I Hear America Singing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Desirée Soteres, Robert Frankenberry, and Christopher Scott in the 2024 film and staged musical I Hear America Singing. p/c: Burning Sled Media

Making 9/10

1. Welcome to Ristorante Passaggio

“Welcome to Ristorante Passaggio. Try the soup. It’s been simmering for years,” was the first line that I wrote when I began the libretto/screenplay for 9/10: Love Before the Fall. It didn’t make it into the final draft, as it was said by Lulu, the hostess, whose presence grew as she said less. By the time shooting began, Lulu’s role, like Orfeo’s, had become wordless. After all, I reasoned, Joseph Campbell would have been only tangentially interested in what the bartender and hostess said in the Cantina on Tatooine.

I approached crafting this project by seizing the triangulated space between received mainstream aesthetic and technical models. In telling an ultimately elegiac love story that unfolds not on Tatooine but in Manhattan’s Little Italy during an Italian meal at a bistro (names are important) called Passaggio, it seemed natural to think in terms of threes—what an Italian calls Sofrito, a French person calls Mirepoix, and what I learned as a kid to call the Holy Trinity—carrots (words), onions (music), and celery (images)—sautéed in a little olive oil (live performance).

More threes, for context: traditional theatrical writing dogma calls for three acts, and the three C’s—concept, character, and conflict. Libretto writing dogma dictates that instead of one page of script equaling a minute in performance, it equals two minutes when sung. Factor in theater’s march towards concision: William Shakespeare’s five acts shrank to Anton Chekhov’s four; the so-called “golden age” of three act books (beginning; middle; end) shrank to the “eleven o’clock era” as commercial authors struggled with the challenge of recapturing an audience’s attention after the intermission and delivering the all-important “palpable hit” at the golden mean point in the book.

The combination libretto / screenplay of 9/10 extends forward that continuum in what, for lack of a pre-existing term that captures it, I began identifying in interviews leading up to the release of Orson Rehearsed in 2021 as “auteur operafilm.” When asked to define it by Toronto Film Magazine I answered, “We're going for something new here together that combines the emotional impact of cutting-edge live operatic performance with the psychological verisimilitude of gritty fourth wall-demolishing auteur filmmaking. Neither cinema nor opera, but film storyboarded, directed, and edited to the rhythm of the score by the composer themself, brought vividly to life by brave, fiercely committed performers.”  

CeCe Jude Hastreiter (Bibi) and Roger Zahab (Charon) in a still from 9/10: Love Before the Fall.

9/10 constitutes my fourth scenario to use the “eleven o’clock” dramaturgical model within a 60-minute runtime. The first was the opera Vera of Las Vegas (1996) wherein a soft folk rock torch song for the eponymous hero/ine hits the spot. The second was The Antient Concert (2017) in which James Joyce confessed the guilt he felt about his relationship with his mother. Both were powered by muscular libretti by Paul Muldoon. The third was Orson Rehearsed (2021), in which Welles’ suffered his (very real) heart attack at the “11 o’clock” spot. 9/10’s spot is more a “rolling realization” than a single dramatic event—the realization (on the part of the characters, and certainly on the part of many audience members) that everything that had just happened had taken place in the Underworld / Afterlife / Purgatory / Bardo / Insert Name Here and that the characters, untethered from chronological time, were (Possibly? Probably?) already dead. Most folks began to realize it when the two men had their heart-to-heart in the bar immediately before proposing to their partners. I like to think that the realization came to Cory first, as he sang the “Ferry Me” song for the final time in the climactic split-screen quartet; that it came to Tony when Cory turned to him and said, “So, it’s time;” and that it came to Trina and Bibi during the “Remember tonight” sextet. By the time Charon reached his hand out to Cory for payment, my contention is that all four already intuited on some level that they were no longer tethered by reality and that their journey had transformed into something more spectral.

2. Combining Videography and Cinematography

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Stationary camera emplacements and rules of engagement for the flycam. (p/c: Daron Hagen)

Although the difference between videographers and cinematographers is not absolute, typically, videographers focus on reportage and cinematographers focus on storytelling. One engages a videographer to document a family event, or to craft training videos, or to sell products, of course; but they also serve as photojournalists and moral witnesses—think of them as bodycams on the body politic. Videographers and their crews collaborate with documentary filmmakers to bring important, often dangerous stories to light.

Guided by the director’s storyboards and / or the shooting script, cinematographers typically oversee a larger crew within a more sprawling collaborative ecosystem. As director of photography, they create and manage the artificially constructed super-reality in which the director’s story unfolds. Their bag of tricks includes optical effects during production, and computer-generated imagery in post, and they can make the inanest narrative material look, at least, as though a meaningful story is being told. 

The Magical Realist story I told was set in a real world (or was it?) Italian bistro in Little Italy the night before the attack on the World Trade Center. Simultaneously, the bistro was a magical Underworld peopled by mythological figures—in this case, a violinist named Charon, a bartender named Orpheus, and a singer on the radio named Eurydice. I depicted the “real” world as having an undercurrent (see what I did there?) of magic or fantasy, along the lines of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which Sethe is haunted by her daughter, or by the morality teleplays of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone—but most like the gentle strain of it explored by the writers of shows like Northern Exposure.

I was given the great learning opportunity with 9/10 to simultaneously direct (in a three-quarter thrust theatrical staging) a silver cast of graduate students at the Chicago College of Performing Arts while filming it with the gold cast of professionals (members of my New Mercury Collective) on location. While describing the highly enjoyable process of staging it theatrically is the stuff of a different essay, I can report that, in the theater, the collective reality built up by the ensemble was experienced from the audience’s point of view. For the live performance staging, I leaned into the traditional Music Theater tropes in it—highlighting the four “I was I am I want” arias and playing the drift into symbolism (when the characters pay Charon) like Chekhov—as a gentle heightening of poetic tone and a celebration of live theater’s call for communal experience.

By contrast, I directed the film as I had storyboarded it, from the “magical” point of view of Orfeo, the bartender—a role that I originally wrote for myself, but handed over to my assistant director, the gifted (and photogenic) composer / writer Cameron Dammann once production began. (I took on the more Hitchcockian role of Mors, proprietor of the Passaggio, and appear in the background periodically.) 

I was fortunate as author / director to collaborate with director of photography Talal Jabari, a filmmaker with several decades of experience. Together, we combined aspects of both videography and cinematography to the shooting of 9/10. The visual narrative’s “magical” context of the Ristorante Passaggio was provided by four stationary cameras operated by local Chicago technicians Aaron Gottl and Matthew Peckham, who also rode the levels on the live recording. Thus, the principal characters were audio-recorded and visually documented both in live performance and for insert safety/coverage shoots in medium and wide shots. As their emotions intensified, I used tight shots either forced in post or shot by Talal with a flycam. In other words: we took the onion of cinematography, added the celery of videography, added the carrot of my directorial stance; then sautéed them in the olive oil of live performance, and arrived at this project’s visual vocabulary.

3. Coordinating Visual Language, Character, and Musical Structure

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My working score includes notes for blocking, shot reminders, conducting cues, and Logic editing cues for my first playback mix.

I bookended the narrative with two extended pantomimes underscored with sustained acoustic strings that constantly shifted in balance on the soundtrack between acoustic string orchestra and digital midi strings, establishing the binary rhetoric of “real / fake” and “living / dead” sound worlds. The audience is introduced first (extradiegetically, by way of titles) to the setting, to Charon, and then to the time. “Four souls” are introduced by way of their shadows, which have emerged in montage from, the image of a rising escalator, and then the facade of the World Trade Center. I began with a warm, lingering medium establishing shot of Orfeo behind his bar pouring wine from a beaker that ended with the light grace note of his dazzling smile in order to establish him as the story’s witness. As for Charon, who appeared as a card identifying him by name flashed on the screen, I knew that, for those who remembered their high school mythology, his role as conveyor of the dead would be a clue to what was to come. For the rest, his role would become clear while it did to the characters in the story. Charon was introduced in John Ford cowboy shots warmed up by a two-shot with Lulu, who acted as a sort of metaphysical Miss Kitty to his Marshal Dillon. The supers, or “Anime di Passaggio,” after being introduced individually in dirty closeups, served thereafter as sometimes-engaged observers in the “magical,” somewhat out-of-focus background of medium and wide shots, and staged throughout to provide three-tiered visual compositions. Finally, a subtitle identified the woman singing a song on the radio about a boatman—a setting of Christina Rosetti’s famous poem, “Ferry Me Across the Water”—as Eurydice. Coupled with a card that identified the restaurant as Passaggio, and the bartender’s name being Orfeo, the action’s location in Purgatory, or the bardo, is made clear to those familiar with Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. 

