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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opera Saratoga Rocks Blitzstein's Cradle

Ginger Costa-Jackson is Moll in Opera Saratoga's production. Photo Credit: Gary David Gold.

Opera Saratoga opened a brilliant staging by Lawrence Edelson of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock on 9 July 2017 in Saratoga Springs. The production alone is reason enough to go. But the chance to be a part of the show’s inspiring, fascinating, distillation of American Music Theater History is something that anyone who loves either music theater or opera (or, like me both—and especially the intersection between the two) should witness. For the first time since 1960, the show made famous by being shut down temporarily by the Feds and performed from the house with the composer onstage at the piano is being performed with the composer’s own orchestrations. If the media can be the message, sometimes the venue is the vision.

At the age of seven, small and awestruck in a plush red velvet seat in Uiehlein Concert Hall in Milwaukee, I was mesmerized by the conductor, Kenneth Schermerhorn. He was strikingly handsome, and athletic. He was charismatic, and when he raised his arms it was easy to imagine that he was celebrating the Eucharist. In fact, he radiated the authority of a minister, but his back was to us, and there was sensuality in his movements when he cued the glittering array of brass instruments, sumptuous strings, and bird-like woodwinds that stirred me. But he was more than a shepherd guiding a flock; he was the orchestra’s sovereign—he was the only one who literally knew the score, and the congregation read only their assigned lines. I didn’t possess then the language to put words to what I was thinking and feeling, but I understand now that what I was experiencing was the intersection of aesthetic, political, psychological, and spiritual forces that constitute performance at the highest level. It blew my mind. The concert hall was like a cathedral, the audience like a congregation, and the communion—for me, at least—entirely spiritual.

In retrospect, I’m not surprised that—sitting there trying to decide which of the many instruments on stage I would most like to play—I decided to become a composer first and a performer second. It was because my father had unintentionally taught me that although Power can compel, it does not last; my mother had by example taught me that Authority can inspire, and therefore last forever. Like Love, Authority must be earned. Every time a new piece of music is read for the first time the composer starts with all the Power and no Authority. If the music inspires and moves the performers, then the composer’s Authority grows. If it does not, well, as Virgil Thomson, whose game-changing Four Saints in Three Acts premiered in 1927, once told me, “Don’t worry about withdrawing pieces, baby; they have a way of withdrawing themselves.”

Never has there been a composer who so comprehensively manifested both in life and work the ironic union of opposites than Marc Blitzstein. Son of a wealthy banker, he received a full scholarship to study piano at no less than the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music; but he wanted to compose. Believing in “art for art’s sake,” this tonal composer traveled to Europe and studied with Arnold Schoenberg, dean of modernist atonal composers. Homosexual, he married a woman whose translations of Brecht introduced him to not just his theories on theater, but his politics, and the socially conscious Weimar Composers—Hans Eisler, Kurt Weill, and Paul Hindemith. By 1938, his first “commercial” music-theater work, which was really a numbers opera, The Cradle Will Rock’s "second act" opener was a self-lacerating duet called “Art for Art’s Sake” in which a painter and musician do, well, what Blitzstein was taught to do during Tea Time at Curtis. The apotheosis of this transit? Composing, for the Metropolitan Opera Sacco and Vanzetti, a grand opera about two humble immigrant anarchists convicted and executed for a crime for a crime they may not have committed. Had there been no Blitzstein, there would have been no “radical chic” at the Dakota for Bernstein, no link from Eisler to Bernstein, by way of Boulanger. And we’d all be deprived of the most vital branch of the American lyric theater’s stream.

When Olive Stanton (who was not the neophyte that myth and Tim Robbins in his lovely film paint her as having been) stood up on cue in the audience in 1937 there was Method (though Welles famously hated the Method) in the madness, magic in the moment. “I’m checkin’ home now,” she sang, and our hearts are meant to rush to her, knowing full well that she’s all artifice, Blitzstein’s throaty Lenya. The sarcastic earnestness of Blitzstein’s lyrics embodies his own inner-conflicts. For example, instead of allowing us to really care for Moll when she asks Andy behind the lunch counter for “Coffee and” Blitzstein crafted a joke: “Coffee and … Andy.” His come-hither dramaturgy is smacked down by a Brechtian, distance-making pun. (Similarly, when Paul Muldoon and I wrote the opera Bandanna together, I encouraged him to indulge his penchant for Oxonian wordplay, even though the characters would, by and large, not have expressed themselves thus, and his hand, as an author, would constantly push the audience away as the music pulled them in.) Blitzstein penned broad caricatures not meant to engage us emotionally, yet, in Moll—on whom I modelled the character of Doll in my own Vera of Las Vegas for this reason, and who is portrayed movingly by Ginger Costa-Jackson in this production—he created for the audience a compassionate avatar.

In the Druggist—evocatively sung with vocal slice and clear diction by Keith Jameson in this production—Blitzstein has clearly crafted a Lear figure, but gives his character no satisfactory payoff. We’re meant to be stirred by Larry Forman’s moral authority, yet we meet him two-thirds of the way through the show and, deprived of the personal magnetism of a Jerry Orbach, the role falls flat—Christopher Burchett is a forceful, slightly bemused, ultimately charismatic Larry in this production. Who do we hear about all night long? Mister Mister. He’s more fun to spend time with, after all. We’re not meant to care about Larry. As Everyman, he’s the manifestation of our righteous indignation. Franklin Roosevelt, in his 1933 Inaugural, had put it plainly: “The only thing we have to fear … is fear itself.” We don’t need to know Larry until he, by showing that he is not afraid of Mister Mister, deprives the Trump-ian Monster of his Power by revealing that he has no Authority.

Bernstein told me that Marc had intended to respect “the third wall” up until the offstage trumpets at the end. Only a year after that fateful night in 1937 when Welles and Blitzstein were compelled by circumstance to eliminate the third wall, Thornton Wilder would run with it, eliminating it without fuss entirely in the shape of Our Town’s Stage Manager. That in 1935-36 the season Porgy and Bess opened on Broadway, Blitzstein would compose an opera (that is a musical that is an opera—it all begins to feel a bit like the reveal in Chinatown: “My sister, my daughter”) that bites the hands of the people who most underwrite opera is unsurprising—I write operas to speak Truth to Power, too. But that he would score it for an orchestra in the pit and embrace the idea of the extravagant, Welles-designed crystal palace set for the 1937 staging is deeply ironic. The orchestra is, after all, an artistic manifestation of 18th century European society, everyone playing their part, only the benign tyrant on the podium knowing the score. Welles’ masterstroke of an insight (he was, above all, a genius of an editor, dramaturge, and adaptor of found material) was to understand that the Authority, the Authenticity, of the piece would be damn-near apotheotic if the composer was alone onstage at the piano, calling the scenes out as though at a backer’s audition—simultaneously the audience’s and backers’ supplicant and god.

In the theater, there are strict protocols for who may speak to whom during production. I’m well-versed in them and have, in the past, relied on them during moments of high-stress, when one is taking artistic risks and feeling particularly exposed. As a Curtis grad (and composer / conductor / librettist / director of nine operas) who, like fellow-alums Blitzstein and Bernstein, was presumeably schooled during weekly Tea Time on “how to behave” in a Green Room, and who “plays the clarinet in the room, not the one in his head,” I sat in the house during the orchestra dress rehearsal and took the piece’s temperature as a seasoned peer. The forces at play during the performance were absolutely incredible: I could feel the grinding of gears as the (decadent?) European Power Structure Paradigm of the Orchestra (with a capital “O” onstage, not nine feet below in a pit, because of the practicalities of this particular theater) and the Maestro both served and upstaged the document. I thought of the great actor / writer / director Howard Da Silva, veteran of the Blacklist and the original production of Cradle, director of several revivals, including the 1947 one conducted by Bernstein. Suspension of Disbelief was never in the cards, of course; but this was different.

When Bernstein conducted that 1948 revival—the first to use Blitzstein’s original orchestrations—he was given a few lines of dialogue, thereby creating what John Mauceri referred to as “provenance” for his own uttering of the same lines last night while conducting the orchestra dress rehearsal of Opera Saratoga’s production—the first to use Blitzstein’s orchestrations since the 1960 New York City Opera radio broadcast featuring Tammy Grimes conducted by Lehman Engel. When we discussed it, Opera Saratoga’s artistic and general director Larry Edelson elaborated,

“I wanted to give Cradle a fully staged presentation, as so often it is done semi-staged or in concert. My one nod to the original circumstances of the premiere is to have Maestro serve as the Clerk. This has become a part of the tradition of the piece, and with our theater and having the orchestra on stage behind the set, I felt we could honor that part of the piece’s history while still maintaining the through line of a fully staged production. (If our theater had a pit, I would likely have made a different choice.) In the libretto, it actually says that Blitzstein played the roles of Clerk, Reporter and Professor Mamie on Dec. 5, 1937 when it opened at the Mercury Theatre!”

Blitzstein, a man of the theater, would have known himself well-served by a maestro who respected and protected the integrity of his notated document as expertly as did Mauceri. (His Decca recording of Blitzstein’s Regina, with Angelina Reaux, Samuel Ramey, and Katherine Ciesinsky is one of my treasured touchstones as a composer.) But would Blitzstein have assigned Maestro lines of dialogue? Did he want to have that conversation? It’s a daring idea, and one I’ve seen put into play in a dozen black box operas and shows over the years. In the context of the Opera Saratoga production, the orchestra and Mauceri onstage, albeit behind the crafty single-piece set painted Rust-Oleum burnt red to match the interior of the theater, it strongly underscored the fascinating Power versus Authority dynamics at play between Maestro and Composer, Maestro and Director, Orchestra and Cast, Document and Production.

In fact, to my ears, the presence of the orchestra in Opera Saratoga’s production serves as the “dramaturgical nuclear reactor” that powered the document—not the least because Edelson’s staging expertly counterpoints with specific choreography and stage a dozen orchestrational flourishes. That Blitzstein’s orchestrations—suave European Weill-isms and an instrumentation similar to Weill’s Mahagonny Songspiel—married to sure-fire American commercial-scoring tricks from the 30s by way of vaudeville (read: those wonderful Paramount circuit orchestras all playing Charlie Chaplin’s scores) and tartly Stravinsky-esque doublings by way of Boulanger and Copland. Indeed, biographer Howard Pollack (whose recent Blitzstein biography eclipses even Eric Gordon’s superb Mark the Music) underlined for me just why the orchestrational similarities between Blitzstein and the Brecht-collaborator Weill are so important: “the novel use of accordion, guitar, and Hawaiian guitar ... all enhance the Brechtian distancing effects found in the work proper.” The Eisler-iana is there, too, of course; but the effect is not as chiaroscuro as the European; Blitzstein’s scoring is more fun, and a bit sexier.

