by Edwin Powell
Director of Bands, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA

Edwin Powell: As a composer, what draws you to opera and does the fact that opera is an amalgamation of multiple art forms help to clarify your ideas as a composer or does it actually make it more of a challenge?

Daron Hagen: I became a composer as a child in part because it allowed me to express myself in an abstract medium in which no one could really assign a specific 'meaning' to my most personal utterances. So-called 'pure' music doesn't 'mean' anything per se. On the other hand, one can construe it as being about la mer if one wants to. Paradoxically, music also can convey the 'truth' with dazzling intensity. I grew up singing in and writing shows, directing and acting in plays, playing in, orchestrating and conducting pit orchestras, and then working as a Broadway copyist and proofreader. I chose to do these things because I never doubted that my life as an opera composer was an inevitability — I wanted to learn, and to keep on learning, as much about every facet of music theater as I could. When I am given the challenge of imagining how who will be singing where on the stage wearing what, surrounded by a set that looks just so, the why becomes crystal clear: my job is to tell a story. I somehow find myself by getting out of myself: I inhabit each character as I write them, I live their story and empathetically infuse it with my own. I find this liberating. Ultimately, there is the give-and-take of collaboration, first with the librettist, then with the stage director, the singers, the designers, all of whom do their jobs better than I can do them. The result is that the process itself lifts us all in communion, in this thing that is bigger than all of us. Profoundly fulfilling.

EP: When Michael Haithcock approached you on behalf of CBDNA to write an opera with wind accompaniment, what was your initial reaction?

DH: Well, first of all, I was thrilled to accept the commission. My first concern though was for the future of the piece: would mainstream opera companies be reluctant to produce an opera without strings? My second concern was also practical: Without resorting to amplification of the voices, how could a wind orchestra be handled in such a way that the score could be sung comfortably? I also felt a sense of foreboding — a sense that whatever opera I wrote would probably not entirely please its commissioners because the band and opera worlds don't appear to really intersect or understand one another all that much. Ultimately, the attempt to straddle these two musical worlds ended up being yet another manifestation — like the fact that Bandanna is intentionally neither strictly an opera nor a musical — of the work's 'falling between two stools'.

Once I got down to work, there was the question of what the opera would be about. I had just gone through a nasty divorce and wanted to write an opera about morals, faith and betrayal. I had spent a good deal of time with the same librettist sketching out a treatment for an opera about Lyndon Johnson and wanted to follow through on some of the ideas that we had been exploring in that piece. When I heard that Michael Haithcock was based in Texas [Haithcock has since become the Director of Bands at the University of Michigan], my first instinct was to accomodate fate by combining all of these themes in a sort of Orson Welles-ian salsa on the Texas-Mexico border.

Once I decided that our Othello would be Hispanic, everything else proceeded smoothly. I did want to find a way to respectfully incorporate some of the gestures, flavors and traditions of mariachi music into the score's musical argument, since it plays such a big role in the characters' lives and because I love it so much. I did this by calling for an onstage mariachi band playing notated-but-memorized parts. That, in turn, made possible a theatrical and orchestrational coup: after ninety minutes of wind orchestra, three sustained mariachi violins — instruments that do not have to stop playing to take breaths — create a seamless sequence of chords that halo a completely static, prayerful, extended augenblick of an aria.

EP: Please comment on the manner in which your characters develop both emotionally and tonally.

DH: The central theoretical conceit of Bandanna is that tonal centeredness equals moral centeredness. Tonality is presented as sacred; everything else as secular. Bitonality and polytonality are meant to evoke a state of amorality. Octatonic and twelve-tone passages are meant to evoke a state of moral confusion or immorality. Highly chromatic passages are meant to evoke a state of moral relativism and the transitions between these various states.

I also created a 'bandanna chord,' an idée fixe that is associated throughout with the bandanna with which Morales murders his wife. This chord (very similar to one in Mahler's unfinished Tenth Symphony) has always struck me as a kind of notated 'death-cry' of tonality. Associating Mona's death cry with the idea of the death of tonality is, for me, an immensely important concept because it both clarifies the opera's compositional dialectic in my mind and gives the audience structural 'signposts' to recognize.