At the end of the screenplay, the same sustained strings underscored the extended pantomime during which the four characters came to terms with their own deaths, led by Charon and supported gently by Lulu and Orfeo. I continued the supers’ narratives, of course; but, since throughout the previous 40 minutes physical proximity of the camera had been equated with emotional intensity, I pulled Lulu, Charon, and Orfeo into the singing characters’ orbits by switching to over the shoulder point of view. I thought of the bookending pantomimes as the Introduction and Coda (“X”) of a 60-minute musical rondo form.

Director of Photography Talal Jabari frames up his shot for one of the “cutaways” in the bar as Aaron Gottl checks Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez’s lavalier microphone and Cameron Dammann (Orfeo and Assistant Director) stands by in character offscreen. (p/c: Burning Sled Media)

After the Introduction, when I began introducing the singing characters, I switched to a chatty, intimate, vaguely claustrophobic Playhouse 90 live television feel for the edits, leaning on the stationary cameras in medium and long shots, and diving in during post occasionally for grainier, artier-looking semi-closeups. I remained with this staccato style of editing throughout the recitatives / conversations, and scenas / action beats. I thought of these as the “A” sections in the rondo.

Operatic arias often function as monologues. Talal accessed his photojournalist videographer chops and his flycam to closely shadow each character while they sang their central aria. The cinema vérité feel was intentional. I tightened these shots even further in post, forcing them into choke shots which heightened the emotional claustrophobia of the situation and resulted in an intimate grittiness that counterpointed the actors’ “all in” performances. These I thought of as “B” sections.

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Christopher Lyons’ poster art for 9/10. (Courtesy Burning Sled Media)

As different layers of the soundtrack were associated with different realities, multiple exposures signified the “magical,” whether it was to delineate two characters singing at the same time whose thoughts were nevertheless on different things, or—paired with overtly cinematic, storyboarded 360-degree camera moves (shot separately and intercut with stationary closeups)—the recurring “memoir-ial moveable feasts” that occurred when Lulu served successive courses. Split screen was matched with contrapuntal music when at least one of the characters was in “reality.” This visual gesture culminated in the 4-split screen of the final remove (“Dining Quartet #2” in the table below) where I intentionally generated tension by disregarding the 180 degree rule and juxtaposing past, future, and present events. I thought of these as the “C” sections.

Each character had a frankly cinematic Buñel-esque cutaway moment seated at the bar, as though they were sharing a drink with the bartender, Orfeo. These storyboarded setups culminated in a two-shot duet at the “eleven o’clock” spot in the narrative for the men during which the story’s theme—the didactic bit about “contented shrimp fishermen”—was laid out. Shot separately as cinematic beats and edited into the “live” performance shots, I thought of these as “D” sections.

Under the hood: I began the project in Final Cut Pro, then transferred it to Adobe Premiere Pro for the heavy lifting, and then finished up in DaVinci Resolve when color balancing began, round-tripping at the very end back to Final Cut to lay in the supertitles.

The real and the magical collide in a multiple exposure from 9/10: Love Before the Fall. (p/c: Burning Sled Media)

4. Combining Analogue and Digital Elements in the Soundtrack

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Daron’s Stage 1 mix of the soundtrack. (p/c: Burning Sled Media)

The soundtrack was built up in three stages: I began the first stage by conducting a recording session in Ganz Concert Hall at the Chicago College of Performing Arts of the acoustic string tracks with the “Rize Orchestra.” Then I overlaid several wind parts and guitar / ukulele / fretless bass solos recorded for me by players in Los Angeles (this was during COVID) using Logic Pro, fleshing them out with some light EastWest horn and breathy Coro samples. Next, I overdubbed myself playing the harpsichord, harp, piano, concertina, and mallet parts. Finally, I stripped in Gilda Lyons’ vocal stems as Eury and the Coro, which she recorded in New York.

Eury’s narrative played out only on the radio, even though she was heard throughout the story singing the Boatman song, sometimes in duet and ensembles with the “living” characters, or Charon. When Eury sang on the radio, I altered her EQ; accordingly, when she was a disembodied “magical” or “spirit” voice, I mixed her into the orchestral fabric, permeating the instrumental score with sighs, moans, and hot-miked lubricious Pet Sounds backup singing; when she sang in duet with Trina and Bibi during their arias, I made her very nearly their corporeal timbral equal. 

Under the hood: since Gilda Lyons performed the on-screen role of Trina as well as the on-radio role of Eury and the nearly ubiquitous on-soundtrack Coro parts, she did by far the most singing—and the most kinds of singing—of anyone involved in the project.

The roles were sung live to the resulting playback in both the theater (for the staged version) and on set (for the film shoot). The singers wore lavalier microphones that almost entirely isolated their voices, enabling sound designer Tyler Ono to create the second stage of soundtrack by adding the vocal stems recorded on set into my original mix. Importantly, about 80% of the singing heard on the soundtrack is as it was performed live; automated dialogue replacement was used only to correct occasional unforced mistakes in the recording process. 

The third stage of the soundtrack work consisted primarily of creating a consistent believable sync between sound and image. Once Tyler accomplished that, he created several different soundscapes in which the action would unfold. The first was the general “A” section space of the dining room. The second was a “hollower” ambience for the innig “B” section dramatic beats taking place in the bar. This “sweet spot”—a liminal zone repeatedly likened by the characters in the libretto/screenplay to “the point at which you sense you’re high, but not so high that you’ve lost control,” or to when a bird hangs in the air before it falls—was an allusion to Richard Drew’s heart-wrenching WTC image. (Were the characters describing their own weltanschauungs and pre-9/11 Imperial American society’s?) In the bar the ambience was a bit less “real,” with the voices of the singers “drifting in” from the dining room—closer to life, consciousness? —still in their original ambience. Next, sound effects (little whisps of “real life” silverware clattering, a stray murmuring voice; the sound of thunder, the alarming sounds of a glass shattering, a chair hitting the floor, and, finally, poetically, phone calls unable to connect) were added to what otherwise was a stylized, controlled, “sterile” (dead?) sound environment. Finally, Tyler rode the spatial mix in five channel Dolby Atmos surround sound required for cinematic viewings before mastering for both DVD and CD releases.

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Anyone who has edited in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, or even Final Cut will recognize this sort of shot timeline. This one is for 9/10.

5. Slippage and Feedback

While Tyler finished the soundtrack, colorist and filmmaker Haruka Motohashi worked to balance the color of the four stationary cameras and the flycam. We discovered at this point that something called “slippage” was occurring in the film’s “timeline” because one of the stationary cameras had been set at the wrong frame rate. As this also happened with one of the cameras used for Orson Rehearsed, I at least had an inkling of an understanding to build upon as I began my apprenticeship in this aspect of post-production by observing as first Haruka scrambled, and then Talal swept in to cope with the problem.

Issue resolved, I went to Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, where, during an artist residency, I gave a final week to integrating the feedback that I’d invited from the cast and other creative team members, touching up the soundtrack and colorization while laying in the subtitles, cards, and end titles. I screened a “final draft” it for the other artists, for whose feedback I remain grateful, integrated their feedback, and finally shared a private streamer with trusted concert and film music professionals, whose candid feedback proved crucial. After three years, knowing as one does that there are always things that can still be improved and doing the heartbreaking producer-hat calculus of accepting those things that could only be made bulletproof with the application of buckets of cash, I froze the cut and called it done.

Shooting 9/10: Love Before the Fall. (p/c: Burning Sled Media)

6. Singing Actors and Acting Singers

Carlos Jaquez Gonzalez (Tony) rehearses his role with Robert Frankenberry (Cory / Musical Director) in April 2022. (p/c: Burning Sled Media)

Although the difference between musical theater acting singers and operatic singing actors is not absolute, typically, musical theater acting singers 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. 

In order 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.

Knowing the actors for whom I would craft roles, in an aggressive example of authorial use of the Strasberg method (or an extreme example of what composers call the “Italian Method” for writing operatic roles), before I began to flesh out the scenario I asked the actors to write essays about their characters that incorporated facets of their own life (and mine, too) experiences. I referenced these in the script, and the actors incorporated them into the roles they then created. 

