Fanfare Feature:
A Conversation with Composer Daron Hagen

BY JAMES REEL

Daron Hagen's first orchestral work, which he wrote at 15, gained notice from Leonard Bernstein. Another orchestral piece he composed while a student at the Curtis Institute found its way onto a Philadelphia Orchestra program. The New York Philharmonic premiered his Philharmonia (commissioned for the orchestra's 150th anniversary in 1992) at Avery Fischer Hall when he was a comparatively elderly 29. But Hagen was never quite a wunderkind composer like Oliver Knussen, and it wasn't until he reached his mid thirties that he felt secure enough to give up his teaching jobs and try the life of a freelance composer, living off his commissions and royalties. If Hagen's name is not bandied about the breakfast tables of America, his talents are in increasing demand (his next project is a left-hand concerto for Gary Graffman to premiere with a consortium of orchestras during the 2000-2001 season), and his music is gaining further exposure on CD. ARSIS Audio, a label distributed by Albany, has already issued four discs devoted entirely to Hagen's music, and several more are promised in the coming months.

The CDs out so far provide a fair idea of the breadth of Hagen's work. ARSIS 106 collects four substantial song-cycles written between 1983 (Hagen's student days) and 1995. Russell Platt's liner notes describe the music well. Sensitivity to text is paramount, Platt writes, also noting that "The good Gallic virtues of freshness, clarity and consistently elegant craftsmanship--starting, arguably, in Gounod and continuing forth through Poulenc and Rorem--find their mark in Hagen too, but are mixed with limited elements of American jazz and music theater that betray him as a child of the suburban 1970s." The disc Silent Night (ARSIS 107), composed for and performed by the American Repertory Singers, is a refreshingly low-key, rather mysterious Christmas album. It sets eight mostly familiar tunes for chorus, adds rich solo lines for cellist Robert LaRue, and weaves in very subtle electronic accompaniments. More typical of Hagen's catalogue is ARSIS 111, with a duo for violin and cello that is a bit more astringent and less jazzy than the Ravel work for that combination, plus suites for violin, viola, and cello. ARSIS 112 presents four band works performed by Michael Haithcock and the Baylor Wind Ensemble. All this music comes across in a serious but accessible contemporary idiom in which tonal triads coexist peacefully with tone clusters.

Naturally, Hagen's worklist neglects to mention the pieces from his teen years. Yet Hagen acknowledges few fundamental differences between those early efforts and the music he's writing 20 years later. "I guess it's easier to say how much I've stayed the same," he says. "I write exactly the same sort of music today that I did when I was 15; I'm just better at it and more ruthless about the quality of my ideas. I have complete craft at this point in my life, so now I'm at the point where craft is not an issue; it's not how you say what you have to say, it's what you have to say. So the difference now is that I know exactly who my chosen audience is, how I wish to speak to them, and who I am. Which took a long time for me. That may sound kind of cheeky, but hell, it's me. I know myself."

Hagen was born in Milwaukee in 1961, and grew up in a household he describes as "very much part of a middle-class culture." Which is not to say uncultured. "Classical music was playing all the time; my parents listened to it as background music, and it was coming from a commercial radio station, so you know exactly what sort of 'greatest hits' repertoire I grew up listening to." Probably the least conventional and most artistically nurturing element in this bourgeois environment was Hagen's mother. "My mother was a sculptor and a painter and a writer," he says; he later transformed some of her journal entries into songs. "She was an extraordinary person; besides these other things she did, she was also a violinist in college. Up until I was eight or nine she was at home all the time sculpting and writing. I would serve as her model and we would talk about all sorts of things, and she said she finally had to send me off to school because I kept asking annoying questions and it would piss her off--questions like, 'Why do flowers open?' and so forth. When I was 11 my father opened a private law-practice, and we had some years when he wasn't making as much money as he had been working for the American Bar Association. People thought we were well off, because when my father was making a good income my parents had purchased this beautiful Frank Lloyd Wright home." Years later, Wright would be the subject of Hagen's 1993 opera Shining Brow. "But the truth was that money was tight, and my mother was compelled to go back to work; she worked her way up through the advertising business in the Midwest. The deal had been that my father was going to support her so she could sculpt and paint--and bring up the kids. But it didn't work out that way; she had to give up her art to help support a family. I guess I'm sort of living the life she'd have liked to live if the generational and gender thing had been right. She would have loved following my career, but she passed away around the time I was a student at Curtis."

