You Sing Beautifully

“YOUTH, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
         force, fascination?

Day full-blown and splendid—day of the immense sun, action,
         ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
         restoring darkness.”

— Walt Whitman

Long have I unpacked Walt Whitman’s lines, which I first read when assigned Leaves of Grass by a beloved English teacher but which I — all of sixteen and enmeshed in the white-hot burn of the first four words of the poem — sped by without taking note. A year later, reading through Ned Rorem’s “art song” setting with a friend as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I’d grown slightly more mindful, and at least made note of the next six lines.

Two years later, during a lesson at his apartment in New York, Ned presented me with a sheet of yellow foolscap on which he had typed (with his trusty Royal portable) the same poem, decreeing that I should “have a go at it.” I had miraculously left Wisconsin behind and settled in Philadelphia where, setting the poem to music myself, I realized that, in life, at least, I had of course skipped lines two and three and was living — at full bore — lines four and five. As the decades passed, the poem stuck with me. My appreciation of lines two and three grew. At the age of sixty, I revisited the poem, and created, with Gilda Lyons, a new setting of it called Restoring Darkness for solo voice, which filmmaker H. Paul Moon and Gilda captured in an extraordinary single shot soon after its completion. The final two lines, of course, were now my focus, and the key to my understanding of this sturdy, wise piece of writing.

As an American composer born in 1961 I am a Latchkey child—a member of the first year of what is typically referred to as Generation X—sandwiched between the Millennials and the Boomers, my relationship to what constitutes “beautiful singing” has matured along lines parallel to my maturation as a person.

As a sixteen-year-old composer manque, I was enmeshed in the white-hot burn of the first four words of the poem. Singing was just that. I was taught to sing “correctly” and “well” in the Lutheran and Anglican choral traditions by superb chorus teachers, but I also grooved to (and appreciated the artistry of) “off the voice” folk singers, Bob Dylan, and the first generation of amplified rock musicians whose vocal training was often nil. By the time I landed in Madison, I was earning beer money plowing through the Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias with voice majors, having for years appreciated the exhilarating vocalisms of Cathy Berberian, the magnificently balanced tone of Barbara Streisand, the splendid phrasing of Frank Sinatra, the emotionally undeniable wisdom of Maria Callas, and the nuanced, Fellini-esque meta-authenticity of Peter Pears.

Two years later, studying with Ned, I learned (but was not taught) why Samuel Barber’s vocal writing was considered more “elegant” than Gian Carlo Menotti’s, and, with gently relentless reminders, encouraged to find Menotti’s vocal writing somehow “theatrical” in nature and therefore less refined. I had already accompanied many of Ned’s early, Billie-Holiday-meets-Francis-Poulenc songs (which I adored) and had begun to process why, when prominent “vocal coaches” were invited to coach Rorem or Barber, they usually chose Barber. But I was in the full flower of lines four and five, composing my first big opera, Shining Brow, and, from today’s standpoint, the vocal writing that I consciously emulated combined Benjamin Britten’s muscular modernism and Stephen Sondheim’s theatrical practicality.

Age came to me “with equal grace” when I rejected the hierarchization that vocal partisans place on “singing styles.” I remember the moment. It was in Texas sometime during the 90s. I had been engaged to present a masterclass at a college that was producing one of my operas, and was coaching a young singer on a performance of Ned’s “Early in the Morning,” which I had been coached on by Ned a few times over the years with various singers. The delightful vocalist was crooning away at a moderately slow clip (I approved—after all, the Holiday factor, on which Ned doubled down when he sang his own music at the piano), finished, and it was time for me to speak up. I recalled that Ned — every single time I played it for him — always had two things to say: “play it faster, and don’t ‘sell’ it.” So, I told the singer the same thing, making it clear that the comment came from Ned, not me. The singer sang it again, faster, and without the Holiday vibe. It sounded more like the way Ned would have liked it; but it didn’t sound the way that singers like to sing it, and audiences, by and large, prefer to hear it. Behind me, in the back of the room, the singer’s teacher (or coach—I don’t recall which) nodded vigorously “no-no-no.”

Ever since, all “singing styles” have had, to me, “equal, grace, force, fascination.” There is “beauty of sound” and there is “beautiful singing.” The two can coincide, but don’t have to; they can co-exist. I mix “singing styles” not only as an efficient way to help mainstream listeners to differentiate characters and to subvert the conception of what constitutes “class,” but to invite audience members with preconceived notions of what constitutes not just “good” and “bad” singing, but “good” and “bad” taste out of their intellectual and aesthetic complacence—to move them to embrace a broader conception of what constitutes “beautiful singing.”

Although the difference between musical theater acting singers and operatic singing actors is not absolute, musical theater acting singers typically lean into characterization and operatic singing actors focus, because their audience requires it, on beauty of sound. A musical theater singer can be a Stanislavskian, or a Method actor, literally feeling the emotions that the character is experiencing, because their audience interprets their “getting choked up” as emotional authenticity. 

To maintain proper alignment of the instrument, most opera singers are taught that they cannot risk allowing a Strasbergian remembrance of experience to get them literally verklempt. Consequently, Classical acting is their usual go-to, as it requires “sticking to the script,” which composers and conductors appreciate. The chamber musician in them cottons to the sort of finding of truth through ensemble building of the Meisner method. Authenticity through collective imagination allows the muscles to remain aligned, and the voice to emerge, physically “unaffected” by the emotion conveyed.

So, what’s the point? I don’t compose for the singers that I can afford, I write for the people singing. Sometimes I get it wrong. But I try to learn from the experience. Once I wrote a role for a Big Star who, in the practice room, sang the role for me as I wrote it for them, but—when they stepped on to the stage—reverted to the way they had sung the role before I had coached them. It was a heartbreaking moment, because I had given them material that would have changed the course of their career, paving the way to the character roles that would have continued to feed them artistically into their sixties, even seventies. But they had mouths to feed, management with which to contend, a public that had decided who they were. Singing is a brutal profession.

Now I am at the “millions of suns” stage of my life as a vocal composer. Long as my stance has been that there is only singing that lands and singing that doesn’t, and that abstract “beauty of sound” is a precious thing, but it is not the Only Thing, I have come to feel a bit like Gusteau in Ratatouille, who feels that “everyone can cook.” No, I am not a gourmand; of course I can tell the difference. But I am drawn to authenticity above all. The rest is exquisite artifice. If I hear you sing, and I tell you that I think you sing beautifully, I mean it.

Time and David Del Tredici (1937-2023)

It was always time with David. He bent it; he warped it; he turned it around back on itself; he lived outside of it; he could practically stop it with music; in life, he ran with it until he ran out of it.

The day in March 2019 that my memoir was published and offered up to the crickets I put all my handwritten diaries—over thirty years’ worth of scribbling—into banker’s boxes and sealed them up. I traded the false specificity of reportage for the even more subjective truth of memory. Now I must pour, as Ned Rorem and his teacher Virgil Thomson used to, through the index of my book to fix events in time. I recall reading the words that I wrote about David to him over the telephone and asking whether he thought they were okay before sending off the manuscript. (He did.)

So, on this March 2024 morning I tried to find my letters to David (and his to me) and discovered that I’d have to move two portable air conditioners, a box fan, and two suitcases to get to the file drawer in the storage closet in which letters from all the D’s in my life ended up so I gave up. They’re in there—all the postcards with Mad Hatters and March Hares stamped on them, words jumping off the page limned in multiple colors (he always had a glass or peanut butter jar filled with different colored pens and pencils on his desk at whatever artist colony or home he was working) with little, crazy asides added in at the last moment. Anyone who received a letter from David knew they could expect an illuminated manuscript of sorts. He took time to write them. They were vibrant, gossipy, funny, and sweet. His communications were always labor-intensive; details mattered: sometimes a sentence would march on in blue ink and end with a single bright red exclamation point.

Since I no longer particularly trust my own memory, I paged through my “Work Log and List of Themes,” a notebook I’ve kept since July 1976 (and which, ominously, is entirely filled up, with no more blank pages to accommodate new work—a nightmare scenario for someone as superstitious and obsessive as me), to determine which artist colonies (and when) David and I had had overlapping residencies over the years (since I always finished something and made note of where I was when I finished it) to fix some dates in advance of a chat with his biographer the other day. So, the chronology of this Mad March through Time is underpinned by the several vignettes that I included in my memoir and the (many more) exactly-dated marginalia (“Sang through this with DDT in the music room,”  or “Bowings revised per DDT,” and the like.) from my “Work Log.”

The central pillar of our relationship was our shared love of Yaddo, the storied artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, at which we met during June 1984. I was between studies at Curtis and Juilliard, footloose, fueled by an entirely impractical sense that it was my time. While being shown around the place by painter Nancy Brett, who was serving that summer as a Special Assistant to the President, I was led into the mansion’s Great Hall to the sound of a Mendelssohn “Song Without Words” wafting out of the spacious music room. I had arrived just before dinner and David, as was his custom, was relaxing by running his fingers through the piano repertoire for the pleasure of our, as he announced when Nancy introduced us, “fellow inmates.” That infectious, unforgettable smile! The mischievous grin. A sparkle in his eyes second only to Otto Luening’s. Nancy left us, and David, reaching for a well-worn edition of Haydn symphonies reduced to four hands, asked archly whether I wanted to be on the bottom or the top.

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Photographed by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center in 1990.

I was, as so many other musicians were, enchanted. I took the left side, hoping that hitting an occasional bass note properly might keep me in the game, and we were off. After a few minutes, I realized that he was gradually speeding up and that his left hand was dropping down between mine and adding bits of my right-hand part that I was leaving out to (let’s face it) survive. It was an exhilarating, joyous display of raw talent. My heart began racing. For a few more minutes I survived on adrenaline until, suddenly, he simply began playing everything up a step. That was it: I was thrown from the horse. He’d exceeded my keyboard skills and, laughing so hard that I teared up, I got up and told him that I had to unpack. “Welcome to Yaddo,” he said, laughing.

Former president of PEN, poet and author Richard McCann, filmmaker Sharon Greytak, painter Michael Flanagan, David and this young composer immediately became constant dinner companions. Over the years, David, Richard, and I remained close friends, and served for decades together on the board of Yaddo. It turned into quite an important summer for me, as I also met poet Gardner McFall, who graciously allowed me to set her poem, “Sonnet After Oscar Wilde,” which I sang immediately upon completion, with David accompanying. Twenty-three years later, Gardner, who was also by then a board member, bravely mined her own life story when she wrote the libretto of our opera Amelia for Seattle Opera.

David and I overlapped several times during the 80s at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and MacDowell—always the four hands, me sight-reading through whatever song he was working on and ending up laughing with joy; him sightreading whatever song I was writing and me singing them. “Why do we have to write for singers?” he would ask, “We know they can sing it beautifully; but isn’t it more fun to hear someone who can’t sing perform it?” (I couldn’t help but notice that the thought had come to him after accompanying me.) In 1990, David was serving as composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic, and, although he never took credit, likely made possible my music’s debut with the Philharmonic—a piece called Common Ground, which had recently been awarded the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize.

The Tower Studio at Yaddo, where David Del Tredici often worked. p/c: Daron Hagen

When David went away on sabbatical during the 90s I’d teach for him at City University of New York. Composition lessons, of course; but also counterpoint and orchestration. I was also on the faculty of Bard College at the time (and for a couple of semesters, the Curtis Institute), and he enjoyed, I think, the fact that I, like him, didn’t consider myself an academic. “Teaching gives me physical pain, doesn’t it you?” he once asked as we packed his station wagon—he off to another colony, and me back to the Upper West Side and a semester of filling in for him. He was only partly serious. David could be a superb teacher. And when he went to artist colonies he—like me—always worked like a dog. We’d run into one another raiding the refrigerator either very, very late or very, very early—the only two “inmates” still awake and working and ask one another how it was going. “I can’t tell you or it will turn to shit,” I would say. And he would say, “I know. Hide the erasers.” If there was cheesecake or dessert of any sort to be had, we’d finish it together. Always, the next day, I’d be jogging it off; David would be pumping iron at the local gym.  I sent him five or six of my students when it was their time to move on over the years and don’t regret it.

Time together at the keyboard was something he shared with lots of other musicians, and I am sorry if I give the impression I was the only one who enjoyed the privilege. I loved him for the force of nature that was his talent, the grace with which he carried it, and the super-hard work that he did, year after year, to honor it. He modelled a working composer to me more than Ned or Virgil because he kept revising and improving everything. Like everyone who knew him, I am devasted by the irony that a man who exulted in the lifelong physicalizing of his music at the keyboard became afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease.

During a visit to Sag Harbor in the mid 90s, I recall him playing the entirety of his opera Dum Dee Tweedle and experiencing more keenly than ever how his obsessive use of melodic and harmonic sequences (either telescoping them to run faster through diminution, or more slowly through extension or metric modulation) skewed one’s perception of time. My memory’s a little foggy, but I think that when he finished, I felt as though he had been playing for about forty minutes only to look at my watch to see that 90 had elapsed. Repetition was talismanic for him as a composer, I think; it could summon emotional lightness or darkness. If tonality was redemptive to him, then his compositional apotheosis came through such a profound compression of harmonic and melodic movement that it felt dissonant—Liszt on steroids.

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DDT 80th Birthday Concert, Joe’s Pub, New York, NY March 2017. p/c: Tevi Eber

By the late 90s, we were performing fundraisers together for Yaddo—he would be paired with the extraordinary, luminous John Kelly; I’d pair off with Paul Sperry, or whomever was singing in whatever opera I was working on. I recall an event at Harold Reed’s, for example, where he performed his Acrostic Song (literally all over the keyboard) and I followed by accompanying myself in some simple, tender settings of Paul Muldoon’s poetry. “How can you be so simple?” he asked. “That terrifies me.”

When Muldoon and I underwent the premiere of our opera Bandanna in Austin in April 2000, David wept afterwards, told me that he knew what it had taken to summon so much darkness in the final scene. “Of course, nobody is going to get it,” he said. I was astonished when he said, “Tonight, you are my hero.” Stephen Sondheim is said to have decreed that, on opening night, one should simply note that a work is “brilliant” to the author. “Criticism later,” he is supposed to have said. I agree. I was touched that David stood by his assessment of Bandanna. I recall—listening together to the entirety of my latest opera, A Woman in Morocco at his apartment in Westbeth—David pointing out exact measures that I had forwarded musical arguments begun in Bandanna fifteen years before. “Diminished seventh chords are very dangerous because they can go anywhere,” he observed. “Yeah, either they can go Salome or Salome at the Super 8 Motel,” I replied, which made him giggle.

One of my treasures remains the fragment of manuscript that he gave me after a particularly athletic read-through of a song in 2002-ish that he subsequently dedicated to me called "Now You Know" during which I had broken down, laughing with tears of joy & disbelief. I think that he wrote "pre-Hagen sketch” on it because I told him that he was absolutely nuts to ask a singer to do something. Over dinner: "Do you DARE to accept the dedication of this song?" he asked. It is my ardent hope that he didn't change a thing on my account.

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I began to sense time beginning to run out on us as early as July 2005, when Gardner and I were at Yaddo working on Amelia and David accompanied me in the music room where we first met as I sang our first, trial aria to see how it landed with the other guests. In the aria, a father pictures himself as looking down on his loved ones from the stars after his demise. By the time the aria had been folded into the opera and premiered, my first son had been born. Came along another, and a move from Manhattan to the country. David and I saw one another less frequently. He still went to concerts—what a champ! But I had stopped. They didn’t feed my work the way that they did his. Ours became primarily a relationship of letters and telephone calls.

Still, Gilda Lyons and I would catch up with David every year at Yaddo’s annual meeting. Lord, how David loved Gilda, and how deeply they intuitively understood one another. We performed a version of David’s Acrostic Song together for him on a concert in Gilda’s Phoenix Concerts series in New York (alongside the world premiere of “Emily’s Aria” from Ned’s Our Town) that I had confected and he observed, with mock horror, “Now that you have had your way with my music, shall we continue to speak?” “Was it okay?” I asked. “It was wonderful, but why did you reharmonize me?” “Because I could,” I replied. The twinkle.

At the premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Herrick’s Oratorio” in New York City, 20 May 2023. p/c: Tevi Eber

I am still having trouble coming to terms with the fact that David is not down in the Village, pulling reams of notes out of his piano at Westbeth, or making little forts with walls comprised of different sorts of jelly jars and vitamin bottles at the breakfast table at Yaddo, or jogging in the woods at MacDowell, or lurking by the driers at VCCA in the wee hours looking for leftovers in the fellows’ refrigerator. When Cantori premiered his Herrick Oratorio in May 2023, it was a chance to say goodbye. David, a Catholic, ever the subversive, had woven Martin Luther’s Mighty Fortress into the finale of what was effectively his final public statement. I had driven in from the country for the premiere and was shocked, but not surprised, by the toll that Parkinson’s had extracted. As ever, his talent dazzled, and I told him so. “You’re up to your old tricks, messing with my sense of time,” I said. He had been, but the path we had traveled together, our shared Mad March, was running out. Nothing between us had changed, but everything around us had. He pulled me in close and said that he loved me and that I should take care of myself and Gilda and the boys. The twinkle was still there.

If I had not been walking out of the church with a friend I would have had to have stopped to steady myself, because, for the first time since hearing David play Mendelssohn before meeting him in June 1984, I felt that David’s time had run out. I was gutted. It wasn’t until an hour later, driving up the Palisades to the country, that I was able to reconnect to the fact that I am blessed to actually have some more time in front of me, with skinned knees and tree forts having given way to basketball and  girlfriends for my sons, and mid-career engaging Gilda. Music remembers absolutely everything, I thought, and it has its own relationship with time. Messiaen knew it; David lived it. To me, a talent like David’s is evidence of the Unseen. And now it is time for me to learn how to let David go. Because there are among us many more forces of nature like him who can use a hand: some of them are very young not just in spirit, but in fact. Help them; lift them up, I thought, the way that the simple fact that talent like David’s existed lifted me. I’ll close with that.

Being Frank: Composing "Shining Brow"

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p/c: Karen Pearson

In 1989 I  began composing Shining Brow, an opera in two acts and a prologue about architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It explored the intersection of Life and Art, self-actuation and selfishness. At the time,  I asked my librettist to make this conundrum one of Wright's foremost concerns. Consequently, our Man asks a question that the actual One may never have asked himself: “Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still remain true to his art?”

My librettist Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. The Times Literary Supplement described him as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War.” From 1973 to 1986, he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the BBC. Since 1987, he has lived in the States.

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Robert Orth and Brenda Harris as Wright and Mamah Cheney in a concert performance by the Buffalo Philahrmonic released by Naxos. p/c: Chris Lyons

I met Paul at the Saratoga Springs artist retreat Yaddo during summer 1988. He was brilliant, ambitious, quick to skewer pretension, and impatient with mediocrity. Already it was obvious that he had every intention of becoming a celebrity poet. His hair back then looked as though it were trying to escape. He did not speak English; he produced it. You could practically hear him listening to himself as he talked. Paul was and is a virtuoso performer of his own poetry. He could read a list of names, or ingredients, and, through line readings alone, move an audience in any direction he pleased. 

In summer 1989 I received a call on one of the MacDowell Colony pay phones from conductor and artistic director of the Madison Opera Roland Johnson asking whether I might consider composing an opera about Wright. Paul was reading the newspaper a few feet away. Without thinking, I leaned out of the booth and quipped, “Say, Paul, do you want to write an opera?” A beat later, he replied, “Sure.”

When Paul and I began Brow, we first read everything we could lay hands on about Wright. We reconvened a few months later to co-author at Paul's home in Amherst, Massachusetts a filmic treatment consisting of a dozen pages describing what would happen in each scene. 

I then determined how long each scene (and each section of each scene) would last, and the sort of musical form I would use to underpin the action of that scene. Giving the outline to Paul, I asked him to create a number of core images and literary motifs that I could then graft to musical ideas, along with some “parallel” poems for related characters, so that when I shared their music, the words would be easier to adapt. At one point I needed a straightforward hymn, and he responded by creating his beautiful Goethe gloss, Hymn to Nature.

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Carolann Page, creator of the role of Mamah Cheney.

Over the course of eight weeks that winter at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, I composed the music for the first act. I wrote the most important sections first, beginning with the last three minutes; then the music that would be associated with the four or five most important dramatic spots (what I call the “emotional nuclear reactors”) in the act; after that, I wrote the connective sections, which could and should be the least musically interesting. Each character existed in a “home” key: Wright in B-flat major; Mamah in E major; Edwin and Sullivan in A minor; Catherine in C major. The lovers’ keys were associated, of course, by the tritone, the “forbidden” interval, and the harmonic fulcrum on which modulation depends.

The most affecting, emotionally expressive tool in an opera composer’s kit is the ability to modulate. Aside from being crucial to maintaining large formal structures, it unlocks “gateways” to new emotional states and signals emotional evolution. I did not really learn how to modulate fluidly until I composed Brow, each of whose characters needed to interact with one another harmonically. I have used the modulatory practices used by Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner in their operas ever since I realized just how eloquent they really are, no matter what the surface style of the piece.

When composing opera, my compositional process has changed little since the early 80s. I retype and reformat the libretto to reflect the underlying musical form in which it will be carried, storyboard it on the wall, and illuminate it with various colored pens and pencils—say, red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I want to “track” also get colors. Standing before the entire opera tacked up on the wall and dreaming on its entirety is as close as I’m likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the colors arrayed on the storyboard.

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Kevin Kees as Wright in the "Fallingwater Brow."

Once the entire opera is “on the wall” I decide what the most important dramatic moments (the “emotional nuclear reactors”) are in each scene; I specify what the climactic moment of the opera is, work downwards in triage fashion to the least important moment. I do not compose “from left to right.” I compose the music for the most important half dozen moments in the opera first. The music for the rest of the piece then spreads outwards from these key moments like concentric ripples.

Paul and I accepted an invitation from Richard (Dick) Carney, Wright protégé and then managing trustee of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, to stay at Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a few days. After lunch with members of the Fellowship (during which Wright’s recorded lunchtime conversation from decades previous played on a boom box), Paul and I settled into the little house Wright built for his daughter. The sun set as we traded impressions and prepared for a formal dinner at which I sat beside architect and Wright protégé Wes Peters, with whom I had a long, intense conversation about Wright’s relationship with Olgivanna. “Was Mamah Cheney the love of his life?” I asked Wes. “She must have been,” he replied, “but I can only say that after her death, for the rest of his life, he never allowed her to be discussed in his presence.”

After dinner, Dick and I took a long walk in the desert and discussed the sort of opera I intended to compose. A fatherly bear of a man, he gestured to me to sit down on a boulder with him. Sighing, he said, “Well, Daron, I don’t think any of us here want you to compose a dishonest piece. Mr. Wright could be a bastard. Promise me you’ll try to convey his essential ‘greatness’ along with the rest.” I didn’t tell Dick that anybody who sings is rendered sympathetic. Instead, I shook his hand. “A promise, Dick.” He picked up some dirt and threw it. “Fine. Come and stay with us as long as you want to. Soak up the feel of the place. Make Mister Wright sing. I promise you that we’ll not stand in your way.”

Daron Hagen and Stephen Wadsworth at the premiere of "Amelia" by Seattle Opera in 2010. p/c: Alan Alabastro

Shortly before Christmas, I finished the vocal score of the first act. I needed a “green light” from the Madison Opera board before beginning the second. The next step was to present it to the commissioners in Madison.

“Just two hours ago,” President Bush began, “allied air forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. These attacks continue as I speak. Ground forces are not engaged.” It was 16 January. The United States had just invaded Iraq. In a huge rehearsal hall customarily used for symphony rehearsals, halfway through playing and singing the first act of Brow for the members of the Taliesin Fellowship and the board of Madison Opera, conductor Roland Johnson asked me to stop at 5:45 so that we could all gather around a portable radio to listen to our President address the nation. “Tonight, as our forces fight, they and their families are in our prayers.”