In Robert Frankenberry (who—as he did so beautifully in Orson Rehearsed—switch hit as a performer and as musical director) I had a collaborator with the expertise as a vocal coach to help his colleagues make vocally healthy technical decisions while managing the radical shifts in singing styles central to their roles. For example, Tony’s role was written to be executed by a singing actor; Bibi’s role was written for an operetta-scaled light soubrette; Cory was written for a big-voiced, uniquely American crossover opera/musical theater voice; Trina was written for a contemporary vocal music specialist. The interaction between these vocal traditions was everything to me. Besides serving to characterize the roles, the new stylistic flavors that resulted when they sang ensembles together constituted an irresistible musical umami to composer-me and remain the most original thing about the score. I cannot overstate how grateful I am to the cast for making themselves so emotionally accessible both to the people in the room and to the cameras. That intensity of expression was the linchpin of the project; without it, a story concerning the transitioning, transformation, and transmigration of souls shall have had no soul.

As composer, I mixed received musical styles not only as an efficient way to help mainstream listeners to differentiate and characterize characters, but to goad audience members with preconceived notions of what constituted “good” and “bad” taste—a musical equivalent to the mixing of camera methodologies, acting methodologies, and staging methodologies—out of their intellectual complacence. So, to be clear: my story plus their personal recollections were the onion; the styles of music that they sang were the celery, and the way they were staged and filmed was the carrot; add the olive oil of performance and you’ve begun a stew.

Robert Frankenberry (Cory / Musical Director) accepts a drink from bartender Cameron Dammann (Orfeo). (p/c: Burning Sled Media)

7. Perpetual Soup

On the one hand, all this mixing and melding, mythologizing, and muddling, can come across as aggressively hand-of-author. Suspending disbelief as an auditor can be hard when one is constantly being pulled out of one’s comfort zone by music scored in a way that wants to be heard playing with the idea of “what’s analogue (alive?) and what’s MIDI (dead?),” what’s commercial and what’s fine art; music that intends to provoke both an emotional response and intellectual hot takes; by story elements that are “too specific not to be true;” by actors intentionally staged in different acting traditions by a director keen on the result—some breaking the third wall, others not; by a visual document edited so that it juxtaposed hectic split-screen ensembles and long, teased out handheld camera shots, sitcom back-and-forth snap edits and slow-motion beats drawing out the moment. If one prefers bento boxes to family style, orderliness to what I consider the truer-to-life nature of disorder, then one might feel, as I overheard one critic mutter years ago on his way out of one of my shows, “What the hell was that?”

On the other hand, I would contend, as two characters in the opera do, that "the point at which stability moves to instability is the sweet spot. The moment when order moves to disorder.” It’s when we realize that we are, as W.H. Auden described, “alive in a moment.” That moment is usually untidy, always authentic, and as elusive as truth; it is to be celebrated, cherished, remembered. Since such moments are inevitably followed by a fall of some sort, the film gently asks what is it that abides?

The answer this story humbly offered is a variation of the perpetual soup that has reportedly been cooking in a Thailand restaurant for nearly five decades. Together, our band of players made a musical and theatrical version of an endless minestrone—after all, anyone who has ever partaken knows that it is less about the stew and more about the gathering. Carrots: How did we spend the time? Celery: Where did it go? Onions: And, my god, how suddenly, surprisingly, unbidden, it ended. Lovingly sauté those questions and add the broth of community and you, too shall have partaken.

Learn more at the Official Website: www.9-10operafilm.art

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Some of the laurels awarded 9/10 during the 2023-2024 festival season.

9/10: So Rossetti, Cassavetes, Auden, and Wenders Walk Into a Bar

Packed one night in April 2022 into the 33’ x 22’ dining room of La Storia, an Italian restaurant in Chicago, were a pre-blocked cast of seven—one of whom played the violin; two were mute; and four who sang—and about thirty diners. Far from being “extras,” some were donors—”angels,” and some were simply souls —”anime,” if you like, who I told beforehand only that they were having dinner in a bistro in Little Italy on the evening of September 10th, 2001 and that an opera would unfold around them. I told them where the stationary coverage cameras were emplaced (and not to look directly into them), and to ignore the steady-cam operator (director of photography Talal Jabari) as he passed fluidly among them capturing closeups like a dancer carrying a fifty pound partner. I told them, “this is the opposite of dinner theater: feel free to eavesdrop.” Smiling, I then admonished them, “but you are New Yorkers, so you know how to give others their privacy.”

Searching their faces, I revealed to the supers before the cameras rolled that their bartender was named Orfeo, and that the hostess was named Lulu; that the strolling violinist who would play periodically was named Charon, and that the woman singing on the radio was named Eurydice. A light chuckle from one of the guests, who recognized immediately that Orfeo worked here because this was as close as he could ever get to being with his wife again. A story told in another opera. Doubling down, I explained that I, a mishappen, portly Detective Columbo-like character in a tweed jacket instead of a raincoat, was the proprietor of the restaurant, which was called “Passaggio,” and my name was Mors. A glimmer of understanding in the eyes of those diners who had read the classics in high school.

During the filming that ensued, some gathered gradually that the recurring Christina Rossetti lyric sung by Eurydice on the radio about a boatman and a pretty young passenger was about their current situation. Others only realized what was going on at the very end when, as the four friends came to terms with who the violinist was (and by doing so came to terms with their own deaths) left the restaurant, the transformation from bar to bardo was complete and a strangely mournful pre-recorded message repeated, again and again, “We’re sorry, but your call cannot be completed as dialed.”

Into a setting as intentionally claustrophobic and in-your-face as a John Cassavetes film this Shakespearean “flight of angels” was comprised of people who either “knew” that they were in the bardo—human souls who were transitioning (or had just done so?) from one state of being to the next, like DeLillo’s falling man—or were there to observe the four singers’ transformation into not-so-distant cousins of Damiel and Cassiel, the angels from Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin. (For those so-inclined, the link between Cassavetes and Wenders is Peter Falk, who portrays a fallen husband for the former, and himself as a fallen angel for the latter.) Who knows? There may be gods seated at the bar. Well, here at Passaggio, there actually are. But Charon will be paid in the end, and the Serling-esque surprise you feel in this Twilight Zone is all yours. In other words, the living sing; the dead do not.

9/10: Love Before the Fall is a sequel to Orson Rehearsed, my operafilm about the final moments of Orson Welles’ life. Welles’ wildly creative mind dreamed up a bardo that filled the inside of an empty theater in which his dazzling intellect could come to terms with what was to come next. The four characters in 9/10 are ordinary people. Instead of a heart attack cutting their lives short, they will, the next day, die in the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. Tony is a talented young chef at Windows on the World; his partner is Bibi, a soubrette from Los Angeles who waits tables there. Cory, a lawyer-turned-arbitrageur who “traded his shingle for a single” shares law offices with his partner Trina, an attorney with whom he fell in love when they were students at Stanford. After four arias during which each takes stock of their life, the men propose. When the women say yes, Cory realizes at once that they are “alive in a moment,” echoing Auden’s four solitary wartime drinkers in Age of Anxiety. They sing Dante’s line, “Remember tonight, for it is the start of everything.” Its promise of love as “a reward for persisting through life so long alone” is in sharp contrast to what happens next: Charon’s inevitable, entirely understandable, unsentimental demand for payment.

The shooting script and score of 9/10 were supported by a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. I staged it as a traditional opera with graduate students at the Chicago College of Performing Arts while simultaneously shooting the film on location with members of my New Mercury Collective. I am deeply grateful for the support of Rudy Marcozzi, dean at the time of CCPA, of Thomas Kernan, the present dean, and 534 Productions. The film is currently in post production and will be released to festivals on September 10th, 2023. Learn more.

Picking Up the Keys: Beginning 9/10

Shortly after my memoir Duet with the Past was published more or less to crickets, a cardiologist informed me that I had aortic atresia, a congenital absence of the normal valvular opening from the left ventricle of the heart into the aorta. In my case, the valve wasn’t closing entirely, and was deteriorating, which meant that it would have to be replaced eventually. The news would have made for a great ending to the book, which began with a description of the infant death—due to the same condition—of my namesake. Instead, my narrative ended with a lyrical portrait of bourgeois family life—the story of a fine artist who ended up somewhere in the middle, raising sons, counting blessings and reconnecting with childhood values.