Maurice Abravanel told me at Tanglewood that, when he conducted the first Broadway production of Weill’s Street Scene in 1946, he agitated for a “scrappier” orchestral sound, but that Weill insisted that American Broadway audiences wanted “sumptuous strings, plush tuttis.” There are few of those in Blitzstein’s Cradle orchestration—it is quirky, original, edgy, and far more like Little Threepenny Music than a commercial score. Throughout, as one might expect, the effects that Hershey Kay and Sid Ramin would in a few years craft with Bernstein for On the Town, and West Side Story are nascent. In Blitzstein, however, they all are dropped within a few measures, the point having been made. During one sequence for Missus Mister, Blitzstein uses a single maraca to limn what Bernstein would have fleshed out into a fully-scored rhumba; during another, a tender duet for the doomed Polish couple, Blitzstein adroitly adds a dash of menace in a bass drum, stalking away below like a heavy; in another passage, scored for low brass, as Bugs threatens Druggist, Nino Rota’s “Corleone Theme” from his 70s score for The Godfather is thrillingly presaged.

“As the director,” pointed out Edelson, “I didn’t feel the impulse to update the piece or to view it through a particularly 2017 lens, because the piece, written as allegory, speaks to me as if it were written yesterday. I certainly added a few things in the staging to highlight themes that resonated strongly with me, but I also trust the audience. I wanted to set up Blitzstein’s ‘Steeltown, USA’ so that the audience could have their own response to the material—not to force a response on them.”

This is evident throughout the production. One of Edelson’s crucial, droll grace notes is the surprise appearance on the feet of the members of the Liberty Committee of stylish red pumps that perfectly draw a line from them to the prostitute Moll, who, of course, has had the fashion sense—not to mention the integrity—to sport them from the start.

The opera house is a secular cathedral, the audience a congregation, and the communion celebrated by the actors and audience, presided over by a trinity comprised of Author-Director-Conductor. There is no greater transposable story than that. There’s an old saying: “The ink’s not dry until you die.” At the beginning of the rehearsal, Mauceri, dressed in blazer and tie, about to give the opera’s downbeat, rose from his stool and, over his shoulder, drily announced to the production staff, “I’d like to point out that the paint on my stool is wet.” I cannot think of a better metaphor for “free, adult, uncensored” theater. Thanks to this production, I am ready, as a devotee of Blitzstein’s work, to let go of Marc on the piano stool and allow his authorial Authority to grow, to allow the ongoing struggle to reconcile Power, Authority, and Truth to be carried forward through the lens of a conductor’s vision. I encourage everyone else to witness as Blitzstein’s powerful orchestral Cradle at last begins to earn its rightful Authority by catching this production while the paint’s still wet.

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

I've also written about Marc Blitzstein here.

Learning How to Breathe Again: Leaving New York After 9/11

"The air is gray," he said.

The hot, lively air, after the smoke cleared, smelled of molten metal and something indescribable—perhaps, if anything, it was the smell of blood iron one smells when one has a bloody nose—pungent, crisp, sickly-sweet, and bitter. Every place has its signature smells—there’s the tropical fragrance of eucalyptus and burnt leña that greets you when deplaning in Managua; the dry, desert aroma of grilled chilies that hangs in the air of Albuquerque throughout the fall.  I still recall exactly how the air in Washington Square smelled the night of 9/11.

9/11/2001, as everyone recalls, was an exquisite day—crisp, cool, and clear. Gilda had only just left for school: the subway took her from 96th Street Station down to the World Trade Center where she transferred to a train out to Stony Brook. My nephew Ryan had just moved to New York to begin college, moved into his NYU dorm room. I finished my first cup of coffee at around nine, sat down at the piano to work. The phone rang.

“Baby, turn on the television. A man just got on the train and said that a plane has flown into the World Trade Center. They’ve stopped the train. The conductor said there are no trains behind us. I can see the smoke.” “Are you okay?” I asked. “Yes.” “Okay. Sweetheart: stay off the phone. Call me when you get out to Stony Brook.” I squatted in front of the television and turned on CNN in time to see the second plane hit at 9:03. I called Ryan. “Where are you?” I asked. “I’m on the street, Uncle Daron,” he said. “The air is gray.” “Get up here as soon as you can,” I commanded. “Start walking north now, fast.” I sprinted out to the deli at 98th and Broadway and bought staples and three gallons of spring water. The sidewalk vibrated with the thunder of military aircraft streaking fast and low southwards over the west side.

Later: “I’m in Stony Brook. Everything’s locked down: nobody’s getting out or going in to Manhattan,” Gilda said. “You’re okay?” “Yes. I’m staying with Matt and Sally.” I walked out to Broadway. Tractor-trailer trucks hurtled south in convoy through the dark at top speed, ignoring all the lights. I followed them on foot. Smell of steel. There was a super-fine white film of grit on everything. Cabs with the back seats ripped out so that they could serve as makeshift hearses headed southwards like a fleet of ferryboats.

Like a lot of people, I was drawn south. Police barricades had been erected, a cordon drawn north of Little Italy. I approached a cop wearing a Kevlar vest and brandishing an automatic weapon as emergency workers struggled to move southwards between the blue sawhorses with NYPD spray-painted on them. “Where do I go to help?” I asked him. “Go home,” he said, remote. Then, for a moment, he gave me his full attention. “Oh. For God’s sake just go home to your family,” he said, anguished. I stared at him, wringing my hands. He softened. “They’re making sandwiches to send south in the park,” he said, pointing. “Maybe they need a hand.” I spent the rest of the evening standing stupidly at a broken folding Red Cross table, spreading bright yellow mustard with a broken plastic knife on one piece of white bread after another.

Any City. No longer mine.

In spring 2012 I boarded the Staten Island Ferry for the first time since 9/11. Standing at the rail with Gilda, the harbor the color of an opal, I could have been looking over the water at Seattle, San Francisco, or Venice. Any City. No longer mine. We strolled around Battery Park City before turning east towards Ground Zero. The Freedom Tower, still unfinished, thrust into the mist on one side; dead ahead, the roar of falling water rose from the negative space of the World Trade Center’s footprint. I looked up into the sky and remembered looking out the window of Jim Kendrick’s Trade Center office, far, far down at the Staten Island Ferry and the Statue of Liberty, both rendered toy like; I remembered drinks at the Greatest Bar on Earth; I remembered a hundred trips to Erewhon and back on the Staten Island ferry, looking up at a skyline I felt mine.

Bone-chilling air swept up from the chasm. It smelled of seawater, traffic, subway, chlorine, and a dash of the hot, lively air bouquet of human sweat ginned up by a crowd on a sweltering day.  There came the familiar objectivity, the feeling of no longer being there. “My thirtieth year in New York,” I observed to nobody. Even after disenchantment with the art world had set in, I had continued to believe in the Jeffersonian notion that there is a “natural aristocracy” derived of talent and virtue. No more. “Wow,” said a bearded Millennial in front of me. He clutched a copy of The Fountainhead and his ear buds throbbed with Björk’s current single. Startled that he had overheard me, I made believe that I hadn’t heard him. “You must be old,” he said, meaning nothing by it. “Oh, I don’t know,” I replied. “Move along,” a cop told me, misinterpreting my chuckle. I looked up from the memorial. Reflexively, I dug in, and gave him a hard look. The cop frowned back. “Listen, pal, a lot of people are waiting to take your place,” he said. I chuckled ruefully, and said, “Yes sir! I really know that!” He shook his head, cocked his finger next to his temple as he shot Gilda a look, and turned away. I smiled at the hipster, who rolled his eyes, stuffed my hands in my pockets, and turned toward the Winter Garden.

In 2016, Congress acknowledged that “over 33,000 first responders and survivors are living with illnesses or injuries related to the attack.” Some of the illnesses (cancers, asthmas, respiratory diseases, etc.) were caused by airborne particulates.

Over the years after 9/11 I gradually lost the ability to breathe through my nose, let alone to smell. I ended up in my doctor's office. “Breathe in,” he commanded. I did. “Your lungs are congested. You’re remarkably healthy for a fat man. Stop drinking so much. Lose some weight, okay?” He looked up to gauge my reaction. “I know,” I said, wearily. “But the sinuses,” he continued. “You’ve got to have them fixed. A man has to be able to breathe.” Beat. “Uh huh,” I agreed. “It’s hard not to interpret this as a metaphor,” I quipped. “Maybe this is a sign. Maybe there’s no air left for me in New York.” He stared at me, unsmiling. “This isn’t Art. It’s Life,” he said, coldly. I looked up at him, startled. “I know—,” I began. “Listen. Let me remind you of something that you seem to have forgotten: art is important, but breathing is imperative. There’s a membrane thinner than a sheet of paper separating your sinuses from your brain. I suspect that most of your sinus cavity is badly infected, necrotic even, and has been for a long time. All that has to happen is for that infection to cross through that membrane and—.” I raised my hands up, and said, “I get it.” He looked at me incredulously. “You’ve got to fix this,” he concluded. I promised him that I would. “I’ll refer you to a friend of mine. I trust him.” He tore the prescription he had just scrawled off the pad and handed it to me. “In the meantime, maybe this will give you some relief.” He looked up, half smiling. “Now, go away and write more music.”

Days later, a surgeon extracted from my sinuses “the most polyps [he had] ever seen.” He pointed out, to my surprise, that he had also removed several turbinates, straightened my deviated septum, and excised an enormous amount of dead and diseased tissue—nearly the entire surface area of the interior of my sinuses. “So, was it like mowing my front lawn in there?” I asked. He wasn’t amused. “This has been chronic for a decade or more,” he said. “You were suffocating. You had use of less than five percent of your sinuses.” I whistled. “So, it was like mowing the lawn of everyone on my street?” He looked at me queerly. “No,” the specialist said, flatly. “It was more like napalming your entire neighborhood.” My nose was stuffed with gauze; I breathed through tubes for weeks. Followed months of steroidal weight gain, antibiotics, bleeding, and more pain, as the tissue regenerated. 

I thought then of the Big Cedar House back in Wisconsin in which I had grown up. Of course, it had been rather small and only special because I made it so in memory. It had just been like a lot of houses, on a street like a lot of other streets, in a suburb like a lot of other suburbs. We had played out our dramas just like countless other families just like us. I’d raced away from it as soon as I could, as hard as I could, and as fast as I could, to the coast. 33 years later, as we crossed the West Side Highway, a cabbie leaned out of his window and swore at us in Punjabi. I was delighted. As I refused to relinquish my soul to the city, it had become time for me to relinquish my place in it.

Relinquish it I have. And, in doing so, I have begun learning how to breathe again.

This morning, in June 2017, I rise from the table to pour some more coffee from the pot and look out into the large backyard surrounded by a white picket fence. I revel in the smells of Upstate New York, of the small village to which we moved a few months after visiting the 9/11 Memorial—freshly-mown grass, coffee, peonies, and the tang of an early summer shower just passed mingle comfortingly as a light breeze passes through,

Spring in Rhinebeck.

Everyone is still asleep. I can imagine at these moments without regret what things will be like here after I am gone. My boys’ tears, and laughter of operatic intensity, will issue forth like feathers from burst pillows. Bath times and bed times will meld into one bright, thrumming, activated chord. Hair will be tousled, favorite books read, lullabies and secret songs sung. Screen doors will get slammed and mended, weeds pulled only to return, hair will be cut, pebbles pulled out of nostrils, ticks removed, leaves raked, gutters cleared, shutters painted, memories forged, wounds cleansed and Band-Aids applied, nascent personalities shaped and encouraged. My sons will know the childish comfort of having observed that their parents love them and one another. Despite the wickedness, the unfairness, and the madness of the world at large, they will feel for a few wonderful years that their world is safe, and that nothing will ever change it.