Before he got to Curtis, of course, Hagen underwent the usual childhood introduction to music. "I studied piano with a Polish immigrant \when I was about nine," he says, "and the only thing I remember, other than the fact that he slapped my knuckles with a pen when I made mistakes, is that I had perfect pitch--he sat me backwards on the piano bench and had me identify pitches as he played them. I stopped studying with him because I used to pay my brother to tell my mother I'd practiced, even if I hadn't been, and my brother got too expensive. I started again when I was 14, because I had seen the movie The Sting and was fascinated with the Scott Joplin music they used all the way through it. That inspired me to teach myself to read music, and I asked for piano lessons again."

Reading music wasn't enough for him. He soon began writing stuff, too. "The first thing I wrote was a rock musical called Together, which I staged with my friends. It had an orchestra of nine, but I didn't make any orchestra parts; I didn't know anything about that. My friends made up the parts themselves and notated them and showed me what they'd done. It was like a dream come true to have the orchestra teach you how to do it."

At 15, Hagen composed an orchestral piece called Suite for a Lonely City, which he managed to conduct in concert. Hagen's mother took it upon herself to send a copy of the score and tape to Leonard Bernstein, along with a letter asking Bernstein's advice on how young Daron's development should proceed. Bernstein, as he so often did, turned out to be extremely enthusiastic. "Of course Mr. Bernstein loved it," Hagen says, "because it sounded just like On the Waterfront! Not intentionally, but I was so smitten with his music I couldn't help using some of it subconsciously. I wish it were as easy to come up with ideas like that now as it was when I was 15. Anyway, that piece's function in my life was to introduce me to Leonard Bernstein, which led me to audition at Juilliard with David Diamond. So when I was 16 years old I went to audition, but I didn't get in, because I still could hardly read music! I had very few skills. I think that the jury--I think it was Elliot Carter, David Diamond, Vincent Persichetti, and somebody else--they were a little shocked that somebody with such rudimentary skills could have written an orchestra piece. Diamond said to me, 'You should go back to Wisconsin and get some craft.' So I did. I spent two years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I also got engaged to my high school sweetheart, whose mother had just read in the Atlantic that Ned Rorem had been hired at the Curtis Institute to reopen their composition department. I'd never heard of Curtis, but in order to make my fiancée's mother get off my back, I sent them a portfolio. A week or two later I got an invitation from Ned, and I wound up studying at Curtis for three years, until I got my bachelor's. When I first got there, all I thought was that perhaps I might be able to make a living someday as an orchestrator. I'd never heard of a composer who'd made a living just as a composer. I was from Wisconsin. But that started to change when I wrote a piece called Prayer for Peace. Daniel Webster, the critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, had been at a student performance where I had conducted it, and he suggested that it should be performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. William Smith, the associate conductor of the orchestra, got wind of the piece, backed programming it, and conducted it with the orchestra when I was 19." It was the first Curtis-student work the orchestra had played since the debut of young Samuel Barber. "That's when I realized I had a chance at making a living as a composer of serious concert music," Hagen says.

"Then I finally made it to Juilliard and studied with David Diamond, and Joseph Schwantner and Bernard Rands. I learned a lot from them all, but especially from Ned Rorem and David Diamond. From Ned Rorem, I learned about exquisite small forms; and from David Diamond, I learned about large symphonic forms. I got my Master's in 1987, and at that point I felt I was ready to start." Hagen turned his back on the American yuppie lifestyle for which he and his peers seemed destined, and moved to Europe where he could compose music and live cheaply. "But then I received a commission for an orchestral piece from ASCAP, and when they flew me back for the premiere, I was taken out to dinner by Frances Richard, who was the director of the serious-music department at ASCAP. She persuaded me to come back for good."

He hadn't intended to repatriate himself so soon, nor did he intend to follow the career path he was steered into. "I had a reading of a piece with the St. Louis Symphony and met Joan Tower, who was the composer in residence then," Hagen recalls. "Now, I had no interest in teaching; I wanted to be a professional composer, living off the fairly gotten gain of my work. I was not practical at all. But there was a several-hour-long van ride from the town where this reading was taking place back to St. Louis, and I got into a long talk with Joan, who started asking me questions about teaching. I was full of myself and held forth grandly for probably two hours. At the end of that she offered me a job teaching anything I wanted at Bard College." Hagen resisted, but again ASCAP's Fran Richard talked him into it. "So staring in 1988 I poured myself into teaching composition and theory at Bard for nine years with all my heart. That's where I learned a lot about being a human being and a musician, and I worked out my values there." During this period Hagen also served several semesters on the faculty of New York University and the City College of New York, and for a couple of years he simultaneously taught a seminar in composition for nonmajors at Curtis.

