY / Lyric Fest, presented by the Brooklyn Art Song Society / Laura Ward, piano

Dedication: "Co-Commissioned by the Brooklyn Art Song Society and Lyric Fest of Philadelphia”

Text: (in order of appearance) Walt Whitman, Orson Welles, Aaron Copland, Joseph R. McCarthy, Abraham Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Paul Robeson, Stephen Crane, William Butler Yeats, Roy Cohn, Donald Trump, Emma Lazarus, Gwen Hagen, Mark Campbell, Rhianna Brandt, Christina Rosetti, Sappho, Tobias Schneebaum, Thomas Ken, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Seamus Hagen, William Blake, Daron Hagen, Roland Flint, Paul Goodman, Dante Alighieri (E)

Publisher: Peermusic Classical

Recording: Naxos | Spotify | iTunes

Part 1: Summer
America (Walt Whitman)
Un-American Activities (Joseph R. McCarthy; Aaron Copland; Orson Welles; transcript, HUAC, May 25, 1953)
Peace Quodlibet (Abraham Lincoln; Amelia Earhart; Paul Robeson; Eleanor Roosevelt)
War is Kind / Irish Airman (Stephen Crane; William Butler Yeats)
Mother of Exiles (Donald Trump; Roy Cohn; Emma Lazarus)
     Part 2: Autumn
The Moths (Gwen Hagen)
Pomodoro (Mark Campbell)
Quail (Rhianna Brandt)
No Sad Songs (Christina Rossetti)
Brown Penny (William Butler Yeats)
Love (Sappho)
Among the Asmat (Tobias Schneebaum; Orson Welles)
     Part 3: Winter
Western Wind (Anonymous, early 16th century)
Prayer in Midwinter (Thomas Ken)
That I Know (Gwen Hagen)
What Lips My Lips Have Kissed (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
Summer is Gone (Anonymous, 17th century Irish, adapted)
The Wolf (Seamus Hagen)
The Lamb (William Blake)
     Part 4: Spring
The New Yorkers (Daron Hagen)
The Green for Pamela (Roland Flint)
Almighty Father (Traditional, adapted)
Rain in Spring (Paul Goodman)
The Start of Everything (Dante Alighieri, Inferno)

Program Note:

The Art of Song (co-commissioned by the Brooklyn Art Song Society and Lyric Fest of Philadelphia) was composed at the artist retreat Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY during August 2018 and first performed in Philadelphia on 4 November 2019. The pandemic postponed the New York premiere until June 2022, when the Brooklyn Art Song Society presented Lyric Fest in Brooklyn. The work was recorded under Hagen’s supervision in Philadelphia at the Curtis Institute of Music over a two-day span in May and June 2022.

Hagen, now 61, had written dozens of songs before entering Ned Rorem’s studio at the Curtis Institute of Music in 1981, and had penned another 50 before graduating Juilliard a few years later. In the ensuing years, along with 13 operas, he has amassed a catalogue of over 500 individual songs and large-scale cycles. Widely recorded, several dozen are featured on Lyric Fest’s 2017 Naxos release Hagen: 21st-Century Song Cycles (8.559714). There is weight then to his comment when he writes, “As a song composer, The Art of Song represents for me something of a musical ‘closing argument,’ a braiding together of the various themes, vocal traditions, and aesthetic strands of my vocal composing—the performers move fluently from art song to musical theater to cantata to opera, in choral, solo, and ensemble numbers that combine texts spanning over a thousand years—over the past 45 years.”

Divided into four large “life seasons,” the 24 songs, accompanied by piano, are sung by two sopranos, two mezzo-sopranos, tenor, and a baritone. In the first section, Summer, Hagen is in full citizen/activist/artist mode, offering an overview of the human cost of American domestic politics since the Civil War. The second section, Autumn, turns inward, featuring poems about aging, love, nostalgia, and finding fulfillment in accepting one’s place in the world. The third, Winter, features words concerning advancing age, the loss of innocence, and the struggle to find (and maintain) faith. Hagen begins the final section, Spring, with a wry musical theater group portrait of a handful of young pre-9/11 New Yorkers before moving through the tragic loss of a child, the balm of prayer, the turning of the seasons, and, in the final Dante setting, the reconfirmation of song’s ageless functions: to witness, to remember, to mourn, to protest, to remind us of who we are, and who we can aspire to be, to begin again.

Selected Reviews:

The Lyric Fest ensemble…succeeds in performing the whole thing in a musically appropriate and gripping way. Their evocative, equally emotional and lyrical performance, coupled with clear rhetoric, gives structure, form and content to the 24 songs… © 2024 Pizzicato Read complete review

—Guy Engels, Pizzicato, January 2024

[The recording is] performed by Philadelphia’s Lyric Fest… It’s a skilful and nuanced performance that does justice to a really interesting collection of texts with complex and varied settings. © 2024 operaramblings Read complete review

—John Gilks, operaramblings, January 2024

It is a safe bet that no other song cycle has matched the diversity of texts present in Daron Hagen’s in The Art of Song, composed in 2019. Text authors include Whitman, Trump, Yeats, and one Seamus Hagen (b. 2011), presumably the composer's son, who contributes a fine poem about a wolf. And that is just the beginning. The 24 songs are divided into seasonal sections: Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring. Summer, as the notes say, represents Hagen "full citizen/activist/artist mode"; it is here that Trump (and Sen. Joseph McCarthy) show up. It is not clear why that mode should be connected to summer, but to some degree, this is the point; Hagen is trying to represent a wide range of experiences, both exterior and interior. The variety occurs not only between songs but within them; Hagen often sets texts in counterpoint to each other, with multiple singers. This may remind medieval music fans of the polytextual pieces of that era. This places strong demands on the singers (two sopranos, two mezzo-sopranos, a tenor, and a baritone), especially inasmuch as a number of the contemporary texts could not be reproduced in the booklet due to copyright restrictions. This doesn't turn out to be a problem; text intelligibility is good, and the singers of the Lyric Fest ensemble accomplish a plain but not inexpressive sound that matches the medieval-like textures. With reasonable clarity from a rehearsal room at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, this fascinating album represents nothing less than a whole new kind of song cycle.

—James Manheim, Allmusic Review, March 2024