"Shall we continue this another time?” I asked Ann Stanke. She looked to Dick, who asked me, “Do you have a problem with moving ahead with this presentation?” It seemed absurd to me, under the circumstances, but I needed the money, and would not get paid unless, by pulling off this presentation, I fulfilled the terms of the commissioning contract. “No,” I lied, resuming my seat at the piano and picking up where I had left off.

Dick then pledged that the Fellowship would support my creation of the opera, and Roland “green lit” my moving on to the second act. It was my first taste, at twenty-nine, of what the life of a viable opera composer might be like, and I relished it.

The cast and production team of Urban Arias’ chamber version, “Usonian Brow” in Washington, DC in 2017.

I spent some time at Taliesin, in Spring Green. Edgar Tafel, the best known of Wright’s disciples, decided that he was going to see to it personally that I experienced what it was like “really to live in a Wright House—to duck when you pass through doorways, discover your feet hanging over the bottom of the bed at night, feel the rooms flowing from one to the next in the dark.” He conjured for me the poetry that Wright seems to have been able to spin for clients.  His impersonations of Wright’s speaking voice were—aside from being incredibly funny—crucial to shaping my vocal characterization—particularly Wright’s stilted line readings, and what David Diamond, in a letter to me, described as “…the pontification, the affected dress-ugh-y, like Stieglitz.”

My friend photographer Pedro Guerrero’s reminiscences of Wright’s gentler moments also helped me to firm up the conviction that part of his appeal must have been the ability to project immense vulnerability in private. Dick Carney's descriptions of the tenderness that Wright could display also informed my decision to create the gentle music that underpins Wright’s soliloquies. Dick was a humane and generous man. My treasured former pupil and copyist Christopher Hume had a degenerative spinal condition that required his settling in a town with excellent medical facilities. I suggested Madison. I asked Dick to look out for Chris. He took him under his wing. They remained close for the rest of their lives.

Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon attend the Arizona Opera revival in 2019. p/c: Stephanie Weiss

The following autumn, in a tiny efficiency apartment at the corner of Amsterdam and 74th Street just off Verdi Square on Manhattan's Upper West Side, over the course of a few months, I wrote in one long delicious stretch the second act. Darynn Zimmer, the soprano who years later recorded the role of Mona in Bandanna under my baton for Albany records, was kind enough to sing through the role of Mamah for me as I composed it.

Like baseball pitchers, most composers have rituals. Mine consisted then of making my world very small and simple when I was writing so that I could keep all of the various motives and ideas suspended in my mind. My scrupulously maintained routine began with morning coffee and a chocolate chip scone from the Korean Market just below my apartment at 303 Amsterdam while reading the New York Times seated on a particular bench in Strawberry Fields. While composing—for exactly four hours by the stopwatch—I drank two bottles of San Pellegrino. Then I would run around the Central Park reservoir (twice: 3.2 miles), and then drink a bottle of San Pellegrino afterwards while walking home. I’d devour two slices of Freddy and Pepper’s pizza (an excellent joint in the basement which is still in business) sitting in Verdi Square, and then spend the evening making a fair copy of the sketches I had made during the day.

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Robert Orth as Frank Lloyd Wright in Chicago Opera Theater's revival, directed by Kenneth Cazan.

I've written elsewhere about what it was like to consult with Leonard Bernstein while I composed parts of Brow. One example of how he “got” the musical rhetoric of the opera merits repetition, I think. During Wright’s Act 1, scene one pitch to his future mistress, I quoted the New York, New York rising fourths motive that he had first used in Trouble in Tahiti, and then in On the Town, on the word, “suburbia.” Bernstein chuckled appreciatively.  “Nice lift,” he said, “very Strauss. But you followed it up with stuff that sounds like Ned’s [Ned Rorem] little Frank O’Hara opera. Did I steal that from him for Tahiti or did he steal that from me? I can’t remember. In any event, I know you’re talking about theft by putting stolen music in his mouth, so you should come up with something else there.”

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Tim Petty as Wright in the Tulsa Opera revival.

At some point, I pointed out that I had been modeling the character of Wright musically on him, and the relationship between Wright and Sullivan on him and Blitzstein. He got it: “That’s Maria. No, it’s the orchestral play-in to the first scene of Marc’s Regina,” he mused aloud. “Well, yes, I stole it from Marc.” Silence. Sudden grin: “But he stole it from Aaron!”

The Madison Opera had asked me to suggest a stage director for Brow. I asked Bernstein to suggest one. He suggested Stephen Wadsworth, with whom he had just written an opera called A Quiet Place.

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The Fallingwater premeire by Opera Festival of Pittsburgh in 2013.

“I’ve written an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright,” I told Stephen on the phone. “I’m looking for someone to bring it to life on the stage. Lenny says that you’re that person. Would you like to come over for coffee and talk about it?” I knew that would get his attention.

That April, we sat cross-legged on the floor of my tiny studio more or less under the piano and in front of the six linear feet of opera scores on the bookshelves and began sounding one another out by pulling scores at random from the shelf and discussing them.

It helped that we both had been compelled to figure out how to work with Bernstein—Stephen as collaborator, me as pupil. Stephen could survive (even enjoy) Bernstein's intellectual death marches; I thrived on his musical pop quizzes. We shared an appetite for conversations that functioned on multiple levels.

Michael Sokol as Wright in the 1993 Madison Opera production.

I know now that our first meeting was typical of Stephen’s special way with everyone—warm, clever, completely at ease, and intellectually competitive. His probing eyes habitually sought out mine; his compassionate face was extraordinarily expressive. His long fingers moved restlessly when he spoke. I found charming his ability to italicize what he was saying by giving you a hard, quick stare, and then releasing you. He was fun.

At first, it was the confidence and maturity of his opinions as we stuck our thumbs into scores and played “what’s the most important moment in this scene” that impressed me most. In time, as we grew to know one another better, I realized that what I had interpreted as competitiveness was instead an urgent desire to understand: if an idea intrigued him, he reflexively craved an explanation.

The talents that have served him so well in his illustrious career were already in full play as, over the course of six very long work sessions at the apartment in the Village he shared with baritone Kurt Ollmann, I played and sang through Brow’s score. I was defensive, and needed to be “sold” on every one of the dozen or so alterations to words and music (I had to my mind “finished” the score months previously) that he suggested. I’m not certain now why I fought him so hard—especially since I knew even then that his criticisms were always spot on. Possibly, it was because I wanted to see just how right he thought he was.

For the workshop, the cast and company of Brow gathered at the Bernstein family’s apartment at the Dakota to give for Madison Opera’s donors and staff a workshop performance (piano and two dozen singers) of the complete score. Ann Stanke, The company's founde and the driving force behind the commission, worked the room as Roland powwowed with the singers.

Daron and Arizona Opera revival director Chas Rader Shieber in 1993. p/c: Stephanie Weiss

At my suggestion, the company had capitalized upon the New York press’ interest in visiting the apartment one more time to fill the room with eyes and ears (particularly the national press) that might not otherwise have had any interest in a commission, however laudable, of an unknown composer by a small Midwestern company.

The boundary between life and death blurred in a familiar—even comforting—fashion as I listened to the music I had provided for the character of Wright—consciously referring as it did to Bernstein’s music at key points—was performed in Bernstein’s home. It had been impossible, strolling around Taliesin with Dick (like me, an insomniac) in the wee hours, not to feel Wright’s presence. It had been impossible at Yaddo not to feel the Trask family’s. It had been impossible to walk through the Common Room at the Curtis Institute as a student without feeling the benevolent spirit of Mary Louise Curtis Bok. And it still felt, at the Dakota, as though Bernstein slouched still in the chair in the den, sipping a scotch, pulling on his plastic cigarette holder, growling one of the last things he said to me: “Play and sing that part again, baby—the part that sounds like Marc.”

Everyone involved with the April 1993 opening night of Brow knew that it was going to be a success. 25 years and 7 operas later, I now am acutely aware of how rare that is. That night, at “the rail” of the house, behind the audience, where authors traditionally are allowed to pace, fret, enjoy, and suffer, performances of their work, with Stephen, as the tragic ending of Madison Opera’s première production unfolded.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s final aria. Arizona Opera 2019 revival.

Stephen said, “Look!” “Eh?” I said. “Look at them,” he said, sweeping a hand over the audience, who were experiencing the last few minutes of the opera. “They’re all weeping.”

“Yes, that’s where we want them,” I said. “No,” he said. “That’s where they want to be. You did it. I did it. Paul did it. The performers did it. Communion. We all did it. Together.”

The next morning a telegram from Ned arrived at my hotel, saying, “I always said that you would arrive at twenty.” The reviews were strong, and the consensus was that my career had begun.

"Can a man be a faithful husband and father and still be true to his Art?” In the years since I've come to my own conclusion about the Life vs Art paradigm. Art is to my Life as the MacGuffin is to a Hitchcock movie. While I have become music, my family is my Life. So much so, that I've experienced a parting of ways with most of my colleagues who’ve concluded otherwise. Perhaps Wright came to that conclusion sometime after the point at which our opera left him, pledging to rebuild Taliesin in Mamah Cheney’s memory. Perhaps not. In the long run, it shall probably only have mattered  to the people he loved and who loved him. 

First published in the Huffington Post on 8 August 2016. Read it there by clicking here.

Now You Are Ready

Eyes closed, I felt the tissue paper hugging my neck’s nape, the shawl nestled at my Adam’s apple, the occasional pressure of a single finger adjusting the angle of my head gently, but firmly, like a pianist giving an A. I smelled the orange spice opening of hand-mixed shaving cream, the sandalwood follow-up of hand soap, the tang of Barbicide, the masculine smell of Pinaud Clubman. The shears snipped in thoughtful bursts at a moderate walking tempo. Andante, I thought. “First I do the beard,” he said. “Yes,” I murmured, not opening my eyes.

There had as yet been no electric razor’s angry buzz, no rushed swipes of a “number two” doing the thinking—it had all been done by hand. It has been decades since I’d last heard the intimate, conversational cadence of old-fashioned barbering. It made me think of the rhythm of my mother’s work sounds as she sculpted me when I was a boy.

Pausing, he asked, “Will you check my work on your beard?” I opened my eyes, reached for my glasses, performed the universal male gesture of running my thumb down one cheek, the rest of my fingers down the other, and closing them, like a prayer, below my chin while turning my head left, then right. “Perfect,” I smiled, taking off my glasses and placing them back on the shelf beneath the enormous mirror. 

His jacket was as white as his hair. About eighty, I thought. “I am finding this haircut oddly comforting,” I remarked. “That’s good,” he said. “Something about not using the razor.” “Ah,” he replied, “you noticed.” The silence for a few beats that feels so natural between a good barber or barkeep and his client. “It was not the way I was taught to cut hair, you see,” he explained. I closed my eyes again as he began trimming my sideburns.

On a hunch, I asked, “Where was that?” He stopped. “Palermo,” he said, quietly. “I learned to cut hair by apprenticing for six years in a barbershop there until, one day, my boss said, ‘now you are ready,’ gave me a pair of scissors, a manual clipper, straight razors, and a brush, and showed me the door.”

I recalled my composer friend Norman Stumpf asking Ned Rorem during a lesson in the early eighties whether Ned thought that he was “ready” to begin his career, and Ned responding, “You’re ready whenever you decide that you are.” My barber performed the customary blessing of matching the length of my sideburns with his knuckles. “Italy,” I mused. “Yes,” he said, reading my mind, “it is a shame about Venezia. Have you been there?”

The waves of emotion, followed by a simple, “Yes, many times.” “I have been only once,” he replied. “I took my wife to La Fenice, do you know it?” “Indeed I do,” I smiled, answering, “Venice’s jewel. One of the peak experiences of my life was visiting Ricordi in Milano and seeing the various performance sets for Verdi and Puccini.” His scissors stopped. “Ah.” Intense, shared emotion. “The opera.”

He worked on in silence, struggling with what to do with the thinning fistful of my hair fecklessly splayed across the exposed scalp growing like the hole in the ozone layer. “When did you come to the States?” I asked. “I was 18. My father applied when I was 13. The U.S. government would only allow him to bring one other family member. He chose me. My grandfather had to put a thousand dollars in the bank in order to show that we would be supported if we didn’t get work.” “Did you?” I asked. The scissors stopped. “I have always worked,” he replied. “Me, too,” I said, quietly. “Yes,” he said.

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A new haircut.

“You are a musician,” he observed, simply. “Of course,” I replied, gently. “My three sons all played instruments. They are in their fifties now. Music kept them out of trouble, and at home.” “Yes,” I replied, “that is good. You must be proud of them.” A caesura in which pictures were drawn down off the mirror. I pulled some snaps of my sons up on the phone. Silence. He reached for his tools. The smell of the talc, the pat-pat-pat as he worked it into my hair; the scraping of his comb; the slight twinge of pain as he hit a blemish.

I thought of an astonishingly personal, cruel, intellectually shallow, and factually inaccurate review of my memoir onto which I had recently stumbled. I had already forgotten the critic’s name. Most kinds of writing don’t require any bravery—criticism least of all—but publishing a memoir is scary; it is one of the kinds of writing that requires courage. I found mine. My book wasn’t confessional—there were no surprises in it for people who knew me—but it was intended to be a work of art that would, in Cesar A. Cruz’s words, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” After a decade working on the memoir, I had spent the first three months of 2019 finalizing the manuscript, and then correcting proofs, making an index, gathering permissions, choosing photos, and so forth. Sending off the final galleys to the publisher, I had thought of the story of the annoyed senior composer who, having just played a recording of her work for an impertinent student in a masterclass, responded to his glib vitriol with a mild, “Next time, you write it.”

I thought of yesterday’s visit to the cardiologist, who, after examining the various diagnostic tests that had been run on my heart, said, “Your heart is getting larger.” When I smiled ruefully, he replied, “That’s not a good thing.” As I do every holiday season, I reminded myself that dealing with grief and depression is not a competition; neither should it be concealed or denied; there’s plenty of anguish to go around.

I thought of my youngest, at the doctor’s office with his mother; my oldest, at school grappling with adolescence. The barber loosened the tissue paper at the nape of my neck and applied a little shaving cream. “Your boys are handsome,” I observed, handing him back the pictures as his straight razor scraped across my jugular. “We are lucky men, yes?” He accepted the snapshots, wiped my neck clean with a warm, wet cloth, spun the chair around and whipped the shawl from my shoulders. “So are yours,” he smiled, “and, yes, we are.”

I looked at the barber’s honest work in the mirror; I took in the aging, soul-weary face of the man who looked back at me, and reached for a way forward. You are not Aschenbach, and he is not the hotel barber; this visit to your barber tells a profoundly different story. I nodded affirmatively to my reflection, and said, “Right, this is how a man does it.”

“Now you are ready,” he said.

Earning the Tune

Granted, melody is but one of the strands that make up musical expression; further, what constitutes a beautiful, or even “memorable” tune, is in the ear of the beholder. Factor in that tastes change: we’re always swinging back and forth, pendulum-like, generation to generation, from romanticism to modernism, like drunks sobering up after a binge, staying sober, and relapsing. After Wagner’s hyper-emotional Tristan und Isolde comes Debussy’s emotionally cool Pelléas et Mélisande where most of the frank emotionalism (summoned up by his utilization of all the music elements at his disposal—harmonic and melodic tension and release, dynamics, texture) is in the orchestra and, in an opera about love, “Je t’aime” is sung as though spoken, and in silence.

I recall for two reasons a composition seminar at Juilliard in fall 1985 at which I presented my String Quartet No. 1. Present were our teachers, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Vincent Persichetti, and David Diamond, as well as about twenty fellow graduate composition students. I remember it primarily because Diamond chewed me out afterwards for “trivializing my work.” I was genuinely surprised by the admonition at the time because I had trusted that the work’s sturdy craftsmanship would speak for itself; that my breezy, self-assured presentation of my musical analysis (I was proud of the fact that every note could be justified both through serial and tonal procedures) would be interpreted as simply unpretentious, and not anti-intellectual. I’m afraid that I never quite embraced David’s advice to “be more respectful of the excellence of your own work in public.”

The second takeaway I recall because it came from an unexpected source. Milton had raised only one point during the question-and-answer portion of the presentation: he had observed that, on the chalkboard behind me, I had mislabeled one of the pitches in my tone row. Chuckling, I had taken no offense, but rather had simply made the correction and sallied into my analysis. Observing my dressing down by the furious Diamond, he came up to me and said, “You know, Daron, it seems to me you pay mightily for that soaring tune in the finale. Maybe ask yourself why.”

The signal I was probably trying to send all those years ago in that seminar was that talent can and should present itself as “easy.” As an upper-class socialite once asked me in a green room, “Why else would we all call what you musicians do ‘playing’?” Of course, I was not giving our shared labor the respect it deserved, so David was correct. But Milton’s point is the one that stays with me now that age and the years have made David’s advice moot.

The “soaring tune” to which Milton referred had been the third, most “ironed-out” version of the rondo’s fugue subject. I had intended that it trigger something close to what Milton had felt. I had felt it when I wrote it, and I trusted myself enough to commit to it. So there it was, a big wet Dionysian kiss in the middle of my highbrow Apollonian string quartet. Milton knew that it took “courage” to share a good tune, and that the first thing that someone looking to put you in your place does is to call it derivative. Why do I feel even now as though tunes have to be “earned?” Raised Lutheran—and, like many composers of my generation, taught to temper tunes with just enough “abstract” wrong notes to keep them from really taking off—I’ve always wrestled with the “unearned” bliss of unabashed, emotionally-frank lyricism. Early on, during the 90s, a New York Times critic wrote of my first opera that I had “a gift for big, sweeping tunes;” thirty years later, another Times critic thought that my latest opera contained “too much lyricism.”  Right.

I thanked Milton for the observation and sort of forgot about the advice that had followed. But, watching my son row with his mates in a shell on the Hudson in the driving rain from the safety of my car this morning, I was reminded that even the bliss of rowing at dawn on the Hudson on a perfect day has got to be earned by also putting out when the weather is inclement.

Back in the day, Ned Rorem’s primly modernist Air Music (a terrific piece in which “there’s not a tune you can hum-bum-bum-be-dum”) won a Pulitzer, while his Sunday Morning (closer to his heart, more effusively melodic) garnered more love than respect. Some composers might say that it takes more courage to dish out a “big tune” with “soaring horn calls” than it does to craft honorable, abstract pieces just tuneful enough not to rile anyone up. After all, the old conventional wisdom runs, pieces with “good tunes” belong on pops concerts. A highly-tuneful work on a major orchestra’s subscription season can provoke conductorial winks to the audience and players. Diamond accused me of “not enough self-criticism” when what he meant was that I shouldn’t indulge in writing memorable tunes. In Tim Robbins’ Cradle Will Rock gloss, John Cusak, portraying Nelson Rockefeller (in this scenario, the upper class baddie), pours money into abstract art with Sarandon (as the amoral art dealer Sarfatti) on his arm because Rubén Blades’ Rivera (the dangerous artist moving between classes) makes art that riles up working class folks. Cue the Blitzstein. Next on our show: was Modernism a State Department / CIA Psy-Op? I enjoy the off the rails nature of that sort of read, whether it is true or not.

So what’s a tune if you denature it? Parlando. Gian Carlo Menotti pointed out to me once that “recitative and parlando are just foreplay.”  I recall attending a performance of Jack Beeson’s opera My Heart’s in the Highlands and growing steadily more irritated that every time he was about to really break out into a memorable tune he cut himself short. Laughing, Bernstein described this affliction as “Tuneus Interruptus.” When Burt Bacharach died a few weeks ago, I recalled Babbitt’s advice to “ask myself why” again. Bacharach’s tunes, seemingly bubble-gummy, are actually tricky to sing; it is the composer’s struggle to be both catchy and smart that gives them their zest. The quip that Peter Shaffer puts into Emperor Joseph II’s mouth in Amadeus that there are “too many notes” shifted in the 20th century to something more insidious: now one runs the risk of putting in “too many pretty notes.” (Even more recently, the vogue is to slam “too much functional harmony.” What is the phrase? In lean times the rich are overweight; in fat times they are lean?

Howard Pollack’s biography of Samuel Barber describes beautifully—and rightly—the upper-class Main Line Philadelphia society into which he was born. Ned, born into a middle-class Chicago family, composed increasingly modernist music as he aged. Like Ned, I was born into the middle-American middle-class. Unlike Ned, I found the acquisition of a Mid-Atlantic compositional accent (the whole “abstract” thing where textures and colors take the place of tunes so that other, less confrontational, factors can come to the fore) and the role of arriviste beside the point, as I was steadfastly committed to the pursuit of emotional nakedness, regardless of … “taste.” The chimera of what constitutes “good taste” is often used to beat down perceived competitors—as if making art is a contest! “Ladies and gentlemen, in this corner, the boxer from Tin Pan Alley; in the other, the pugilist from Lincoln Center.”

An artist who labors to conceal his craft is, when successful, often described as an “effortless” melodist and derided as a “tunesmith” rather than as a composer. A “tunesmith” is a tradesman; a composer is an artist. In The Agony and the Ecstacy, novelist Irving Stone has testy Pope Julius shout up to Michelangelo, “When will you make an end?” The maestro snarls back, “When I am finished.” Crawford’s contempt as the dissolute patroness Helen for Garfield’s vulgar “striver” virtuoso violinist Paul in Humoresque, for all the delicious camp with which it is presented, is adroitly mixed by someone who had been around and seen a thing or two (playwrite Clifford Odets) with envy, self-loathing and lust. Artists move freely through classes, it is true; but we’re still servants at play; we are meant never, ever to forget who owns the house, and the way to the kitchen door. We’re still talking about how talent intersects with class, aren’t we, Milton? You old fox.

A digression, perhaps, but it is important to mention that it isn’t just “melody” that comes in for the class-related slap down. I recall the casual contempt with which a colleague whose cultural reference points (and social aspirations) were shaped by their years at Harvard and Columbia dismissed the first movement of my Koto Concerto. Why? Because, for them, “serious” meant “saturating the chromatic” and I had, as a compositional challenge, based it entirely on a simple pentatonic pitch group. The brilliant composer David Rakowski has written hilariously about the various other self-imposed (!) creative hang-ups of our compositional generation here.

When the American Academy gave me an Academy Award a few years ago, the citation noted that I was being honored for having “achieved my own voice.” Grateful as I was for the recognition, I admit that I was a little puzzled by the citation. Stephen Sondheim’s smart, tart lyric from Anyone Can Whistle came to mind: “What's hard is simple. / What's natural come hard.” I think my songs are harder to sing than they ought to be because I’m still —still! — after forty years, struggling to be “easier” to sing. What is in youth derided as “facile” is deemed later as “not self-critical enough.” (In need of more “wrong” notes?) Some composers have to fight to get there; others never give it a thought; but, one day, a composer ceases to care what colleagues and critics think. A mindful composer never stops caring about how the audience feels, though. Consequently, I still believe that anybody can, in fact, whistle; I believe in “peace, justice, and good tunes.”

Why? Because, in the final analysis, good tunes are the surest, most generous, most intimate way a composer has to share unconditional, unearned love with an audience. That’s why tunes move us so deeply; why they threaten some people, console others, and embarrass others. As Milton admonished me so long ago, “Maybe ask yourself why.”

And the Music Was With Him: Burt Bacharach (1928-2023)

ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The bit was in. I had spotted bliss—far off in the distance still, but real enough to enthrall. Fifteen years old, summer of 1976, body vibrating, ablaze with youth and hormones at the kitchen table at three in the morning with the radio on listening to Ron Cuzner’s overnight jazz show on WFMR and copying parts to Together, the musical I was writing for my friends.

Cuzner introduced the six-minute-long 1971 Polydor recording to his listeners as though disclosing classified information over whisky to a fellow agent in a smoky bar near Checkpoint Charlie. I remember the words clearly: “He hails from California. (beat of silence) Marlene Dietrich (again, the silence, to let the enormously important intelligence land) is reported to have (beat) loved him. He married a glamorous movie star (beat), Angie Dickinson. But he was a student of Milhaud, and Cowell (I knew who these guys were and was impressed) who, shall we say, went off the railswith the likes of (he paused, as though about to invoke a Holy Trinity) Warwick, Jones, and Alpert. This (Cuzner’s ultimate seal of approval) very cool orchestral work describes the moment you first see (long beat) her.”