"Teaching at Curtis there at the end was fun, but I realized it was also a way to keep from facing up to my big personal challenge, which was to go without an umbilical cord. Then, two years ago, my entire life changed. My marriage ended, and I wanted to try something new and really go for it: live as a freelance composer. For the last two years I've been living off commissions and I've never been happier. I'm doing what I dreamed of doing when I was 15, but didn't think was possible. Of course I have no health insurance and I've got no savings, but I'm leading an honorable freelance musician's life. It makes me happy, and humble, because when I pass a homeless guy on the street, the fact is, 'There but for two months' paying work go I,' and that grounds me."

Asked if he recognized what his friend and record annotator Russell Platt characterized as a Gallic quality in his music, Hagen waffled. "I think that I've never really sensed that I was that much of a francophile," he began. "People say that about my music sometimes, I guess, because it is very straightforward and they equate simplicity with francophilia. I think I'm simple not because I love things French but out of conviction that I am best as a composer when I'm simple." Then he felt a self-contradiction coming on. "All right, this is going to sound like total francophilia, but I think it was Jean Cocteau who said that it's simple to be hard, but hard to be simple, and that's absolutely true for me. I work hard to be simple."

"Simple" is hardly the word to describe the convoluted development of some of Hagen's works. Consider the 1997 Concerto for Cello and Wind Ensemble on ARSIS 112. "This is an example of the weird, bastard evolution of things that start out as normal pieces," he says. "I've had to push those notes around more than for anything else I've written. It began as a violin concerto for Maria Bachman, which I wrote at the request of Tim Page, who at that time was producing for BMG. He thought if I wrote a concerto for Maria, he would record it. So I wrote it for free, basically on spec, but when she saw it, Maria didn't want to do it! So I set it aside. Now, I've always wanted to write a cello concerto for Robert LaRue, whom I'd also known from our student days at Curtis. I revised the piece and turned it into a cello concerto for Robert to play with the American Symphony Orchestra. I think that the piece really benefited from my having a second look at it. And then I rethought it again when I recast it for winds, to come up with enough wind-ensemble music to fill up a CD that Michael Haithcock wanted to do with the Baylor University Wind Ensemble." For that disc, Hagen already had in hand a 1994 Concerto for Flugelhorn and Wind Ensemble and a nine-minute Shakespeare-inspired piece from 1989 called Sennets, Cortege, and Tuckets. To round out the disc, Hagen produced the wind version of the Cello Concerto, and came up with a tone poem titled, Night, Again. This was derived from an orchestral work called Built Up Dark, which had in turn been fashioned from a piano piece that was based on ideas from his opera Shining Brow. And now material from Night, Again is turning up as the core material for an opera called Bandanna, a retelling of Othello on the US-Mexican border. This is more than "weird bastard evolution"; it's close to incest.

Night, Again, by the way, is an intense, frightening portrait of the wee hours as experienced by a chronic insomniac. From the composition you might suppose that sleepless Hagen quakes in his bed, terrified. Actually, he's a more productive insomniac than that. "I get up and work," he says. "When I was married, I made a very concerted effort to go to sleep at the same time each night and sleep all night long, and I did manage to sleep like a real person for a couple of years. But living by myself now, the idea of going to bed at night really seems sort of beside the point. I just sleep when I can sleep. Now I never have a time when I think I should be sleeping or should be awake, which is one of the weird parts about being a freelancer. I do have to maintain a certain schedule; otherwise I'd be sleeping from five in the morning to 11 in the morning, and being awake the rest of the time. That's not a good way to live your life if you're trying to deal with normal people. At this point, I'm a fairly happy insomniac. I'm in a good time now. And, believe me, I've tried everything. I know I'm going to get letters from well-meaning people telling me about home cures, but I've tried them all."

Hagen loses no sleep over getting his music recorded. "ARSIS has been very, very good to me," he says. "They don't have a lot of titles yet, but they're growing very quickly, and several of their titles are already devoted to my pieces. Bob Schuneman, the producer, is a great guy, and he also runs E.C. Schirmer, the publishing house, and Galaxy Music Corporation. Bob has done what all the publishers are talking about doing but aren't getting down to: creating a record label that goes with his publishing company. Film companies have their own record labels so they can keep the copyright in house, and music publishers have been talking about creating labels to promote their own composers for years, but Bob, so far as I know, is the first to go through with it. He began by recording only works that were in the E. C. Schirmer catalog, but now he's generous enough to commit to disc works that I have with other publishers. I admire the vision and courage that he's squandered on making records."

"Not counting what's already been released, we have four things in the works together. My opera Shining Brow, which is published by E. C. Schirmer, is in the can and will come out next year. That's a two-CD affair, and it's pretty ambitious for a small independent label. Also, this February I'm conducting the cast album of Bandanna, which will be another two-CD set, with all the principal roles sung by Met veterans. Also there's going to be a CD with the Cleveland Chamber Orchestra and other groups playing my large chamber-works. In June I'm recording another CD of art-song cycles, this time with Paul Kreider, a magnificent baritone."