My sons will enjoy the safety of living in a village where they may walk home after dusk illuminated by the soft, peaceful, flickering golden light streaming from the windows of the homes of neighbors that know, love, and will help to protect them. They will feel good, clean dirt between their toes. They will run in the grass barefoot without the risk of stepping on a used syringe, or slipping on used condoms. They will feel over-ripe tomatoes burst in their hands when on a soft summer afternoon, they pick them from our garden. They will experience languid summers, grow loopy with sunshine; enjoy the healthy silkiness of their own skins. They will spend entire days building dams across the brook behind their Grandparents’ house, drawing treasure maps, catching and releasing bugs, making believe that they are La Longue Carabine in the woods, crying “My death is a great honor to the Huron, take me!” to no one. Dog day cicadas will sing their burring songs by day, crickets their chirrups by night. My sons will run into the middle of the lawn, close their eyes, lean their heads as far back as they will go, feel the sun on their faces, spin around, and imagine they've awakened after a seventeen-year-long slumber to swim in the hot, lively air.

Pocket Scores and Patrimony

You could be a stranger alone in a foreign city and still find a friendly face to sit next to by locating the little flash of yellow in the audience and heading for it as, onstage, musicians rehearsed. After a quick whispered greeting (no introductions necessary) you could take a seat next to the partitura's holder, who would, without being asked, share it with you -- possibly even place a finger momentarily on the spot being rehearsed to help you get your bearings. By the end of the rehearsal you would have made a new friend -- possibly for life. Rome, New York, Vienna, or Paris -- the city's name and geographic location were irrelevant: you were a musician, an artist, a citizen of the world, and that flash of yellow, that pocket score, was your passport, universally accepted and valued. 

John Updike called the (now Knopf) Everyman Classics volumes "the edition of record." Hard to dispute. They were designed to fit in the vent pocket of a man's blazer, there to be found while seated alone in a cafe drinking espresso or absinthe or both one assumes; or drawn out whilst seated on a park bench enjoying a good pipe; or to be drawn like a sword by a physical laborer during his break intent on intellectual self-betterment. One can't rekindle, as it were, a conversation with a book or score begun decades before when reading it on an iPad. And, if one's blessed to have had parents who wrote in the margins of their books, then their conversations can continue with you as you come upon them as you read them; at those times it is as though they had never died. 

These thoughts occurred to me yesterday when I drew from the shelf in my studio the yellow Eulenburg edition of Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 to study, as a musician does, prior to rehearsing it last night with the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia. As a composer of concert and theater music in his fifties, one of my passions is the symphonic works of Beethoven and Haydn. As devotedly as I study Verdi as an opera composer, I am deadly serious -- particularly after having composed five symphonies myself -- about improving as a symphonic writer: climbing into Beethoven's skull and physicalizing his musical thinking by conducting it is just the thing. 

I turned to the first page and was surprised to find, jotted in the upper left hand corner, "Max Rudolf, 20 September '83, Curtis." I'd completely forgotten even attending the rehearsal. Yet, in a sudden rush (like that episode of "Star Trek" where Spock puts on the Smart Guy Helmet) all of the maestro's comments suddenly downloaded from some sort of musical cloud. I paged forward and found notes I'd taken on the use of "piqué," a bowing technique ideal for setting up the entrance of the first movement's second theme. Later, in the Menuetto, "October 10, '83 -- Rudolf takes repeats in the da capo." And so forth.

Returning to the first page, I read, in the upper right hand corner, "LB, 1986 -- 'longest continuous fortissimo in classical music'," from a masterclass Bernstein had given at Tanglewood.  "Rare forte-fortissimo at 190," and, later, comments about the "empty" measures in the first movement (bars when nobody plays) pointing out Beethoven's defining of musical structure through negative space (read: silence). Suddenly I recalled the humid Berkshire morning in it's entirety -- me, 25 and hung over, watching the young conductors sweat bullets, my yellow score on my lap, learning. 

Returning again to the first page, written above the title, the words "NOT VACATION" in capital letters. Above them, in parentheses, the name Masur. That rehearsal I recalled. Maestro had mentioned to the Philharmonic sometime during his tenure there that Beethoven is said to have finished the 8th while still composing the 7th, the magnificent choral 9th still nascent in his imagination. There was nothing "light" about a piece many call one of the lighter symphonies. My notes above the trio in the Menuetto, for example, note Masur pointing out that the writing clearly foreshadowed Brahms. "It's like he was seeing into the future," I said to the orchestra last night as we rehearsed the section again. "This time, play it like Brahms," I said, "and you'll see!" They did. We did. 

I have written often over the years of matrimony -- the many things ("all of the good things," as my father once admitted, without a trace of sentimentality) that my artist mother taught me. I'm acutely sensitive to the concept of "hegemonic masculinity" in music history. It's wrong, from our historic perspective, that women composers' works have been sidelined by the men programming concerts and writing the history books. I've worked to change that during my life in music. I do understand, also, that young composers of all gender identifications are understandably eager to wriggle out from beneath not just their professors' thumbs but from the demands placed upon them by the perceived excellence of prior generations' artistic achievements.  The repertoire forces us to come to terms with the troublesome, ultimately inescapable demands of Acquiring Craft, and of Continuous Study. These facts of musical life are, to me, gender non-specific. 

I went to sleep last night with Beethoven's music in my muscles, and his way of thinking in my brain, confident, excited by the fact that the study beforehand and the movement during rehearsal, the activity of transforming with my brothers and sisters in the orchestra the master's notes into sound would somehow rewire my own thought processes during the night. I awoke this morning changed -- better, humbler, intensely grateful for the opportunities that a life in music has given me to reconnect with a past that is smarter and wiser than my own. I'm launching at last into a multi-year project to rehearse every Haydn symphony with the orchestra. I am ready to draw his scores from the shelves of my studio and learn. 

This piece has also appeared in the Huffington Post. Click here to see it there. Learn more about the Orchestra Society of Philadelphia by clicking here.

Suspending Disbelief

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

“I hear music in my head,” he said.

“Me, too,” I replied.

His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.

“But I feel it, first,” I said.

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

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

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

“You gotta practice,” he said.

“Pretty much,” I agreed.

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

“That sounds fun,” I laughed.

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

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

“You bet your ass,” he agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m not offended,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

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

“I’ll bet that you do,” I agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” I said.

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

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

“Amazing,” he said.

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

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

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

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

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

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

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

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

The Ink's Still Wet: How Composers Keep Score

View fullsize

Observing as Gerard Schwarz rehearses "Amelia" for Seattle Opera. (Photo by Rozarii Lynch)

Lukas Foss told me once (by way of justifying his reorchestrating of parts of Beethoven’s Eroica prior to a Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra rehearsal he was conducting) that, as far as he was concerned, “we should always treat music as though the ink’s still wet.” Fascinating as the resulting performance was (it certainly had an electric spontaneity to it), Lukas was asking for an awful lot; his days as music director there were numbered.

As a composer, I was apalled when, twenty years ago, I showed up at the first “orchestral read” of a revival of one of my operas at a regional opera company, looked at the parts on the stands, and realized that the conductor had gone through them and—with great care—changed all my dynamics. I caused a fuss with the chap, who explained that he had limited rehearsal time, and that he was simply doing what he had to to make sure that my orchestrations worked with him on the podium—a variation on the old musician trope "play the clarinet you have in your hands, not the one you see in the store window." In other words, I learned over the years, it was I who was shocked to find gambling going on at Rick's. Twenty years later, settled in my seat in the theater to observe a wandelprobe of a revival of another of my operas, I wondered, throughout the first act, why I couldn’t hear the low piccolo doublings of the violins (a useful commercial pit orchestrator trick that subtly firms up the pitch and plumps the tone of a small section of strings) and the very high, Britten-esque passages for two piccolos (they make orchestral climaxes for a small orchestra sound a lot bigger). When the musicians took a break, I walked down to the rail and leaned over and asked the venerable maestro engaged for the revival quietly, “Where are my flutes?” He shot a look at the flutes, both of whom were swabbing out their instruments and all at once attentive. “There was a lot of low piccolo that can’t be heard, and a lot of very high piccolo that sounded shrill, so I had them play everything on the flute in the correct octave,” he replied. “Ah,” I said, “I understand. Thank you.” I made quick eye contact with the flutes as I turned away. One nodded almost imperceptibly. Subsequently, they played their parts exactly as written. I’m proud of that moment, because it is the way I believe a mature professional composer should behave.

Nevertheless, the older I get, the more I agree—when it comes to my own music, at least—with Lukas. I now look to Verdi and Puccini, who laboriously crafted new iterations of their operas for each major production, adding and subtracting arias, changing tessituræ, crafting—in the Italian fashion—roles specifically to the artists who would sing them. When I worked as a proofreader and copyist on Broadway I witnessed firsthand as songs were added and excised from scores by the shows’ creative teams at lightning speed. After all, the American music theater would be a lot poorer today if Stephen Sondheim hadn’t retreated to a hotel room in Boston during out of town tryouts for A Little Night Music and come up with Send in the Clowns.

Astonishing it was, back in the early 80s, to sit next to David Del Tredici in the shed at Tanglewood as the orchestra rehearsed one of his magnificent, sprawling Alice-inspired orchestral works, and to see (in green pen for Solti and Chicago; blue pen for Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, red pen for Slatkin and St. Louis, and so forth) his small, though trenchant revisions as each score was run through its paces by a different set of players. Even more astonishing it was as a student in Philadelphia to examine Leopold Stokowski’s copy of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, and to see, in one color, his own orchestrational changes for performance in Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, and Stravinsky’s own, in another color, for another performance.

Nevertheless, when it comes to concert music—symphonies, string quartets, and so forth—there’s still a strong feeling amongst most composers that “the document”—that thing labored over in private for months and years by the solitary composer in her studio—is sacred, and that changes are made only with the greatest trepidation. Even I, as hard as I’ve worked to cure myself of this attitude, find it hard to revise my symphonic works. Orchestral rehearsal time is incredibly expensive—especially nowadays, when a twenty-minute long composition can receive thirty minutes’ worth of rehearsal before the first performance. When a player stops the rehearsal to ask a question, it costs money. Moreover, although the composer has (in principle, at least) all the authority AND the power when her music hits the music stands, every question diminishes her authority. The players cease trusting the dots and dashes on the page. They begin second-guessing things. The result is as inevitable as it is chaotic.

Consequently, the full scores of serious concert and operatic works attain an almost tombstone-like stolidity, crafted as they have been to withstand bad performances and facilitate great ones. I’ve conducted Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony with a community orchestra that struggled with it, and a regional orchestra for whom it represented no serious technical challenge. The transcendent glory (and I mean glory!) of its execution is that it came off with both.