Five years earlier, my brother Kevin had brought the Columbia LP’s of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS home and I had scandalized my fellow ten-year-olds by playing “it was goddamn good” (listen to Alan Titus sing it here) in class at Linfield School to the horror of Principal Buege (pronounced “Biggy,” of course) and to the delight of my mother. (Kevin had provoked similar outrage by bringing Jesus Christ Superstar to school a year earlier.) But my mom also adored Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, and Frank Sinatra—the exquisite Nelson Riddle arrangements of the Cole Porter songbook especially. I was immersed in the Beatles songbook, of course; I had read Twilight of the Gods, Wilfred Mellers’ terrific book about their songs, the previous summer. My brothers and I had wept in 1970 when the announcer introduced the first local broadcast of The Long and Winding Road on WOKY by revealing that the Beatles had decided to split up.

Intuiting that something interesting was about to happen, I slipped a cassette in to tape it, missing the first few bars. I would listen to that recording of And the People Were With Her a hundred times that summer. I still have it.

My literature teacher, Diane Doerfler, knew that the one thing I was sure I was going to do was leave Wisconsin for the coast at the very first opportunity. Which coast was very much up in the air. My father favored the west coast: he recorded movie soundtracks by way of a jack he had installed on the back of our television. I’d spent a lot of time listening to dozens of them—particularly to Elmer Bernstein’s majestic Great Escape, Magnificent Seven, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Doerfler was in favor of the east coast: she had tossed me a copy (which I still have) of John Cheever’s collected short stories about life in the Hudson Valley and quipped, “Here. Read these. They will help.” (They did. Doerf was right; after decades in Manhattan, I now live in the Hudson Valley.)

From the moment that And the People Were With Her (listen here as you read this piece) ended, my “Killer B’s” for the rest of summer 1975 became Beatles, Bernstein, and Bacharach and the west coast became a real contender. John Williams’ pealing orchestral main title to Star Wars in summer 1978 hit me like a hammer, and I was certain — according to my diaries — that I would move to Los Angeles and start work as an orchestrator, perhaps even graduate in time to scoring. The decision was made when mother sent my orchestral Suite for a Lonely City to Helen Coates and in return received a letter — a sort of unexpected musical golden ticket — from Leonard Bernstein which she would open a few feet away from where I was sitting. East it was.

In a few months, Kevin would put Britten’s Billy Budd on the record player, and my future as an opera composer would be set: Bacharach was supplanted by Britten. By the time I graduated high school, the earthy authenticity of Bartok supplanted the Beatles. College in Madison brought Homer Lambrecht’s influence; he introduced me to the Italianate suavity of Berio, and my musical trinity became Berio, Britten, and Bernstein. When I finally landed at Curtis, Lukas Foss got me into Stockhausen — a needed antidote to the polishing and professionalizing I was receiving in my lessons with Ned Rorem — and my world was turned inside out. I dedicated myself to Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach as far as the school and my peers were concerned — heaven knows I had enough to learn about that repertoire! — and holed up at the Free Library with Stockhausen and the eastern bloc modernists in the afternoons. Though I toyed with a career in LA during summer 1988, I ended up moving to Europe instead, returning to New York City for good in 1990.

Being a pianist and devotee of the American Songbook helps one to truly credit the subversive power of Bacharach’s music. Gershwin, Arlen, Kern, Rogers, Porter — the lot of them — were only a few years past. Like Bernstein, Bacharach’s chord choices could be deliciously “classical” (I hear the harmonic choices of Bill Evans), with modulations, shifting meters and phrase lengths. Some of his bridges (my favorite is the wandering and wonderful, take-that-Kern-and-Arlen bridge to A House is Not a Home — listen here) are pure bliss. Like Stephen Sondheim and Bernstein, his tunes could be tricky. But during his Warwick-Alpert years, I sense that something in him led him to craft surprisingly memorable (though, again, deceptively simple yet more than quirky and smart, I’d say inspired) tunes.

I have read that Bacharach will be remembered compositionally as a transitional figure bridging the methods perfected by the 50s Brill Building bunch and rock and roll. Or maybe as the American Michel Legrand. Maybe, but I think that takeaway unfairly diminishes his accomplishment. He was a master of instrumental MOR. (“Middle-of-the-road,” a commercial radio format that includes “easy listening” and can even cover cool genres such as Shibuya-kei and show tunes and not so cool ones like Countrypolitan.) MOR makes musical snobs crazy—particularly when a gifted composer writes it. I love that. It’s subversive, and musical chauvinists just don’t get it.

Bacharach brilliantly subverted commercial music clichés and practices by marrying them (thereby freshening classical tropes and supercharging pop music tropes) to classical chops and compositional procedures not to accompany the dissipation of the valium and martini hazed Greatest Generation, but to underline their societal disillusionment. When James Coburn steps into William Daniels’ den (watch it here) in The President’s Analyst (1967) and Daniels’ character (a gun-toting “liberal”) flicks a switch, filling the room with “total sound,” the music supplied by Lalo Schifrin captured the essence of what I have described elsewhere as that which is “heard in the waiting room of a dentist’s office while awaiting a root canal.” It’s MOR, it’s the seamy underside of the American Dream, and it is glorious.

When Cory, a 35 year old arbitrageur who works at the World Trade Center, arrives and lets rip with a big aria in my operafilm 9/10: Love Before the Fall, he’s characterized by the sort of virile Mike Post television theme (here, or here, or here) from the 70s-90s he’d have grown up with—who knows, maybe watching LA Law as a teenager was what inspired him to become a lawyer! When Bibi, a 21-year-old singer brought up in Los Angeles, remembers her childhood there, she swings into music that could have been lifted wholesale from Nikki (listen here). MOR had served as the background music to their suburban childhoods as much as shag carpeting had comforted their bare feet in the den—one on the east coast, the other on the west. It is my honor to characterize them with the music with which they would have identified. Editing the film, I’ve watched again and again (as only one strapped to a moviola must) as people in the room reacted with everything from delight to contempt to these musical moments, depending on who they think they are or what they think music ought to be.

Bacharach was who he was, and his honor — whether it be in South American Getaway (listen here, where he out swingles the Swingle Singers and puts a pin in Berio’s magnificent Sinfonia), or Pacific Coast Highway (listen here, from 1968) in which he captures the dread-filled determination to be carefree that I still picked up on while driving on it during the 90s to Stinson Beach — was to contextualize his time.

To me, though, the most incorruptible facet of Bacharach’s compositional gift remains the gleaming horizontality of his melodies from which the chords seem to hang like icicles from the eaves of an irregular roofline. Hal David’s lyrics were middlebrow — another thing that made the songs easier to digest than Sondheim’s — but heartfelt and soulful. I was never crazy for the collaborations with Bayer Sager. Elvis Costello’s verse — smart, dark, and probing, was a great foil for the late Bacharach as a songwriter. Bacharach set lyrics as an art song composer would poetry (or as Elton John treats Bernie Taupin’s words, though he is liable to override the lyrics entirely for the sake of a good hook or tune) — permitting the rhythm of the unevenly proportioned lyric lines to generate melodies more like those from an art song than a popular song.

Perhaps, if he had been the sort of man who could have been contained by the eastern seaboard, he would not have toured with Dietrich, courted commercial success, or married Dickinson, or encountered his singer muse Warwick (his Leontyne?) and created I Say a Little Prayer (listen here to it as not just a love confection but as the cri de coeur of a woman whose boyfriend is in Vietnam and you get how his songs can be simultaneously winsome and wise) and a host of other great Motown-influenced gems. Maybe he would have surpassed Alec Wilder’s expectations and created a new American art song repertoire. Maybe he would have been America’s other Samuel Barber. Maybe he did. Maybe he was.

On Ned Rorem's Our Town

When Thornton Wilder’s 1938 meta-theatrical triptych of portraits of American Life Our Town (which, no matter when it is staged, always takes place in 1938) was produced at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, twenty years had passed since the American Dream had been convulsed by the “War to End all War.” That which burns away any Rockwell-esque nostalgia and powers the drama of the play is the “Damoclesian sword” that was the rise of fascism and the impending outbreak of World War II—only months away. The audience was invited to grieve for the characters from the moment that they met the omniscient, fourth-wall-piercing character of the Stage Manager. It was in the air: Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, (with Blitzstein and Orson Welles on stage essentially splitting the role that Wilder would transform into the Stage Manager for his Our Town) had electrified the American theater during summer 1937. Louise Talma (the only composer besides Hindemith to convince Wilder to pen a libretto, in German, no less—for her earnest, turgid Alcestiad—in the ’50s) told me at Yaddo during the ’90s that “Thornton certainly knew Marc’s opera. The Depression was winding down. We saw Hitler coming to power. People were mourning Good Old Days that never were.”[1]

Arguably, Wilder’s “continual dryness of tone”—as he described it in the introductory note to the 1938 “acting edition” of the play—found its ideal composer in Aaron Copland’s seminal 1940 musical score (dedicated to Leonard Bernstein) for the original film.[2] Copland, according to Vivian Perlis, stated, “For the film version, they were counting on the music to translate the transcendental aspects of the story. I tried for clean and clear sounds and in general used straightforward harmonies and rhythms that would project the serenity and sense of security of the story.” Rudolf Bing, then general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, approached Copland in 1951 with the idea of expanding his score into a full-length operatic version. Wilder, according to Perlis, quashed the idea, responding, “my texts ‘swear at’ music; they’re after totally different effects.”[3] What was required, as Wilder wrote in his introduction to the play was, “the New England understatement of sentiment, of surprise, of tragedy. A shyness about emotion ... a sharpening and distinctness of the voice.”

Fast forward. Wilder said no to many composers during his lifetime, though he did permit Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart to turn The Matchmaker into Hello Dolly and, in 1965, did grant rights to Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green to adapt The Skin of Our Teeth into a musical. Musical theater collaborations are fickle—everything’s got to fall into place or the producers bolt and the soufflé falls. Everything didn’t, and the project collapsed. When Lenny returned to Wilder, seeking operatic rights, Wilder shut him down. We are the poorer for his decision.[4]

I studied with composer Ned Rorem during the early ’80s while a student at the Curtis Institute, and served as his copyist for half a decade after that. I knew his music from the inside out, and I knew particularly well his short operas. Art song composer nonpareil, he and Kenward Elmslie had adapted August Strindberg’s Miss Julie in 1965 with mixed success, and many thought him not suited to the demands of large-scale lyric theater. But Ned persevered, and garnered universal praise from opera stalwarts when, in 1994, he returned to Miss Julie, trimming it into a “taut and persuasive” 90-minute one act, according to James Oestreich in the Times.[5]

J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy, the svelte poet, erudite editor, and versatile librettist for Little Nemo in Slumberland (Daron Hagen), Miss Lonelyhearts (Lowell Liebermann), 1984 (Lorin Maazel), Dolores Claiborne (Tobias Picker), and A Question of Taste (William Schuman) among others, and I met when translator William Weaver commissioned me to compose some songs in memory of James Merrill—Sandy was Merrill’s executor. I admired his libretti and told him so. He said that Tappan Wilder had agreed to loosen the bonds on the Our Town rights, and that he, Sandy, was looking for the right composer. How, he asked me, would I proceed if I took on the job? I don’t recall now what I said, but I do recall ending the conversation by saying, “You know, the man you’re looking for is really Ned Rorem. Ned’s Quakerism provides the proper emotional repose; his age the appropriate cultural reference points. Most importantly, he’s entirely secure in his own voice, and will be comfortable letting Wilder’s play take the lead.”

I doubt that Sandy chose Ned because of what I said, but I knew then (and now) that I was right.Our Town the opera was premiered by Indiana University Opera Theater with student singers and orchestra on February 25, 2006. Its professional debut was at the Lake George Opera on July 1, 2006. Intended from the start to be a chamber opera, the orchestration is small, and the scoring is light and transparent throughout—consistent with a work best suited to young voices. The formal structure follows Wilder’s play closely. Minor deviations from the original play seem to have been made (the fleshing out of the role of Simon Stimson, the creation of choral numbers, for example) to provide opportunities for musicalization. Rorem moves in and out of speech and utilizes more elevated recitative (parlando) than in his previous theatrical works.

Playing through Ned’s first manuscript vocal score with Gilda Lyons shortly after he finished his first draft, we pounced upon the opportunity of giving the concert première of the (now classic) aria for Emily. (Notably, the opera’s only freestanding set piece.) In it, the ironic union of opposites that make the opera Our Town the immediate American classic that it is were on full display—economy of construction, absolute, unwavering resistance to unnecessary emotionalism, frankly open textures, wisps of Poulenc at his driest, and the sort of stunning Protestant hymns that only an atheistic alcoholic Quaker whose life partner was a church organist can pen. Everywhere in the music there is a sort of cool, self-contained regretfulness—the regret so central to the play’s initial impetus, a regret so intense as to border on dread—that perfectly underpins and undercuts the sentimentality of the portraits.

Rorem uses three compositional strategies to hold the opera together structurally, track the story’s narrative, and to keep his musical rhetoric coherent.

First, he manifests Wilder’s “emotional shyness” with abrupt stylistic cross-cutting (in mid- thought, sometimes in mid-musical phrase) between Americana (Thomsonian faux-Protestant hymns, plush sustained cinematic strings, Copland-esque woodwind solos, Ivesian collages), transatlantic modernism (the tartly-scored “sting” chords, jagged, off-kilter ostinatos in close- canon, denatured melodic fragments in place of memorable tunes), and Gallic lyricism (rapturous string obbligatos, sudden snatches of emotionally-vibrant melody, Debussy-esque orchestration).

The first sixty seconds of the opera deftly arrays all three techniques. The pungent bell-tone chord that strikes 5AM declares that Our Town is part of a continuum of American operas that frankly destabilize traditional harmony by thrusting, like a billy to the ribs, an unresolved fourth into the triad. Blitzstein’s poisoned capitalists, Bernstein’s tragic suburbanites, my tormented architect, and Rorem’s dread-filled citizens of Grover’s Corners all inhabit the same American operatic landscape. Ned immediately crosscuts to another of his favorite tropes—the faux Protestant chorus underpinned harmonically by parallel unresolved sevenths in the bass—before overlaying a sudden, Gallic, sensually-arresting obbligato in the high strings. When the action begins, the parlando (passages of elevated speech that do not quite rise to song) section that follows is typical of the handling of dialogue throughout the opera: The characters unpretentiously skitter halfway between speech and recitative over a plush, comforting pad of sustained, Copland-esque strings.

Second, throughout the opera, beginning in the background during the first moments as a woodwind obbligato like a nettlesome foreigner, is a “deedle-dum” figure that unmistakably evokes the falling motif associated with the doomed nuns in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites[Fig. 5]. Rorem’s personal association with the motif inspired him to quote it in his own song, “For Poulenc” [Fig. 6], and, over the years, a dozen instrumental works, large and small. In the score of Our Town, it completes its transit (in Ned’s life as a composer and in his catalogue) in his characterization of Emily [Fig. 7].

The motif evolves inexorably over the course of the opera, generating tension the way that someone playing with their hair during a serious conversation is at first slightly distracting and, over time, enervating. It begins to take on a life of its own as the second act unfolds, the curling of melodies in the background behind the characters’ parlando turning in on themselves in an Ouroborus-like way, transforming the fragments into slowly unraveling ostinati that are both claustrophobic and comforting—like the family life Rorem’s music limns. Characters begin taking on the background ostinati and incorporating them into their parlando in odd melismatic passages that heighten words in a baroque fashion. As the second act closes and the young couple marry, the dread given us by the first acerbic chord of the opera returns, literally underscoring the fragility of their happiness. A violin solo gives another fleeting taste of sensual pleasure before Rorem snuffs it as, again, “too much” to close with an anything but comforting, dread-filled, Ives-ian mash-up of the “Mendelssohn Wedding March.”

Pedal points in the strings, quizzical quasi-chorales in the winds and brass, the “deedle-dum” curling wind obbligati, all return in the third act; the opera continues to unfold, but all the vocal lines are heightened above parlando (they’re taken closer to “song” and effusive tunefulness by making their tunes less abstract and more traditionally singable and giving the phrases more melismas) in a way that they weren’t in the first two acts. This “gradual emotional warming” manifests Ned’s third, and most subtle, strategy for giving the opera emotional depth, the character of Emily emotional verifiability, and the piece a satisfying emotional trajectory.

This is how he did it. Gradually, Rorem invests the chorus with more and more emotional warmth so that they—in death, but not in life—create the sort of musico-emotional landscape into which Emily can step. The apotheosis of the opera is, of course, Emily’s aria, wherein Rorem combines at proximity all the musical gestures laid out in the first two acts. In this, the “eleven o’clock” spot, he gives Emily the only unabashedly rapturous music in the opera, and on the most regretful sentiment: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” The composer’s self-control in finally allowing us to “feel” is masterful; the effect is devastating. His obvious identification with Emily, Poulenc, and the nuns is an astonishing personal revelation for a composer so famously public in his prose and yet so resolutely private in fact. Emily concludes, as Ned (a writer who eschews exclamation points and composer who famously hates repeating words, breaks his own rules) sums up a world-view, “That’s all human beings are. Blind!”

But why did Our Town need to be made into an opera? Just 80 years have elapsed since the 1937 premiere of Wilder’s play, yet a 1938 audience’s dread is like that felt in many quarters in 2017. Spring 2017 may find Americans in greater need of the sort of narrative that Our Town provides than they have been since the ’30s. The “Damoclesian sword” of rising fascism has returned with a vengeance; we’re told that we’re not experiencing a Depression, yet unemployment isn’t being measured in a way that considers how many people have simply stopped looking for work, or the fact that retired people are working at Walmart to supplement their pensions. The Peterborough, New Hampshire, that Wilder used as a model for Grover’s Corners had faded to the margins by the time I began visiting the MacDowell Colony during the early ’80s. Nobody in Wilder’s play could afford to live in the Peterborough of today.

Ned has told me that Satie’s Socrate may be “the greatest of all operas.” Certainly, he exploits in his score for Our Town the same kind of baroque cantata textures and affects as Satie did in his 1920 masterpiece and that Wilder (according to Mabel Dodge)[6] most preferred. But the Rorem and McClatchy Our Town also contains—in the propulsive, off-kilter ostinati percolating uneasily beneath the Nantucket matter-of-factness of its musical surfaces and its stubborn unwillingness to wear its heart on its sleeve—an astonishing undercurrent of unanticipated, and highly effective dramaturgical fury.

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This article originally appeared as the liner notes to New World Records 80790-2 [2 CDS] world premiere recording of Ned Rorem and J.D. McClatchy’s opera Our Town, based on the play by Thornton Wilder.

Footnotes

1. Louise Talma in conversation with the author at Yaddo, summer 1995.

2. Thornton Wilder’s “Some Suggestions for the Director” from the 1938 “acting edition” of the script.

3. Vivian Perlis quotes Aaron Copland in a letter to the New York Times, January 31, 1998.

4. Tappan Wilder, program notes for “Thornton Wilder and Music,” a program by the American Symphony Orchestra, December 19, 2014.

5. James Oestreich, New York Times review of the Manhattan School of Music production of the revised Miss Julie, spring 1994.

6. Mabel Dodge is quoted by Tappan Wilder in his American Symphony Orchestra program note.

Old Pictures

Risking Lot’s wife’s lot, poring through a box of old pictures the other day, I came upon a posed portrait of me with my arm thrown around the shoulder of someone with whom I once felt close. I thought of Maya Angelou: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Another picture, a candid of me accompanying a young violist at the Camargo Foundation, an artist colony in France, came to hand. I couldn’t remember her name or the name of the piece we were playing, but I could remember the tune and what key it was in. I remembered the smell of lavender and the Med wafting through the half-opened French doors. The abductive reasoning “duck test” came to mind: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” Chuckling, I thought then about the “Duke” (Ellington) test: “If it sounds good, it IS good.”

I began thinking about the role that paradigmatic imagery versus syntagmatic has played in shaping the way that I think as a composer and dramaturge.

Just as every image one sees brings another to mind, everything one hears inevitably reminds one of something we’ve heard before. Composers are mockingbirds. What of originality? Musical allusions, outright quotations, sampled recontextualizations, false recollections, received opinions, sentimental reverence for the canon, social engineering, and the understandable human desire to be loved—maybe what saves composers in the end is the fact that music itself is an abstract artform.

Just as every piece of music brings another to mind, everything one sees inevitably reminds one of something we’ve seen before. Portraits are generally paradigmatic, static in nature; they are staged, inherently theatrical; they are artificial portrayals of the “truth” in the moment, or the subject—think mashed potatoes standing in for ice cream. Candid photos are usually syntagmatic, narrative, “frozen moments,” or augenblicken—think movie stills; the term “candid photo” itself imbues, or at least encourages the viewer to infer that, because it was captured in medias res, it is somehow honestly derived.

Closing pas de deux from my ballet "Interior," based on the Zola novel, "Therese Racquin," choreography by Diane Coburn Bruning commissioned by the Juilliard Dance Division, Muriel Topaz, director, for their 1989 spring gala, with Bruno Ferandez conducting the orchestra, 17 April 1989.

I first got to know Edgar Degas’ great painting Interior, or Le Viol in 1972 as a child from a reproduction in a coffee table book belonging to my mother. Precisely ten years later, to my astonishment, I first saw the original hanging over the couch in Henry McIllhenny’s living room in Philadelphia, having been taken there by my teacher Ned Rorem for tea. It now hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I’ve read somewhere that Degas himself refered to it as “mon tableau de genre,”—as a “genre” painting outside of his usual fach. It combines decorative elements, such as the wallpaper; theatrical ones, like the consciously syntagmatic, theatrical placement of the characters and narrative ambiguity—the title encourages us to respond to the dramatic tension created by the competing visual rhetorical languages: the elements in the painting clash, paintings within the painting distract and compel. Degas places directly before the viewer a mirror into which, should we by chance look deeply enough and, if only Degas had not shielded us from ourselves in it by making the image indistinct, we would see ourselves—complicit voyeurs taking in a sordid and painfully human scene.

Degas is said to have drawn inspiration from Emile Zola’s great novel Therese Racquin, in whose characters this transgressive power dynamic is forcefully explored. Diane Doerfler, my high school literature teacher, tossed the book my way in 1979. Eyebrows arched mischievously, she promised that I’d “find an opera in it.” During fall 1985 I dipped into sketches I was making for one to craft the second movement (“Interior—after Degas”) of my Piano Trio No. 2 for the Lehner Trio, who debuted it at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center during spring 1987. By then, choreographer Diane Coburn Bruning and I were casting about for a subject for a new ballet, which we called Interior, commissioned by Muriel Topaz for the 1989 Juilliard Dance Division’s spring gala. I suggested the Zola, and we were off. Diane’s choreography juxtaposed and interwove a traditional narrative (we tracked the lovers’ story) with abstract (decorative?) moves for the ensemble.

When Seattle Opera commissioned me to craft the large-scale opera Amelia in 2005, our creative team intertwined mythology, fantasies, simultaneous timelines, and rhetorical juxtaposition to create context to convey the story of Amelia, a mother-to-be at full term coming to terms with the childhood loss of her naval aviator father had been lost at sea during the Vietnam conflict. In one example of combining the paradigmatic and syntagmatic, a climactic quintet during the second act featured Amelia’s aunt praying in real time while seated next to the unconscious Amelia in one hospital room, Amelia Earhart emerging from her downed aircraft in Amelia’s imagination, a father and son who is succumbing to injuries sustained in a fall from a great height (who may or may not be Icarus and his father Dædalus), and Amelia’s dead father, in dress whites, urging her back to life.

A screen grab from Orson Rehearsed.