A staccato scene in the doctor’s office followed by the Patient walking out into the parking lot, distractedly pawing at his sternum (as though that would tell him anything) with one hand while processing the news and in the process dropping his keys—an apt metaphor. Curtain. It would have been an effective, full-circle first act break for a tragicomic two act Off-Broadway musical—certainly suitable for an ending to my memoir. As Orson Welles observed in the unproduced screenplay, The Brass Ring, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” And yet.

In My Lost City, Fitzgerald wrote, “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York's boom days.” Indeed, traditional theater—and episodic television—give one five acts to skid to a halt. I had only begun sketching the treatment for Orson Rehearsed when Duet with the Past was published. I was aware that it would either serve as the beginning of a new act or as the postlude to a life torso.

An opera film about a polymath artist dying of a heart attack is obviously an artistic response to the heart disease diagnosis. Orson is postmodern in its disregard for outmoded conceptions of high and low art; it exists after elitism. It isn’t that the music is eclectic, it is that the idea of style is irrelevant. It is post stylistic. As the political tool of the Big Lie roared back into civic life, I expressed the dread I felt as a citizen and father by acknowledging the arbitrariness of traditional narrative, seeking Truth in a corkscrew fashion with the Möbius strip-like dramaturgy of Orson Rehearsed. There’s no happy ending, just death. The curtain falls; the hero simply dies; a solo piano plays a ragtime tune to an empty theater.

Like a terrible vast caesura came the pandemic. The implosion / pulverization of what once constituted the “classical music world” accelerated as big institutions cancelled their seasons and musical careers simply stopped. Faith that it was all but an interval between acts seemed naive. Having finished the sixteen month process of editing the opera film of Orson, I released it into the independent film festival world and was astonished to find that particular scene vibrant and keenly anticipating a return to “normalcy.” Orson began gathering laurels, screenings, and growing legs before the audio recording was released on Naxos. It appeared that institutional support for digital visual content by necessity had increased, and a host of opera presenters, composers, and stage directors took up filmic projects. Companies realized that it costs less to film a new project and to stream it than it does to stage it in a small black box theater.

One obvious thing I have learned by publishing a memoir in middle age is that I don’t get to stop my story where I want to. This morning rain falls in heavy sheets of “white” noise and I sketch the treatment of my next opera film, 9/10. It is—despite the fact that it is set in a restaurant in Little Italy the night before the Twin Towers fell—about second acts, about what happens after the disaster. I am beginning to hear, tuning up in my imagination—very, very far off, and I could be mistaken—the primordial sound of an orchestra that doesn’t sound anything like the orchestra that I grew up loving. 

Experiencing 9/11, I remember feeling during the next few years that New Yorkers struggled to begin a new act. For me, it was a new narrative that I didn’t feel as though I wanted to be a part of, so I began to think about moving away. Now, as the pandemic begins to wind down, I sense neither the beginning of the end nor the end of the beginning, but the start of just another act.

So: I choose the beginning of my second act, choose my own post-disaster narrative—one in which the Patient stops pawing at his heart, picks up the keys, and hits the road again with renewed energy because of having committed to listening, defining his weaknesses, and learning.

Click on the arrow below to watch the teaser for 9/10.

Ouroboros

I don’t remember presenting my music to a roomful of students at a community college on the west coast in December 1990. But I had a note this morning—thirty-two years later—from a young composer who was there. Composer and conductor Troy Peters had played him a cassette recording of Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony reading my orchestra piece Fresh Ayre (which became the first movement of my second symphony—long story) and it had, as the cliché goes, struck a chord with him: “Polychords,” he wrote, “A over E, then E over A, followed by the unadorned octave-doubled major-seventh melodic leap: E, D#, then a near-octatonic hexachord I couldn't justify using any of the scale types my freshman-level instruction had provided.”

I remembered bringing it into a lesson with Joe Schwantner at Juilliard in fall 1986. He took the time to figure out the hexachords. “May I take this page home with me this week? I’d like to study it,” he said. I was floored. The next week he brought with him an array of numbers that told the theoretical story of what I had done during those first ten bars that humbled and dazzled me and changed my life. Ensued an exciting discussion of Schoenberg’s signature hexachord, and a fascinating ramble through the first few pages of Joe’s own Aftertones of Infinity.

Four years after Joe had changed my life, I had paid it forward without knowing it for the young composer in Washington. Matthew 7:6 came to mind. Thirty-six years later, I remain moved by the profound act of faith (in teaching, in Art, in the aesthetic, and on and on) that Joe demonstrated in casting pearls before me. 

Accepting one’s role in the transitivity of teaching is both humbling and exhilarating. If one fetishizes the pearls one casts, as Oscar Levant quipped, teaching can devolve into “revealing openly known secrets.” If one doesn’t underline—if only a bit—the importance of the thing being taught, then one trivializes not just one’s role, but the tradition itself. 

But what are the “pearls” being cast? Are they “artistic truths?” Whose truth? What kind is it? Small or large T? Objective? Normative? Subjective? Complex? Plato argued that fine art and poetry cannot impart truths because they do not give humankind access to the Forms. On the other hand, Aristotle defended poetry as a means of obtaining general knowledge about probable courses of human events. Picasso knew a thing or two about Art. He is supposed to have said that “art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.” The other day I watched Orson Welles’ witty documentary F for Fake and was grateful all over again for his reminder that “our songs will all be silenced, but what of it?” His answer (the one with which I agree, if you take my operafilm Orson Rehearsed at its word) is to “go on singing.” Go on casting pearls.

“I share this with you with no expectation of a response,” wrote the man, now a respected colleague in mid-career. “I believe it's important to let those who've changed us for the better know of the role they played.”

I tried, in Orson Rehearsed, to capture, as one generous and perceptive colleague observed about it, “the hallucinatory parabola of [an] almost mythological creature.” In truth, with a wink to the maestro, I know that I succeeded in creating something that gives back to the person viewing / hearing it exactly what they expected: surface beauty, if what they wanted to feel was clever at the creator’s expense. It is a work that grows deeper with repeated listenings / viewings. What’s required in accessing Orson Rehearsed, ironically, is faith—faith that the artist and his subject might have something more to say beneath the self-awareness that Art is, in most ways, a magic trick—a work about just that; a work about Process, about singing, about dying.

“This is simply an amusing anecdote,” concluded the modest note—the note that expected no response. Quite rightly: one should teach without the expectation that the process of paying it forward shall have been anything except the point. One teaches as an act of faith—faith in the “dead artists out of the living past,” and the expectation that the aesthetic provides not just entertainment and solace but something (whether we capitalize it or not) more than the bromide that “life is art and art is life.” Somehow, Art “changes us for the better.” 

I am grateful for the letter. I feel blessed to have been reminded of the Ouroboros that is Art (and, by extension, the teaching of art) by a message from a colleague that completes / concludes an orbit of over three decades. That’s the way that things end; but it is also how they begin again. Pass it on.

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.

An Affair of the Heart -- Interview: Toronto Film Magazine

 TFM:  How did you start making films and what was the first film project you worked on?

 DH: Several years ago, I was diagnosed with a congenital, degenerative heart defect. I began looking for a story to tell in which I could explore reconciling my own mortality: what issues run through the mind of a fully expressed artist conversant with the relationship between art and life seriously facing the prospect of death? I chose Welles as my subject because he was an artistic polymath—writer, visual artist, actor, director, filmmaker—and a deeply-committed social activist who also strove to live a complete and fulfilling personal life. I have always believed as a theater person that (as architect Louis Sullivan posited) “form follows function.” 

 Consequently, it seemed obvious to me that Welles’ ebullient creative generosity and aesthetic range, intellect, and art required a many-layered dramatic treatment—one that fused images and sound on a deeper than usual level, wedded electro-acoustic and live music, live performance and film, opera and music theater, and jubilantly mashed-up musical and visual languages. I determined to build a multi-media piece that used the “bardo odyssey” of the great filmmaker Orson Welles (the film takes place as he lay dying of a heart attack) to do this.

 I knew that this deep dive was going to require more than a love of movies, an acquaintance with the writings of André Bazin, and access to some video equipment. The editing process is so important to any life, but it is central to a writer, composer, or filmmaker. I had scored some films, so I was conversant with that end of things; but my subject in Orson demanded that I not just imagine but feelhow it feels to edit film month after month. I had directed my operas professionally, conducted them, written their libretti, knew the ropes of live theater; but I had never directed a film, or managed a film production team. It turns out that the opera and film worlds are astonishingly similar. That’s how I came to start making films, beginning with Orson Rehearsed.