What does a composer do, after the inspiration and composing is over, to protect her vision and to furnish to the players the most durable road map she can—one that, like Copland’s Third, will make a bad orchestra sing and a great orchestra burst into flames? I was asked this the other day by one of my adult pupils whose opera was being premiered at long last by a major company and wanted to know if I had a “work routine” I could share with him so that he wasn’t at the mercy of the generosity of the company’s orchestra librarians and musicians once his music hit the stands. I was surprised to admit that I didn’t have one. Sure, I had in my files “work routines” for use back when I was a proofreader during the 90s, but nothing more current that considered engraving software and contemporary practices. So, I jotted these thoughts about “ten passes” through the score for him, and share them now with you. They are by no means comprehensive, but they represent a starting point, and making yourself go through the score ten times to check for these things will make life better for everyone, including the audience.

View fullsize

Full scores of some of my operas.

ONE

First I go through the vocal parts and recheck the hyphenation of every word with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. Then, I go through again and check the punctuation. Singers and vocal coaches look to punctuation for an indication not just of what the words are trying to express, but where they can breathe. Finally, I check the prosody. In short, I set text for sense first, then, for sensibility. I avoid putting unaccented syllables on downbeats, since that isn’t the way people speak in real life. Well, William Shatner does, but he’s the magnificent exception.

TWO

I go through and check all the key changes if it is a tonal work. Engraving software tends to leave vestigial bits of code around double bars that confuse not just the midi triggers hidden in your score file, but they mess up the spacing. This leads to a pass through to double check the layout of the score pages. Most software defaults to putting too many bars on each system of music so that, when you must squeeze extra music in to facilitate a page turn you can. I deduct a measure each page to give more space to the music.

THREE

Then I pass through the clarinet part to see if I can’t make the keys easier by having the player switch to an instrument with a different transposition, like D or E-flat. I then do this for the trumpets. Finally, I’ll change heavily sharp keys to flat ones for the brass. Happy players perform better.

FOUR

Then I go through and recheck all the slurs in the winds and brass. Slurs in the winds refer only to where the player should breathe, not to the shape of the phrase. Then I check all the bowings (yes, I do my own bowings) in the string parts. Again, bowings are NOT phrase marks. If there’s something tricky, I’ll pick up a violin and try it slowly; I’ll physicalize it so that my authority is actual, not hypothetical.

View fullsize

You're perfect, now change: the score to one of my operas.

FIVE

I pass through the entire orchestra to recheck articulations. Each composer develops her own personal glossary of what each accent means. I lean on Benjamin Britten (whose articulations are the best of anyone’s—they always sound without special explanation, even out in the audience) and Richard Strauss, both of whom spent a lot of time on the podium and were taught a lot by players about what they needed to see in order to give the composer what she wanted.

SIX

I then conduct through the score one more time, checking to make sure that the time signatures I’ve chosen match the beat patterns that the conductor will likely choose to keep things together most efficiently. Sure, they’ll choose their own patterns, but, as with bowings, one wants to establish a basis for a mutually-respectful dialogue.

SEVEN

I then check the “dove tails” in the score. These are the points when players “hand off” tunes to one another—whether from solo to solo or from one choir to another. These are frequently a little tattered. A seamless orchestral sound is something attained only through attention to this detail. One never gets any credit for having done it, but one can tell when a composer hasn’t. (Remember, craft is only really satisfying when it is good enough to conceal itself.)

EIGHT

I then go through and check the dynamics. I remind myself that the players have been trained since childhood to balance with one another. Second-guessing their training leads to the same chaos that a conductor “following” rather than “leading” the orchestra does. It’s like a sonic hall of mirrors, and it leads to disaster. If you want the winds to balance as a choir, just give them all the same dynamic and score it accordingly. Nothing else is needed. If you want the different sections of the orchestra to balance, look at the repertoire and you’ll see that they are marked the same dynamic; the composer’s choice of suitable ranges is what ensures the balance, along with the players’ training. Fine-tuning with all sorts of dynamics within the chord leads to stressed-out players and weird sounding tuttis.

NINE

After running through the percussion parts to make sure that I’ve given the players enough time to run from one instrument to another, I check the rising chromatic lines to make sure they are spelled in sharps, and the falling chromatic ones in flats. This is particularly important when the music is based on an octatonic (or any artificial) scale. The players see only one part in front of them. All those augmented seconds make sense intellectually when you see them in the full score, but they make a single line player's life harder. That said, a famous composer once asked me “Why do your chords ring and mine don’t?” I was compelled to answer that it was because I spelled mine correctly. After all, an A sharp is higher in pitch than a B-flat, and so forth. The other composer was not amused.

View fullsize

Kelly Kuo rehearses "A Woman in Morocco" at the Butler Opera Center as I observe, flanked by the production's vocal coach Kathy Kelly.

TEN

Finally, I go through and make certain that all the rests are “collapsed” into sensible groups. Double bars exist only as a reminder to the player to “look up” for information from the podium. Composers who’ve mainly played chamber music always divide up the beats too much in their orchestra pieces. Players need to see only where the stick is probably going to be in their peripheral vision—nothing else. Then, if I’m using Sibelius software, I’ll go through and “reset note spacing” to get rid of more digital kudzu, and then “lock score” and “freeze position” so that all my work isn’t lost.

AND THEN...

I’d say that, if you do all that, then you’ve found about ten percent of what is likely to go wrong in rehearsal. Throw your hands up in the air and begin again, friend Sisyphus. The ink's still wet.

This essay has appeared in the Huffington Post. Click here to read it there.

The Seventh Wave: a Father's Dignity

The Pacific was anything but. It was that time of the day in the tropics when the competing gravitational pulls of the setting sun and the rising moon are at their most fierce. The idea that the seventh wave is always the largest is a myth of course; but there is to the surf a stubbornly predictable, horrible rhythm of violence and surcease. The sheer tonnage of seawater thrown against the Nicaraguan coast can crush you like a rag doll if you’re caught at sunset between the water and the lava cliffs.

It was February 2015, and Enrique Bolaños, the affable right-winger whom I had met at a party in 2007 was out. In the interim, Daniel Ortega had returned. He had thrown up statues of Bolivar and Chávez here and there, built homes for those Managüenses who had been living in Las Ruinas, accepted a treatment facility from the Germans to decontaminate Lake Nicaragua, began coming to terms with La Cheureca, and begun paying people to pick up the garbage around the highways. Closer to our little house, talk had finally given way to definite plans for the restoration of the Casares oceanfront, devastated by the 1992 tsunami. The road from Diriamba to Casares had been paved; the Chinese had fixed the one that ran south. There was even talk of running a municipal water pipe south to the Hotel Lupita, just to the north.

One evening, as my son and I walked northwards along the beach, his small, strong hand—as seven-year-old boys’ hands must—began writhing wildly to get free. He was desperate to run into the Pacific, to throw himself into the incoming surf, and tired of his father telling him to be careful. Rendered breathless by the intensity of his own emotions, he cried, “Let me go, Papa. Let me go!” I gripped his hand all the harder as the seventh wave begin to rise to the west, Leviathan-colored, majestic, and awful. “Ow, Papa,” he said, pulling away.

I lost my footing, fell, lost my grip, and he dashed into the water in pursuit of his flip-flop. He dove for his shoe just as the undertow was strongest and slingshotted seaward like an arrow, arms extended, head down, somersaulting like driftwood. My heart exploded. There was nobody around to call out to, no time to damn myself for being over 50 and out of shape. I pushed up from the sand and stumbled into the surf just as the next roller, horse head high, broke over him. God, take me and not him was my only thought. I was about six feet from him when the wave hit me head on and brought me to my knees. My arms were extended before me like a priest’s arms to a congregation, half a broken Host in each hand. Water still up to my neck. I heard the roar of the wave breaking on the beach behind me.

Suddenly, my son appeared before me, tossed skyward like flotsam by the wave, clutching his lost flip flop, a look of wild triumph on his proud, beautiful, magnificent face. The ocean threw him into my arms and I grabbed him, hard, and held him for dear life as my heart burst a second time. How could any Father ever look on as his son drowned, I thought. Right? There was a knot in my throat, and a hot iron behind my forehead. Death has slapped me on the back and bought me a Toña, I thought, aware that I was going into shock. “Run up the beach,” I told my son. “Get inland.” With a passing, quizzical look, he did as he was told.

A father’s dignity comes, Lord, from the fact that one of us will (and has a right to) completely forget that they were saved today, but the other will not, I thought. A moment later, I caught up to him and, together we continued up the beach. I could scarcely breathe. He had no idea how close we had both come to drowning. I watched him from the corner of my eye as—happy—he pointed his strong chin into the wind. After a while, whistling, he slipped his hand back into mine, and together we returned to the little house. “Want to watch Pelicans roost?” I asked, knowing that he would say yes.

This piece has been reprinted in the Huffington Post. Click here to read it there.

Elegance, Intelligence, and Dignity: Remembering William Weaver

William Weaver was one of my closest faculty friends during the decade I taught music composition at Bard College. The eminent translator of works by Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, and Italo Calvino, among others, Bill also worked as a commentator on the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts, and made exquisite libretto translations. His monographs on Puccini and Verdi  (The Puccini Companion, and The Verdi Companion) continue to serve as irreplaceable resources for me as an opera composer. Wednesday evenings when I wasn’t drinking with my department chair, I either spent with harpsichordist and Frescobaldi-expert Frederick Hammond, or over pasta and champagne with Bill and his emotionally mercurial Japanese partner Kazuo Nakajima at the house they shared on campus in which Mary McCarthy used to live. I learned more about dramaturgy from Bill over dinner during those years than from anyone else. To dine with him was, in a way, to dine with Callas and the rest; only two other men I’ve known could match his operatic erudition: Speight Jenkins and Frank McCourt. He also taught me how to make an exquisite Pasta Puttanesca in less than five minutes.

Bill also maintained a villa called Monte San Sevino (on to which he had built an addition with royalties derived from his translation of The Name of the Rose that he called his Eco Chamber) and an apartment close by St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. Over dinner in his Village pad in autumn 1995, Bill asked me, “Do you know any poetry by Jimmy Merrill?” I did. Merrill, one of my favorite poets, had succumbed to AIDS only the previous February. I had read The Changing Light at Sandover in high school, and it was my good fortune to have from memory his Kite Poem. I closed my eyes and recited it, concluding:

Waiting in the sweet night by the raspberry bed,

And kissed and kissed, as though to escape on a kite.

EC Schirmer's first edition of the songs.

Letter from Bill about the songs.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that Bill was weeping. “Did you know him?” he asked. “No,” I said. “I never met him.” Beat. “Well,” Bill sighed, looking down. “I have a proposition for you: I’d like to commission some songs in Jimmy’s memory. I also have a young protégé named Charles Maxwell—a countertenor—who I’d like you to hear. If you like his voice, then I’d like you to premiere them with him.” Flattered, honored, I agreed immediately. “But the rights—,” I began. “Oh, just ask Sandy McClatchy to release them,” he said. “He’s Jimmy’s executor.” I waited. “How much will you need for the work?” he asked. Uncomfortable, I looked down. “Let’s do this,” he said, smiling. He reached in his jacket pocket and drew out a little notepad. Ripping off a blank page and sliding it across the table to me, he said, “Why don’t you write down on this piece of paper how much you need?” I did as I was told, wrote down a number that I thought was reasonable, folded the paper, and slid it back to him. Smiling, he opened it, read the number, put the paper down, drew his checkbook from another jacket pocket, and wrote a check. Still smiling, he ripped the check from the book, folded it carefully in half, took a sip of his chianti, and slid it back to me.  I put it in my breast pocket without opening it. “Now!” he clapped his hands. “Let’s have some dessert!” An hour later, walking to the subway, I thought to draw the check from my pocket: he’d given me exactly twice the amount for which I’d asked.