Every character's utterances can and should be perceived on a number of levels: they may allude to another musical or poetic document, a textual or musical motif another character sang earlier, or even a suggestive sonority or harmony. However, the most superficial of listeners will still at least be entertained. The point is this: the more levels an audience member is sensitive to, the more complex that person understands the opera to be.

EP: Can you tell me more about what you mean by 'deep listening'?

DH: Film editors routinely talk about how the so-called MTV generation is capable of taking in much more visual information more quickly than previous generations of filmgoers. Martin Scorcese has expressed his fear that editors may begin to routinely cut 'too quickly' in order to cater to this target audience, causing scenes to lose emotional depth. Now, I believe that, when it comes to music, the MTV generation is also comfortable processing a much more complex musical 'mix' than prior generations. We grew up 'deep listening' to pop records that had very high production values. The producer and engineer (the folks performing tasks similar to a film editor's) have become as important as the members of the band because of the way they help the band to specify a hierarchy in the mix. The kids I grew up with (who had no musical training) listened in a very sophisticated way. Alas, when I'd put on some Richard Strauss, whose orchestral textures were customarily not much more complex than well-produced multi-track pop, they couldn't 'deep listen' to it. 'Couldn't? I always wondered, or 'wouldn't? because they had somehow been given the message that they couldn't....

It quite misses the point when so-called serious composers attitudinize about pop music listeners, dismiss them as unsophisticated, say, 'I spent nine months of my life writing my piece; I don't want it listened to by someone who gives it less than their full attention.' Dismissing the overwhelming majority of the people who actually want to listen to your music is a rather arrogant pose, don't you think? Rather than just dismissing the audience, or doling out to them the artistic equivalent of 'bread and circuses,' I see my job (when I am being an opera composer) as an opportunity to help pop music lovers in their thirties and forties — folks who are, not coincidentally, my age — to listen to serious concert music and opera the way they 'deep listen' to pop music. Serious listeners have the luxury of listening to recordings many times. It is my hope that Bandanna's felicities and sophistication will become more apparent over the years, as scholars, musicians and music lovers get to know it better.

EP: The mariachi band plays a very colorful on stage role.

DH: They do, don't they? The mariachi band embodies the joys of the characters' secular lives; the disembodied 'Chorus of the Disappeared and the Dispossessed' (and, obviously, the entire cast, when they sing Latin words from the Mass) give voice to their spiritual roots. Life and Death on the one hand, Sacred and Profane on the other.

EP: Please discuss further your philosophy on how your orchestration contributes to drama.

DH: Each character is associated with a different pallet of instrumental colors. As each character evolves, so do the colors in the orchestration that accompany them. Simultaneously, emotional, psychological and moral states are created by the orchestration that comment upon what the character is going through. Wind players need to breathe — this is a powerful metaphor for Life! The saving up of the three violinists — who do not 'breathe' per se — until the end, when Mona says her prayers just before she is murdered, is an orchestrational metaphor for Death. The orchestra is telling us that she's already reconciled to her impending fate. When, after ten minutes of far-off sustained violins, her husband Morales strangles her with her bandanna, the winds return, in a ghastly, wheezing 'air attack' of the 'bandanna chord.'

EP: What is the role of the orchestra versus the voices?

DH: The orchestra is both the omniscient narrator of the opera and a character in the opera. It creates the context in which the characters play out their internal and external lives. People often say what they think they ought to say instead of what they really feel: when Morales is drunk and giving his wedding toast, his words are happy but the music under them is not. He is in denial.

Another example is when Morales is singing the same music that Mona sang in the first act where she says, 'some sense of shame.' This ends up being a big motif and it comes back at the same moment that Morales describes Emily's love for Jake. This is intertwined with the motif where Jake sang that his love for Emily was put to the test. So at the same time you have four different things being said at once. People intuit these things, even when they don't register them consciously. Opera's ability to present multiple levels of meaning is one of its most exciting trump cards.