 TFM: Which musical genre and which genre of filmmaking fascinates you as an artist and why? 

 DH: I feel most comprehensively expressed as a composer of music interwoven with some sort of dramaturgical narrative. I’ve written eleven operas, yes, but I’ve written an awful lot of music for the concert hall—five symphonies, a dozen concerti, reams of chamber music and hundreds of art songs. Although I am a passionate collaborative artist, I admit to really liking the highly centralized and subjective control of the auteur model as defined by François Truffaut in his essays because it comes closest to the way that composers used to function in the opera world.

 TFM:  How does it feel to write, direct and then compose music for a personal style of indie film?

 DH: Absolutely wonderful. I have savored every second of the Process of making Orson Rehearsed: from discovery with the actors during the rehearsal and staging of the live component of the film, to learning how to live the life rhythm of a film editor; from the familiar process of scoring to film, to the unfamiliar process of shooting film myself to music already scored and seamlessly switching alternating between the two. My goal was not to document a live performance, make a music video, or an Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but to create a pathway toward a new genre which is not a hybrid but something more personal, more resistant to categorization—a film about opera, an opera about film.

 TFM:  What is the most challenging aspect of being an independent filmmaker in the film industry?

 DH: I don’t have an answer for that yet. My process as an artist is driven forward by continual reinvention and discovery, and I am just now learning the challenges of being an independent filmmaker. 

 TFM: How difficult is it to fund indie films?

 DH: To the extent that the world of an opera composer is similar to that of an independent filmmaker, I am familiar with the process of bringing producers and presenters to the table, hearing their vision, collaborating, making art with the artists and resources in the room instead of the ones in my head, and letting projects either unfold or evaporate, depending on things I can’t control. Funding is always a problem, of course. On the other hand, technology has made it cheaper to make films; so long as you have access to the tools and the skills to wear a bunch of different hats, you can arrive at the end with something that looks and sounds pretty good.

 In the case of Orson Rehearsed, the Chicago College of the Performing Arts served as a production partner in exchange for their students shadowing me as composer, director, and independent artist, as well as being cast in productions that combined both seasoned professionals and emerging artists. They shared costs with my New Mercury Collective, which is basically my sandbox, or, as Welles would say, train set, in which I build little sandcastles and operatic locomotives. I have more creative control than I do when I work with an opera company, but less money. 

“These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film.” Daron’s editing notes detailing the synchronization of images in the three simultaneously-projected films-within-the-opera-within-the film for the “Everybody’s Shakespeare” sequence. At this stage, these took the place of storyboards.

TFM:  Tell us about the process of the production for Orson Rehearsed? 

 DH: First, I threw spaghetti at the wall for six months in Logic Pro. I created about twenty 3-6 minute long “think pieces” about specific events and elements in Welles’ life that he might think about while dying. These dramatic beats combined manipulated snatches of recordings of my own acoustic works stretching back to the 80s, sound effects, brief snatches of Welles interviews, loops, and newly-composed vocal lines—most performed by my wife, vocalist/composer Gilda Lyons, and some by me—and mockups of what would become acoustic instrumental lines.

 I chose to divide the character of Welles into three avatars: one young, one middle-aged, one dying. This allowed for ensembles and multiple points of view. They sang a libretto that combined newly-written material by me with words drawn from public domain sources and repurposed—Shakespeare, Welles himself, Emma Lazarus, and others. Gradually, these spaghetti-throwing sessions generated a core of about a dozen musical ideas that held the entire piece together.

 Simultaneously, I filmed dozens of high-def video scenelets that would serve as visual equivalents to the musical motives being tossed up during the work in Logic—a man’s hands typing on a manual keyboard in New Haven; a woman’s hands gliding over piano keys in New York City; a child blowing out candles on a birthday cake, or tracing the letters carved into tombstones in a graveyard; hail falling in Paris; waves breaking and the sun setting in Nicaragua; an elevated train passing by overhead in Chicago; the desert outside of Albuquerque, and on and on. These images ended up unifying the films projected onstage during the live production component of production, and also served as raw material to be edited into the final film.

 During the next six months, since the film was taking place in someone’s mind and would unspool in real time in the theater, I gradually arranged the essays into a sequence, dropping some, adding others, in order to create a psychological and emotional narrative that would take the place of physical action. I edited together all the footage into three sixty-minute films that would accompany the three Orsons in live performance. These films would, in effect, show us what was going on in the minds of the avatars in Welles’ mind—films within an opera that would become a film. I edited into this mix some licensed stock footage of a red silk scarf, film leader, the Statue of Liberty at sunset, some protestors, and a poignant skein of footage culled from a 40s newsreel of a boy walking away from the camera on a country road. This boy ultimately became a rather important “ghost character.”

 Once I had synchronized the electro-acoustic soundtrack to these films, I composed the acoustic chamber orchestra component that would be performed live by the Fifth House Ensemble at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago in conjunction with the electro-acoustic score, conducted by Roger Zahab. A trusted and admired colleague who generously (and bravely) agreed to my request that we eschew the standard “film to image” gear that is used for screenings of Hollywood films when orchestras show them, Roger (who had access only to a click track) marvelously coordinated live singers, an orchestra, and pre-recorded sounds in a theater entirely by ear. I asked him to do this because I wanted the risk, the excitement, and the flexibility of live execution that I have grown to feel as a conductor myself is the secret ingredient to great opera performance.

 Next, I stage directed the show with the immensely gifted and creative cast. Their performances were captured visually over two shows and a dress rehearsal by three stationary cameras and one roving closeup camera—sort of one step up from the usual archival video. The soundtrack audio was recorded in the house. I wanted the soundtrack to sound captured live in order to advance the dialectic of “live” versus “canned” and the combination of the two. Post-production, and live concert mixing can make everything sound so homogenous that nothing sounds “real” anymore.

 I left Chicago with about ten hours of audio and video and let it sit for nearly a year before diving back in. First, I ever-so-gently massaged the soundtrack and had it mastered. Then, I cut the performance film to the soundtrack. Next, I intercut the pre-shot films and the live performance footage (which I washed out into black and white to differentiate it from the pre-shot films) before adding a third layer of semi-opaque “ghost” images screened in red and blue that carried forward elements of both. I received important feedback from colleagues at this stage about what was and was not “landing”—Rabab Haj Yahya, H. Paul Moon, John Corigliano, and Todd Vunderink, among others. This last stage of the process slowly brought the film’s messages into clearer relief and allowed me to discover what the rhythm of the recurring images and music were trying to express. 

 TFM: What inspires you to work as an artist in society and what kind of impact would you like to have on your audience as a filmmaker and composer? 

 DH: Artists of conscience can speak truth to power and make a difference (for the better) by reminding people of their humanity and interconnectedness, the responsibility we have to one another. I try to do that. I am proud to serve on the faculty of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts of Roosevelt University because the institution’s values match my own. That generous, staunch support helps me to amplify my citizenship and hone my craft while sharing it with students.

 TFM: What is your next artistic project? 

 DH: I am directing a staged production of my opera New York Stories for Florida Grand Opera in the spring, and then directing a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate).

 TFM: What do you think about the distribution of indie films and what do you recommend to emerging artists? 

 DH: I don’t know enough about distribution to make any recommendations. At present I am submitting Orson Rehearsed to festivals and learning about distributors. It is an art film for which there is a minuscule market; I never expected it to be commercially viable or “popular.” Still, it is garnering laurels (for which I am grateful and honored), and it might get some legs, however humble. After it has been shown at festivals, who knows?

TFM: Why do you make films? 

 DH: Really, it circles back to process for me. I’m just feeling my way forward as an artist and as a human, learning, going deeper into truths, and working to connect, and to make the bit of difference I can, as I am able. I’m very lucky to have landed in a place where I can discover and reinvent while collaborating with extraordinary artists.  

 This interview originally appeared in Toronto Film Magazine on 23 November 2020 when Orson Rehearsed was awarded the “Best Composer” laurel at the Montreal Independent Film Festival. You can read it there by clicking here.