I had at the time the impression that composing for a male soprano was pretty much like writing for any other singer, but I was wrong. Writing for Charles Maxwell, I learned just how much physical strength and stamina is required to sustain singing for any length of time an octave higher than men customarily do. An African-American born in North Carolina, he projected the intelligent, elegant, self-contained dignity of one who had endured and overcome bigotry at home before emigrating to Italy, where he completed his studies at the Instituto Musicale “P. Mascagni” in Livorno. We debuted my Merrill Songs together at the Danny Kaye Playhouse in Manhattan the following November on a Clarion Concert, thanks to Fred Hammond—Fred had taken over as director of them as a favor to his mentor, Ralph Kirkpatrick. I was so intrigued by the otherworldly appeal of Charles’ voice—it retained its brilliance and clarity even in the extremely high register without ever losing its volume—that I subsequently suggested to my librettist collaborator Paul Muldoon that we make the character of Vera in our new opera Vera of Las Vegas a female impersonator—personal reinvention was to be the core theme, and playing The Crying Game’s trope seemed an apt starting point—so that I could craft it especially for him. 

Bill died five years ago, not far away from where I now live, and I miss him dearly. This morning, as I scrolled through the latest McCarthy-esque prattling in the news, I thought suddenly of that dinner with Bill in 1995. I looked up from my chair and my eyes rested on the spine of his Puccini Companion a few feet away on the bookshelf. I felt gratitude for having had the good fortune to have witnessed firsthand the understated elegance of his transit through life. I felt gratitude for having been able to enjoy—over a hundred Metropolitan Opera broadcasts over the years, and a few dozen meals—his frank intellectual brilliance. I felt gratitude for the humble, gentlemanly dignity with which he confronted the challenges of both Art and Life.

This piece originally appeared in the Huffington Post. Click here to read it there.

Farewell to Little Pete's

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

Closure #1: OCTOBER 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View fullsize

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

Closure #2: February 2017

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love him anyway.

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

Moonstruck

In the dream I dreamed that I was the cavalier with the enormous nose.

“What hour? What country’s this? What day? What season?” I mused. It was in the early hours of 14 November, 2016. A warm winter in Upstate New York.

My five-year-old son’s heel dug into my ribs, pushing me toward the edge of the bed.

In the dream, my dead brother Kevin was De Guiche: “It’s not just a moon, sir. It’s a Supermoon!”

“I’m completely dazed!” I replied, opening my eyes a crack. Though the digital clock read “3:45,” moonlight so bright streamed through the window that I gasped. My wife muttered questioningly. “It’s okay,” I said, swinging my legs out of the bed. She turned over and went back to sleep. I glanced at my youngest son. An hour or two earlier, the moonlight had awakened him, and he had launched himself (preceded by the pounding of his small feet on the floor as he ran from his room to ours) into our bed, there to create the crossbar in the letter H between his parents. Tenderly, I folded the covers over his chest, fumbled for my glasses, found them, placed them on my nose, and reached for my phone. I ran my other hand through my hair and remembered my next line: “Like a bomb, I fell from the moon!”

I’d gone to bed knowing that there would be a lunar event; my subconscious had obliged by casting me in a summer stock staging of the moon madness scene of Rostand’s play. It had ended badly, of course. I was awake, now, and with consciousness’ return the dread I’d been feeling for days flowed back out of my subconscious like a stain. Quietly, I crept down the stairs, fished by memory with my feet for my slippers under the piano, turned on the coffee maker, and looked out the kitchen window at the largest moon to be seen since 1948. Nimbus clung around the bare branches of the trees. The streetlamp across the way flickered pinkly before dying. After a few minutes, the coffee maker sputtered and wheezed; I poured myself a cup and carried it out into the backyard. 

It was the birthdate of Aaron Copland, America’s greatest composer, a Jew from Brooklyn who—in adroitly tossing together during the 40s some cowboy songs, good Gallic Boulanger sauce and some spicy Stravinsky harmonies—invented an Americana salad so durable that it is as patriotic as a portrait of Lincoln and apple pie. By all firsthand accounts, whether they be those of his protégé David Del Tredici, his younger friend and colleague Leonard Bernstein, an even younger Ned Rorem, or even the acerbic recollections of David Diamond, he was a decent and humane man. I met him at Tanglewood in summer 1986, and sat with him in the shed as he listened to Lenny conduct his Symphony No. 3, turning his head slightly to me every few minutes, smiling sweetly, and asking me gently, quietly, “What is the year? What summer is this?” His tears.

The harder truth was that it was also the birthdate of the evil, alcoholic demagogue Joseph McCarthy, a man reared like myself in Wisconsin, of all places the birthplace also of Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette Senior, born a Republican, founder of the Progressive Party, civil rights and anti-war activist, about whom I also learned in grade school. The current governor, Scott Walker, for whom I have no admiration, couldn’t manage to graduate from Marquette University; McCarthy, at least, graduated before serving (poorly) as a judge, falsifying war injuries to garner medals as a marine, and slithering, asp-like, into the cathedral of politics, from whose pulpit he preached fear and hate, managing nearly to ruin the lives of many of the artists whose work has inspired me most for the past forty years.

It was also the anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s dramatic last moment debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1943. Would I even have become a composer myself had I not thrilled to the sight of the Jets flying across the screen of the Oriental Landmark Theater as a teenager, Jerome Robbins’ moves electrifying Bernstein’s lightning-in-a-bottle score? Had he not written to my Mother when I was fifteen and decreed, Zeus-like, that I was indeed “the Real Thing, a composer,” would I have come to the coast at all I wonder?

The harder truth is that it was also the day that one Steven Bannon, an openly anti-Semitic man, was named chief counselor to an American President-elect of little subtlety, poorly-read, poorly-educated, with not a sliver of experience as a politician, lawyer, or as a military service man. A golden-spoon rich kid opportunist who told poor people that the fact they were badly educated was the fault of the educated people that they resented had found a neat scapegoat.

Shivering, I poured what was left of the now cold coffee on the grass and headed back in. Seated at the computer in the kitchen, I surfed quickly through the digital front pages of Le Monde, Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. The cyclic, orbital nature of these harsh dichotomies illustrate Santayana's dictum that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” but we're into fouler stuff now. Now our Facebook timelines deliver to our “smart” phones “truths” calculated by special algorithms to entertain us, to reinforce our Weltanschauungs. The "big lie" is now comprised of countless little self-exculpatory, self-justifications for why the “other” guy is “better off.”

I checked into Facebook. Dear friend Lara Downes saw that I was online and sent me the text of an article she was working on about the election. In it, she described that, on election night, her mother "kissed [her] goodbye, and said, “I’m so sorry, sweetheart. I’m so sorry for all of you.”

I rose from the computer, poured another cup of coffee, and stood in the door of the kitchen to watch the sun rise. To my amazement, a young deer strolled without fear right up to the door and looked in at me. "He makes my feet like the feet of a deer; he enables me to stand on the heights," I recalled from Bible Study class. The deer is a sacred animal. It is a shaman, and often the bringer of tidings. It embodies the spirit of softness combined with strength, grace crossed with power. Why had he come on this, of all days?

I reached behind me for an apple. I expected the animal to bolt, but it remained, solid, self-assured and brave, a beautiful thing in itself. I opened the door and rolled the apple across the patio; it came to a stop between the deer’s hooves. It blinked, twice. It cocked its head over its shoulder as though listening for die ferne klang, dipped smoothly to scoop the apple up in its mouth, and walked slowly, with the stately grace of a queen, to the picket fence at the end of our yard. I looked away for a moment. When I looked back, it was gone.

“What hour? What country’s this? What day? What season?” I mused. History teaches us that this has all happened before and that it will happen again. The good and the evil share the same day. How can we possibly explain this to our children? Why must the moon be so very close to us in our time? I understand that it is our turn, but why must it drive us mad?

You can also read this essay at the Huffington Post by clicking here.

Thanksgiving Song

This is no gauzy, sentimental reminiscence of an old familiar haunt from my salad days penned for the holidays in an effort to inspire warm and fuzzy feelings. No. This is a song of praise, relief, love, and lament for my brothers and sisters who’ll clink glasses across a table in a diner somewhere whose thoughts and memories may have to suffice tonight as their family.

Tonight I’ll be humbled, dazzled, and more grateful than I can say, to sit at the head of a table with my beloved wife and fifteen other adults, dear ones all, and eight of their (and our) children in a beautiful home in a safe Upstate New York village, together celebrating Thanksgiving.

I never expected to survive my forties, and nearly didn’t. My story’s not unique, and its details are not worthy of the staccato delivery of war reportage. Time has made more legato my memories of the many, many hours I spent in the Metro Diner at 100th and Broadway, arguing politics, wooing dates, composing, devouring the New York Times, and nursing hangovers. Hell, I ate there before it was called the Metro, back when the Metro Theater still showed second-run films and before, during its death throes, it showed porn. After my divorce, I ate there daily for nearly two years.

The Metro Diner at 100th and Broadway, in Manhattan.

Up until the spring morning in 1997 when my soon-to-be-ex-wife sandwiched herself heavily into the booth across from me and I saw her for the last time, the Metro Diner had been one of my favorite Upper West Side haunts. 

I spread the settlement agreement on the table in front of her like the plans to a house. “Let’s get on with it,” I said.

“No. I want to order something first,” she said, a cool Pan Am smile flickering across her lips. She glanced up to gauge its effect. I looked away. She gathered up the papers with elaborate care, piled them neatly to one side, picked up a menu, and deliberated. 

I stared at the ice in my plastic water glass. The waiter brought her a cup of coffee. She ordered, leaned back in her seat, and stretched. “How ‘ya been?” she drawled.

I looked out the window. A pale, slender woman in a red dress only partly concealed beneath a royal blue pea coat sped northwards up Broadway with her head down, shielding her eyes from the intense morning sun. She reminded me of my violist girlfriend from Marseilles, dashing once through a drizzle to meet me near the Campanile in Venice.

I looked back at her and thought about the violent North African with whom she said she had taken up in Venice. After I had paid to fly her home from Italy, he had continued to call her: “Vaffanculo strozzo!” I’d snarl into the telephone when he called.

I stopped loving her the day I learned of her first affair. One day I returned from teaching at Bard and picked up a letter waiting for her on the landing in front of our apartment that candidly discussed her infidelity.

“How have I been?” I repeated the question vaguely, scratching at my arm. I examined the half dozen scabs on each of my hands. As a child, I had compulsively picked scabs when under stress. My arms and legs were covered with wounds. Sighing, the dermatologist had informed me, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for you. It appears to be psychosomatic: you are simply uncomfortable in your own skin.”

