On the occasion of the 9 May 2024 staged premiere of the new 90 minute staged version of I Hear America Singing co-produced by Aria412 and the New Mercury Collective at the Rauh Studio Theater in Pittsburgh ten years to the day after the staged premiere of the show’s first 60 minute commercial incarnation, commissioned in 2013 by Skylight Opera Theater in Milwaukee, I’m taking a beat as author and director to get all this down before moving on to the next thing.

A decade ago, the assignment was to create a musical revue that celebrated American song. I elected, instead of providing arrangements of various tunes with the usual between-song patter, to crawl into the mind of Robbie Doerfler, an aging Broadway composer struggling with a midlife crisis and a decade-long bout of writer’s block. What does a blocked composer do when they come up short? Variations, of course, which Robbie calls “recontextualizations” as he pages through not only the American songbook but the Lomax Collection, warming up gradually until, with the final songs of the show, he’s found his voice again and is, to his existential relief and his friends’ delight, composing “his own” music again.

Once strapped in to that musical conceit, I wrote a book that would consist of sequentially “closing circles.” Desperate for a personal and professional comeback, composer Robbie invites two graduate school friends instrumental in the launch of his once-promising career who’ve moved on in their lives back to New York where he hopes to revise and put on a backer’s audition for a new production of the show that made him famous that he hopes will both mend his malaise and their friendships. His friends, Rose and Roger, are the sort of couple that falls in and out of love seasonally; Robbie determines to bring them back together for good as he “mends” himself. As the show coalesced in Milwaukee, the core theme of music’s role as an engine not just of entertainment but of healing and bringing people together grew. The “artistic merry-go-round” postmodernist creative stance Robbie (in the play) and I (as composer of Robbie’s world) took in order to survive suited the theme and satisfied the producers.

As a composer, I can’t resist (as most chefs cannot resist asking their guest what ingredients they think may have been used in their entrée’s creation) divulging the songs that I used as touchstones for the score. They’re all treated musically with the sort of loving familiarity composers tend as a whole to show shared cultural artifacts, and often (if one isn’t acquainted intimately with how the original sounds) don’t really sound all that much like the public domain songs whose musical DNA they inherit.

I began with a fairly straightforward arrangement of The Vacant Chair, a very popular song of composer George F. Root, with text by Henry S. Washburn composed in 1861. The second song took the first two bars of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s song A House is Not a Home, recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1964 and featured in their Broadway show Promises, Promises and combined them with a duet written when I was fifteen for a musical called Together for a foray into mid-century American M.O.R. (It is always fun to see who in the audience visibly exhibits aesthetic PTSD when they hear 70s soft rock; in this case, it explicitly conveys the tone of Roger and Rose’s marriage and the cultural milieu in which it unfolded.) Next, I turned to the Navy Hymn (Eternal Father, Strong to Save), using the chord progression but overlaying a new tune. I had at the time just finished composing the opera Amelia for Seattle Opera, into the score of which I had threaded the Naval Hymn, so it was on my mind.

Having taken the chords from one well-known song and overlaying a new tune, I turned to John Philip Sousa’s 1894 classic march The Stars and Stripes Forever, rearranging it harmonically, adding lyrics, and having Rose sing the piccolo obbligato. Great fun. I then turned to what began as a "crossover song” (part art song, part American Songbook vibe) from my own back catalogue, teasing it into its dramaturgical function as a deal breaker by adding new lyrics and counter-melodies to form the ensemble number called Our Love’s Absence.

Hagen with musical director and star of the show Robert Frankenberry during production of the show at the Skylight Music Theater in 2014. p/c: Burning Sled Media

Having spent a lot of time with the Appalachian folk ballad known by dozens of names, including Over Yondro while composing a long-lined passacaglia based on it for my violin concerto Songbook, I had lots of material left over, so the next song—a richly harmonized scena duet, scarcely touches on the original tune and chord progression, but retains the folk flavor of a ballad that has inspired literally hundreds of covers and recontextualizations. I then went to Lomax and dropped into my score some a capella verses from Rye Whisky, first recorded and released by Fiddlin' John Carson in 1926 to set up a song where I alternated lyrics attributed to former Confederate major James Innes Randolph overlaid on a tune derived from the Northern minstrel troupe stage song Joe Bowers with lyrics and melody drawn from the song The Picture Graved Into My Heart from the civil war song cycle Dear Youth, in which I set a letter of Hannah Ropes written on December 27, 1862 describing a dying soldier. (A lot to unpack, to be sure, but, sadly, still timely.)