Orson Rehearsed, my 2021 opera film, explored the interior of Orson Welles’ mind as he comes to terms not with the bardo of giving birth to a baby, but with the bardo between life and what comes after. Like the viewers of Degas’ painting, the audience at once witnesses both a portrait and a staged tableau. In Orson, not one but three “realistic” avatars strive to braid themselves into a coherent understanding of what is happening to them, accompanied by movies that reveal the (entirely subjective) images inside their minds. Together, they perform “live” with music both acoustic and canned, both “real” and “synthesized.” The “live” performances they give are then recontextualized on black and white film inside an otherwise full-color film that treats their live performance as but one of multiple elements—the others being single-color screened stills from elsewhere in the narrative, and a complete storyline for a mute character (the “Departing Boy / Youngest Orson”) who exists only as fragments of public domain stock footage from the 30s and newly-shot footage with a child actor (my son, at the age of nine). At the climactic moment in the opera film, (“Myocardial Infarction,” or the instant of his death), Welles’ consciousness extends from the instant of his demise into the past and the future. One of the Orsons sings Emma Lazarus’ 1903 sonnet “The New Colossus” as a reminder that Rhodes fell, that the library at Alexandria was sacked, that, as Matthew 24:6-8 reminds us, “all … things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”—only, in Welles’ case, it is. Or maybe not. A second Orson sings the repugnant words of the reptilian lawyer Roy Cohn; the third smugly spews the tweets of a “reality television show politician” from 2019. 

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Observe (in addition to the fascinating lagniappe) in this still from the faux newsreel shown at the beginning of Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” how Welles characteristically delineates foreground, middle ground, and background action, overlaying overall the chiaroscuro of a shadow.

 I drew some more pictures from the box. A snapshot of my high school sweetheart came to hand.  “Is all that we see or seem,” asked Poe in 1849, “but a dream within a dream?” On the piano rack behind us sat the manuscript of a setting of Poe’s poem that I had just made for her. I found the sheet music, published a few years later by EC Schirmer, and had empirical proof of the “truth” of the fact that it was composed on Christmas Day, 1981. Why? Because there it was, in a published piece. It must be true, right? But I don’t remember being there. Remember Turgenev, in 1862, in Fathers and Sons, when he rolled out this heartbreaker: “The drawing shows me at a glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.” Indeed, I have forgotten so much now; and such strange new memories have begun to surface after the publication of my memoir. In truth, I had forgotten that the song was written for her in the first place. The picture brought it all back in a flash.

I closed the box, taped it shut, and wrote “OLD PICTURES” on it with a sharpie before stowing it away, probably not to be opened again for another twenty years. For some reason, I thought for an instant of a recent, rather nasty review in which a freelance writer/composer had described Orson Rehearsed as “a hectic 60 minutes with a tendency to cliché (‘we are all alone’) and cod-metaphysics (‘eye equals I’)” and was reminded that one is never clever enough to play that game. The quotations, of course, like most of them in the piece, were Welles’ own public domain utterances. As for the word cliché, slipped in like a shiv, the writer is saying that my work betrays a lack of original thought. The Internet being what it is, I went to the computer and listened to some of the critic’s music, took the work’s measure, and smiled inwardly, for—to paraphrase Plato—beauty truly is in the eyes of the beholder.

Pomodoro: Singing a Librettist's Praises

So moved was I by it that I posted a picture of a dazzling late November tomato from my garden on my Facebook feed in November 2018. Within moments, Christopher Rouse (Godspeed, Chris!) posted, “Better eat it soon!” To which I immediately replied, “Oh, it was et mere seconds after I snapped the pic!” A few beats later, Mark Campbell posted, “There is a song in this, Daron,” to which I replied, “If you pen the lyric, I will set it!” “I just might,” Mark responded, “But it’s not a comic song, as much as tomato is usually a comic word.” “Agreed,” I typed, and forgot about it.

A few days later, Mark sent me one of the finest, most “settable” lyrics I’ve ever read. Thanking him, I resolved to put it aside until I had a project in hand that was worthy of its excellence. A year later, Lyric Fest of Philadelphia and the Brooklyn Art Song Society co-commissioned me to create a sixty-minute song cycle for six solo voices and piano four-hands. On my birthday this past November, the resulting valedictory cycle, which I titled The Art of Song, was premiered by its commissioners at the Church of the Holy Trinity on Rittenhouse Square. Mark’s poem joined a big garland of poems, and figured prominently as one of the emotional and musical anchors of the piece as a whole.

I realized, as I walked into the church for the concert, that I had last been there during an era now almost entirely lost: November 1982. With me was my then teacher Ned Rorem—the Curtis Institute of Music being just across Rittenhouse Square—and my benefactor at the time, curator and chairman of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Henry McIlhenny—whose townhouse stood also on the square, next door to the Ethical Culture Society and its pretty little performance hall. (Although the romantic in me would have preferred that Henry’s fortune derived from tabasco sauce, it in fact grew out of his grandfather’s invention and development of gas meters.) Ned had invited Henry to the recital in order that he might hear some of the music that had derived from his financial generosity. Several classmates were about to premiere on a concert series sponsored by the church a sonata for cello and piano that I had penned for the occasion. (The music is in a box unopened since the 80s now somewhere in my in-laws’ attic—proof that, while I rarely withdraw something I’ve written, pieces tend to withdraw themselves.) On the same program, my fellow art song swashbuckler, soprano Karen Hale (then Noteboom) and I were set to perform a slew of brand new songs—all of which ended up in the first song cycles of mine that E.C. Schirmer published—Echo’s Songs and Love Songs.

If my last visit to the church had taken place during my life’s April, then surely my return celebrated it’s November. Here I was, myself now, like the “funny word” tomato in my garden—the pomodoro in Mark’s lyric— “a flashing ember in the ashen garden;” here to celebrate my 58th birthday with the premiere of a new work after the “end of summer had long passed, / to shine the last,” and—as he cannily repeated the line, “to shine the last and brightest.”

Harmony drives emotion in the instrumental component of vocal music the way that lyrics drive the tune. I’ve long composed autobiographical songs in G major. “Pomodoro’s” harmonic “reality” is C major; but it harmonically aspires to be in G major. A stubborn tritone (or raised fourth scale degree; the third of C’s secondary dominant—which injects a great deal of harmonic “lift” into a chord progression) F# keeps edging the music into the key of G (the dominant) when the emotion intensifies.

Mark’s poem begins, as a character sketch number should, conversationally.

When I first saw the thing,

I thought it was a hoax.

The cruelest of jokes.

Had to be store-bought, I thought,

Tied to the vine with a string.

Split neatly up into short digestible bits that the composer can deal out like cards in a light parlando style—think old-time recitative but a little more elevated, like contemporary popera—not actually tuneful, but agreeable, bougeoir, and disarming—his tone evokes Billy Bigelow from Carousel; he’s knowing, wry, an affectionate trickster. But beneath the chit-chat, Mark is keeping the construction tight by internally rhyming hoax / jokes, and bought / thought and then literally tying up the stanza with thing / string. It requires music that disarms the listener and draws them in—a Sondheim-like musical theater vamp, perhaps; but something that, like the words, has the craft to conceal its craft, and the humility not to broadcast how clever it is.

A tomato in my garden

In November.

Late in November.

Mark sits on the delicious, warm “r” sound in garden and November, and—knowing that most composers (certainly me) will want to linger there—repeats the word. This invites the composer to warm up the music, too, to turn up the emotional heat a tad. The lyric provides a neat transition to the next lines, which ably continue ramping up the emotional heat.

A flashing ember in the ashen garden,

Before skies darken,

Before the ground begins to harden,

A bit of (welcome) purple in the fire imagery, which he blows on with a triple rhyme—garden / darken / harden—all those juicy, fruity “r’s” to sing and use to “feel” as a singer. The composer’s job here is obvious: the rhymes are quickening, so the harmonic and rhythmic pulse should, too. In this case, I broke from groups of four eighths into groups of three—an intentional little stretto effect, a little heartbeat gallop, gentle and virile.

Long after we’ve counted our losses

And tossed them into sauces.

An agreeable climax to the parlando arc of the first third of the song—a self-deprecatory bit of practicality: losses become sauces the way that life gives us lemons and we make lemonade.

But there it was,

Round and ripe and real,

With no autumnal flaws.

Bigelow is back, rolling in those delicious “r’s” (round / ripe / real) and pulling us back to the opening conversational parlando—as though to say, “don’t worry, I won’t be highfallutin’."

And then Mark does something elegant because it is prosaic, but sincere, not overly-clever:

I felt compelled to kneel,

And sigh, sigh, sigh:

This is Monteverdi—like me, a November-born Scorpio: Lasciatemi morire, or “let me die.” —But not 20th century death of course, but 16th century death as orgasm. In this case, a spiritual orgasm, more a metaphysical naturalism—the kind of lyric that simply must be attached to falling 2-3 suspensions (returned are the tender triplets of a quickening heart) because, well, that’s what Mark knows composers have done in the west with this gesture for four centuries. It is a delight to set these words chastely to music, and to be able to use them to prepare the singer’s delivery of the central image of the lyric, which calls for intense musical lyricism:

“Pomodoro.”

The Calaf yearning to burst out from within the self-effacement of our Bigelow does so and we’re charmed. He’s a dear, this one, and by nature feels compelled to immediately give us a nice big explanatory Protestant parenthetical that undercuts the Italianate grandiosity of his expression:

(Forgetting I’m not Italian,

Nor much of a gardener,

Though through the years I had acquitted myself,

Adequately enough.)

Mark ends with a little touch of Voltaire’s gardener’s humble pride, like another Billy knuckling his forehead to Vere. As though nodding in agreement, the music bridges with two little repetitions of the fragment of melody to which the words “adequately enough” were just sung. And with those excellent progenitors standing in the wings, the lyric deserves to soar.

Pomodoro.

Pomodoro.

Mark gives us two iterations of the word pomodoro, allowing the composer to climax (as one may and does in Italian) first on the first “ah-o” syllable in the word, and then on the “or” third syllable, a terrific set of mouth shapes (which Mark obviously knows) and also a nod to Italian opera, with which our Bigelow has evidently gotten away from Carousel long enough to develop more than a passing acquaintance. At this point, it becomes not just a lyric and a song about aging, but —poignantly—how singers are often at their best just as their voices are leaving them; about the difference between music theater and opera.

For “tomato” was too mundane, too common,

For this rare phenomenon.

So now we know that the first time the singer sings the word earlier in the song he has to saw “to-may-to” and this time “to-mah-to” because we’re going to go there, too, as Americans who write songs and are about to call the whole thing off. Look at all the “mm’s” there—tommmmato, mmmundane, common, and then a feint to the yummy “r” sound again (“rare”) and a payoff in the delicious word “phenomenon.” Sexy, sensual, and smart. And now, for this sort of song, convention calls for the revelation of a secret, and Mark does not disappoint. It is the composer’s honor to step aside, to provide some simple background chords, to let the lyric speak—with the greatest intimacy and simplicity in the song, since it is the singer’s truth—for itself:

For it had waited,

Until the end of summer had long passed,

To shine the last.

Mark repeats the point, as a lyricist must—

To shine the last and brightest…

…Where he gives the composer an ellipsis because he knows that the syllable “bright” is a gorgeous one to loft high, softly for a male voice, and he is making that possible for the composer without having been asked. Repetition as a device (and punning, since the second and third syllables of the title sound like “adore”) having been established in the lyric, Mark gives two final iterations of the delicious word in question, which provided the climax of the song, and now provides its tender, wistful release.

It’s the difference between lyrics and poetry, lyric theater and a straight play. A great librettist like Mark Campbell knows how to show his hand without committing “hand of author;” knows what kind of words a composer needs to make the combination of the two the only thing that matters. There’s profound poetry and dignity in that.

Pomodoro.

Pomodoro.

POMODORO

When I first saw the thing,
I thought it was a hoax,
The cruelest of jokes.
Had to be store-bought, I thought,

Tied to the vine with string.

A tomato in my garden
In November,
Late in November,
A flashing ember in the ashen garden,

Before skies darken,

Before the ground begins to harden,

Long after we’ve counted our losses

And tossed them into sauces.
But there it was,

Round and ripe and real,

With no autumnal flaws.

I felt compelled to kneel,

And sigh, sigh, sigh:

“Pomodoro”

(Forgetting I’m not Italian,
Nor much of a gardener,
Though through the years I had acquit myself,

Adequately enough.)
Pomodoro.
Pomodoro.
For “tomato” was too mundane, too common,

For this rare phenomenon.
For it had waited,
Until the end of summer had long passed,
To shine the last,
To shine the last and brightest...
Pomodoro,
Pomodoro.

—Mark Campbell (2018)

The tomato in question.

Remembering William Smart (1933-2019)

The night I bottomed out in December 1989 it was snowing lightly—little feathery, inhibited flakes that seemed shamed at having arrived as too-early guests. I attempted to get up and felt the stabbing pain of paresthesia in my legs and fell to my knees as though in prayer. My legs were useless. I pushed up from the ground with my fingertips as pins and needles exploded in my shins and began hobbling towards the broad white marble steps of the Venezia Santa Lucia train station like a newborn fawn until the numbness went away. I lurched to the first pay phone I saw inside the station, leaned against it, and placed a collect call.

“Bill, have you got a spare bed?” I asked, head beginning to pound. William Smart, Director of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, answered. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “We’ve got a full house right now.” I counted to five before pleading, “I’ve sublet the apartment on Saint Mark’s Place and have no place to go….” Beat. “Bill, I need to dry out....” Another beat. We had had this conversation before. “…And you’re probably broke, right?” he asked. “Afraid so,” I answered. I had left for Europe without any money in my pocket. And now I was even more deeply in debt. I had no telephone number, no address, and no commissions. The banks had confiscated my plastic. I had defaulted on my student loans. I had spent a lot of money I didn’t have to buy myself more time in Europe to figure out whether I sincerely wanted to return. I couldn’t just kick my former student and her friend out of my apartment on Saint Mark’s Place. They needed time to find somewhere to live. I wasn’t naïve enough to expect Manna to arrive with the dew during the night.  I needed somewhere safe to recover my health. I needed time to compose, and to take copy work to pay debts. Bill helped me. He told me to come to Virginia, and that he would work something out. A few days later, as the plane succumbed to gravity and sank through charcoal-colored rain clouds towards the tarmac at JFK, so did my heart.

I reached Mt. San Angelo in the middle of one of those Virginia winter storms when the air is warm, but the trees are sheathed in ice and look like glittering dowsing rods swaying in the wind. Bill and I cleared out a small storage room. Together, we moved a battered upright piano into it, a desk, found a cot, and roused out one of the Bolivian flags that were used back then as bedspreads. I launched into fifteen-hour workdays, finishing the full score of Common Ground. Ned Rorem had just finished a brass quintet—he threw the copying to me. After a couple of months, I ventured back to New York. I helped my student and her friend pack their things and reclaimed the apartment on St. Mark’s Place. I had an address and a phone number again. Ann Stanke was one of the first to call. At the time, I honestly couldn’t recall why she wanted to talk to me. After admonishing me for having disappeared for six months, she announced that she had good news: Madison Opera had decided to move ahead with commissioning Shining Brow, the opera that launched my career as an opera composer.

Along with being a terrific writer and honored professor, Bill moved the Virginia Center of the Creative Arts to its present home on Mount San Angelo and served for over twenty years as its director. According to Sweet Briar College’s obituary, “Smart grew the artists’ colony into becoming the nation’s largest, rebuilding its campus after a major fire and helping to mentor and inspire hundreds of authors, artists and composers who have gone on to win MacArthur genius grants, National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes and other major fellowships and grants.” He helped found the international organization of artists’ colonies, Res Artis. A decade ago, he moved to Amalgamated in the Bronx. 

Bill and I had fallen out of touch, and not spoken for over a decade. Like me, Bill was an alcoholic. Long ago, during his drinking years, he created his share of hurt and chaos. But he also, at the lowest point of my life, accepted me as I was then, and threw me the rope that probably saved me. I know I’m not the only one he saved. I owed him, and still do. Godspeed, old friend.

Solitaire with Orson

I am sitting at the window of my hotel in the Loop, looking down at sheets of ice shuffling and reshuffling themselves like cards in the Chicago River as I work on Orson Rehearsed, the opera I'm developing with the Fifth House Ensemble and my own New Mercury Collective at the Chicago College of Performing Arts. Tomorrow I'll conduct Fifth House for the first time in sections of the work; Mercury performer-gladiators Robert Orth and Robert Frankenberry will sing multiple manifestation of Orson Welles' enormous inner self.  (To learn more about the show, click here.)

I diarized obsessively for decades, but stopped when my sons were born. They're my narrative, now. I "moved up one," grew impatient examining the contours of my own navel, and took on the truth that Art played the role of MacGuffin in my Life. I write with some trepidation, because my comments here are poetic in nature, not polemical. I'm not engaging in disputation or Academic debate. These are the thoughts of a working artist—or, more precisely, a father whose sons are enjoying a snow day back in Upstate New York while he finds himself, unaccustomedly, with a free hour in his hotel room on the road, working in this, a city that his father worked in when he was a child.

Allow me to deal this round of Solitaire, as my Father did the night my mother died.

1. One of Spades

Oh, how we enjoy cutting our heroes down to size. Type "drunk Orson" into a search engine and an awful video of an aged, bloated, wounded-bear of an Orson Welles, three sheets to the wind, seated at a table gripping a wine glass, slurring advertising pabulum about a mediocre table wine comes up. We laugh. He's ridiculous, worthy of our contempt. Yet, at 29, in 1944, Welles was still beautiful, stumping for weeks on end for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then seeking an unprecedented fourth term. Welles is said to have coached FDR in public speaking; he wrote speeches for him. Only three years after he and Herman J. Mankiewicz had taken on William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his time, a gigantic Authority and Power figure, in Citizen Kane, Welles replied to a "get well" telegram from the president (Welles had made himself ill campaigning for FDR) by pledging that, "this is the most important work I could ever engage in."

2. Two of Diamonds

Welles' greatest success as an actor and director in the theater was probably his legendary "modern dress" Caesar, a bare-stage, poor theater reinterpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar that debuted in November 1937 as the Mercury Theater's first production. Born of necessity—there was little budget, and street clothes were free—the genius was in the decontextualization of the play as a critique of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Theatrical lighting pioneer Jean Rosenthal and Welles collaborated on Caesar's lighting, which—since there was no set—shouldered the majority of the emotional and psychological storytelling. A gifted visual artist, Welles knew the importance of not illuminating the most important thing on the stage, as well as light's ability to shape and define physical space with filmic fluidity. That Leni Riefenstahl’s agitprop Triumph of the Will had already thrown up "cathedrals of light" was known—it also happened to be financially prudent, and in step with the flowering of an emergent theatrical technology. Deftly fusing the iconography of religion and politics, he used electric light to take the place of "Divine Radiance" like Prometheus stealing fire. Light, however evocative, is in itself soulless, and he knew that. The result was that he evoked the gestalt of Auden's Age of Anxiety, and the Quartet for the End of Time existential ennui of the characters in Sartre's Paths to Freedom. That's a lot of illumination to pile on an Everyman Brutus' shoulders. 

3. Three of Clubs

The first scene of Kane after the newsreel is triply reflective: In a movie called Citizen Kane, actors portraying Reporters (observers of life; supposedly seekers of truth) watch a newsreel (photographs of a life edited together—"fake" news?) in the dark. They're aware that they are missing something, and set out on a search for the meaning of "Rosebud." The Mob in Caesar is transformed into secret police: they're looking for safety in the wrong place. The reporters return empty-handed; the Mob gets exactly the sort of politicians it deserves.

Welles believed in FDR the way Beethoven believed in Napoleon. Albert Einstein, the first publicly intellectual scientist, famously spoke out against nuclear weapons; but it was the popularizer, Carl Sagan, who really captured peoples' imaginations with Cosmos. He did so by traversing the liminal zone between advanced scientific study and poetry. Welles sought truth, too; but, rather than looking out into the cosmos, or taking to the political bully pulpit, he looked inward, choosing as his vessel of exploration the plays of Shakespeare. He repurposed Polonius' advice, "to thine own self be true" to read, "to love, Jedidiah, on our own terms" in Kane.

Welles did want to be loved, and he knew how to arrange that. (Leonard Bernstein to Ned Rorem: "Our problem is not that we want everyone to love us; its that we'll never meet everyone.") Welles seems to have believed that he'd make a fine politician (he contemplated a run against McCarthy in '43), but he was self-aware enough to have the corrupt politician point out to Kane that looking for love from the Mob will get you nowhere. There's plenty of commentary about Welles' search for the "Rosebud" of love. Most of it limns a narrative which describes a much-caressed genius-boy of nine who lost his mother prematurely, and his charismatic father soon after. It's easy to pigeon-hole Welles the way Harold C. Schonberg, and even friends like Oscar Levant viewed Bernstein—as the "great popularizer of commonly accepted truths as insights." But Welles saw past the transaction to what lies beyond acceptance, even admiration.

“Popularity should be no scale for the election of politicians. If it would depend on popularity, Donald Duck and the Muppets would take seats in the Senate.”

— Orson Welles

Throughout his work, Welles asked whether love is true, or if Love is Truth, and the other way around. We do get the politicians we deserve: obviously the current occupant of the White House wants to be loved, but, paraphrasing Robert Bolt's screenplay to Lawrence of Arabia, "some men lie to others; they conceal the truth. Other men lie to themselves; they forget where they hid it." True, one cannot write about love with tears in one's eyes, but Welles was a romantic who did not lie to himself. He spent an awful lot of time thinking about crafting the illusion of love, as manifest in his fascination with magic tricks, for example, his documentary essay F for Fake, and so forth. Isn't it all a Muppet show?

Welles points out, through the character of Jedidiah in Kane, "That's all [Kane] wanted out of life ... was love. That's the tragedy of Charles Foster Kane. You see, he just didn't have any to give." Like Bernstein, Welles had an enormous capacity to give and to get love; that capacity made them both great popularizers and artists. But Welles could have settled into a senate seat about as comfortably as Bernstein the executive directorship of an orchestra.

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”

— Orson Welles

4. Four of Diamonds

Welles' dramaturgical chops were those of one who, like Bernstein, intuitively knew exactly what the emotional and psychological nuclear reactors powering a scene were, what each relationship sparked from, what powered each work as a whole. If Bernstein had Mahler, Welles had Shakespeare, and both did their finest work in the theater when editing and reinterpreting the Bard—Bernstein with West Side Story and Welles with Caesar.

He sought artistic freedom (as opposed to simple self-actualization, which is easier, because it requires only selfishness and singleness of mind to achieve), of course, and achieved it. While to the outside world Welles lamented that he spent ninety percent of his time raising money, he wisely had Kane lament, "If I hadn't been rich, I'd have been a truly great man." I believe that Welles' masterpiece was not Kane, or Chimes, but Moby Dick Rehearsed, for thirty years after having noted that RKO had given him the "world's biggest train set," he was able to create a theatrical sandbox in which every performance was different, every evening like a page from Joyce's Ulysses, disconnected from other performances, but connected because the ideas flow from one place to the next like water. He found a way to be paid to do as he pleased.

The enormous self-restraint required to cope with complete artistic freedom (and to therefore not deserve the slings and arrows of every critic who lays it on with the "self-indulgence" rap because its easy, and because they can) prompted Stravinsky to point out at the start of the 20th century that, "now that we can do whatever we want to do, we must first decide what we do not want to do." Welles understood that people resent being preached to—hence the Bible's parables, which really are ripping yarns. He understood that, for every Poetics of Music (whether ghost-written by a Robert Kraft or not), Carl Sagan Cosmos, Joseph Campbell Hero With a Thousand Faces, or Bernstein Harvard lecture, there will always be a host of intellectuals smarter, more insightful, more adept at argument, poised to envelop the scene in the smoke of argument, the entanglements of nomenclature, the rules of rhetoric, so that, in a couple of beats, we're all back on “safe” ground, mundanely talking about talking about the thing rather than doing the scary work of, as Wallace Stevens pointed out, grappling with "not ideas of the thing but the thing itself."