My eggs came. Sunny side up. They were runny, viscous, like snot. Next to the eggs was a pile of hash. I smothered it in catsup. A slice of blood orange serving as garnish was twisted like a set of filthy dentures. I fought back a wave of nausea. We both ate mechanically. What a mess. “I don’t know,” I said, looking at her squarely.

“So,” she smiled thinly, “are you still a drunk?” “I drink a lot,” I answered. “But I am not a drunk.” “Oh, that doesn’t matter,” she said. I looked at her. “Because I’ll tell the judge that you are.” “Ah,” I said, without inflection. I looked at the back of my hand. The largest scab there looked exactly like a fleck of the hash on my plate. I pulled it away from the skin and tucked it between the folds of my napkin. She got down to business: “I want you to know that I know that you got to be a better and better husband and I got to be a worse and worse wife.”

Surprised, I looked up at her. She smiled brightly, and crammed a slab of pancake in her mouth. I looked away again. Why had I made her end it? Why did I need to prove to myself that I had tried everything, everything possible to make it work? Why had it been more important to me to be right than it had been to be happy? She pushed her plate to the side, smacked her lips, and reached for the settlement papers. I—reflexively still paying for things—signaled for the check. 

“You know,” I said, “that you haven’t any moral or ethical right to a dime.”

There was a sudden clatter of dishes in the kitchen and a sharp hiss as something hit the hot griddle. She slowly picked up the pen, lit up a malevolent, self-satisfied smile, and said, “I am legally entitled to it. I can get it. And I want it.” As she signed the paper and I countersigned it, I felt nothing. 

Twenty years later, I will put my hands together at dinner, say a prayer, and offer this song of praise to the bright-faced young Juilliard student sliding into a booth at the Metro, his violin case in the seat across from him, his expressive hand signaling the waiter for a cup of coffee, far from home, Beethoven and the Russian girl back there on his mind. 

I’ll offer this song of relief to the out of work actor whose family back in Iowa sent him a check for the holidays that he’s just cashed at an exorbitant fee a few doors away because he hasn’t eaten in three days sitting at the bar, a dogged paperback copy of Ibsen’s plays in his lap, his lips silently mouthing lines from a scene he's learning for an audition tomorrow. 

I’ll offer this song of love for the elderly couple in the back booth holding hands I’ve known for forty years who don’t even need to make eye contact with the staff anymore: they’re simply taken care of, and rarely pay for their meal. 

I’ll offer this song of lament for the homeless people who stop at the front door and are wordlessly given a free cup of hot coffee to warm them as they continue their long walk up and down Broadway. 

I'll offer it because these people were for years my family, and because the song was always about the people, not the place, and it still is.

Read a wonderful piece by George Blechner in the New York Times about Manhattan's waning diner culture here.

Read an article about "Little Pete's," a diner in Philadelphia similarly beloved, by clicking here.

Remembering David Diamond

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

###

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

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

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

But I knew none of this then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked from one face to the next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I gave David a letter, and left. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

###

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damping the Triangle

The vegetable garden is riotous: the Sunflower has grown impious with age and now leans inappropriately into the midst of the tomatoes, the Black Eyed Susans are running rampant, the herbs are all shot. My sons, ages eight and five, loopy from their Saturday morning soccer games, are enjoying their precious ninety minutes of computer screen time in the kitchen. Gilda is in the library composing. Although the air is crisp, the October sun is still warm when you're in it. I'm in my workshop throwing together a cold-frame for the garden from an old window and scraps of plywood.

Like the historic Victorian in which we live, the workshop is home to many ghosts, all of whom seem to have grown accustomed to us to the extent that they don't seem to mind us being around. We've brought our own with us, of course, and they're around, too, echoes of what happened here before us.

I only listen to the radio when I work with my hands. A small silver Sony boombox sits on the workbench, sawdust lodged in every crease. I'm not surprised when WMHT announces that the second Daphnis et Chloé suite of Maurice Ravel is up next. Although I haven't heard the piece in years, I know it as well as I know my childrens' faces. Music, as Anne Sexton observed, swims back to us. Pop songs on the radio inspire an array of associations for me, sure; but serious concert music invariably triggers deeper ones. That's why I compose it. Great compositions, like great people, fade from memory, but never really die away entirely. All we have to do is to play or listen to them again, and they're born anew.

I'm heaving the circular saw onto the workbench as my father-in-law Bernie walks in the door. Every so often he throws cool stuff he's collected over the years into the bed of his daughter's childhood classic red radio flyer and drags it down the street to our house, where he spreads it out like a cat delivering dead mice and together we pick through it. "Keep what you want," he announces, "and throw out the rest. I'm not saving things anymore." I hand him a paper cup full of hot coffee and he sits heavily in the canvas chair I leave set up for him. The Ravel begins, burbling in the clarinets, the solo strings and flutes giving us the bird calls that have launched a thousand film scores. Bernie fishes a lure from the stash he's brought and holds it out to me.

"I got this from a fellow when I was a lifeguard at Crystal Beach," he begins. Post-stroke, the vital, athletic, classics teacher whose daughter I was courting who I got to know two decades ago moves more slowly; he can no longer read his beloved Shakespeare, or remember that he's told the same story before. In fact, I've heard this one, but it's a good one, and I'm glad to hear it again. "Have you ever caught anything with it?" I ask him. "Nothing but carp," he laughs, and I smile, thinking of Carpathia, the enormous, proud, and cruel Black Carp who eats flies and carrot sticks that I have told the boys in bedtime stories lives at the bottom of Lake Katrina at Yaddo.

Sudden, whooshing ritardandi, extreme portamenti in the solo strings come from the radio: I conjur an image of myself buying a pocket score of it at Tanglewood in August 1985, inhaling it like the smell of tangy hibiscus tea, and trying to figure out the doublings, writing in the margin, "what is it that makes it sound so sexy?" Bernie continues his story and I think, "that has got to be the Philharmonic with Bernstein." Is Bernie all there? Am I?

Suddenly, I smell Borkum Riff pipe tobacco. My father's signature smell. I think of him, smoking his pipe, the steely aggravation he barely concealed while tolerating my nervous, fumbling movements as we built a cold-frame together when I was eleven. And here, 43 years later, I find myself building another, musing, "do I frighten my sons as much as my father frightened me?" My son, playing goalie this morning, throwing himself at the soccer ball, my heart outside my body, leaping with him. His glance to the sideline where stood his mother and me, like touching a rabbit's foot, reassuring himself that we had seen him. His brother, head down, kicking a nutmeg through the opposing goalie's legs and pumping the air with his tiny fists. "No," I tell myself, "they don't fear me."

We agree, as we have done countless times before, like two old ingenious Quijotes, that we're amazed we're still here, and realize we're still here because of our Gildas and our kids. I look over at Bernie and realize that it is my turn to tell a story.

The Danse générale begins. "I was a teenager when my school orchestra performed this piece at the Evian Festival," I begin. "I was a composer and not considered a member of the orchestra. But I was there and they needed a fifth percussion player for the big finish." Bernie smiles, half-listening to me, half to the music. "I was told that I had only two responsibilities by Chip Ross, the classmate who had been directed to put a triangle into my hands and tell me what to do." The Ravelian juggernaut gains momentum. The little workshop is filled with sound. "What were they?" asks Bernie. "First," I answer, "to hit the thing when it came time to, and, second, to dampen the thing when the piece ended." 

"Sounds straightforward," says Bernie. "Exactly," I answer, listening for the snare drum tattoo that the old set of Durand parts had in the percussion parts as the cue for the triangle at the end, just as I had listened for it in France during summer 1983. "And here it comes," I say, realizing that there is no question but that this is the recording made by Ormandy and Philadelphia: the trumpets in thirds are not New York, and the strings are obviously Philly. What was I thinking? That was clearly Delancie playing the oboe solo back there. But the music is orgiastic by this time, and the triangle is beating away. "I fulfilled my first responsibility," I tell Bernie. The piece ends, like a mighty emotional anacrusis, and there is silence. "Then," I tell Bernie, "the piece ended, and the last chord died away, leaving, hanging in the air, the decaying sound of one lone triangle, held proudly aloft by a scarlet-faced composer, realizing, as all his classmates turned to look at him, that he had failed them all."

"Nature," my teacher Homer Lambrecht once reminded me, "teaches us also how to let things die." We'll cut the Black Eyed Susans back; they'll return, they are perrennials. The rest we'll mulch, and we'll put the cold-frame up and start anew. We'll make, as Lenny insisted, our garden grow. Could I have damped that triangle all those years ago and still have ended up here?

This essay has also appeared in the Huffington Post. Read it there by clicking here.

Taking Wing: Composing "Amelia"

This essay first appeared in the Huffington Post on 12 August 2016. To read it there, click here.

Librettist Gardner McFall and Daron Hagen in New York City, 2007. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

This is the story of how Amelia, an opera commissioned by Seattle Opera about a first time mother-to-be named Amelia, whose psyche has been scarred by the loss of her pilot-father in Vietnam, got written.

The opera tells the story of how she breaks free from anxiety to embrace healing and renewal for the sake of her husband and child. The original narrative unfolds over a 30-year period beginning in 1966. Amelia interweaves one woman’s emotional journey, the American experience in Vietnam, the mystery that is Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, and elements of the Daedalus and Icarus myth to explore man’s fascination with flight and the dilemmas that arise when vehicles of flight are used for exploration, adventure, and war. With an intensely personal libretto by American poet Gardner McFall, whose father was a Navy pilot lost during Vietnam, the opera moves from loss to recuperation, paralysis to flight, as the protagonist, Amelia, ultimately embraces her life and the creative force of love and family.

Daron presents the completed partitura to Speight Jenkins. (Photo: Kelly Tweeddale)

As the old saying goes, “Life is short. Opera is long.” And grand operas are beautiful beasts that sometimes take a very long time to gestate. In another life and time, say, 1860-something, I might’ve met Speight Jenkins while squinting over a hand of poker in the saloon of a tumbleweed-infested ghost town—he, the editor of the local gazette and local magistrate; me an itinerant alcoholic Lutheran preacher making a forlorn show of shepherding a flock.

Instead, a hundred years later, Speight graduated UT, Columbia Law School, served in the U.S. Army, and later became a music critic and journalist, helming Opera News for seven years, and then writing about music for the New York Postfor another seven before a guest lectureship about Wagner’s Ring brought him to the attention of Seattle Opera’s board of trustees such that they offered him the post of general director of the company in 1983. As it happens, we met for real by Email.

“I’m writing to you,” Speight’s 5 November 2003 message began, “to find out if A) you are interested in writing an opera for Seattle, and B) what your ideas for such an opera might be. My first interest is in the music; the crucial factor in any opera is the music.”