Hagen's worklist includes items in nearly every medium, but vocal pieces abound. This is no surprise from a former student of Ned Rorem. Hagen's songs, in fact, should appeal to anyone with a taste for Rorem's approachable, fluid, yet sophisticated work. But Hagen doesn't write songs merely because Rorem got him into the habit. "I'm naturally drawn to the combination of words and music," Hagen says. "I wanted to be a writer when I was a teenager. I'm fascinated by language. One of the reasons that I work so much with Paul Muldoon, the Irish poet, is that his words and his language inspire me to write good music. He and I have just finished co-teaching a course in Toni Morrison's atelier at Princeton about setting words to music. I hope the students liked it; Paul and I sure learned a lot. I love voices and I like singers, and along with the intersection of loving music and words and singers, I adore the process of composing and going through the production of musical theater. There is the communion of people coming together to commit to undertaking a work of art that is larger than any of us. For me, my biggest thrill as a composer was standing at the back rail on closing night of Shining Brow when it was revived at the Chicago Opera Theater (in 1997). It's got a big tearjerker of a finale, and I looked out over the audience and saw people crying, and realized that no one can take that particular accomplishment away from me as an artist. I connected with the audience, and they connected with me, and the singers, and the orchestra, and Paul Muldoon the librettist, and the sets, and the conductor. It was the biggest rush to know that I was part of something bigger than myself, but also that my work was at the core of it. It gave me a lot of strength to withstand criticism. And it made me grow as a composer, realizing I was capable of making that connection if I was good. Everything else fell away; all the issues of style and influences and musical politics and career fell away at that moment, when I realized that was my primary relationship. And that darkened theater is where that relationship takes place for me. I don't think I've gotten to where I want to be with purely instrumental music yet; I have a lot to learn still about symphonic writing. I've done tons of it, but it's not quite in my bones the way the operas are. Having written so many songs erased the issue of craft for me.

"When it comes to setting texts to music, I look at the text, I hear it, I feel it, and I just write it. There's never a question of how I get a particular sound. An interviewer asked Eric Clapton recently if he ever thinks about technique; he sat down with his guitar, improvised something, and said, 'That's how I'm feeling right now; I feel it, and then I play it.' That was a candid, sincere sort of musician-answer. And that's where we all aspire to be. Ned had me writing two art songs a week for three years, whether I had a good, bad, or indifferent reaction to the poem he'd assign. I set a lot of poetry back then that I probably never would have encountered if he hadn't assigned it to me. Setting something to music that you don't like is a terrific technical challenge. I was lucky; I happened to relish the challenge. Some of Ned's students simply refused.

"Now I'd like to write a musical. Muldoon and I are very keen to write a commercially-viable musical; ironically, it's because of the artistic challenge. Shining Brow was a traditional grand opera, functioning straight in the middle of the opera genre. Vera of Las Vegas was completely avant-garde, and Bandanna is half opera and half musical. It uses song forms and set pieces in a through-composed context, so at any given time you can think of it as both an opera and a musical, as Candide could have been had Leonard Bernstein and the authors been able to agree from the outset how to write the show. Lenny thought the theater was his place, and he intuited that it was my place as well. Now I want to spread out in it a little, which is why we're thinking about a musical. Paul has written poetry and librettos, but he has never written lyrics, per se. He wants to try writing lyrics as a technical challenge, and I want to write songs, using verse-refrain song forms. Making him the lyricist and making me the composer puts us into a different tradition as well, because if we're going to do a musical we'll need a book writer. That also means I won't orchestrate my own show. I'll have to relinquish a lot of the control I enjoy as an opera composer. Now, I don't want to write musicals for the rest of my life, god forbid, but I see it as a lateral move, not a vertical move downward. I'm certain it will be a horrible flop, but it will be a noble failure. I can see writing a show like Lost in the Stars or Street Scene; Kurt Weill has never been a great hero of mine, but that's beginning to change: I've always been interested in the two halves of his career, and how everybody has a veiled contempt for his musicals, even though they contain some of his most interesting music."

Things haven't always gone quite the way Hagen has anticipated, from failing to get into Juilliard on his first try to stumbling into a decade of teaching almost against his will. Now it would be typically ironic if, poised to become a successful composer of concert music, Daron Hagen spent the rest of his life as the thinking man's Richard Rodgers.

Copyright © 1999 by Fanfare, Inc. Reprinted by permission from Volume 23, No. 1 (September/October 1999), pages 129-133.

Home - Favorites - Composers - CD Big List - Reviews - Books - Links - Search - About Us