It takes a poet running at full bore to conjoin, as Welles did in Midnight, Shakespeare's "nimbus floods" with Melville's allegorical mists, and the moral haze hanging over Walt Whitman's descriptions in Specimen Days with a healthy, Midwestern dollop of 1 Corinthians on top, reminding us, like the angels in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, that "we see through a glass, darkly."

Which brings us back to those reporters sitting in the dark at the beginning of Kane, seeking truth in fiction. Manifesting the Aristotelian admonition to grapple with the Art and Life paradigm, Welles staged them as denizens of Socrates' Cave. Behind the fire, the javelin of light stabbing down from the projection booth, is a stage / screen. We're all puppeteers, he reminds us, vying with one another to construct the most viable reality. Remember high school classics class? If you skipped it, or didn't do your homework; or of you did do your homework and you fall for the appeal of the Big Lie, then you call what you see and don't agree with nowadays "fake news."

One person escapes the Cave. He emerges into the sunlight, sees the Cave for the prison and illusion that it is, re-examines his former existence, and determines to return to the Cave to spread the Good News. Naturally, they crucify him.  (Look at him! He doesn't work out; he's obviously not disciplined or in control of himself! He's fat, drunk, doing a wine commercial. He's the object of ridicule who seems to have learned nothing from Falstaff, for there he is, looking and acting just like him! Why should we believe anything he says?) As Andre points out so wittily to Wally in My Dinner With Andre, New York City may in fact be a prototype of the concentration camp of the 21st century, built by the inmates who take a perverse pride in what they've created. "Aren't we schizophrenics?" he asks. "Are these flickering shadows Reality?" asks the returning escapee, the reporters, the audience, the artist.

5. Five of Hearts

"Rosebud" is anything you've loved and lost. Lost childhood, lost parents, lost lovers, lost youth, lost dreams, loss, loss, loss. Welles allowed that Kane, the ultimate narcissist, must "at least have loved his mother." Maybe Rosebud wasn't a sled; maybe Rosebud was Light.

Jedidiah pans Kane's wife's performance. She, of course, has little talent, and Jedidiah has a choice: he can go easy on her out of compassion and pity, or he can assess her as an extension of her husband’s ego. She's "nothing special," but she's special to Kane. ("When everyone's special, nobody is.") Rilke reminds us that Art is never understood by criticism; beauty's in the eye of the Beholder, etc., but Kane's inability to see his wife as separate from himself is what motivates him. He demands she be perceived as gifted the way that our current president feels that he's a genius because "fate is what happened." Jedidiah hits the nail on the head. ("Never," my Uncle Clifford once admonished me, "rub a man's rhubarb.") Kane must fire him just as surely as the denizens of the Cave must, upon the Hero’s return, reject the bringer of news of the blazing, brilliant, brightly-lit outside world.

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.”

— Orson Welles

I believe that Welles, upon his return to the Cave, calmly elected to order lunch. Lucas, Spielberg, and other more “commercially viable” great filmmakers sugar-coated Truth better, so they made more money and acquired more Power; but Welles' Authority has never been questioned.  When Welles tried to play the game of life their way, he couldn't help leaving the results on the cutting room floor because he was constitutionally unsuited to "selling out"—even Touch of Evil is an art film flying under the radar as a potboiler with the hysterically miscast Charlton Heston serving as Hollywood's canary in the cinematic coal mine. Welles had heard the Chimes at Midnight. He had learned that it is more important to be understood, in the end, than it is to be loved.

Delivering this talk at Amherst College in March 2018.

The night my mother died in my arms, my father, who had been playing Solitaire downstairs, quoted Joseph Cotton's line to me by way of explaining himself and why his wife hadn't died in his arms. When my own personal Jedidiah writes his review and hands it to me, I hope that I am wise enough not to hand him his pink slip.

This essay served as working notes for a public address at the Chicago College of Performing Arts Center for Arts Leadership delivered on 18 January 2018 and on 5 March 2018 at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Amherst College.

Remembering Mel Rosenthal (1940-2017)

For my particular friend Mel Rosenthal, photography was an instrument for social justice. His Leica thrust before him like Quijote’s spear, he hurled himself into the back of squad cars in the South Bronx to raise awareness of social issues surrounding poverty and equality, into the Tanzanian countryside during the 70s to document medical care, into the Nicaraguan countryside to witness the effects of the revolution there. Mel was incredibly well-read, and taught English at Vassar for a few years. (We were both devoted readers of the Aubrey-Maturin books, which Mel could quote at length.) “Antonioni’s Blow Up blew my mind,” he told me once over Mescal one winter during the 80s at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. “I didn’t have a damned clue, but I knew I needed to be a photojournalist.” In time, Lisette Model mentored him. He was Susan Sontag’s age, and had a huge crush on her; he used to tease me about the fact that I, 22 years his junior, had one, too. 

He joined the faculty at Empire State College in 1975, and added artist mentor to his folio. But he never considered himself an academic. “I’m a messenger,” he told me once. “You touch people with notes; I do it with images. I take their pictures and give them back their image; you listen to what they say and give it back to them in music.” He was a poet addled by one-hundred-too-many waltzes with malaria, kicks in the ribs in pursuit of a shot, and the broken heart of a man who couldn’t—wouldn’t—forget the things he’d seen. Another winter in Virginia, we wept together, tenderly passing pages of our mutual friend Jerome Badanes’ just finished manuscript of The Final Opus of Leon Solomon to one another as Jerry sat, head in his hands by the fire, vulnerable and over-exposed. 

Mel was a clear-eyed sentimentalist who could handle himself. When Gilda Lyons and I married, Mel—to our astonishment and trepidation—volunteered to photograph our wedding. In the event, Mel covered our wedding like an infiltration of enemy territory. Shoulder to shoulder with my bride before our priest in Rhinebeck’s Church of the Messiah, ring poised over her extended finger, I looked into our priest Gerald Gallagher’s eyes and followed his gaze downwards to see Mel, flat on his back at our feet, framing up a Gregg Toland-style hero shot. Gallagher, a tolerant, intelligent man, whispered, “Mel, I’m not sure that this is appropriate.” Swinging the camera away from his face with an enormous grin, Mel wasn’t about to take orders from a priest. “I don’t work for God … or for you, Jerry” he said, and got back to it. “The guys with the Berettas on Bathgate trusted me,” he told my father-in-law Bernie at the wedding reception, “because they knew I was a stand-up guy.” “But you still know why there’s a bat leaning against the wall by my front door,” Bernie, a classics scholar from South Buffalo, observed, in return. “Of course,” Mel laughed.

When the opera I’d written with Paul Muldoon called Vera of Las Vegas debuted at Symphony Space in 2003, Mel decided that he wanted to document it. Gilda stepped in at the last moment to portray one of the Catchalls. Opening night, Mel and I sat beside Leonard Garment, Ned Rorem, and Gary and Naomi Graffman at a catwalk-side cocktail table in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia. During the “Strippers’ Chorus,” Mel’s unerring sense of where the true story lay compelled him to document the following scene not in the opera but arguably more interesting: Gilda was staged with her derriere poised above our heads. Mel’s camera snapped as Naomi observed, gimlet-eyed, to me, “And you’re expecting her to count seven against five, for godsake.” Len, peering up at one of the Catchalls, touched my arm and said, “you’re a twisted man, Daron.” Mel photographed Gary as he gazed at Shequida like a cobra hypnotized by a mongoose. “This,” I replied to Len, “coming from Richard Nixon’s lawyer.” Sound of shutter clicking. “Yes, well—,” Len replied. Mel’s camera clicking again, capturing Len’s pride in his son (my Curtis classmate) Paul, playing a solo in the little cabaret ensemble as he absent-mindedly remarked, “The President didn’t wear fishnet stockings.” Beat. “That I know of.” Beat. Shutter-click. Mel, in heaven, shooting every face, mapping each reveal. Ned, genuinely curious: “How can Gilda sing in that getup?”

Visual artist and professor Bobbe Perry probably saved us all from scurvy one summer at VCCA, building beautiful soups from whence we all spooned wholesome lunches during a rocky period in the kitchen. She and Mel fell in love that summer and made one of the most beautiful couples I’ve ever known. They were like Dickinson’s “two butterflies,” in their questing hearts and profound mutual understanding. Both deeply-committed, sensitive artists who really knew one another. They lived around the corner from us on West End Avenue for years. Five years ago, we moved to the country. “Not enough pavement for me there,” groused Mel when Bobbe tried to get him to their country place. “It makes me tense.” We no longer ran into one another at artist colonies, or late at night, or when the dog needed walking, or over produce at Gourmet Garage, or at friends’ openings, and funerals.

In 2001, at our annual Halloween party, I was Diego Rivera, Gilda was Frida Kahlo, Bobbe was radiance itself, and Mel came as Che Guevara. The tiny apartment was packed with mutual friends and even some people that nobody knew, adult beverages were consumed, everyone was sweaty, Jerry Badanes and absent friends were toasted, righteousness was summoned, at one point the Internationale was sung. He pulled In the South Bronx of America off the shelf and read the inscription he’d written in it the previous March: “For my old loyal shipmate and particular friend Daron. May we continue to have wonderful voyages together. Love, Mel.” I hugged him fiercely. “I was lost on the infinite sea,” I sang into his ear, “but I’ve seen where she’s bound for.” He closed his eyes. He knew the Melville. And he knew the Britten. “There’s a land where she’ll anchor forever.”

We’re gonna be okay, Mel; forever’s a long time, but we know where you’re bound for.

This piece has been syndicated in the Huffington Post. To read it there, click here.

Yaddo: Transforming Sorrow into Joy

Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, is more than America’s most prestigious artist retreat: it is a testament to one couple’s determination to transubstantiate loss into works of art. Like mine, Yaddo’s story is about what poet Kim Addonizio calls "the presence that absence makes." After the tragic deaths of their children, financier Spencer Trask and his gifted wife Katrina dedicated themselves to the creation of Yaddo for the same reason that my parents created me. There envelops Yaddo (rhymes with “shadow”) a profound Victorian melancholy that serves as an unspoken reminder to even the fastest of trackers in any given pack of ambitious young artists passing through the place of serious art’s immense stakes. To me, Yaddo is not just a hallowed place, but also my home.

I ended my mother's doomed gavotte with cancer at her request during the 1982 Christmas holidays, returned to school at the Curtis Institute, and unspooled my final year there as a pupil of Ned Rorem's. Upon graduation the following spring, without an address, my books in storage, my life a completely chance-ful thing as I prepared to move to Manhattan where, in a succession of sublets and rentals for the next 30 years, I'd live, I first came to Yaddo in summer 1984. I landed there at the very, very end of Yaddo's first great era, a time not long after the days that one could not even apply; Elizabeth Ames invited people directly. So it happened that Ned telephoned the President of Yaddo, Curtis Harnack (that wonderfully humane man), and his brilliant, wise wife, Hortense Calisher to arrange for my first visit. 

“Yaddo,” wrote Ned, “is necessary for you now. Don’t try so hard to be Rastignac. Perhaps a little less need to get ahead, to be a “professional”; a little more introspection and, indeed, egotism, will do you good. But who knows? One man’s meat, etc.….” Ned instructed me to ask David Diamond (with whom I would begin studying at Juilliard the following September) what books I should read before entering his studio. Along with decreeing that I spend the summer studying “Beethoven Quartets op. 59, No. 1, Opus 131, Haydn’s Opus 33, No. 1, Mozart, Brahms, Bruckner, and Berg,” David had commanded me to read Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. I arrived at Yaddo with the need not to be Rastignac, but Orpheus; I desired nothing more than to sing my departed mother’s spirit out of the Underworld, bring her back to life.

Daron Hagen at Yaddo. Summer, 1984. (Photo Credit: Hortense Calisher)

After a train ride up the Hudson, I disembarked at the Saratoga Springs train station. I had with me the clothes on my back, Mann and Rolland in my backpack, four shirts, three pair of underwear, two pair of jeans, four pair of socks, mechanical pencils and erasers, thirty dollars, and lots and lots of King Brand manuscript paper.

Now retired, James Mahon, a courtly, red-bearded Charon with a mild voice and probing, intense eyes who gravely addressed me as “sir” long before I had any claim to it, placed my backpack gently in the beat up old company station wagon. We drove slowly through town, past Town Hall and the Post Office, and the Adirondack Trust bank. We passed the Parting Glass, where mingled during August the jockeys from the Saratoga Race Track and their tall, glossy girlfriends, the Yaddo artists, the City Ballet dancers, the Philadelphia Orchestra players, the townies, and the bettors.

James turned on to broad, tree-lined Union Avenue—one of the Hudson Valley’s grandest boulevards. Flanked by over a dozen Queen Anne-style mansions built during the late 1800s, it begins at Congress Park and culminates a mile and a half later at the Northway. In 1978, the entire area was listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Union Avenue Historical District. As the car rolled by the racetrack, with its bevy of Victorian structures, I felt as though we were going back in time. We passed the National Museum of Racing. I thought aloud: “Seabiscuit.” “Ah, yes sir,” James drawled, glancing at me curiously in the rearview mirror, “that was a brave little pony now, wasn’t it?”

“Whitney,” I said, “Jerome, Vanderbilt….” “Ah, yes sir,” James drawled, “those would be some other names associated with the race track, that’s for certain.” On our right, at the far end of Union Avenue, adjacent to the track, began a dense, shadowy forest. “This would be Yaddo, sir,” James said, turning on to the grounds.

The life-sized portraits of Katrina and Spencer Trask that hang in the mansion's main hall. (Photo credit: Hagen Collection)

Spencer Trask, founder of the well-known Wall Street firm, and his wife Katrina had the mansion built in 1892 by architect William Halsey Wood, who did little but execute the designs provided by his clients. 55 rooms, a medieval dining hall and tower, barns, outbuildings, four man-made ponds bearing the children’s names, a rock garden, and a large formal rose garden, all laid out to Spencer’s specifications.

James slowed the car as we passed between the lakes. We veered left, and then right, then climbed the drive, and to our left the mansion blossomed into view atop the hill. I gasped. Embarrassed, I looked toward the rearview mirror and saw that James’ eyes were warm. “Yes sir,” he smiled, “that’s the Main House. We’ll be driving past West House, Pine Garde, and East House so that I can drop you at the Office.” We shook hands and he handed me my backpack after I got out.

Tears spontaneously flowed as beloved, infinitely capable program director Rosemary Misurelli (who I had never met) bundled me up in her Rabelaisian Earth Mother arms at the front door of the office. “I feel as though I have come home,” I burbled. Weeping, she covered my face with kisses, and then took me in to meet Curt, who asked me why I was crying. “I have no idea,” I said. “Are you okay?” he asked. “I think so,” I said. “I don’t understand why I’m crying.” “Oh, I do,” he said, with a kind, open mid-western smile.

Upon arrival, a Special Assistant to the President escorts every artist to his or her studio and bedroom. That summer, Doug Martin and Nancy Brett served. I was given a tour of the grounds, and then shown into the mansion’s grand hall. Hanging there were two life-sized full portraits. Before being told her identity, I was as irresistibly drawn to Eastman Johnson’s painting as I had been to the Norman Rockwell portrait of Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist. We hadn’t met, but my heart instinctively moved out to her. I felt safe here. “Yes, that’s her,” Nancy said, gently pulling me away and leading me up the sweeping stairs. “Katrina Trask?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, pointing up at the two-story tall Tiffany window atop the stairs. “That’s her, too.”

My younger son draws from the lead-lined treasure chest in the library the note that has resided there for a long time and left, as far as he was concerned, just for him. And, at Yaddo, why not? (Photo credit: Hagen Collection)

We turned left at the foot of the window, passed a large brass spittoon, and reached the sliding door leading to Oratory (a place of prayer), the room next to what had been Spencer’s den that would serve as my bedroom.

Everyone who has lived and worked at Yaddo over the past century has heard stories about the ghosts. There’s the Puritanical one that keeps watch in the bedroom on the second floor of the mansion opposite the stairs that opens the windows when something naughty is happening in the room. There’s the Testy one that slams the closet door in Katrina’s bedroom when the current occupant spends a little too much time on the fainting couch.

In May 2007, I sat before the upright piano in the Acosta Nichols Tower studio, writing with trepidation the title Amelia over what would become the first page of over four hundred pages of piano sketch of my opera about flight and rebirth. A bird flew in through the open door and flew frightened circles high above me in the white cone of the ceiling. I got up and spoke quietly to the bird, “You’ll be okay, friend. Everything will be fine. The door is open. Fly through it.” As though on cue, the bird swooped down and glided back out through the door to safety in the surrounding forest. It was the plainest sort of blessing, and a perfect example of the sort of thing that happens at Yaddo.

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There are always beautiful seasonal arrangements at Yaddo built of flowers from the estate's gardens. (Photo: Hagen Collection)

Yaddo is about the work, first. My work book lists the following pieces composed all, or in part, there between 1984 and the present: four major operas: Amelia, Bandanna, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and Shining Brow; two cantatas: A Walt Whitman Requiem and Light Fantastic; my Symphony No. 3; and nearly a hundred art songs and chamber works, large and small.

Much of Yaddo’s magic derives from the effect that it has on one’s fellow artists. For example, I had learned about the extravagance, the power, and the beauty of raw talent at Curtis, that talent is like a natural resource—amoral and unearned. It can be cultivated and strengthened by its possessor, and it can be misused, of course. But I had never (and have never, since) met anyone quite as joyously talented as David Del Tredici, who I befriended during my first residency. He was—and remains—a nova.

At Yaddo with fellow composers David Del Tredici and George Tsontakis, Autumn, 2006. (Photo credit: Gilda Lyons)

I first met Joel Conarroe that summer. Joel, the author of books and articles about American literature and anthologies of poetry, president of the Guggenheim Foundation from 1985-2002 (and a trustee until his retirement in 2016); former chair of the English Department, Ombudsman, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and former president of the PEN American center, was deeply gentle, erudite, decent, and agreeable company over dinner during the weeks that our visits overlapped.

In 1994, Joel and David Del Tredici  reached out to Donald S. Rice, then Chairman of Yaddo’s Board of Directors, and together nominated me for membership in the Corporation. Subsequently elected by the Directors and Members that year, I was further elected by our brothers and sisters fifteen years later to continue beyond the restriction of a term limit as a “Lifetime Member”–an honor bestowed on only one other Member: Susan Brynteson, Yaddo’s beloved Librarian, and (now retired) Vice provost and head of the University of Delaware Library. In his letter commending me to Don, Joel described me as “represent[ing] the best of what Yaddo is all about.” I treasure Joel’s approbation and this honor above any other I’ve received in my life.

Performing with Gilda Lyons in the Music Room during the Annual Meeting. Aaron Copland premiered his Piano Variations on this exquisite instrument. (Photo credit: Angellos Ioannis Malefakis)

I was taught a briskly affectionate character lesson of immense value one evening at West House during the early 80s by novelist Lynn Freed. She’d been in residence long enough to observe our small society in action, but it was our first real conversation. “What do you make of so-and-so?” she asked. “And him? And her?” We compared notes. Presently, she asked, “Darling boy, why are you such a Rabbit with people in public, and so Dead-Spot-On-Brutal in your assessment of them in private? Surely there’s a balance, no?”

When at 16 I told my English teacher Diane Doerfler that I intended to move to the east coast, she presented me with the volume of John Cheever's short stories I possess to this day: “Read these,” she said, throwing me a rope. “He and Updike seem to get it right.” Only a few years later Susan Cheever and I became friends at Yaddo. I imagine Doerf would be pleased to know that I told Susan about her gift. Years later, playwright / actor Ayad Akhtar was made a member of the Corporation. He charmed me, when we met for the first time during the annual fall meeting, by regaling me during dinner with fulsome reminiscences of Doerf, whom he credited as “an essential guiding force in his early development.”

Yaddo's Collected Balzac, shelved in West House.

It was at Yaddo—reading the Trask family’s exquisite 1901 Little, Brown and Company Works of Honoré de Balzac shelved in West House—that, over the course of fifteen years, I savored every word of Balzac’s monumental La Comedie Humaine, in English, and then in French. He remains to me as precious as Georges Simenon is to Ned. Rastignac—he, whose name is an insult in France, has served all my life both as a warning and as a negative example, as surely as Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe has constituted a blessing and an imprecation. In other words, on the one hand, “la vie humaine se compose de deux parties: on tue le temps, le temps vous tue,” and, on the other, “there are some dead who are more alive than the living.”

Katrina Trask’s was one of what Rick Moody calls the “momentous and astonishing and beautiful deaths” that have taken place at Yaddo. During my first visit—summer 1984—I had spent several weeks composing a requiem, what poet and memoirist Richard McCann might call a “ghost letter” to Katrina. Richard wrote, in one of his poems, “Quiet! Don’t you know that the dead go on hearing for hours?” I believe that they continue hearing forever if they are of a mind to. I believe that Katrina Trask continues to hear what goes on at Yaddo to this day.

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A photo of a Daguerreotype of Katrina Trask that hangs in West House.

Here’s how I met Mrs. Trask. Near the end of my first visit, novelist Doug Unger was sitting on the second-floor landing, around eleven-thirty in the evening, reading The New Yorker. Across from him sat a third person, whose name escapes me. That reassuring, late-night quietude (the plashing of water in the little fountain next to the front door, the soughing and whispering of the pines, underpinned by the steady thrum of automobile wheels on the Northway) unique to this house surrounded us. I didn’t know at the time that Doug was up there. I was reading in the Great Hall, next to the fireplace with the phoenix on it.

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The Grand staircase. Katrina Trask is portrayed in the Tiffany window. (Photo credit: Hagen Collection)

At that instant, I less “saw” her than “felt” Katrina Trask’s presence. In the same way that one might glimpse a child streaking out of a suburban front yard and into the street, and with the same terrible wave of heart-in-the-mouth dread, perceived peripherally, intuited while focusing elsewhere, a woman descending the main staircase in what John Cheever mischievously described as “poor Katrina’s shower curtain” came before my mind’s eye. It was unquestionably Katrina’s ghost. Her right hand was slightly raised, as it is in the portrait, and in it was a telegram, a poem, or a letter. Allan Gurganus suavely describes what I saw as “some essence quorum of our souls’ intensities.” At the instant that I noticed the apparition, I heard a cry from the second floor. I leapt to the foot of the stairs to see what the matter was. Looking up, I saw ashen-faced Doug.

“What did you see?” I asked. “A woman in a white dress, so help me God,” he said.

From behind him in the darkness the third person—who couldn’t possibly have seen the staircase—said, softly, “It was Katrina.” We coughed, laughed, looked at our feet. I have seen an angel, I thought. I used to describe the feeling I took away from the moment as being exactly like the way I used to feel when I heard the crunch of gravel in the driveway that meant Mother was home. Now, as a father, I recognize that the feeling was more like the way I feel when my children are sleeping in the next room, yet I am in every way but physically with them.

My younger son at Yaddo, Summer 2016.

How, I wondered as a boy, would it feel to experience happiness without dread, and, if I did, how long would it last before the inevitable happened and I ended up, at two in the morning, my ass is in the air, scrubbing again and again the same square foot of asphalt tile until I had forgotten what the question was? Now I wonder, when I’m telling my sons a bedtime story about the animals at Yaddo (who have names, and speak, and have adventures, and inhabit a world that is entirely real to my boys, as real as Yaddo is to me, and as precious), I wonder how it is possible that there is no dread in our home; how is it possible that this happy story won’t end for my sons the way that it ended for my brothers?

After much discussion, and many Yaddo bedtime stories, and Elaina Richardson’s permission, I agreed to take my son with me to attend the 24 July 2015 ceremony at Yaddo at which the mansion and grounds would be proclaimed a National Historic Landmark.

The water in the “Sleepy Naiads” fountain was cold and clear. “Brr,” said my son, now aged 6, pulling his small, perfect feet out. It was his first visit to Yaddo. To look our best, we had dressed in matching starched white shirts and shorts. But a child’s a child, and we’d decided that, before touring the mansion together, we ought to dip our feet in the fountain. I passed him his stockings. We sat in the grass. I handed him his shoes. “You make the ears,” he explained. “Then you jump through the hole, right?” I asked. “Uh huh. And then you pull the ears tight,” he said, pulling on his shoelaces with a look of satisfaction.