We began an 18-month epistolary working relationship, during which I pitched him no fewer than two-dozen potential scenarios. He chose the last, a sprawling, innigpiece in which I explored my preoccupation with flight as metaphor for life, birth for letting go and linking with the past, and the fact that the dead are not lost to us. Characters included the Wright Brothers (two male sopranos), Icarus and Dædalus, Neil Armstrong, Amelia Earhart, Leonardo da Vinci, and a little boy (me) laying on the floor on his tummy watching the moon landing on television. Once sold on my idea, Speight green-lit the project, my attorney began billing, contracts were drawn up, and collaboration agreements sketched out.

The evening of 25 June 2004, pacing back and forth in the Pink Room (the room in which Katrina Trask spent her last years) in West House at Yaddo, the artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, I drained the battery in my cell phone talking for six hours with famed director Stephen Wadsworth about the treatment on which I’d sold Speight. His role, Stephen explained, was to “strengthen the through-story and transform my oratorio into a dramatic vehicle.” I proposed (before even asking her) that we use Gardner McFall’s life experiences to hold together the narrative and ask her to write it.

I’d met Gardner at Yaddo during summer 1984 and set one of her poems, “Sonnet After Oscar Wilde,” which closes the song cycle Love Songs. Most importantly, I loved her poetry. Secondly, Gardner’s flier father was lost at sea during the Vietnam conflict, triggering a lifelong poetic fascination with his unknown fate. Because I wasn’t interested in doing a “take down” of the military, but rather in exploring the human toll that military service extracts, Gardner’s self-contained dignity and complete identification not just with my heroine’s emotional state as an expectant mother (Gardner has a daughter) but also with her psychological makeup as a Navy junior guaranteed that the characters that she drew in the opera would personify the honorable rectitude that they do in real life.

The next day, Stephen sent me his first scenario draft of the first act, in which he had begun incorporating Gardner’s experiences (as I had related them), thereby anchoring the opera I had initially conceived in the events of Gardner’s personal narrative.

When I called her, later that day, explained what I had in mind, and invited her to write the libretto of Amelia, I took for granted that she would be willing to mine her past as I do mine, and to lay bare her most painful memories for the sake of telling our story. If I hadn’t intended to strip myself every bit as bare in the process, I would never have asked.

The following summer at Yaddo, a few weeks after David Diamond’s death, Gardner began tentatively committing to some words for the libretto of Amelia. Each afternoon we met—again, I was in the Pink Room, and Gardner was down the hall—and talked about Amelia and the sort of opera we wanted to make together.

“I wish,” I wrote to Speight on 8 July 2005, “I could express how excited Gardner and I both are by what we have come up with. When, at about two this morning, I slipped under her door (she has been lodged in the same house, down the hall) the tenth generation of revisions to the work we’ve done together here on Ameliabefore pouring myself a glass of wine and doing a little reading, I didn’t expect to hear from her before her departure. But this morning I discovered that Gardner had slipped a note under my door, which read, in part: ‘Daron—I feel the Amelia project is such a Blessing—truly—and about our work together in the coming months I can only say: CAVU: Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited!’”

“We did not begin in earnest until May 2006, again at Yaddo. By that time, we had contracts with Seattle Opera and a final, mutually agreeable scenario. … Each morning, I sat down at my computer in Yaddo’s High Studio to write, using the scenario as an outline but feeling free to invent key imagery to associate with the characters and to supply emotional motivation for their actions. When I completed a scene, I would share it with Daron, who processed the text by retyping it, sometimes making a deletion, or asking for an additional line or two. … By the time I left Yaddo in mid-June, I had finished the first two scenes of Act I.” - Gardner McFall, in the Afterward of Amelia, the Libretto

I began working out the opera’s musical ideas by setting a sheaf of Amelia Earhart’s public statements to music for treble chorus and string quartet. The Milwaukee Choral Artists and a string quartet made up of members of Present Music conducted by Sharon Hansen premiered the song cycle, called Flight Music, in November 2005 at the Cathedral of Saint John in Milwaukee. Most of the music of this cycle ultimately turned up somewhere in Amelia.

Over the course of the next year, Gardner, Stephen, and I met periodically at Gardner’s home on the Upper West Side to thrash through the libretto together. We were not cooks sharing a kitchen but, rather, dreamers sharing a vision, each asking tough questions of the others. For me, it was like a return to the summer months of 1992, when I played and sang through Shining Brow for Stephen at his apartment in the Village and I was compelled by a trustworthy collaborator to justify every dramatic beat.

The Acosta Nichols Tower Studio at Yaddo, where much of Amelia was composed. (Photo: Daron Hagen)

It wasn’t until May 2007, fully two years later, that I sat at last at the upright piano in the Acosta Nichols Tower studio at Yaddo, and began, with trepidation, writing the title Amelia over what would become the first page of over four hundred pages of piano sketch. A bird flew in through the open door and flew frightened circles high above me in the white cone of the ceiling. I got up and spoke quietly to the bird, “You’ll be okay, friend. Everything will bTe fine. The door is open. Fly through it.” As though on cue, the bird swooped down and glided back out through the door to safety in the surrounding forest. It was the plainest sort of blessing, and a perfect example of the sort of thing that happens at Yaddo.

During April and May 2010, Seattle Opera rented a cozy house for me atop Queen Anne Hill. New commissions came, including one for a new opera based on Winsor McCay’s seminal surrealist Little Nemo comic strip for Sarasota Opera, based on a libretto by J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy. On my own for the first time since marrying Gilda, desperate for an escape from the pressures of production, I drank every night. I was sober for rehearsals, but I felt desperately over-exposed as a person. When Kate Lindsey, as Amelia, “saw” Icarus, Dædalus, and her dead relatives in the room, she was playing my reality. When Nathan Gunn cradled the newborn at the end of the opera, he was playing me.

Daron looks on as Gerard Schwarz leads the wandelprobe of Amelia. (Photo: Rozarii Lynch)

After five weeks of staging rehearsals, production moved from the rehearsal hall to the opera house. My heart began to lift during the ritual introduction of the production team on the empty stage. The orchestra had rehearsed the score. The focus of production shifted to the realization of my larger compositional vision (including sets, lights, a mighty orchestra, and an audience) as the huge mechanism of the company came into play.

Technicians walked purposefully about, whispering. The lighting designer conferred with his assistant at the portable board set up in the orchestra. The enormous sets were assembled and struck, one after another, on the stage. I walked the darkened house for hours, memorized the sightlines, and gauged what would “speak” to what part of the audience.

Opening night of any opera is exhilarating as hell, but this was Amelia, in which I had invested so very much. The McCaw Hall curtain slid silently up to reveal the first scene. Gerard Schwarz brought his baton down, and the Seattle Symphony began the first bars, intentionally redolent of Vere’s music from Billy Budd—a blessing, homage, and a curse on this opera’s characters. In the front yard of a suburban tract house lay a young girl on her back holding her father’s cap, on which could be clearly seen a commander’s insignia. Her mother folded laundry in her room. Her father sat in the kitchen, cutting himself a slice of pie.

An S.O.S. rhythmic tattoo began. It was this particular household’s—and the opera’s—stuttering heartbeat. (I chose it because Father was a radioman and because its underlying message was that, as in my childhood, anxiety underpinned the bourgeois family scene.) I knew that the audience wouldn’t entirely understand until the moment that the mother received the news from the Chaplain that her husband was lost in action what they had been intuiting: what they had thought was the present was the past; the happiness unfolding between father and daughter was a memory. Dodge was not there—he was singing in the past. Amelia’s mother Amanda sang a duet with that past.

I wondered that hay fever had struck this audience as hard as it did. “Those sniffles are not because of allergies, darling: they’re weeping,” Gilda whispered.

The first scene ended and the orchestra segued into the first interlude. A set of variations on the lullaby that Amelia’s father had sung her as a child, the interlude traced her evolution as a person from the age of nine (the point at which she learned of her father’s disappearance) to age 31 (the point at which we meet her in her third trimester of pregnancy).

The curtain rose. Amelia’s dream life counterpointed her waking life. On one side of the stage sat Icarus and Dædalus constructing their wings; on the other side, Amelia and her husband slept. At the end of the scene, her dream shifts to a memory of her mother giving her the news of her father’s disappearance. Amelia leaves, and in her absence, her dreams and memories intermingle. Icarus and Dædalus, prepare to take to the air. “Who invented flying? And why?” asked Amelia’s memory of her mother.

The orchestra joined her on this pitch, because it was in this dark, subconscious place that the second interlude would move and unfold. Then, the curtain, accompanied by a smear of polytonal string chords, rose to reveal Tom Lynch’s set. The Vietnamese couple recounted Dodge’s (final?) moments, which were enacted around them. The loss. As the characters spun out the long moment of discovery with which the scene ends and the orchestra quietly explored the moment, the house was absolutely still. It felt as though the opera house was collapsing in on itself.

“Did you hear that silence?” Speight asked, aglow with satisfaction, during the intermission. “I mean, did you read it? It was incredible.” He sped off to confer with his peers—the general directors of other companies considering productions of their own. Shell-shocked, Gilda and I did a walkabout arm-in-arm through the lobby. Several tearful Vietnam veterans approached, expressed thanks to me for addressing their experiences in the opera. “I’m honored by your reaction,” I responded, hoarsely. The air was earnest. People had been touched.

The second act began. The curtain slid up to reveal a painted sunset nearly identical to the one I had just seen during intermission. Amelia arrived. The action moved through Amelia’s breakdown—the most straightforward story telling in the opera, intended to reassure those theatergoers who had felt set a bit adrift during the first act.

The orchestral interlude exploring her relationship with her father and flight ended. The death of the boy unspooled, the reunion of Amelia and her dead father took place, along with her subsequent reawakening. Cue the interlude tracking Amelia’s labor towards its climax. The orchestra dropped out, the baby emerged, and the final unaccompanied nonette pealed forth. The wave of emotion that swept through the house was like an unexpected spring shower.

I thought of sitting at my mother’s feet as a child, watching her sculpt. I thought of the six things that she had taught me that every worthwhile piece of art required: hard work, love, dedication, discipline, craft, and the revealed secret. I had committed my life to the pursuit of the secret. I had learned that the secret was my Truth. The frog behind Amelia’s back? The final tableau was an exact portrait of the inside of my mind and heart the moment that my son Atticus was born. I had been given the opportunity to share my truth, and to know that for one instant I had gotten “it” exactly right.

The final scene of Amelia as staged at Seattle Opera (Photo: Rozarii Lynch)

Amelia held her baby. Paul held her. Helen wept for joy. Dodge and Amanda (having returned as a couple of middle-aged doctors) cuddled, and then kissed gently on the other side of the stage. The Flier squatted down center, gazed brightly into the night sky. Young Amelia (as a young resident) slept on a bench outside the delivery room. The Young Boy’s Father, holding the little cellophane bag containing the last of his dead son’s possessions, walked slowly toward the exit. Characters slowly exited; like mist rising from the sea, the set flew up and out. As each character parted, I felt as though another of my ghosts, one of my presences, departed. I felt lighter and lighter. By the time the Flier sang Mother’s final words, “I was never bored,” I felt suspended in midair like Icarus before the fall, weightless, a completely “chanceful” thing—.