Orson in the Bardo -- Interview: Wellesnet.com

Mike Teal of Wellesnet: Despite the fact that the pandemic has taken a heavy toll on the entertainment industry, Daron Hagen’s filmed opera, Orson Rehearsed, has been playing at movie festivals around the world and has won laurels in the Los Angeles Film Awards, Chicago Indie Film Festival, Cinefest India, and the After Hour Festival in Brazil, among others.

The film is based on a stage performance of the work, held in Chicago two years ago, which itself had incorporated filmed material into the show (much as Welles had done several times throughout his theater career).

Now the tables are turned and the new film has incorporated a lot material from that stage performance.

Hagen is a highly respected composer who has written twelve operas, and whose orchestral works have been performed by major orchestras around the world.

MT: The word “bardo” is used to describe Welles’s state at the moment he lies dying. Is this a Buddhist interpretation of Welles’s life and death?

DH: Orson Rehearsed takes place during Welles’ transition between life and death. He is, in effect, both the scorpion atop the frog’s back and the frog in mid-river. What we call it is a matter of convenience. In truth, I have been fascinated by this transitional zone for decades—inspired, probably, by the fact that my mother died of cancer in my arms when I was a young man. I have been treating this subject for decades. For example, in 1998, I recast Shakespeare’s Othello as a large two act opera on a libretto by Irish poet Paul Muldoon called Bandanna, set it on the Texas-Mexico border (yes, it dealt with the issue of immigration, among other things) on the Day of the Dead in 1968, and treated the Rio Grande as a River Styx. The debt to and homage to Welles and his Touch of Evil was overt—the corrupt labor organizer in Bandanna was named Kane. He, along with all of the characters in that story, straddled the liminal zone between life and death, love and hate, innocence and corruption, good and evil, and so forth.

Now Welles serves as both Orpheus and Eurydice in Orson Rehearsed. During the film, he crosses from life into whatever it is that comes after. In other words, no, the film is not a Buddhism-inspired speculation about what Welles might have been thinking, but rather a secular humanist yarn that conveys the narrative not through external stage action but through internal action as his thoughts proceed through a sequence of emotional, psychological, and philosophical states. What Welles thinks we audience members see on three movie screens; we also see his thoughts given physical form in the staged actions of three figments of his imagination—opera-singing avatars who interact with one another. And in the final film we see a melding of the three films, a live performance, and another semi-opaque set of ghostly avatars who interact with both the films and the avatars.

MT: With the instrumentalists onstage with the singers, it struck me that it might be more accurate to consider this a kind of oratorio or cantata instead of an opera. How would you describe it?

DH: From the start, Orson Rehearsed was intended to be sui generis. As such, one can interpret it any way one pleases — it’s an opera or a cantata, a musical or a play with words, a set of critical essays or a song cycle, an art film or a music video. There is but a single step between Max Steiner and Richard Strauss, who believed — as I do — that a great work of art should entertain the neophyte, intrigue the well-informed, and enthrall the expert. That sleight of hand, from what I’ve read, delighted Welles as an artist and man. As a technical and artistic goal, it certainly delights me. So, if Orson Rehearsed must be called anything, I’d choose “prestidigitation,” as it captures both the high, medium, and low of it all.

MT: The word “Edit” is repeated by the singers frequently, almost like a mantra. What is the significance of that?

DH: The recurring line is a cri de cœur. As a man with a congenital, degenerative heart defect, I consciously monitor my heart more than most folks probably do. In Orson Rehearsed, Welles is dying of a heart attack. The recurring, juddering cries of “Edit. Edit. Edit,” are not just the sound of his own heart coming through to him through his imagination, but they are the essence of an artist’s life—as Meister Eckhart said, “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.” Welles spent a lot of time editing scripts, film; we know also that he was repeatedly devastated when other people recut his films—when people edited him. That is why I edited the film myself: I wanted to feel (granted, using Premiere Pro software, not a moviola) what Welles did. Orson Rehearsed is my twelfth major operatic work, so I’m no stranger to the tender mercies of the editing bay.

MT: There are more than a few references to political matters, with Welles at one point saying that the only good acting is political. I was also struck by your quoting of Roy Cohn, the infamous right-wing lawyer who helped Donald Trump rise to power in the 1970s. Do you see any kind of parallel between Welles’s death in 1985 and the rise of the kind of far-right politics currently described as Trumpism?

DH: Welles wrote speeches for FDR, took a year off to campaign for him, and is widely revered as a man who stood up for what he believed in. All of the biographies I’ve read of Welles—including Simon Callow’s sprawling, epic treatment—show him to have been a man of fine character. It is too on the nose to posit that the diabetic Welles died of a broken heart, but how could he have missed—as someone who had lived through HUAC and McCarthyism—the effects of Reaganism and the already rising tide of the fascism we’re facing today? Who of us in our darkest moments has not been beset by devils? I chose both fixer Cohn and his tweeting protégé—reverse anachronisms yanked out of chronological time—to serve as Welles’ devils.

MT: I remember the video screens during the live performance all showing a sunset at the end. The ending on the video is different, with everyone gradually leaving the stage, as in Welles’s Moby Dick Rehearsed. Was there a change, or am I not remembering correctly?

DH: The screens do show a sunset throughout the last scene of the staged iteration as the orchestra gradually drifts off; but then they give way to black and white film leader and the word “Fin” as the Youngest Welles places his beloved Hamburg hat on the pianist’s head and exits. The film is true to this. As you point out, the reference is to Welles’ Moby Dick Rehearsed.

MT: When will this video version be available to the public?

DH: This is my first film, so it was a surprise to me that, after one is done, the entire thing gets mastered the way audio recordings do. So it is in Digital Cinema Package format and meant for theatrical projection. At present I am submitting it to festivals and learning about distributors. It is an art film for which there is a minuscule market; I never expected it to be commercially viable or “popular.” Still, it is garnering laurels (for which I am grateful and honored), and it might get some legs, however humble. After it has been shown at festivals, I imagine it will be broadcast. After that, who knows?

This interview originally appeared on the Wellesnet.com website on 4 November and may be accessed here.

"Orson Rehearsed" Interview: Chicago Movie Magazine

Daron Hagen is an American composer, filmmaker, director, and author. He made his debut as a director mounting his own works at the Kentucky Opera in Louisville; he has also directed his works at the Skylight Music Theater in Milwaukee, the Chicago Opera Theater, and others. He is currently directing a film version of his opera Shining Brow for Ohio Public Television.

It was truly our pleasure to interview Daron Hagen for Chicago Movie Magazine.

1. What draws you to filmmaking, cinematic language and composing music for film?

I started watching films critically in my late teens at the Oriental Landmark Theater in Milwaukee at exactly the same time I started digging into music composition and its attendant commentary. The Oriental was a glorious, ramshackle calendar house that showed all sorts of films—from Fellini to Scorsese, Welles to Wenders, Chaplin to Kieślowski, Ford to Ford Coppola, Kurosawa to Lucas. Around the same time, I began reading film criticism and theory—beginning with Truffaut’s incendiary screeds. I am drawn to film because, setting aside the crucial component of live performance, it does everything that opera does and in much the same way.

Operatic scores and filmic documents convey narrative and control dramaturgy through manipulating time and fundamentally altering our perception of its passing. Film’s visual and sonic rhetoric creates the reality in which the narrative unfolds, exactly as opera sets forth an assemblage of gestures, timbers, moods, and sticks to them. As a composer cutting film, I feel the way that I do when I am composing and orchestrating music: one’s choices are guided always by the desire to clarify and illuminate the dramatic and emotional nuclear reactor firing the scene; rhythm is paramount, transitions are where the emotions shift. 

Opera composers have traditionally been treated, like auteur filmmakers, as the genre’s visionaries. The opera house is a vast mechanism filled with profoundly gifted technicians, directors, and craftspersons, all of whom are happy to spray Febreze on mediocre operatic product if they must, just as the artisans in a film production company do. 

In the US at least the opera world seems to have shifted away from the traditional idea of the composer leading a team of collaborators gathering together to illuminate and enhance the composer’s intent. In addition to the much-needed heavy-lifting being done by opera producers in terms of fostering a collaborative environment that reflects current ideas of racial and gender equity, there has been a systematic reevaluation of the composer’s role in the collaborative process: just twenty years ago, treating opera composers like commercial music theater composers still seemed to be at least a short-term path towards dismantling the 19th century “great man” model. For many of my colleagues, the opera composer’s role now is that of a member of a creative team led by the director or the producer.