The Yaddo Mansion seen from the Sleepy Naiad Fountain. (Photo credit: Hagen Collection)

I looked up. At the top of the hill, framed by cloudless blue sky, sat the Yaddo mansion. My son's attention shifted from his shoelaces to follow my gaze. “Papa?” “Yes, honey.” “How did the children die?” he asked. I looked back down at the grass, deciding how much to say. “There were four of them. They all died before they were teenagers,” I said. His eyes widened. “Do you really want to hear this?” He nodded gravely. “One lived only 12 days.”

My son shook his head in wonder: “Like the ‘Other Daron,’ Papa?” “Yeah,” I answered. “No wonder you love this place so much,” he said. “More than you know, baby,” I said. “So, tell me,” he said, placing his hand on my beard the way that I sometimes stroke his cheek. “The oldest child had Uncle Kevin’s middle name, Alansson,” I began. My boy looked up at the house as I spoke. “He died of some childhood disease. The middle children were Christina and Spencer Jr. At some point when they were children, they caught Diphtheria kissing their Mama goodbye.” He turned suddenly, and asked, “Did their Mama die, too?” “No,” I answered, “their mama Katrina was okay.” He threw his arms around me, and began to cry. “It’s okay, baby,” I said, stroking his hair. He looked up at me, and asked, “What happened to the last one?” I pulled him close. He buried his head in my chest. “The last child was named Katrina,” I told him, stroking his hair. “She lived only nine days.”

Presently, we gathered up our things and walked to the car. "Can we come back, Papa?" "Not only can we return, we must," I told him firmly, digging my chin into the top of his head as I held him, tears falling into his hair's golden ringlets. "Why, Papa?" I looked at him—his tender, small frame just beginning to flesh out with the wiry strength of the man into whom he'd grow, and I thought to myself that Life is fragile, that Art is fragile, too; I thought that the Loud drown out the Rest most of the time, but that Art, so simultaneously ephemeral and eternal, like Love, can do more than prompt a tyrant's tears; it can give strength and hope to those fighting for a better world for our kids, a safer place to bring them up, a more tolerant mindset, more open hearts. I had to look away from him. and up the hill towards the mansion as I formulated a simpler answer, an answer that, hopefully, even a child might understand. "Because Yaddo," I whispered, "is a place where sorrow is transformed into joy."

My older son at Yaddo, Summer, 2014.

My younger son at Yaddo, Summer 2016.

This essay first appeared in the Huffington Post in an earlier form on 5 June 2012. You can read it there by clicking here. Below is a little fundraising video shot in the Yaddo Mansion's Music Room several years ago.

"Now is the Time": Peace, Justice, Good Tunes

There it is, the piano vocal score of your new opera. All those notes. Hundreds of pages of meticulously elevated text. Characters limned through motives, orchestration, clever gimmicks. You flip through the thing, looking for the memorable tunes and....

“I can’t teach you how to write a good tune,” Ned Rorem told me during my first lesson in September 1981 in the tiny attic studio in the mansion at 1726 Locust Street that served as the Curtis Institute, “but I can show you how to make a ‘perfect’ song.” Professional composers craft "inevitability," which listeners and enthusiasts interpret as inspiration. Some readers confuse the joy of “shop-talk” with academic study, and attack composers who pull back the veil in little essays such as this that demystify the process by which a composer does her work.

The fundamental problem with contemporary opera—which is in fabulous shape, in my opinion: lots of new composers trying their hand at lots of vital, socially-conscious subjects, in lots of alternative venues, using all sorts of new technologies—is that, still, still, the overwhelming majority of composers think that creating “elevated parlando” of the sort that this little essay discusses crafting is enough. In fact, if a composer succeeds in creating an opera that sets text in this manner more than half the time, then it is going to be yet another show in search of tunes. Bernstein, looking at one of the tunes that I had penned for my Shining Brow long ago, said that the fact that it rose into recognizable lyric melody was what made it good, and that when it did that, it reminded him of what Marc Blitzstein used to say: “Peace, Justice, and Good Tunes!”

I can’t teach how to compose a good tune any more than Ned (or Lenny) could. And they never talked to me the way that I’m going to talk about setting a line of text to music in this essay. My aim is not to lay down rules, or to make value judgements. This is not particularly deeply thought-through; it is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of strategies. (For example, I’ve completely omitted humorous line-readings, and settings that make the singer a liar, or in disagreement with the words. I'm also leaving out triple and compund meters, and music where the pulse is moving at the eighth note.) I don’t pretend to be an academic. Nothing you’ll read here can be empirically proven to be right or wrong, better or worse. I offer the following thoughts about setting a simple English phrase to music for the delight of non-musicians and the amusement of fellow-composers. We’ve all been here, and, with opera enjoying the resurgence here in the States that it is, there are more of us here than ever.

This essay is not particularly about prosody; rather, it talks about how to make a “highly-elevated” parlando setting of a single, stand-alone common English phrase: “Now is the time for all good souls to come to the aid of their party.”

Somebody once told me: “Play the clarinet in the room; not the one in your head.” It’s great advice. In the case of setting words to music, one has to remember that singers lean heavily on the tradition of “strong” and “weak” beats when deciding how to phrase a melody. Further, when they study their role, they are trained to look for important words, which, traditionally, are put on strong beats. The most important word in a phrase is generally the highest note. If a composer plays against these basic traditions, she should do so knowingly.

I usually begin setting a line of text by doing a “cold read” of it. I set for “sense” first, not for “feel.” Some words, as Jack Beeson explained to me once many years ago, are “inherently fast:” short words, and single syllable words that, if elongated, postpone the amount of time that a listener must wait until they understand what the singer is saying. My stance is that the listener should understand the text above all. Only after I’ve achieved that may I begin to add emotion, color, and psychological effects using the various musical tools in my toolbox. Every moment that an audience is in front of the singer, waiting for her to give them the sense of what they are saying, diminishes the drama just as much as a plot point so obvious that the reveal comes as no surprise.

Having chosen the word deemed “most important” (in this case, I've chosen the word “come”), let’s make it the climax tone. (This is where all those counterpoint exercises you did as a kid come in useful.) Sometimes the most important word is not one that will sound good slung high; that's when you go to Plan B—either by choosing a different word, or through a number of clever tricks we won't talk about here. Then, simply lead up to it, and down from it. Repeatedly hitting the climax tone ends up sounding funny (as Adams intentionally has Madam Mao cluck, chicken-like, about “the book” in Nixon in China) or naive. In any event, it is common sense that, the higher a singer sings, the harder it is to sing; the harder it is to sing, the more intense the emotion. That is the bread and butter of writing for voice.

“Irrational rhythms” include all “tuplets” and non-naturalistic syncopations. (The more "irrational" the rhythm, the more vehemence is being conveyed.) In fact, with parlando recitative, which is what we’re trying to craft here, one starts by trying to capture in the simplest rhythms the essence of a natural line reading, and then, with increasing stylization, aims to enhance the effect of that reading to maximally carry emotional and psychological information. Any time you tie a note across a beat, or introduce a tuplet, emotion increases. The relative weight of the words also shift, making the climax stronger.

One can enhance the naturalism of the line reading by dropping the pitch of the least important words in the lyric. In this case, I dropped the words is, to, and of.

Another strategy is to make certain words “lower neighbors” that are associated with passing chords and secondary dominants in the harmony. In this case, the words is, all, come, and there are associated with intensifying chords. This further puts the spotlight on the most important words. I’ve also made the line more “abstract” this time, separating it into three parts as I would a fugue subject. This is particularly useful if you intend to have the phrase recur in an ensemble later, where you’ll need to be able to treat it contrapuntally. The held tones leave space for other voices to be heard. There’s more artistry and elegance in this line reading, of course, and, with the elegance comes greater lyricism.

The bigger the melodic leap for a singer, the more emotion is generated. Verdi taught us that a dotted rhythm preceding a leap is a thing of great joy and comfort to singers, and excitement to listeners. Dotted rhythms bring out a “marked” quality that voices naturally take on—even stentato can be achieved—remember the way that your mom called out to you the fourth time when you didn’t come in from playing in the backyard for dinner the first three times she called. Big octave leaps also deal efficiently with the problem of moving through the passaggio, if brutally.

Conversely, a line reading can be infused with an enormous amount of emotion quite easily by filling it with suspensions, little staggered breaks, and stretto. This “sobbing” effect is to me the sexiest, most emotionally compelling thing about Monteverdi and company; voices “throb” marvelously (and spontaneously) when asked to do this because of the rubbing together of the vertical harmonies that are being implied by the lubricious melody. This simple arch form is now quite ripe for maximum emotional punch in the hands of any singer—partly because of the hundreds of years of performance practice from whence it cadges its moves.

A singer looking for clues to their character often look to what the composer elects to put above the passaggio; a composer who wants her words understood places them below the passaggio. The “break” in the voice—let’s say it is a D on the second line from the top in treble clef for females and the same place an octave lower for males—is a naturally-occurring resource, or curse, depending on how you look at it. Singers work hard to iron out the change of sound between the two voices whilst traversing it. Composers playing “the clarinet in the room” need to be aware of that. One can help a singer out enormously by simply putting a rest in where they would customarily change voices. In this case, I also messed with the suspensions, pushing them together in stretto to increase the excitement of the line reading.

Another way of creating “arc,” or “lift” to a phrase while enhancing the sense of the words is to make of entire clauses musical gestures. In this case, I’ve made the first measure into an up-beat to the word “souls,” and the rest a simple “paying off,” as in when a ship has just crested a wave.

Another, subtler, method of intensifying understandability and emotion simultaneously is the insertion of dissonance on key words. In this case, I’ve limned the words time, all, souls, aid, and party as though smudging them with my thumb. They “grind” a bit, and hit the ear harder. Combined with lower neighbors, the underlying tune remains secure, but the decorations act as melodic intensifiers. Also, in this example, I’ve intentionally placed two segments of the line “time for all good” and “come to the aid” across the passaggio to intensify them through physical challenge, separating off the head and the tail of the line in a way that accentuate the importance of the central climax.

Combining all the effects discussed above, one final result is a “highly-elevated” parlando setting of the text. It would be impossible for a singer not to sound entirely energized singing it unless they were told by their coach to ignore the many articulations, rhythmic nuances, and other effects arrayed by the composer in an effort to help them shine. I haven’t talked about the crucial matter of articulations. I have elsewhere, and I will do so in another essay. But, for now, I will only encourage any young composer to look at the way that Benjamin Britten uses articulations in his music—and, particularly, in the way that Peter Pears executed them. They constitute an astonishingly varied and specific collection of colors, effects, and techniques.

Having now created really exciting dialogue and recitative for your opera, you can sit down and write the excellent tunes that are opera’s true heart and soul. Nothing is more revealing and inspiring than when a composer throws themselves over the parapet of song; nothing is safer and more disheartening (and frustrating) than a well-intentioned opera filled with nothing more than the sort of highly-effective, honorable, ultimately forgettable vocal writing described above.

Suspending Disbelief

The dog day 1981 Philly air had that sexy, crapulous swamp-tang to it that anyone who has sweated through a summer there either loves or hates. I’d arrived from the Midwest but a few weeks earlier, and I loved it. As it happened, I was wadded into a ball in the back seat of a cab like a sweaty mash note, jib to the wind, headed toward the Curtis Institute, immersed in a winsome bagatelle about composing music with the driver.

“I hear music in my head,” he said.

“Me, too,” I replied.

His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

“But I feel it, first,” I said.

He twisted the knob on the radio in the dashboard and the Vivaldi that had been purling from the speakers like the sound of fat bumblebees mixed with an old Singer sewing machine melded into the sound of traffic.

“On MTV I heard Eric Clapton say, ‘I feel it, I put my hands on the guitar, and I play how I feel'," he said, skeptically. "Is it like that for you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But for me it’s like there’s static between my heart and my brain and I need to get better at notating what I’m feeling to eliminate the static,” I said.

“You gotta practice,” he said.

“Pretty much,” I agreed.

“I get home. I plug my guitar into my amp in the basement. I turn the knob to nine. I hit a chord. I feel it,” he laughed. “And for that I don’t need to practice.” He twisted his mouth into an upside-down smile and nodded for emphasis.

“That sounds fun,” I laughed.

He slammed his palms on the wheel and unleashed a stream of Punjabi at the big dude in an SUV ahead of us. I understood not a syllable. But I was swept along by the magnificent roiling emotional intensity of the sounds. They shot from his lips like illumination rounds; they stuttered and flashed, hit their mark, and ended with him hitting the horn a few times for good measure. Traffic was gridlocked. We weren’t going anywhere.

“You felt it. You said it,” I ventured.

“You bet your ass,” he agreed.

“I have no idea what you said,” I observed, "but I loved the colors, the richness, the warp and woof of it, the rhythm….”

“You loved the music of it,” he corrected me. “You don’t speak Punjabi,” he laughed. “If you did, and you knew what I just said about his mother, it would be different.”

I laughed. “You’re right. I don’t want to know what you really said.”

“Exactly. You are a poet. You want to hear what you want me to have said.”

“No. I want to hear what you felt, not what you meant,” I answered. “I got that, loud and clear.”

The knot of traffic loosened for an instant and we shot forward. He glanced at me again in the mirror. “I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said.

“I’m not offended,” I said.

“You said ‘take me to Curtis Institute’,” he observed. “I assumed.”

“What? That I was a poet?” I asked. “I know lots of musicians who aren’t particularly poetic, humane, or even intelligent.”

“But you said you feel music,” he said. “That makes you a poet. I hear other people’s music in my head. I feel things when I hear music, or when I play my guitar, but I do not hear my own music,” he said. “You hear instruments. And voices—.”

“Not exactly. I think that would make me psychotic,” I teased him.

“No. Not crazy,” he said, seriously. “Poet,” he insisted.

Rittenhouse Square stood before us, Rindelaub’s bakery to the right. Traffic was awful. He reached for the meter and shut it off. Twisting around in the seat, he said, “This ride is on me. You stay in the cab, and we’ll talk until I get you to Curtis. That’s how you’ll pay the fare.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

“I’ll bet I make more money than you,” he observed.

“I’ll bet that you do,” I agreed.

“I sit in my cab all day and I think, you know?” he said. “I think about what the people in the buildings that I drive past do all day. Do you think that they think about me?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “I doubt it.”

“Me, too,” he sighed. “Can I tell you something?”

“Of course,” I said. "It’s your time, now.”

He laughed. “I will tell you why I came to the U.S. from Pakistan.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I saw on television a movie called West Side Story. I thought to myself look at those hoodlums, they are so beautiful flying across the screen like that. Then I realized that of course they are actors and it is a movie, but I thought how amazing that a movie should for a moment make me forget that.”

We turned right and began circumnavigating the square. Then, traffic snarled again, and we were stopped in front of Henry McIllhenny’s townhouse. “You know how the fellow who lives in there made his fortune?” I asked. “By mixing jalapeno peppers with water and selling it.” The driver leaned over and looked out the passenger side window.

“Amazing,” he said.

“America is amazing.” I warmed to him. “The amazing thing is that he has spent much of that money supporting the work of playwrights like Tennessee Williams, painters like Renoir, composers like Rorem, who teaches at Curtis.” We crawled forward towards the Barclay Hotel.

“What makes you a poet, my friend,” I ventured to the cabdriver, “is that you are self-aware enough to have marveled at, to continue to treasure, maybe, your own ‘suspension of disbelief’ and to want more. For a moment, you didn’t see the hoodlums, you saw their souls in flight. An appealing ‘American Dream',” I observed. "Suspending disbelief is more than just the sacrificing of realism and logic for the sake of aesthetic enjoyment; it is an extension of faith on a person's behalf in an artist's ability to illuminate human truths and to help us regain (and maybe even improve upon) our humanity." He didn’t answer.

"Honestly," I concluded, "I think that in today's world it takes courage to knowingly enter into a work of art." We turned left in front of the Barclay and stopped at the corner of 18th and Locust.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

I un-scrunched myself, grabbed my tattered boy scout knapsack, yanked the door handle, and slid out of the cab. I rapped twice on the roof of the car to signal that I was clear, and he stuck his head out of the window.

“Don’t stop feeling the music,” he said.

“Don’t stop suspending your disbelief,” I replied.

This essay appeared in the Huffington Post on 3 May 2017. Click here to read it there.

Farewell to Little Pete's

Little Pete's Restaurant. Cash only. A Philadelphia treasure, in October 2014. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

Closure #1: OCTOBER 2014

This is a piece about Closure and the closure of Little Pete's, a belovéd greasy spoon across the street from the Warwick Hotel in Philadelphia. A wrecking ball is set to fly through Little Pete’s. Progress commands that a 300-room hotel must take the place of the parking ramp at 219 South 17th Street in whose corner nestles one of Center City Philadelphia’s treasures. We’re not talking Bookbinder’s (which is now, ignominiously, an Applebee's), chock full of tourists and overpriced, or the smattering of trendy boutique restaurants that surround Rittenhouse Square like hipsters lounging on the margins of a poetry reading. We’re talking about a Genuine 24-Hour Greasy Spoon, Home to Collars Both White and Blue, an Insomniac’s Oasis in the Night, a Caffeine Addict’s Last Resort, a Trusted Purveyor of that mysterious mélange of grill top odds-and-ends, Scrapple. We’re talking about Little Pete’s, for Pete’s sake. I'm afraid that the news is grim.

I’ll forever associate Little Pete’s with my youth, not just as a composer coming into his own, but also as a person whose world was opening up in one Big Bang. My life as it was then, almost impossibly full, was discussed, vivisected, celebrated, dreaded, and mourned at Little Pete’s.

Autumn 1981. This Wisconsin Boy, a tender nineteen years old, had only just moved to Philadelphia. The Grace of Whomever had handed me a lottery ticket in the form of an invitation to study at the legendary, preposterously intimidating Curtis Institute of Music. I was a Brooks Brothers shirt and blue jeans sort of guy. I grooved to Stockhausen more than Rorem, Berio more than Barber, and Bernstein even more than the Beatles. 

Little Pete’s was the setting for countless post-lesson symposia. During my lessons, my mentor Ned Rorem casually dropped priceless aperçu and dry, acerbic criticisms while slashing through my compositions, his pencil waving this way and that like a rapier. Afterwards, a bit shell-shocked by the enormity of Ned’s self-assurance, my best friend, and fellow Rorem pupil Norman Stumpf, and I would head for Little Pete’s, where we would debrief. “Did he tell you that you succeeded in being boring?” I asked Norman, over Pete’s wretched, perennially burnt Joe, one afternoon. “Not this time,” Norman replied. “But he told me that William Flanagan wrote my song better in the late 50s.” “Who was he?” I asked. “That’s what I said,” replied Norman. I already knew what Ned’s answer had been: find out.

I didn’t yet have a telephone in my apartment. I’d use the payphone in Little Pete’s to call home for reports of my mother’s gradual submission to cancer back in Wisconsin, and then drink with a cellist friend until four or five in the morning, attempting to slake the thirst for silence in my head. I cannot recall how many dawns I greeted, my body still young enough to absorb the alcoholic gut punches dealt it during the previous hours, doing my counterpoint exercises at Pete’s lime green counter, “scrambled eggs and“ a few inches away, untouched, the dread of disappointing Ford Lallerstedt in class a few hours later by presenting mediocre work pulling me back from the edge.

I celebrated my first critical triumph as a composer at Little Pete’s; I also received my most gratuitous wing clipping by a music critic there. In 1983, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s august music critic, Daniel Webster gave my string orchestra work, Prayer for Peace, which William Smith had just premièred with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a glowing review in the paper. I’ll never forget my brother Kevin, who had come to town for the performance, spreading the newspaper on the table between us, skimming it before reading it to me, so that, if necessary, he could spare me the worst bits. Seventeen years later—a lifetime, really—my alma matercommissioned a piece to celebrate its 75th anniversary called Much Ado. Made careless by the standing ovation the piece had received the night before, I spread the Inquirer out on a table at Pete’s expecting at least a casual nod from the critic. Instead, my frothy showpiece was dealt a pasting. Composers do read reviews. Well, I used to—until that day, anyway.

I courted my girlfriend for months by walking her each day from Curtis to her train at Suburban Station. The day that she allowed me to carry her violin for her was the equivalent of moving from “vous” to “tu.” Afterwards, a little giddy, downcast, yet hopeful — the way you can be when you are in your early ‘20s and in love and have time and health and just enough money to get by, I bought the Daily News and the New York Times and worked my way through them at Pete’s until I felt the urge to compose percolate up within me like a welcome fever. Then, a man with a mission, I’d head for a practice room at Curtis and spread notes on music paper like jam on bread. God, that felt good. In time, the love affair sputtered. Music did not.

This morning, an old school chum posted the news on Facebook that Pete’s shall soon be no more. The comments following her post were lovely, and they’re still coming in. I shouldn’t be amazed by how much the place meant to all of us. 

No more sentimental reveries over crab cake sandwiches when I return to Philadelphia for the occasional master class, performance, or lecture. One less skein of memory holding me to one of the few places on the planet, and one of the few times, when I was able to summon both the elegia of James Agee and the earnest and callow drive of Thomas Wolfe. “Aw,” a Philadelphia-based friend told me on the phone just now when I called him to confirm the news, “just drive on, old friend. It was inevitable. It had to happen. And it all began the day that they let people throw up buildings taller than William Penn’s hat.”

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At "Little Pete's" on 27 February 2017. The restaurant got a reprieve, and is now scheduled to close in May 2017. (Photo by Neil Erickson)

Closure #2: February 2017

Fully three years after I first contributed the article above to the Huffington Post, still accepting "cash only," the diner holds on. The final closing date has been officially announced and accepted by management, and a steady stream of customers has been coming in to say goodbye for months, said the owner when I stopped in this morning.

Enough time has passed that the Warwick Hotel across the street has passed back into private hands and out of the clutches of the chain that had demolished its once elegant lobby and replaced it with a hideous, Euro-trashy, neon-blue fishtank affair.

My wife and I had checked into the Warwick the day before, our two sons in tow. I'd returned to Philly to hear a performance by the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia—Michael Ludwig had given a lovely account of the violin concerto I'd written for him a few years earlier. After Michael's vivid, glowing performance of my concerto with Dirk Brossé and the orchestra, I'd dined with my belovéd writing mentor (whom I'd first met as a student at Curtis in 1982) Emily Wallace and her husband Gregory and discussed my memoirs; I'd enjoyed a quick brunch with my good buddy, rising composer and Curtis faculty member David Ludwig, at Pete's the next morning.  I'd even taken a moment to stretch my legs out before me in a favorite chair in the Common Room at Curtis for a few moments before walking to Little Pete's, spreading the Inquirer out on the green formica countertop, and reading a respectful review of my concerto by the same critic who had panned me all those years back. 

June 2017. The original Little Pete's is literally no more. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

A few nights before, I'd sung my "Elegy for Ray Charles" at World Cafe Live in University City, a few blocks away, putting over my good friend Stephen Dunn's lovely words breathily into a hot mic and accompanying myself publicly in this town for the first time since the last time I touched the keys as the lounge pianist in the Barclay Hotel lobby in fall 1982. Then, I was about to make my Curtis debut, conducting my music with the Curtis Orchestra next door, Mother dying of cancer, my life just beginning. The other night, my wife and young sons sat at a nearby table. First, she took the stage and rocked the joint with a spiritual, and then rocked it again by singing the trumpet part(!) of Charles Ives' Unanswered Question in an arrangement by local composer Andrew Lipke. When Gilda and I laid down my new arrangement together of John Henry, I knew that I'd finally licked my ghosts in this town. 

