Daron Aric Hagen
Songbook
60 Art Songs & Arias Spanning 25 Years

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The songs of Daron Hagen are among the best being produced today. No composer since Samuel Barber and the heyday of Ned Rorem has captured the imagination of singers and lovers of great vocal music with such ease. Great sensitivity to words and poetry and an imaginative approach to setting them to music has characterized his songs from the beginning of his career. This generous new collection of sixty songs (many of them from cycles, and three of them drawn from stage works) draws on twenty-five years of song composing and is remarkable for its depth and variety. Hagen’s catholic taste in poets allows him to range from the great astringent English Poet, Philip Larkin (Larkin Songs [2000] and Irish Poet Paul Muldoon, a frequent operatic collaborator (Muldoon Songs [1989]), to younger American poets such as Alice Wirth Gray (Figments [2002]) and Susan Griffin (Phantoms of Myself [2000]). This collection also includes several of Hagen’s anthology cycles which use poems by different poets related to a single theme: Love in a Life (1981-1998), which sets poems by Browning, Alsadir, Dickinson, Byron, Roethke, Whitman and Lodge and The Heart of the Stranger (1983-1999), which includes poems by Codrescu, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Blake and Houseman, among others. Songbook also includes a foreword by famed Tenor Paul Sperry, an Introduction by Dr. Carrie delapp Culver, a useful afterward by the composer that gives the background on the writing of the songs and a complete bibliography of related publications by and about Daron Hagen.
– Barry O’Neal, Director of Concert Music, Carl Fischer

‘Hagen chooses texts judiciously, respectfully. He aims to enhance, not obliterate. Most of the songs are haunting, fleeting quivers of moments and sensations – the resignation of two lovers to the end of their affair, the oppressive emptiness remaining after the death of a son. Hagen freeze-frames them all with the lightest of compositional brush strokes. … A composer who can crystallize a moment in musical magic is a rarity. Expect to hear more of Hagen.’
– Mark Carrington, Washington Post

‘No other American composer in his generation sets English so persuasively, so easily, or with such immediate feeling.’
– NATS Journal of Singing

‘Hagen’s music is truly a canonical hybrid of opera and popular forms, with vocal writing that periodically swings and radiates a sultry, burlesque feel.’
– Randy Nordschow, NewMusicBox.com
‘Hagen confirms his status as one of the better composers setting English texts to music... His text setting shows a sensitive ear, and he is often an inspired melodist.’
– Fanfare Magazine

‘Hagen uses dissonance judiciously, suggesting emotional storylines and subtexts … these are fascinating texts for songs, matched with equally intriguing music.’
– Peter Dobrin, Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Hagen's music makes no errors. And like the stronger stretches in the theater and concert music of, say, Argento and Harbison, he sustains the idea of non-minimalist tonality as a still-viable medium.’
– Leighton Kerner, The Village Voice

‘Teachers will find this a valuable volume for college age students as well as professionals. …Hagen can help us grow. It is clear to me that he is growing, that this collection is only a step along the way in the development of a major songwriter.’
– Paul Sperry, from the Preface
Daron Aric Hagen Songbook
Available wherever music is sold.
CARL FISCHER
0-8258-4916-0
soft cover, 172 pages. $29.95

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