As a lifelong learner and personal reinventor, I decided to move laterally into directing my own operas about ten years ago because I wanted to explore the similarities between stage and cinematic languages and directing. Although absolutely delighted as a composer to provide music for a film perfectly pitched to serve the director’s and music editor’s vision if required, I realized that I could only explore the territory between the two disciplines if I not only created the score, but also wrote, directed, and edited the film to the score, adjusting each to the other to form a more perfect dialogue between them. In order to maintain the frisson of live opera’s visceral appeal (and palpable risk), I needed to create a production process that allowed for there to be a live production as part of the progression towards the screen.

I formed The New Mercury Collective, a loose association of actors, singers, writers, and designers with whom I had made crossover projects over the previous thirty years utilizing both Music Theater, Opera, and Filmic staging techniques. This would be my sandbox, and the place where I would create Orson Rehearsed, which I knew from the very start would end up as a film and an open-ended music-theater piece that would constantly change shape depending on the circumstances.

2. Do you believe in film schools or does making a film teach you more than film school?

I did not go to film school, so I don’t know. Since I learned how to write operas by accompanying them, singing in them, writing them, conducting them, and directing them, it seemed sensible to me to learn filmmaking the same way—by taking on the genre’s constituent tasks and learning by doing. I did go to Juilliard and to Curtis to study music, so I have some pretty strong ideas about what I learned at those places, and what I didn’t. For example, I am astonished that student composers are not simply required to attend the rehearsals of their local orchestras. Critical listening (to actual performers in situ performing one’s own and others’ music) teaches more about composing than does any class because you can hear what works and what doesn’t—and when it doesn’t what the performers have to do to make it work. Perhaps I am projecting, but I imagine that nascent filmmakers encounter pretty much the same terrain in film school.

3. What makes cinema stand out more than the arts for you?

I could never relinquish live theater—making it with others and watching it has given me the most fulfilling personal and aesthetic experiences in my life. During my lifetime, technology has made it easier, faster, and cheaper to write film operas than staged operas. 

4. Did you choose a certain directing style for making this film based on the script? 

I have cool adoration for the subversiveness of Truffaut’s Doinel films and an appetite for the ethical earnestness of Rod Serling’s morality screenplays. My mother was a visual artist and took pains to explain Welles’ techniques to me when together we watched Kane when I was a kid. But my roots are in opera, so I warm to Fellini’s aesthetic of intensity: I like to create environments that are so fake that they create their own reality. Film is great at this sort of subterfuge—even better than live theater, but not better than a live magic show.

It was pretty early in my career as a composer of large-scale works for orchestras and opera companies when I really came to terms with the concept of strictly terracing simultaneously presented ideas. Composer Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov in his Principles of Orchestration lays out elegantly the idea that complex compositions should strictly hierarchize foreground, middle-ground, and background events for the listener through orchestration. Arnold Schoenberg’s string quartets are masterly in their painterly use of relief, chiaroscuro, and “deep action.” The violas in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier tell us clearly what the Marschallin is really feeling: either we hear them or we intuit them. Either way, we win. These precepts are no different from Welles’ framing of the father in the foreground, mother and banker in the middle ground, and Charlie and his sled in the background.

For Orson Rehearsed I shot about thirty hours of full-color video to create three 60-minute films that portrayed the internal thoughts of three onstage singers who portrayed Orson Welles inside his own mind. Into this I mixed about ten minutes of licensed and public domain archival footage. The films constituted the background images (all tied to musical ideas in the score, of course). The foreground images in the film are all in black and white and consist of the reality played by the avatars themselves as they sing. Between the two (like the violas in Strauss) flows a layer of ghostlike, semi-opaque single-color images drawn from the upper and lower layers of rhetoric that superimpose themselves like fleeting thoughts and then disperse. The Process was: shoot the background films, stage the foreground action, then, formulate the middle layer while editing together the top and bottom layers.

Omar Mulero

Robert Orth

Robert Frankenberry

5. How did you choose the cast and the crew of your film?

I had already created my Collective and intended to draw from them the team needed for this project. But I needed not one but three Orson Welles avatars: a youthful, middle-aged, and dying Orson. As a faculty member of the Chicago College of Performing Arts, I was able to cast the young Orson with Omar Mulero, a gifted tenor and graduate student there, then just beginning his career. 

For the middle-aged Orson, I knew beforehand that I would write for Robert Frankenberry, a prodigious musical and theatrical polymath (conductor, tenor, stage director, composer, pianist) who I had cast as Louis Sullivan in the Buffalo Philharmonic’s recording of my Frank Lloyd Wright opera Shining Brow and who had gone on to conduct the orchestra in a revival of the opera in a site-specific staging at Wright’s Fallingwater a few years later. 

I’d known for nearly a decade that I was going to write the role of the dying Welles for the legendary baritone Robert Orth. Bob was a fiercely capable, emotionally brave intellect and performer who could suavely straddle the American Music Theater and Opera traditions. The “go to” baritone for an entire generation of well-known American opera composers, Bob and I had first crossed paths when the terrific director Ken Cazan had cast him in a revival of Shining Brow with the Chicago Opera Theater in the 90s. As it happened, Bob was receiving chemotherapy during the staging and filming of Orson Rehearsed. His performance was nothing less than heroic, and he passed away a few months after production. 

Having these three men go through the discovery and staging process together, and serving as their composer and director, was really, really moving—the most fulfilling experience of my career in the theater. The give-and-take between them—Bob’s wisdom and experience, Frankenberry’s brave questing, Omar’s open, honesty—soaking it all up, glowing and growing in the process—amazing. It’s why I committed to the theater as a teenager and why I’ve remained so.

While staging my opera A Woman in Morocco for Kentucky Opera I had the good fortune to collaborate with lighting designer Victoria Bain, with whom I explored a lot of the Jean Rosenthal-inspired effects I wanted for that production. For Orson, she graciously jumped in to the Kieślowski-esque Red-White-Blue aesthetic I had in mind for Orson Rehearsed  (I first fell in love with this when composing the opera Bandana back in the late 90s—the vocal score is chock-o-block with lighting cues that most theatrical lighting designers ignore) and she nimbly avoided most of the pitfalls inherent in lighting a stage show that was going to be folded into a movie but still had to look good in the theater. There was an able young team in Chicago called Atlas Arts Media that were then just getting on their feet that was able to adroitly handle both the camera emplacements I needed for coverage and the live mix of sound for the soundtrack and CD-release of the score. 

Conductor Roger Zahab and Hagen during production at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago. (Elliott Mandel photo)

6. How did you fund your film and what were some of the challenges of making this film?

The Chicago College of the Performing Arts served as a production partner in exchange for their students shadowing me as composer, director, and independent artist, as well as being cast in productions that combined both seasoned professionals and emerging artists. They shared costs with my New Mercury Collective. It is basically a sandbox, or, as Welles would say, a train set, in which I build my little sandcastles and operatic locomotives. I have more creative control than I do when I work with an opera company, but less money. On the other hand, technology has made it cheaper to make films; so long as you have the skills to wear a bunch of different hats, you can arrive at the end with something that looks and sounds pretty good.

The major challenge of production was the real-time coordination of my elaborately-crafted electro-acoustic tracks, the live onstage ensemble of eleven instrumentalists (the Chicago-based Fifth House Ensemble), the three live singers in performance with the three sixty-minute films, and the three onstage sixty-minute films on a low budget. The credit goes to composer / violinist / conductor Roger Zahab, who held it all together from the podium. The team at Chicago’s Atlas Arts Media mixed the show in real time while also giving me basic camera coverage so that I could embark upon the next leg of production with hard drives full of soundtrack ready to be mixed, and shots ready to be edited together.

7. Do you consider yourself an indie filmmaker and what would most be the most difficult thing about being an independent artist?

I have been an independent artist all my professional life, so moving sideways into the creation of indie film has been a deeply pleasurable learning experience; one that feels like donning a familiar and much-beloved old sweater. Though I’ve served on the faculties of Bard College, Princeton, and Curtis, among others, they were always adjunct positions—however long-term, that helped to pay the bills so that I could make more art. I’ve been lucky, but I’ve always been a very hard worker, and I’ve been supported by a lot of really generous people, been given a lot of opportunities to learn my craft and to grow up in my chosen fields. The indie film world of makers, presenters, and festivals is on first take a more mutually supportive scene than the concert music world.