The definition of what constitutes a 'beautiful' melody, 'good' vocal writing, or even 'good' singing changes with fashion. Cutting-edge, mainstream American Opera is so much more than what happens to be in style at any given time: American musical theater composers have since the 1940's taken up where Mozart left off with his songspiels and wedded the tradition to the specific rhythmic and coloristic qualities of the English language to create a uniquely American art form. That's incredibly inspiring.

In Bandanna, I require the singers to move seamlessly along the vocal continuum from speech, rhythmic speech, recitative, parlando, song, to aria while moving across the continuum of musical styles (each of which requires a different sort of vocal production) utilized in the score. This must be meticulously notated, so that he greater the emotional urgency, the greater the elevation of the text into melisma, even broad 'melody.' Sadly, I have sometimes found that singers with traditionally attractive voices aren't all that interested in taking that sort of technical challenge on.

EP: In working with winds as opposed to a traditional pit, is your concept of phrasing different?

DH: Very different. In an opera the string parts are usually the longest and the brass parts are the shortest, with percussion used ornamentally. Loss of the strings, and the necessity of therefore dividing held chords up between different players cause all of the parts for all of the players to be more elaborate. You have to 'crosshatch' and 'pass off' lines; you have to do all of the things we know that you have to do when you write for winds in order to create the illusion of la grande ligne. It's the thing we were just talking about — how winds have to breathe but strings don't. This means that the first and second parts become equal in importance and every wind part winds up being twice as long. The orchestration for Bandanna emanicipates the idiophones (marimba, xylophone, vibes, harp and piano), uses them as a unit throughout, and makes them just as important as the other sections.

EP: Why only two horns as opposed to four?

DH: Because I didn't want to fall back on using the horns to fulfill the role of sustaining chords the way that strings ordinarily do, any more than I wanted to fulfill it with endless tremelos in the mallet parts. Furthermore, I had a quartet of saxophones — something not often found in opera orchestrations. They are associated with the villain all night long. Can't imagine why!

EP: I notice that you use brass mutes extensively. Would you care to comment on this?

DH: Using the various mutes available in the brass exponentially increases the number of colors you can get from them, many of which sound amazingly like the special effects you can ordinarily achieve in the strings, while allowing the players to 'blow hard' but 'play soft.'

EP: I noticed, in the correspondence, that you sent Paul Muldoon lyrics by Sondheim, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Ira Gershwin, as well as detailed formal analyses of the lyrics.

DH: Yes. I was surprised to learn that Paul was at the time unfamiliar with the craft and formal traditions of writing so-called "commercial" and "Broadway-style" song lyrics, with their introductions, verses, bridges, choruses, refrains, and so forth. I was frankly inspired by observing a poet of his erudition, creative panache and flawless technique labor to adapt his voice to this demand for the first time. His struggle to write Lyrics that also stand as Poetry in this piece mirrored my efforts in this piece to straddle the Music Theater and Operatic traditions. For instance, today Michael Haithcock, the conductor of our world premiere production here in Austin, asked me to explain a line in the seduction scene where Kane says to the little girl, 'Why would a drain shy away from it's own stink?' Mike asked, 'What is he saying?' He's saying about five different things, I answered, and some will come across right away, others will take time — some may never become clear. This can either entertain an audience or antagonize them. And that's before the various levels of musical rhetoric are factored in. Multiple entendre can make the characters more lifelike, more complex, and more interesting to me. There's a lot of risk in setting words for the theater that are so consistently "poetic."

EP: There is, in the libretto, this intriguing item you call a meta-text. Where does this come from?

DH: This is something that I have asked my librettists to do for me in every one of my operas. When four characters are singing at the same time, they can be singing for four different reasons. But if the things they are saying rhyme nevertheless, then the manner in which those rhymes are lined up creates the larger context in which the listener understands the situation. The characters' lines then can comment on one another — though the characters themselves may be unaware that they are doing it. What the listener receives is a combination of discrete texts and a meta-text. He doesn't have to know that he is hearing a composite meta-text floating on top of the others, but he intuits it. "Parallel poems" in hand, I then craft melodies to which I set the texts disarming in their accessibility in order to create a space in which the audience is willing to do the hard work of figuring out what's going on.