I was awakened this morning by the sound of my son's voice: he was singing the trumpet solo of the Ives as he relieved himself in the bathroom. I knew at once that it would be a good day. After checking out of the Warwick, we celebrated by visiting Little Pete's a final time. The four of us squeezed into the booth in which I first sat tha September 1981—the night I first hit the east coast— and ordered breakfast. The waitress who had presented me with a free piece of blueberry pie and said, "Welcome to Philly, honey," has long since passed away, and the boy I once was has become a man who can no longer eat most of what is on the menu. I couldn't resist introducing my eldest to the mysteries of Scrapple.

I love him anyway.

This essay originally appeared in its original form the Huffington Post on 31 October 2014. Click here to read it there.

Remembering David Diamond

David Leo Diamond (July 9, 1915 – June 13, 2005) was an American concert music composer and one of America's great mid-century symphonists. He was also my teacher. He was tough on me, and often cruel, but I always felt that he believed in me, and wanted me to be a better person and artist than I was. He had known the best minds and talents of his time, and I relished the challenge his aesthetic and intellectual expectations represented. Over the course of many years, I think that I grew to understand him. By the time that he died, I think that we had become friends.

###

“Yes,” I read the letter, astonished and trembling in our rural Wisconsin kitchen in 1978, “your son is the Real Thing, a born composer. I think he should come to New York and study at Juilliard with my friend David Diamond.” It was from no less than Leonard Bernstein, to whom my mother had sent some of my music with a plea for guidance. Astonished, mother sent this man Diamond, of whom we had never heard, a letter. He wrote back to her, “Helen Coates did deliver your son’s score to Mr. Bernstein and Mr. Bernstein sent it on to me here with his reactions which were enthusiastic. He clearly feels your son should study with me here [at Juilliard]. … Above all, though, the composition jury will need much more music to consider.”

David Diamond studied at the Eastman School with Bernard Rogers, in New York with Roger Sessions and in France with Nadia Boulanger; while living in Paris, he also befriended Andre Gide, Albert Roussel, Maurice Ravel, and Igor Stravinsky. He was a superb artisan whose Neo-classic compositions grafted intense lyricism with a neurotic and deeply felt hyper-contrapuntal compositional style. He became a star in the compositional firmament quite young, and spent the rest of his career beguiling and reviling performers and colleagues. 

Bernstein famously referred to him as “a vital branch in the stream of American music,” while Virgil Thomson (for whom—like Ned Rorem, like me—David briefly worked) wrote, “Composers, like pearls, are of three chief sorts, real, artificial and cultured. David Diamond is unquestionably of the first sort; his talent and his sincerity have never been doubted by his hearers, by his critics, or by his composer colleagues.” Posterity was important to him: he left behind meticulously crafted ballets, eleven symphonies, concertos, ten string quartets, numerous chamber works, and many admirable songs.

But I knew none of this then.

I also wrote at that time to Lukas Foss, John Harbison, and Dominick Argento and asked each for guidance. All three wrote kindly letters advising me to enroll in Madison for a year. I wrote to Diamond that I had decided on Wisconsin for a year, at least, before coming to the coast. After admonishing me for not putting my return address on the envelope of the letter, he concluded, “If you have been accepted into the Wisconsin school by all means go there and see how you fare. … Make your application next year.”

I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The next winter, I sent some more music to Diamond. His response was brutal: 

“Certainly, I hope you will make a good impression in all the entrance exams required. After all, Mr. Bernstein’s recommendation to me matters, but it will not matter that much to the jury unless they agree. I say your potential is large. But you are very young and art is very long, and it takes many years, even decades to develop a strong technique, an individual style. As of now I sense enormous facility, no interesting thematic ideas, and little self-criticism. So you see, there is the goal to set for real achievement in a very difficult art form. And I am willing to help you reach that goal. So let us hope for good results from the jury, the exams, the Deans.”

Demoralized, I applied to Juilliard as instructed. My parents fought bitterly over whether to spend the money on the airplane ticket, Father capitulating only when Mother said, “If he is turned down, then maybe it will convince him to go to law school the way you want him to.”

I arrived at Juilliard preceded by my scores and a mediocre letter of recommendation (I steamed it open) from my composition teacher in Madison that read, in part: “Daron’s music operates within a narrow and highly derivative framework excused perhaps by his inexperience and youth.” 

It was evident to me the moment I entered the room that I was to be sent packing. The men who were to determine my future—Diamond, Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt, and Vincent Persichetti—sat at a long table on one side of the room. I seated myself in a straight-backed chair on the other side, facing them. The scores I had submitted sat in a neat pile in front of Diamond. 

“Lenny wrote to me about this young man,” began Diamond. A flicker of interest—or annoyance—flitted across Babbitt’s face. “Why do you want to be a composer?” asked Persichetti. “Because,” I replied, “it is the only thing I have ever done that I know I will never be as good at as I want to be.” My bravado met with cool disapproval. Diamond moved to the piano and, moving from low to high, stabbed at six or seven pitches. “Kindly sing the pitches back and name them,” he said. I started to sweat as I sang the first three or four and then trailed off. “Your ear is not your strong suit,” he clucked.

Next, Persichetti moved to the piano. “I am going to play a little medley for you of various themes. Just call out the name of each, if you can, as I play, and I’ll move on to another.” I recognized the unmistakable pungency of the Tristan progression.

“Good,” he smiled warmly. I was dazzled as he seguéd directly into a Gershwin tune whose name I didn’t recall, “That’s fine,” he said, continuing. Then I missed two, and he played something that was clearly Mozart, but what I didn’t know. I tittered nervously. “What’s that?” asked Persichetti. “I’ve never seen someone do that before,” I effused. “That was wonderful!”

“Yes, well,” said Diamond. “Evidently the repertoire is not your strong suit either.” Carter looked out the window. Babbitt looked at the table in front of him. Neither made eye contact with me or said a word. Diamond reached for one of my scores and flipped it open. After paging through it idly, he pushed it over to Babbitt, who didn’t look at it. “Mr. Hagen,” said Diamond funereally, “it is felt that you should … return to Wisconsin and … develop your technique.”

Clammy with cold sweat in my Kermit-green leisure suit with a round-trip airplane ticket in the pocket, I thanked the men who had just passed judgment on me, excused myself, went to the nearest bathroom, and vomited. Seated on the toilet, I wept with humiliation, fury, and frustration. They had been clear: I was not good enough. I returned to Wisconsin a day early. My parents, who didn't know that I'd be arriving that night,  were asleep when I got home.

I returned to Madison, and began lessons with Homer Lambrecht. I also practiced the piano and composed obsessively. I took a flier and applied to the Curtis Institute, and was invited by Ned Rorem to study with him there. Over the course of three years there, I composed “one of everything”—nine hours’ worth of music (three hours worth was symphonic), and either performed it myself, or coached and conducted it. 

“I am writing to you,” I began in my letter to David in January 1984, “because I feel I’m finally ready to come to Juilliard. Studying with Mr. Rorem has been a revelation, but,” I wrote, telling him exactly what I knew he would want to hear from a potential student, “I realize that my facility can still get ahead of my self-criticism and honestly feel that you are the single best man to help me with that.”

Did I really believe that David was the right teacher for me? I don’t think that I cared. I intended to move to New York, and I needed a place to hang my hat. When I told Ned that I wanted to finish my training with David, he looked alarmed, “Are you sure? What makes you think you’re not ready to just go out and start?” I told myself then that learning from David’s command of large-scale forms (symphonies, string quartets) would perfectly compliment the grounding I had received from Ned by way of his virtuosity in small ones (song cycles, suites). It turned out to be true.

March is the month that most conservatories hold auditions. Juilliard was no different. On the way to the interview, I passed the bathroom in which five years earlier I had vomited. The door opened, and David, in a zippy blue pin stripe suit, poked his head out. Rain fell straight down. I straightened my tie, shot my cuffs, and sidled past him, into the room. I scanned the table set up before the windows, through which the Hudson could be seen like a gray stain, and recognized Babbitt, Carter, and Persichetti.

“Mr. Hagen,” he drawled. His thin lips and pale face were dour, but his eyes shone. “You may sit down.” So serious! I stripped off my raincoat and dropped the copies of the New Yorker I’d brought to catch up on during the train ride from Philly. They slid to the floor. I flapped my arms.

“Oh, for the love-a Mike!” I hissed. I looked up into Persichetti’s kind eyes. He had been trying to see what I was reading. “Hello, Mr. Car—,” I said, lunging at him. “No, he’s Roger Sessions,” piped Babbitt. “That’s not funny, Milton,” scolded Diamond. My head swiveled to respond. I opened my mouth like a koi. “We all remember you from four years ago, Mr. Hagen. And, looking at the number of scores you’ve sent us …well … it seems as though you have been working very … hard.” Diamond offered the observation as a question, his eyebrows rising. “You’ve been very … prolific … haven’t you?”

I returned his gaze steadily as he fingered the American Academy of Arts and Letters pin in his lapel. Was it a trick question? This time, telephone conversations had been had, arrangements been made: Ned had spoken with Bernstein, and with Diamond. I had made hay at Curtis, acquired some connections, and managed a couple of minor achievements. Was Diamond inferring that I had been too prolific? Shrugging, I looked out the window at the Hudson River over the roof of the LaGuardia High School. Through the gauze of rain, I could see the sun setting. There were gulls.

“Let’s see,” Diamond continued. “Vincent, will you do the honors?” Persichetti stubbed out his cigarette, scrunched his eyes up behind his glasses, and slid onto the piano bench. He winked at me. This time when he launched into his mad medley, I was ready for him: “Coronation Scene from Boris Godunov!” I said. An insane modulation and he was playing a Chopin Mazurka. “Chopin: don’t remember which one,” I said. He began the Tristan progression, and I said quickly, “Tristan, of course.”

“Nope,” he said. “Trick question.” He continued. “Of course, it’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk.” “Uh huh,” he smiled. He played one, unmistakable crunchy chord. “Rite of Spring!” I laughed. Something pointillist, lovely, but stylistically diffuse. “Pretty,” I mused. “I don’t recognize it.” He stopped. “Something of my own,” he smiled. “Neat!” I said.

“Mr. Hagen,” Diamond began, “I have no doubt whatsoever that you will be, or plan to be, as prolific as ever. I would say that is a blessing which must be haloed by the development of more severe self-criticism and a larger awareness of structural invention.”

I looked from one face to the next.

“Okay!” I said. “When do I start?” Laughter.

“Well,” said Carter, looking at me and speaking for the first time. “David will work out the details of your scholarship. That’s that.”

The following fall I began studies at Juilliard. To my way of thinking then, I was there for one reason: my composition lessons with David. I worked hard to please him. I thought that all of my peers were dynamic, impressive composers, but I instinctively kept to myself—so much so that many thought that I still lived in Philadelphia. 

Every few weeks, the composition department held a composition seminar at which we either presented our new works, or a visiting composer presented theirs. The faculty attended, as well as all of one’s colleagues. I found the seminars desperately dry. After my first presentation, Diamond pulled me into the hallway and chewed me out: “Never, ever do that again. Your piece is brilliant. You are brilliant. What you said was brilliant. How you said it was unacceptable. You’re a better composer than most of the people in that room. If you don’t treat yourself with respect, how can you possibly expect your colleagues to?”

Like Witold Lutosławski, David wore excellently tailored suits. He occasionally rouged his cheeks. His shoes were always shined. He enjoyed sincere flattery. A serious drinker when he chose to be, he preferred very cold, very dry champagne and excellent vodka, if it was available, followed by brandy. David was fun to drink with. He enjoyed the fact that I could hold my liquor. He loved good food, arguments, and books. The pretentious infuriated him, though he seemed to appreciate people who could pull it off. It seemed to me that he felt that Society had short-changed him; it had contradicted his hopes. While his default mien was grave, he could be pixyish and ebullient. 

Our every conversation ultimately circled back to the three intertwined things we had most in common: anger, depression, and chronic insomnia. Were the causes chemical, or the result of pathological narcissism? Were they darker, more Nixon-ian?

“When I was younger,” David told me once, “I rarely slept, always worried about money. My anger and my hostility drove me to extremes of behavior that must have seemed theatrical to some. Sessions, for example, when I confessed to him in a lesson that I intended to kill myself by jumping out of the balcony at Carnegie Hall, admonished me to jump from the second tier, as jumping from the first would leave me with broken legs, while the latter would guarantee a split skull, or at least a broken neck.”

A superb raconteur, David’s reminiscences of the 30s and 40s were peppered with vivid character sketches of Greta Garbo, Clifford Odets, Carson and Reeves McCullers, Copland, and Blitzstein, among others. A compulsive diarist, the shelves in his Rochester home contained dozens of books filled with his graceful, athletic handwriting. He confided to me over the years—usually in dark asides after some perceived slight—that he was writing an autobiography that would settle this or that person’s hash. 

After David’s death, Gerard Schwarz, who genuinely loved him and continues to champion his music, loaned me a copy of an unpublished manuscript, which I read. I understand now why he chose never to complete it: the first fifty pages ring with his feisty voice, and promise a memoir as pleasurable and captivating as an evening spent drinking champagne with him, listening to him tilt at windmills, and lacerate colleagues. Sadly, the document loses its way, tells rather than shows, never progresses far beyond the 60s, and becomes a circular argument, exactly the sort of self-justifying document that David, as an avid and careful reader, disliked. Perhaps another, more polished, manuscript is out there somewhere, awaiting the hand of an experienced editor. I hope so: the world deserves to hear his version—whatever that may have been—of things.

David could transform in a heartbeat from needy to imperious. This made him numerous enemies. Not just his enemies questioned the accuracy of his memory. I believe that he tried hard to be truthful, but that he was more the Don than de Passamonte, more Pierrot than Pedrolino—in other words, the extraordinary intensity of his feelings (he was as ruthless with himself as he was with others) sometimes distorted the way he perceived not the truth, but the world. 

Lessons could be grueling, especially if he had gotten it into his head that you had somehow betrayed him. I used to write music reviews for EAR, a downtown new music magazine. For a (rave) review of David’s Symphony No. 10 (premièred a few weeks earlier by Bernstein with the American Composers Orchestra), I had created what I thought was a pretty spicy lead: “Diamond’s Tenth looms over the audience like an enormous tombstone.” Someone had gotten a copy into David’s hands.

“You have a deep-seated subconscious desire to destroy me,” he bellowed. “Get out of my sight!” It was my first taste of his legendary temper. In my case, at least, it was always as fleet as it was quick. His apologies, when they did come, were always sincere. I admired him, and I always accepted them.

For Ned I composed three art songs each week for three years—one on a poem of my choice; one on a poem of his choice; one of a poem he had set. For David I constructed two fugues (each more elaborate than the last) a week for two years—one on a fugue subject of his choice, one on a subject of my own devising. Ned’s regimen helped me to learn how to access my emotions and express them fluently with musical notes. David’s regimen helped me to learn how to explore the relationship that those notes have with one another on the abstract, purely musical level.

David’s obsession with fugue as a compositional procedure mirrored his lifelong effort as an intellect to make sense of the world in which he lived. When Bernard Rands without malice wondered aloud during a composition seminar what the point of writing fugues was at the end of the twentieth century, David was apoplectic. Bernard was calling into question the very method by which David fashioned his sanity.

Inspired by the Copland-Sessions Concerts, I produced during those years several dozen recitals in Philadelphia and New York featuring my own, and colleagues’ music. I called them Perpetuum Mobile concerts because, at the time, constant movement was my way of life. My intentions were good, but I see now how naïve I was to have mounted them—particularly at my own expense. I wanted colleagues to like me, yes; and I thought that working together, we might all benefit professionally. I was genuinely surprised and hurt when several of the Juilliard composers whose music I featured treated me as though I was hitching my star to theirs. Diamond explained to me that I didn’t really care about other people; I just wanted to look as though I did:

“Daron,” David’s letter began, continuing a conversation begun a few days earlier on the telephone, “You are confused by my use of the word selfish. I refer to self-absorption, pre-occupation with self, self-advertisement, a certain exhibitionism and charm at the same time being generous in your Perpetuum Mobile concerts for young composers is not the inner you, it’s the outer man saying, “look gang, I’m for the other young’uns.’ Giving in this way is not altruism of the spirit."

###

“Fugue subjects,” David said, briskly sketching one on the sheet of music paper on the piano rack in front of us on a winter morning in 1986, “are like snakes.” Over his shoulder, I could see snowflakes whirling outside through a tall sliver of one of Juilliard’s slit-like windows. “Every one of them has a head, a body, and a tail.” Chop, he slashed a line between the head and the body. Chop, he slashed another between the body and the tail. “Or like people,” I replied, “with a head, a body, and a tale.” He laughed pleasantly. The Regency Theater just around the corner was in the middle of its three week Truffaut retrospective; Marc Blitzstein’s Piano Concerto had just been performed at Carnegie Hall for the first time in fifty years.

“Or a Life,” he frowned, leaning over the keyboard, “with a memorable Beginning, Middle ripe for development, and an End….” He stopped writing and straightened up. “Now sketch a counter-subject.” I took the pencil from him and began adding my squiggles to the line above his. He pursed his lips. A sharp intake of breath: “Something memorable,” he said, “not ... mechanical.” I tried again, but all I could think was that Life, like “a Pretty Girl, is like a Melody.” 

I looked at the oil of Pierrot he had painted that hung over the piano. It wasn’t very good. Clowns frighten me. I giggled nervously. “What’s so funny?” he asked. “If Life is a Melody, then Energy must be the human compulsion to organize sound into Song,” I rallied, half-serious.

“And Force is the application of creative energy,” he smiled encouragingly. “And composition is Birth?” I asked. “And pulse is Gravity,” he answered. “Which makes entropy, or the lack of pulse, Death,” he said, taking the pencil. “Look,” he circled the head of my counter-subject, “this is memorable, so why not just take the tail of the subject, invert it, and use that as the head of the counter-subject?”

Chop, I thought: the snake devouring its tail. Chop. “In my beginning is my end. Eliot,” I risked. He chuckled. “Right. The Ouroborus. My end is my beginning. Mary, Queen of the Scots. Earlier. Better,” he replied with finality as through the door the three light knocks of his next student indicated that my lesson was nearly up. I carefully placed the enormous pages of my manuscript into the elephant portfolio in which I had brought it.

It took me twenty-six years to understand what David said next: “Mr. Hagen—,” he admonished gravely as I reached for the doorknob. I turned around, and his voice softened. “Dear One,” he began again, “Don’t let gravity win.”

###

As inspiring as studying composition with David was, dealing with him as an employer was an exercise in sadism. I copied the parts for his Flute Concerto, commissioned by the New Haven Symphony for Jean Pierre Rampal. Rampal, while in every other way professional, urbane, and musically sublime, had been too busy to learn his part before the first rehearsal. As copyist, I was compelled to attend rehearsals and to correct any errors that might need fixing. It was snowy and nasty that week, and I disliked intensely the train ride from New York to New Haven. (I did manage to compose a Suite for Viola during them—so at least I have that to show for the commute.)  Murry Sidlin vented his frustration when three or four errors that had eluded my proofreader’s eye became known piecemeal because the orchestra, in order to save money, had excused certain players until the last minute.  

I recall standing at the lip of the stage score in hand. David sat in the audience, my former lover seated beside him. Wheeling around and pointing at me from the podium, Sidlin shrieked, “Copyist! I thought you corrected these parts!” It was the copyist’s and the composer’s worst nightmare. Humiliated as a man and as a copyist, I answered, “I’ll correct them during the break, Maestro. “What?” bellowed Sidlin. “The break,” I said. “During the break.” Sidlin writhed with frustration. I looked at Rampal. Holding his flute like a scepter, he stared out into the empty hall. I looked at my former lover. I looked at David, who appeared to know a whole lot more about what was going on than I did. 

After the premiere, I accepted an invitation to join Rampal, my ex, and David for a late dinner. I found it impossible (as, flirting with the waitress, he drew an American Express Black Card from his jacket pocket as fluidly as one would a handkerchief from one’s sleeve) to dislike Rampal. Feeling like a spider caught in a web, I drank. A kindly Yale coed took me home with her. Back in New York, David commanded me to make corrections to every one of the seventy or so printed parts by hand, using whiteout, India ink, and an electric easer. I suppose he thought he was teaching me a lesson.

Not long after, at my final lesson, he said, after observing that I had never brought him a vocal piece to look at,  “I was speaking to Lenny the other night about you. He says that it’s a shame that you never showed me your vocal music, because I could have cleaned up your prosody problems.” I was astonished. A year later, at my first lesson with Bernstein, I was saddened but not surprised when he told me that he had never said that.

The school year ended, and with it my time as a student of David’s. A colleague threw a party at his stylish Lincoln Center apartment. My colleague—David’s favorite student—was handsome, ambitious, intelligent, blandly elitist, and highly accomplished. Diamond adored him, and called him, as he called me, “Genius Boy.” I admired his craftsmanship and work ethic. His bookshelves were stocked with well-thumbed volumes. Good literature, in good editions. One wall was covered floor-to-ceiling with orchestral scores. A gifted pianist, his grand piano dominated the living room. Tasteful objets d’art were carefully placed here and there. An inscribed portrait of Diamond hung between the bedroom and bathroom.

The liquor was expensive. The conversation was interesting. The fond farewells to David were sincere. He’d be stepping off the Juilliard faculty in a few weeks, and this party was both a birthday celebration and a sendoff. Supine on the couch, vodka martini cradled on his chest, David held forth about Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges to a ring of attentive upturned faces. I poured a scotch. Seen through the heavy tumbler, the tableaux looked like a Caravaggio. Uneasy, I put the glass down without drinking from it.

Virgil Thomson called what I did as a copyist to make money “working on other men’s music,” and fiercely disapproved—except when I worked for him. Vincent had only recently told me to do anything but. Scholarship notwithstanding, I was self-supporting, and I needed the dough. I fingered the frayed cuff of my Brooks Brothers shirt, knew the lining of my jacket had long since begun to sag, took note of my scuffed, cheap shoes, and remembered that I was broke. 

I had been taught at the back of Father’s hand to never, ever, ever give the impression that I thought highly of myself. Indeed, I thought of myself with my ass in the air in my pajamas at the age of seven along with my brothers, scrubbing the kitchen floor in the middle of the night, Father hissing, “You all think you’re smarter than me.”

I gave David a letter, and left. 

For the next few weeks I copied music in order to make some money on which to live while composing at an artist colony. July rolled around. I put my books and papers into storage, gave away the furniture, and hit the road again, my knapsack on my back. On my way out of New York, I checked the mail one last time and found a letter from David:

“I have read the very touching letter you gave me on leaving [the] party several times and treasure the feelings expressed in it. It is good to know that I have contributed something of value to you as a teacher during your Juilliard years.”

I still had a year of studies to complete at Juilliard. I met with Joe Polisi, who told me that I would work for a semester each with Joseph Schwantner and Bernard Rands. This seemed both interesting and agreeable. Consequently, in between fulfilling commissions and working as a freelance pianist and copyist, almost by accident, I completed the coursework for the masters’ degree. As it had become time to discuss whether I would remain to pursue my “terminal degree,” I was summoned to the same room in which I had first auditioned. Diamond, Babbitt, and Persichetti were already there. They sat in a row on the other side of the room. It was hot for June, but a familiar icy remoteness gripped me. I became hyper-aware of my surroundings. When we met seven years previous, I was an annoyance to them, a fly that deserved to be swatted—no, flicked—back to Wisconsin. I remembered the ridiculous green leisure suit I'd worn to that audition. This time I wore a Juilliard sweatshirt and blue jeans. I had a clear idea of where I stood, professionally. Now I was competing with them for commissions.

During their lifetimes, composition programs had sprung up around the country; the doctorate (which had barely existed in composition) had become an exclusionary degree: if one wanted the financial safety net of a career in Academe, one now had to have one. I smiled at David, who was scheduled to return to the faculty. He gave me a schoolmarmish scowl in return, and began, “Despite my objections, Daron, you have continued to accept commissions while engaged in your studies here at Juilliard. You produce concerts, you accompany dance classes, you copy music, you conduct a chorus at NYU, and every time I talk to you you have a new amour. I think that you should take a year or two off to consider your life choices before returning to complete your degree. Perhaps then you’ll be prepared to concentrate on your composing in a more disciplined fashion.” 