8. What is the distribution plan for your film?

Since I am learning as I go along, I am simply entering the film into festivals and finding out who actually watches it carefully enough to find value in it. If it lands with enough people it will get legs, just as operas and concert pieces do. I realize that “legs” in this case means a distributor. If it doesn’t, then, well, nobody got hurt: in the process of making it I lived my best life, and I made a piece of art about which I care passionately.

9. What is your cinematic goal in life and what would you like to achieve as a filmmaker?

I’ve got several projects already in pre-production that carry forward the methods (combining music and image, film and live theater) I’ve been steadily digging into over the past 20 years. I’m slated to direct a filmed version of my opera Shining Brow at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Westcott House with the Springfield Symphony and Think TV (the Dayton PBS affiliate) next year. I’m also filming my next film/opera 9/10, set in an Italian restaurant in Little Italy the night before the Twin Towers fell, in Chicago, in spring 2022 in another CCPA-New Mercury Collective co-production. I’m taking things as they come and scaling things in order to match vision and budget sensibly. My ultimate goal is to gain complete fluency in the idiom and to work at the highest levels with collaborators from whom I can learn the most.

10. What kind of impact would your film have in the world and who is your audience?

Chris Lyons Illustration

I am thinking of this film the way that a poet thinks of a poem and a serious opera composer builds an opera: it is dense, highly allusive in its methods, and it benefits from repeated viewings; Orson Rehearsed delves with subversive lightness into some pretty dark and scary places. I am not expecting it to be “popular” in any sense of the word; it is an “art film,” that will land with people who bring an open mind and heart to it.

11. Please tell us more about the Chicago College of Performing Arts and your involvement with the institution. 

Rudy Marcozzi, rock-solid Dean of the Chicago College of Performing Arts, and Linda Berna, Associate Dean and Director of the Music Conservatory, understand that my values as a citizen and as an artist are in synch with Roosevelt University’s as an institution. The school maintains Opera and Music Theater programs side-by-side. I am grateful to have been encouraged by the faculties of both divisions to work freely with their professionally bound singers on my compositions, which consciously combine the technical and aesthetic methods of both disciplines in our uniquely American way. With their guidance, I cast CCPA’s young artists in projects that also feature mid-career professionals that I draw from my Collective, from whom (as Omar did in Orson) they learn through collaborating and observing during production. In addition, I invite the composition students—who study under the strong, mindful leadership of composer / visual artist Dr. Kyong Mee Choi—to serve as members of my production teams, to assist me as director, and so forth, to be immersed as composers in the production of opera and film in a way that they cannot elsewhere. I can’t tell you how supportive the faculty at CCPA has been of this atelier / sandbox / train set nestled within the various conservatories that make up the school.

Official Trailer.

This interview originally appeared in the October 2020 issue of Chicago Movie Magazine and may be accessed there online here.

Duet with the Future

Some are born with the gift of measuring out their lives with coffee spoons; others must develop—or reconnect with—the ability to appreciate and find inspiration in the (un)predictability of middle-class domesticity. In 1981, when I tore out of the Midwest as a teenager like a bat out of hell, bound for the east coast and god-knows-what, I somehow got it into my head—as so many artists (it doesn’t matter what sort—nascent, deluded, or manqué) do, that I should renounce many of the more traditional values taught me by parents and teachers during my privileged, Lutheran, middle-class suburban childhood. My memoir, Duet with the Past, is a written account of the thirty-five-years it took me to reconnect with my childhood values. 

In an ironic twist for one named after a brother who died in infancy of heart disease, I was diagnosed in January with a congenital heart condition. Around the same time, I learned that my memoir—on which I had been working for about twelve years—had been accepted for publication.

There are lots of different kinds of writing. Most don’t require any bravery—criticism least of all. 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.” I 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 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.”

Duet with the Past was published in April, around the same time that Swan Song, a frankly autobiographical septet for shakuhachi, shamisen, koto, and string quartet was premiered at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York City. Thanks to the staunch support of Kyo-Shin-An Arts I had written a koto concerto, and developed a close relationship with Duo Yumeno which yielded The Heike Quarto, a four-part, sixty-minute long suite over the course of five years based on the great Japanese tale of Heike for koto and cello—panels of which they performed across the US, in Japan, and, that month, at Carnegie Recital Hall. 

During May I composed a seventh piano trio—this one celebrating three inspiring colleagues and friends—Sharan Gale Levanthal, Sarah Kapps, and Peter Marshall—and the Wintergreen Music Festival, where we have all been privileged to serve as guest artists for a number of years. The trio premiered it in July. A beautiful new release on Albany by duo au courant (Stephanie Weiss and Christine Wright-Ivanova) called Sacred and Profane featured world premiere recordings of three song cycles: jaik’s songs, A Handful of Days, and Vegetable Verselets.

In June I joyously gave my first reading as an author at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck—the small village in Upstate New York in which I live. (I’ve since given readings in Virginia, Philadelphia, and Chicago, with more scheduled.) I was touched to learn that my childhood classmate Roberto Diaz (now director of the Curtis Institute) was touring in Central America a trio called Book of Days that had been commissioned by our alma mater. I began revising and reorchestraing my early opera Shining Brow for a new production by Arizona Opera, but stopped halfway through in order to compose The Passion of Jekyll and Hyde, an 84-minute long “opera without voices” for chamber orchestra to be premiered live with the great 1920 public domain John Barrymore film at the Wintergreen Festival in July, suavely conducted by Erin Freeman. H. Paul Moon’s elegant documentary of the event was released in August to acclaim.

I returned for a few weeks to Yaddo in Saratoga Springs during August to compose a 60 minute song cycle for six solo voices and piano four hands co-commissioned by Lyric Fest in Philadelphia and the Brooklyn Art Song Society called The Art of Song. Upon returning home, I revised and reorchestrated the second act of Shining Brow for Arizona Opera.

A few weeks later, in September, Chas Rader-Shieber’s intelligent, insightful, and bracing new directorial take on Shining Brow went up in Phoenix. I orchestrated the Blake Songs for tenor and orchestra for November premiere by Robert Frankenberry, Roger Zahab, and the University of Pittsburgh Symphony during downtime at the hotel, and was astonished and moved by an unannounced check-in one night at the theater by my co-author—whom I had not seen in years—Paul Muldoon. Holding hands with him, and with the brilliant young emerging conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, who had just deftly navigated the score, during the company bow closed a loop for me, as did the world premiere, at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia on 4 November, of The Art of Song. The concert was followed by a lavish 58th birthday party—with Prosecco and cake(!)—at the Academy of Vocal Arts which brought together many friends old and new and for which I remain intensely grateful.

Through it all, I sketched the outlines of the new operas 9/10 and The Deputy, and continued editing film for the movie version of Orson Rehearsed—marking the passing of one of its stars, my very dear friend Robert Orth, for whom it was written. I gave a lot of private lessons, and I enjoyed taking the sleeper train to Chicago to fulfill my duties as an artist faculty member of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts. 

All these activities were my coffee spoons. The real action took place every morning over breakfast with my sons, at the end of the day talking shop and family with my partner Gilda; the real action consisted of trips to the doctor, births, soccer games, birthdays, funerals and farewells.

And, in crafting this short essay, I began writing a sequel today to Duet with the Past called Duet with the Future.

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With Duo Yumeno — Yoko Reikano Kimura, koto & shamisen player, and Hikaru Tamaki, cellist — at Tenri in New York City (Meg Fagan photo).

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Daron reads at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY (Karen Pearson photo).

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Peter Marshall, Sarah Kapps, Daron, and Sharan Gale at Dunlop Pavillion at the Wintergreen Performing Arts Festival (Atticus Hagen photo).

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Soloist, composer, and maestro—fellow members of the New Mercury Collective on a new adventure together premiering Blake Songs with the University of Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in Pittsburgh (Aaron Wyanski photo).

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Recording with duo au courant — mezzo-soprano Stephanie Weiss and collaborative pianist Christina Wright-Ivanova — in Las Vegas (Chuck Foley photo).

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A surprise reunion with co-author Paul Muldoon at a performance of Shining Brow in Phoenix (Joseph Spector photo).

Wintergreen Music, Zen Violence Films, Burning Sled Music, and the New Mercury Collective present a feature-length cinematic presentation of music composed by Daron Hagen at its world premiere, in combination with the original 1920 public domain film "Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde," and concert footage filmed and edited by H. Paul Moon.

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