For the 2024 revival and film, I pulled the next song from the original staged version of the show and inserted a brand new one called The Let Us Song which doesn’t owe any progenitors much of anything except that it is fast, fun, and a lighthearted answer to the Leonard Bernstein song Storyette H.M. from Songfest — the gimme, a repeated canonic fragment of the words “let us,” is silly, but earned. Bernstein’s setting of Gertrude Stein opens the door to my own Curtis Institute-era setting of Stein’s I am Rose which is redolent of … me, I guess, and then a (veddy-veddy serious) setting of Blake’s Sick Rose that I actually did compose as a graduate student at Juilliard. (Combining material of my own / my personal history with found material / American musical history was one of the many methods I employed to stay “on point” and to avoid veering into pastiche.)

The next scene is underpinned by my new treatment of When I Was Single, adapted from two versions of the Scottish Highlands children’s song recorded by Lomax in 1949 (Lomax, pp. 154-158). I turned then to a ridiculous setting I made of A.E. Houseman as a senior in high school called O, When I Was in Love With You (which is itself a sendup of Flanders and Swan) followed by a Mills Brothers-style vocal treatment (with new lyrics) of the folk song Old Bachelor (Lomax, pp. 354-355), recorded by Lomax in 1949, which I turned into a gay pride anthem for Robbie. (One of the pleasures of working with a singer/composer/conductor/pianist like Robert Frankenberry is the fact that, when he senses the direction I am going, he’ll “double down” if he can: he did so with the last verse of Bachelor, pulling it hard into a deliciously cringy 90s “popera” that makes an indelible impression.)

I followed that with (And Then) I Let Him Go, an adaptation of Liza Jane, an Appalachian fiddle tune recorded by Lomax in 1937 (pp. 284-285). For the 2024 film and revival, I contributed a new song for Roger called To Stop Time, about alcoholism, with fresh, very-much-Hagen music and lyrics. (The dramaturgical strategy was to violently whiplash from the jazz hands tone of Bachelor to the gritty, “realistic” tone of my preferred brand of opera.) This is followed by Robbie’s “from the heart” eleven o’clock number I Believe in Song, which, in the chorus, uses the same descending chord progression (but my own tune, of course) as the Gershwin brothers’ 1924 popular standard The Man I Love from Lady Be Good and adds my own Kern-ian bridge and verse.

A still from *I Hear America Singing* that shows the triangular framing of nearly every shot. p/c: Doug Estok

In order to further focus Robbie’s recovery of personal voice (and the end of his writer’s block) for the 2024 film and staged revival, I wrote a new song for Rose (and, of course, had Robbie just penning it himself) called I Never Wanted Anyone Before. It’s completely me, and, as a nod to the DNA of the project as a whole, based on a song that I wrote in 1979 for the musical Together back in Wisconsin. I closed the show with a new song for (and by) Robbie to sing with his pals called You Don’t Fall Up, You Fall Down.

I accepted Aria412’s invitation to direct a revival of the show, so long as I could weave it (with a revised script and screenplay that made its connections to Orson Rehearsed and 9/10: Love Before the Fall clearer and stronger) into a film.

If you’ve made it this far, then you probably have an appetite for meta-modernism, and that is what the new documentary / film / musical / play that we just finished staging (and filming) overlays on the story told in 2014. My new script combines pre-written interview questions and answers for Robbie (as well as improvised questions from documentarians Tevi Eber and Talal Jabari, which are answered in character by Robbie), who is either fantasizing or not that he is, during the course of the reunion with his friends, the subject of a television documentary. So there is a layer of rhetoric about media and the role of truth, as well as the role of narrative-making in our coming to terms with aging, and death, and failure, and success, and, and, and….

In the final event, the film of I Hear America Singing serves as the final installment of the Bardo Trilogy, an examination of the transition between life and what comes after in the theatrical musical film works Orson Rehearsed, and 9/10: Love Before the Fall. More about the trilogy as a whole later. So, for now, we’re left with a question: when Robbie falls down, did he die? Did he fall down, or up? As Robbie asks in the script, “Where do actors go when they go up? Heaven?” The bardo?

Robbie (Robert Frankenberry) in part of his final monologue in the documentary / musical / opera film I Hear America Singing.

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