“You need to decide,” David decreed, “what is really important to you.” At that moment, he reminded me of my high school trigonometry teacher Max Hilmer, sincerely baffled that I didn't want to be like him. I thought also of Diane Doerfler, the literature teacher who had taught me that “making art is more important than teaching about it.” Finally, I thought of Ned Rorem, who had once mistakenly mischaracterized my fear of being thrown out of school as “a seething desire to please” him. I felt as though David was trying to manipulate me, and life with my mercurial, emotionally-manipulative father had taught me to become emotionless (that familiar icy remoteness), and capable of brutality when I felt that I was being subjected to manipulation. Oh, I was seething now, all right, but not with a “desire to please.” You spend your time, I thought, or you are spent. 

“May I have some time to think about this?” I asked. He became suddenly magnanimous: “By all means, Daron. Take as much time as you need to decide.” He clapped his hands together and then spread them before him like a blackjack dealer completing his shift. I smiled coolly in return, excused myself, and walked as slowly as possible to the door. Closing it with elaborate care behind me, I looked across the hallway at the door of the bathroom in which I had thrown up before retreating to Wisconsin. I walked briskly to the elevators. As I jabbed the call button, the remoteness dissipated, a sheen of cold perspiration slicked my forehead, and I began to feel again.

With a ping, the doors parted, revealing a flock of ballerinas in leotards clutching diet Pepsis and wadded-up packs of cigarettes. I took a deep breath, held it, and plunged into their midst. They unselfconsciously banged into one another and brushed up against me. I got an erection. Their voices piled atop one another like flamingos. I exhaled explosively. Their long pink necks and sweaty, gangling frames generated a miasma of musty leggings, baby powder, crotch, and cigarette-smoke. There was no air.

I felt hot. Then I felt cold. I poked at the first floor button, three, four, five times. My ears began buzzing; my reflection in the doors began to blur. I was going to pass out. I looked around at their rouged baby-faces and their hard eyes. My hands turned to ice. Another ping. Just in time. I tumbled out into the Juilliard lobby and down the stone-lined tunnel of the entranceway across from the (then) Chinese consulate on 67th Street.

I needed to sit. Looking for a bench, I saw my ear-training teacher, Mary Anthony Cox. As I passed her, she noted my distress and indicated that I should join her. I admired and trusted Mary Anthony. She was one of the best teachers I had ever had. She asked what was wrong. I put my hands out before me, palms down, and watched them gradually cease trembling. Then, I described my meeting with the composition faculty.

“Honey,” she sighed, “you are a round peg. Graduate school is a square hole. Of course you can make yourself fit in here, but you don’t belong. You’re a real composer. You write music. So, do it. Mozart didn’t need a doctorate to write his operas. You don’t need one to write yours.” 

###

Over the course of the next seventeen years, I made semi-annual visits to David at his home on Edgerton Street in Rochester. He never forgave me for not finishing the doctorate at Juilliard. “Twenty years from now,” he predicted, “you’ll need it. Tastes change. People forget who you are, what you’ve accomplished. A new generation denies you respect. It has always been that way.” I called him once a month to visit, to ask how he was, to gossip, and to ask him what he was working on. At one point, he asked me to orchestrate his opera The Noblest Game for City Opera, as he no longer had the physical stamina to execute it himself. (I begged off.) As the years passed and I remained staunchly supportive, grateful, and respectful, our correspondence took on a gentle mellowness punctuated by his flashes of caustic commentary on each emergent compositional saveur du mois. I learned only after he died that I was the one of the few of his numerous students to remain steadily in touch with him. In May 2005 I wrote to David:

“On the telephone just now you asked me why, after 26 years, I continue to write so much music. I think that I finally have an answer for you. I write music compulsively, reflexively. How could you expect me to slow down or to stop any more than you could expect LB to settle down and to focus his energies on composing? I write so much because I write when I’m sad, and when I’m happy, married or divorced; when I’m broke, and (even better, I’d like to believe) when I’m flush. I compose whether I’m paid to or not, and whether I want to or not. I compose as I always have done: as I breathe—because the alternative, cher maître, is unacceptable. …So please do come to Yaddo [the artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, NY] next month, where Michael Boriskin and I have put together a concert that will be performed in the Music Room at Elaina Richardson’s behest that will feature your early Flute Quartet. I miss you and long to see you.”

The late afternoon light on the main lawn of Yaddo in June was stunning. David and I stood on the back patio, arm in arm, looking down towards the Sleepy Naiad statue at the foot of the lawn. He had grown frail. “Before I forget,” he said, “I want to tell you that Marc [Blitzstein] used to like to sit over there.” He squeezed my hand and pointed at a spot far down the lawn near the rose garden. We turned around, and re-entered the grand hall. I guided him gently into the Music Room. Life-sized full body portraits of the Trask children loomed over us like gravestones. Late afternoon light streamed laterally through the leaded windows.

I looked at David: his impeccably tailored gray serge suit hung loosely over his diminished frame. His blue shirt’s collar was crisp. There was a large New Zealand-shaped liver spot on his scalp over his right eye. What remained of his hair was colorless. His skin was papery and luminous. His rheumy eyes brimmed with tears.

“Marc cared,” he whispered urgently. “When he wrote Regina here, he could sing and play every note. He knew words. You remember I told you once that he rewrote the entire libretto for Lenny's Trouble in Tahiti without needing to change a note of the music?”

I stood up, walked to the front of the little ensemble, and addressed the audience. Comprised almost entirely of local high school students enjoying a rare glimpse of the estate’s inner sanctum, they were attentive and excited. “A word about teachers,” I began my memorized introduction. “I have been a member of the corporation here for a number of years, am in the middle of my career as a professional composer, and have addressed many audiences and classrooms filled with students. It has been twenty years since I had a lesson with the amazing man sitting a few feet from me. Nevertheless, I am more nervous now speaking in front of him than I have been before any audience in the interim. Teachers that we admire and adore have that effect on us. That’s a good thing.” There was a sprinkle of laughter. I asked the audience to acknowledge David and they applauded warmly.

“Thank you, Dear One,” he said, sitting. “You know, I can actually see them all around us: Lenny, Aaron, Virgil, and Marc.” He meant it. More tears.

The concert over, I asked my wife Gilda to snap a few pictures of us.

“I think that it is an illusion that the dead have left us, David,” I ventured, as we posed. He smiled, squeezed my hand, and whispered, “Yes.” “How are you?” I asked. “Terrible. My heart, you know.” “But Jerry is doing your music.” “Yes, but he’s the only one.” We sat together for a few minutes. “They're all here, Daron,” he said, with conviction, “especially at Yaddo.” And then, voice trailing off, “I’ve driven so many people away; I’ve lost so many….”

At that moment, a dozen schoolchildren from the audience surrounded us. They had loved his piece. He smiled radiantly, sincerely enjoying the moment; he accepted their praise, and asked them their names.

A few days later, on 13 June 2005, David died of heart failure.

This essay has appeared in the Huffington Post. You can read it there by clicking here.

Six Beats for Blitzstein

Marc Blitzstein, American composer (1905-1964)

Marc Blitzstein’s music is not exactly an obsession of mine, but I do find the musical DNA of which it is composed indispensable. Strands of that DNA — strict adherence to economy of means, a passion for combining words and music, the belief that music can promote social justice, an abhorrence of pretension — are woven contrapuntally, inextricably, into the music that I compose, and have been, nearly from the start. Here are six Blitzstein beats.

One

Bltzstein’s music is powered by the ironic marriage of opposites. A fierce advocate of the poor and disenfranchised, he was born in Philadelphia in 1905 to affluent parents. Determined to write music popular with Regular Joes, he studied composition and piano at the Curtis Institute. Then he went on to Berlin to study with Arnold Schoenberg and to Paris where he worked with Nadia Boulanger. He began as a modernist, but he turned populist in the 1930s, shortly before he (an openly gay communist) married novelist Eva Goldbeck. Three Portuguese sailors in Martinique beat him to death in 1964 after a sexual encounter. In 1937, he entered Broadway history when the Works Progress Administration shut down The Cradle Will Rock — an opera presented as a musical. As the story goes, director Orson Welles and producer John Houseman walked the musicians, cast and audience from the Maxine Elliott Theater to the nearby Venice Theater, where — in order to evade union restrictions — they performed the piece from the audience, with Blitzstein (not a union member) accompanying from an upright piano onstage.

To some, Blitzstein’s signature gambit of destabilizing tonality by throwing a suspended fourth in the bass was crude. But, like a beat cop’s billy club to the ribs, it got things moving. Minus Blitzstein’s example and inspiration, Leonard Bernstein might have been a very different, possibly lesser, composer.

Two

One rainy November 1980 day Karlos Moser, then head of the opera program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where I was an undergraduate music major, and I were working through some songs that I had contributed to a revue he was concocting. My introduction to Marc’s music had come when Karlos cast my older brother Kevin as Ben Hubbard in his production of Blitzstein’s Regina during the late 70s. Karlos mentioned in passing that the State Historical Society possessed the Blitzstein papers. Thrilled, I had sprinted across the street to the archives, filled out a request to see them, and was astonished to be granted immediate access. Within thirty minutes, I held in my hands a Photostat of the manuscript of Blitzstein’s fair copy of the first page of Cradle. I was 17.

Odd it was, only a year later, to find myself a student of Ned Rorem’s at the Curtis Institute, composing and practicing on the same pianos Marc once did, passing his graduation portrait (along with everyone else’s — Leonard Bernstein, Ralph Berkowitz, Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber, Lukas Foss, and on and on) on my way each week to my piano lesson. Odder yet to have landed there in part because of a letter from his friend Bernstein to my mother, telling her I was “the real thing,” and encouraging her to send me to Juilliard (that’s another story) to study with another of Marc’s close friends, David Diamond.

John Houseman tells the story of opening night of The Cradle Will Rock.

Three

John Houseman’s production of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock at the Fairbanks opened on 30 July 1983. I was there, seated in the first row. I still weighed about 160, sported a Blitzstein-esque moustache, and was still a student at Curtis. Before the performance, Houseman took the stage to tell the story of the night the show opened — Blitzstein at the piano, Orson Welles dashing around the theater, playing multiple characters, everyone afire with the moment. Ordinarily too abashed to importune, I threw myself at Houseman afterwards. “You captured lightning in a bottle, didn’t you?” I enthused. “Yes, my boy,” he drawled in his Professor Kingsfield voice, “I’m acutely aware of that.” I laughed. He was disarmed. “You look like Blitzstein,” he remarked. I flushed with pleasure. He frowned. “He ended badly.” I waited. Beat. “Yes, I know,” I said, “I’m a composer.” He thrust his chin upwards theatrically as though searching for answers among the klieg lights: “Dear God,” he said, exploding the G, extending the O into a melisma, and plucking the final D like a pizzicato. “What does one do with a composer?” I laughed again, shook his hand vigorously, and thanked him for his time. “Not at all,” he said. “Good luck.” He stared at me, hard, for three long beats. “You’ll need it.”

Four

Summer 1985. Saranac, Serge Koussevitzky’s home overlooking the Berkshires across the highway from the Tanglewood grounds. Late one evening, after hearing me improvise at the piano in Marc’s style and a discussion about Blitzstein’s music, Bernstein asked me to have a go at completing Sacco and Vanzetti, the unfinished opera for the Met found in the trunk of Marc’s car after he died. I told him I’d love to have a try, but couldn’t afford to do it for no fee. A few days later, at Bernstein’s behest, Jacob Druckman approached me on the back patio and put a little money on the table for the project on behalf of the New York Philharmonic, for whom he was then serving as composer in residence.

My instinct was that, as I did when offered by Ellis Freedman and Sylvia Goldstein a job as Aaron Copland’s final amanuensis, I should refuse it. I told Druckman that I felt that if I wanted to establish myself as a composer, then I needed to be known for my own music, not for what I had done for others’. He said that I had a point, and was impressed enough by the professionalism with which I handled the situation to speak to his wife Muriel about a ballet commission.

Having my hands on Blitzstein’s sketches was just too inviting an invitation to refuse. After spending a few days with them, I concluded that the most responsible thing to do was to leave the thing alone-they were just too fragmentary, too raw. The finished score would require the creation of too much original material to make it coherent. That May, Eric Gordon helped me to find the manuscript of Marc’s Piano Sonata, which hadn’t been performed publicly since the 20s so that I could program it on the concert series I was putting on in Philadelphia and New York.

Five

During spring 1990, I was fortunate enough to work on my first major opera Shining Brow with Bernstein. As Bernstein once did for Blitzstein with Trouble in Tahiti,I did for Lenny: I would play and sing the scene from Brow that I was working on. He’d amble over to the bench, push me to the side, and start playing off of my manuscript, squinting, sort of wheeze-singing as he briskly double-checked parts he wanted to speak to.

“Okay, baby,” he’d begin. “Try this.” He would “put over” a few bars of what I had written and veer off in a new direction, improvising an entirely different line reading. Then he’d stop, suck on his plastic cigarette holder, quickly page to a different part of the sketch, find something, and say, “Or you could have used this from before, like this.” He’d play a few bars.

“No, that wouldn’t work,” he’d think out loud. I’d improvise a different line reading. “No, no, you can’t do that!” he would laugh, “Marc did that in No for an Answer! Do you know that one?” He’d noodle a few bars. “No, that was Tender Land. Ugh. God.” (Laughter.)

During Wright’s Act 1, scene one pitch to his future mistress, I quoted the “New York, New York” rising fourths motive that he had first used in Trouble in Tahiti, and then in On the Town, on the word, “suburbia,” “Nice lift,” he said, “very Straussian. But you follow it up with stuff that sounds like Ned’s little Frank O’Hara opera. Did I steal that from him for Tahiti or did he steal that from me? I can’t remember. I know you’re talking about theft by putting stolen music in his mouth, but you should come up with something else there.”

At some point, I pointed out that I had been modeling the character of Wright musically on him, and the relationship between Wright and Sullivan on him and Blitzstein. He got it: “That’s 'Maria'. No, it’s the orchestral play-in to the first scene of Marc’s Regina,” he mused aloud. “Well, yes, I stole it from Marc.” Silence. “But he stole it from Aaron!” (Generous, warm laughter.)

It still felt, a few years later, at the family’s Dakota apartment (the day Brow received its workshop run-through after Bernstein’s death), as though he slouched in the low chair in the den, sipping a scotch, pulling on his plastic cigarette holder, growling one of the last things he said to me: “Play and sing that part again, baby—the part that sounds like Marc.”

Daron and David Diamond in the music room at Yaddo a few days before Diamond's death in June 2005. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

Six

“Before I forget, I want to tell you that Marc used to like to sit over there,” said David Diamond, squeezing my hand and pointing at a spot far down the lawn near the rose garden. We were sitting on one of the pews in the Yaddo Music Room. Life-sized full body portraits of the Trask children loomed over us like gravestones. The June 2005 air was lively. Late afternoon light streamed through the leaded windows.

Elaina Richardson had asked me to curate a recital of music by composers who had worked at Yaddo. Michael Boriskin and his Music from Copland House players performed. I wanted to honor David, with whom I had studied, so I programmed his early Flute Quartet. I also suggested that he be invited and, to everyone’s astonishment, he agreed to come. He told me that he had wanted to visit Yaddo once more. I looked at David: his impeccably tailored gray serge sit hung loosely over his diminished frame. His blue shirt’s collar was crisp. There was a large New Zealand-shaped liver spot on his scalp over his right eye. What remained of his hair was colorless. His skin was papery and luminous. His rheumy eyes brimmed with tears. A few days later, on 13 June, he died.

That day, however, David’s observation was piercingly clear: “Marc cared,” he whispered urgently. “When he composed Regina here, he could sing and play every note. He knew words. You remember I told you once that he rewrote the entire libretto for Lenny’s Tahiti without needing to change a note of the music?” (When David reminisced, the facts could sometimes be sketchy, but the point was always clear.)

In May 2007, I sat before the upright piano in the Acosta Nichols Tower studio, the one at which Marc had written Regina, writing with trepidation the title Amelia over what would become the first page of over four hundred pages of piano sketch of my breakthrough opera about flight and rebirth. A bird flew in through the open door and flew frightened circles high above me in the white cone of the ceiling. I got up and spoke quietly to the bird, “You’ll be okay, friend. Everything will be fine. The door is open. Fly through it.” As though on cue, the bird swooped down and glided back out through the door to safety in the surrounding forest.

It was the spirit of Yaddo, yes; but it was also the spirit of Blitzstein.

Coda

Here is an aria from my Filmopera Orson Rehearsed in which Orson Welles recalls the night that Blitzstein performed The Cradle Will Rock from the piano at the Fairbanks Theater. The role of Welles is sung by Robert Frankenberry. Roger Zahab conducts the Fifth House Ensemble in a production I directed at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago in 2019 and released in March 2021 on the Naxos label. Discover more here.

 This essay was originally published in the Huffington Post under the title "Obsessed: Marc Blitzstein" on 14 May 2012. Click here to read it there.

Confessions of a Teamster Monk

This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 13 November 2014. Click here to read it there.

Daron Hagen copying the full score of his opera "Bandanna" in Milwaukee in winter, 1998. (Photo: Ryan Hagen)

The Gospels were copied by hand. Every scroll in the Library of Alexandria was. The knowledge that survived the Dark Ages did so in manuscripts that were hand copied, mainly by monks. Came the revolution in the 1450s: moveable type (placed by hand) and the printing press. Gutenberg’s Bible changed everything. Shakespeare corrected galleys or proofs. The next revolution: the linotype machine, which made it possible to type words onto slugs of hot lead, a technology that originated in in the late 19th century and persisted until the 1970s. Came the computer....

Music was also copied by hand. In the late 15th century, “plate engraving” (carving the music, with a variety of metal styluses, into sheets of soft lead) became the preferred method for published scores, and it remained so until the early 1980s.

As late as the ‘80s, EC Schirmer sent my first published compositions to Korea, where non-English speakers engraved them on lead plates. Correcting proofs could be hilarious. A composer had to know all of the standard proofreading symbols back then if they were published by, or worked for, a music publisher. Sometimes, the red ink of corrections covered more of the page than the black ink of the music. “Rivers of blood,” we used to call proof sheets.

When an orchestra performs, each player reads a score that includes only his “part.” The only person on stage who sees what everyone is playing at the same time is the conductor; he reads what is called a “partitura” — Italian for score. From the beginning, the parts had to be “extracted” from the partitura by hand. This was an expensive, labor-intensive process that required a high level of expertise on the part of the copyist. Unless a piece was wildly popular, these parts, until as late as the early ‘90s, were still copied by hand.

Computer software “engraving programs” like Score, Finale and Sibelius have now rendered mine the last generation of American concert music and opera composers who shall have had the opportunity to serve our musical apprenticeships in the ancient, traditional, and I think honorable manner of extracting, by hand, using quills, India ink, and vellum, the individual parts from whence the musicians play. 

Every musician should do it once. It is possible to copy music mechanically, without really engaging intellectually — sort of like driving while having a conversation. Sometimes I did marathon jobs during which I would listen to every Mahler symphony in order, go back, and begin again. But, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is actually “playing” the composer’s process the way a pianist “plays” a composer pianist’s piece — your brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when he wrote it. Several of my employers’ styles and methods grew so familiar to me during those years that I blush to admit that I could still probably compose something in their style that would be pretty hard to spot as ghostwriting.

The money was good, the work was always interesting; and there is absolutely no substitute for learning a piece by another composer from the inside out by extracting all the parts by hand.

We professional music copyists during the 80s were like monks — only we were teamsters, too. Seriously — we were. (I still have my old union card.) We were a band of brothers who would run into one another at Associated Music just south of Columbus Circle when we stuck our heads out to pick up supplies, meet with our clients, share “secret saves” and anecdotes from the trenches.

###

I recall a lesson (on the down-low, as I was a pupil of David Diamond’s, who would have been livid with me had he found out) in 1986 with Vincent Persichetti. His bird-like eyes shone as he spoke; his sentences came out in staccato, conspiratorial bursts. The score of my first symphony was spread out before him on the table that separated us. His cigarette smoldered, forgotten, between his fingers; the long, drooping ash hanging from the business end was on the verge of falling off.

“Golly, you’ve got a handsome hand, Daron,” Vincent said, paging through my score one last time. He got to the point: “Arnie tells me you won’t take his class.”

Arnold Arnstein, appreciated and respected by an entire generation of American composers, including Bernstein, Harris, Schuman, Barber, Piston, Persichetti, and Diamond, among others, was generally believed to be the finest living American music copyist. He really was. Years of the work had destroyed his eyes, which were reamed in red and watery, hugely enlarged by the thick glasses he wore.

Arnie taught a class in music copying at Juilliard that all of us composers were required to take. I had been working already for five years as a professional copyist, and had some pretty heavy clients, including Diamond (a sadistic employer), George Perle, Ned Rorem (an excellent, patient employer who — without telling me — customarily paid other copyists more than me), and others, and so I had figured, with casual ignorance, that I should be exempted from attendance.

“We’ve got to figure out some sort of way to work this out, Daron,” said Vincent. “Arnie’s a great copyist, y’know; he could teach you a lot.” He shot me a quick, inquiring look. “But, but,” he not so much stuttered as drew quick gulps of air, “y’know, if you weren’t so talented, I’d say, uh, sure, y’know, go ahead, take these copying jobs. But, I think you’ve gotta not do that. Um, do anything, uh, be a garbage man; just stop copying other people’s music for them.”

“But I need the money,” I replied.

The cigarette ash fell on my score, as I had feared it would. “Yeah, I know. Oops,” he said, brushing off the ash, “Sorry.” A quick, sweet smile, “Plus, you get half the money up front and all that; then you have to work it off,” he sighed, looked at the floor. “Well. Maybe I could ask Arnie to put you on his crew for this Menotti opera he’s copying right now. I hear it’s pretty wildly behind schedule and he needs extra guys. Then you could learn from him, y’see, get paid at the same time, and not have to take his class. How about that?”

I never took Arnie’s class, but I know that I should have. Despite Vincent’s advice, I went on to serve as a copyist, proofreader, or editor on hundreds of projects over the next fifteen years. Sometimes I hear a piece of music on the radio I’ve never “heard” before and realize that I copied the original set of parts for it during my salad days. It is even stranger to attend a rehearsal of one of my pieces and see yellowed, dog-eared, old rental library parts on the players’ stands next to mine for someone else’s piece that I don’t even remember having copied.

###

Copying the score of "Sappho Songs" at Bellagio in 2004. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

I haven’t copied anyone else’s music for about fifteen years, now. I don’t regret having done it, though. I learned humility at the back of colleagues’ hands as a copyist, and I learned the hard way that printed music serves as an imperfect mirror through which the performer steps in order to enter the world of the piece itself. The performer turns around and faces outwards, from whence he came, and performs what he has discovered for those of us listening on the other side of the bars, the other side of the mirror. I am amazed that anything comprehensible, let alone moving, results.

Measures, bars of music, attempt to cage the bird of song in an effort to preserve it, just as mad King George attempted to rescue his sanity by placing himself in his doctor’s care. 

I found then and still find the transaction between composer, performer and audience that musical notation hopes to enable enormously puzzling. It is the reaching without end for the elusive note just barely heard in one’s imagination and just beyond the grasp of one’s conscious mind, what Schreker called Der Ferne Klang, Mahler Das Lied von der Erde, that is to me endlessly enthralling.

After all, music, an abstract art, doesn’t in itself mean anything; a composer can attempt to create through notation a psychological context in which the performer sings, but the resulting song in performance is as much the performer’s creation as the composer’s.

Music streams endlessly whether we are aware of it or not. It is a manifestation of the “world without end” described in Ephesians. In sadness, a composer comes to understand that as surely as the scorpion in the parable is compelled by his nature to sting the frog and drown them both while fording the stream, a composer must attempt to notate what he hears, and by so doing, clip his songs’ wings.

Even for Charlie Parker, the Bird himself, the chart was a cage; inspiration during performance was the key. The key.