Amelia (or was it my wife Gilda?) sang to her newborn, “Anything is possible.” That moment was for my elder son. I thought of his wonderful dignity—my son, who had allowed no assaults upon his integrity—had made no concessions of personality except those made through love to his parents. Those concessions remain the ones, solely, which in no way reduce or cheapen the giver. A child can concede through fear (through physical fear of punishment or emotional fear of rejection) and become at last a vicious rebel or a spiritless thing. That perhaps is truly dignity—inviolate integrity of personality that has made concessions only to beloved people, institutions, or principles.

I had not expected that, in summoning all of my spirits to form the finale of the opera as I had, I would also be waking them. I had come to understand that, in the future, they would no longer be available for me to sing for and about, to remember as and when I pleased. I had transformed my sorrow into joy, my Life into Art. I had also learned that telling one’s “truth” is not enough. Living it is what counts.

Amelia has received a number of revivals since its Seattle Opera premiere, notably by the University of Houston and the Chicago College of the Performing Arts. Learn more about the opera here.

Loving and Losing: Composing "Bandanna"

This essay first appeared in the Huffington Post on 14 August 2016. Read it there by clicking here.

In the final tableaux of “Bandanna,” Morales (Othello) strangles his wife Mona (Desdemona) and then takes his own life.

Writing a prescription for Prozac in autumn 1997, my therapist at the time described my condition as “clinically depressed.” Years before, just after my mother’s death, I’d also been prescribed pills—even electro-shock therapy (which I had violently opposed) had been discussed. My family’s appetite for mood-altering substances, and my fear that medication would “blunt my compulsion to create” had kept me from filling the prescription.

I was all too aware that, as Julia Kristeva pointed out in Black Sun, “depression is the hidden face of Narcissus” and that Christian theology, in which I had been immersed since childhood, considered sadness a sin. Dante even consigned the melancholic to “the city of grief” in Inferno. “The loss of the mother,” wrote Kristeva, “is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity, the sine-qua-non condition of our individuation, provided that it takes place under optimal circumstances and can be eroticized.”

Came at this time a commission from the College Band Directors National Association (over a hundred colleges ultimately joined the consortium) for a full-length opera on a subject of my choosing (using a librettist of my choice) by way of a phone call from conductor Michael Haithcock.

I chose Othello as my subject matter in order to explore not just the feelings of betrayal and anger that I still felt towards my ex-wife (we had recently terminated a turbulent and nearly entirely disagreeable ten-year marriage) but also the guilt I still felt, and the incomplete mourning in which I felt caught like a fly in a web, as a result of having been called upon by my terminally-ill mother to euthanize her. In other words, I chose to fight my “battle with symbolic collapse” by creating an opera about it.

I decided to recast the Venetian tale of the Moor in a 1968 Texas-Mexico border town. The result was Bandanna, a two act grand opera. The commission required only that I could not use strings (except for basses) in the pit. I asked Paul Muldoon to write the libretto based, as usual, on a detailed co-written treatment in which I determined the exact length of every section of every scene, and mapped out the structural underpinnings of every scene, aria, and ensemble.

I composed the prologue and most of the first scene of the first act at the MacDowell Colony during January 1998 in Chapman Studio, the most remote of the many cabins dotting the property—fully a mile away from Colony Hall. I would have completed the entire first act there but for the fact that there were 26 inches of snow on the ground. For nearly four hours each day, I slogged through the snow in a decidedly non-meditative frame of mind—the walk to and from the payphone, where I was jacking in to check E-mail and to send Muldoon requests for changes, took over an hour each way.

I wrote the balance of the vocal score at home in New York City. Composer Eli Marshall, a former student and friend, stayed with me for much of the time. My work routine consisted of rising at 7 AM, composing until 5 PM, dining at a nearby burrito joint where I spoke Spanish with the waitress, and copying out the fair score in the evening while drinking a bottle of Antinori Chianti. The vocal score was completed in just over four months.

When I co-wrote with Paul the treatment for the last scene of Bandanna I was entirely aware of the agonizing sequence of matricidal, fratricidal, uxoricidal, and suicidal acts that would be ritualistically enacted. Accordingly, in her concluding Willow Aria, the music that Mona sings is written from the point of view that she already knows that she is dead; the strings that accompany her are, throughout the opera, associated with death, inasmuch as they, unlike the wind instruments featured everywhere else in the score, do not breathe.

The transition from Mona’s aria to her murder features three violins, and it tracks Morales as he crosses the stage with excruciating slowness, to her hotel room door. He is Charon, and he is in no hurry. Morales is Orpheus to Mona’s Eurydice. In fact, both Mona and Morales already intuit what must happen and are now just going through the motions: once Morales opens the door, his deputy Cassidy appears. Morales executes his friend. He then turns, as though in a dream, to Mona. He strangles his wife, who does not struggle, with the opera’s eponymous bandanna. Then, without really pausing, except to muse, “Holy Mother of God,” he kills himself by placing his service revolver in his mouth and blowing himself away.

One critic complained later that “the final scene—the climactic murder-suicide—is anguished to a grotesque degree.” If I could have made it even more grotesque, more like a slow-motion nightmare, I would have, so focused was I on capturing my inner state. While composing it, I felt such an intense sense of closure that, at one point, I actually felt as though my mother was standing behind me at the piano, her hand resting on my shoulder. When the chorus crashes in, they sing “Dona nobis pacem” (pun intended: my ex’s name was Donna) to anything but comforting music. The trombones, in fact, are marked, “blaring like the horns of an approaching semi.”

In those days, I used to send a copy of the vocal score of whichever opera I had just finished to Jack Beeson, who would go through it and make marginal comments very lightly in pencil like “You buried a plot point here. This is an intrinsically slow word: why did you set it fast? Courageous! This is the Nieces from Britten’s Grimes! Watch the passaggio!”

Jack, exclusively published by Boosey and Hawkes and ensconced with tenure at Columbia University, was a major behind-the-scenes power broker during the years that I was coming up. I respected his opera Lizzie Borden and particularly liked Hello, Out There, a trenchant one act. Jack’s knack for setting American English in a way that was understandable across the footlights I admired. His operas rarely blossomed into full-fledged song—something I found as a colleague regrettable. Jack, like the many other powerful old guard colleagues I knew then, never did anything for me, and it never occurred to me to ask him to.

During spring 1998, Jack and I played and sang (and argued) our way through Bandanna one afternoon at his spacious Columbia University faculty apartment while his wife Nora kept the tea coming. “You’re going to take a pasting from amateurs for the male ranges,” he predicted. “The men are slung high. I get it: they are all being macho. I know you want them to sound that way. Moreover, I see you are saving up the sound of the female voice for the final scene. However, you are pushing the limits of verismo writing. Maybe too much.”

View fullsize

A page from the Hagen-Muldoon treatment for "Bandanna" with Daron's hand-written notations.

When Jack asked me a few years later to join him as a trustee of the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera I asked him why. His answer was cheerfully truculent: “Because you’re not one of my former students, threatening to kill yourself if I do not throw a Pulitzer your way. Also, you are sane, you happen to write good operas that get produced and your expertise is required.”

I orchestrated the first act of Bandanna by hand at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts during June 1998. The second act I orchestrated mainly at Yaddo the following month, completing it in New York that July. It is the last of my operas whose full score is still in manuscript form. I switched to engraving all of my own music shortly after the farrago that correcting vocal score proofs of the vocal score for Carl Fischer became—an incompetent engraver whose work was so slipshod and inaccurate that I was forced to work through five sets of proofs had been engaged.

Bandanna’s first staging, which served as the centerpiece of the College Band Directors National Association’s national convention that February was a calamity. Upon arrival I learned that the University of Texas graduate students serving as lighting and set designers were unequal to their tasks. The student singers struggled with the roles. A few days into production, the poor fellow singing Kane simply stopped showing up. I watched, like impotent Madam Racquin, as tempos shifted wildly from rehearsal to rehearsal, student singers made up music as they went along.

I contacted Paul Kreider, with whom I had recently performed, along with Carolann Page, selections from Shining Brow at the Guggenheim Museum at the invitation of House Beautiful magazine. Paul had initiated the Vera of Las Vegas opera commission, written his doctoral dissertation on my songs. He was a fearless performer, and a trusted friend. If he couldn’t save this situation, it couldn’t be saved. Paul flew in, and learned the role of Kane in three days. With relief and gratitude, I paid his fee myself.

The premiere production did not represent the work I created. Its first performance (half a dozen players were for some reason absent from the pit for much of the first act) was greeted with what seemed to me to be defensive, uninformed distaste by most of the conventioneers.

Since the band and opera worlds are mutually contemptuous, the constituencies most inclined to produce Bandanna cancel one another out. As Tim Page wrote, “neither fish nor fowl—as fierce as verismo but wrought with infinite care, [Bandanna is] a melding of church and cantina and Oxonian declamation.” Catherine Parsonage expands upon this assessment: “[it] is wholly convincing as a modern opera, ranging stylistically from the music theatre of Gershwin, Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim to traditional mariachi music and contemporary opera of Benjamin Britten. Hagen, who served his apprenticeship on Broadway, acknowledges that holistically the piece falls between opera and music theater. Hagen’s style encourages audiences to be actively involved in constructing their own meanings from the richness of the textual and musical cross-references in his work.”

From the start there were also other colleagues who really got it, like Ukrainian-American composer, pianist, and conductor Virko Baley, who had for years conducted the Nevada Symphony Orchestra and was professor of composition at UNLV. A dynamic, thrilling pianist, tough-minded thinker, and musical swashbuckler, Virko and I had had some great adventures together. I admired him: he knew life, and he wasn’t afraid in his music to offend. He had entirely grasped the fact that Bandanna’s score meant to push people’s limits. “These characters are at the end of their shit,” he told me. “They’re in extremis. That’ll make people who like their opera tame uncomfortable. The whole damned score is unsettling. You got what you wanted, baby.”

View fullsize

The partitura from "Bandanna's" Act I, scene 1 "fistfight" sequence.

A few months before the premiere, presenting the great conductor and promoter of the wind ensemble as a performing group Frederick Fennell with a copy of Bandanna, I asked him how he thought the piece would go over in the band world. Eyes twinkling, he told me that he felt that there were three kinds of band conductors: “First, you have what I call the Educators: they teach high school band and play simplified arrangements of pop songs and movie themes. Then there are the Spit and Polish Men: they play marches, and for them music history stalled around the time of Holst. Finally, there are the Maestros: they could have been orchestra conductors but chose to conduct bands because they love them. These men and women are hungry for new repertoire, and can have a better grasp of the symphonic repertoire than their colleagues can in the orchestra world. Almost none of them know anything about opera, my boy, so your opera is doomed.”

The music of Bandanna, to my mind, not only successfully evoked the morally bankrupt world in which it’s Touch of Evil-infused characters lived, but also gave voice to my own inner world at the time: I was an unhappy fellow at the end of his rope, in a dark place, and looking for a way out. Bandanna addressed and expressed what was then my “truth”—that Life was a shadowy, Conradian “horror” glimpsed during flashes of lurid Malcolm Lowry lightning over Cormack McCarthy landscapes. The music was aggressively at odds with the words that it carried much of the time, like a horse that will not be ridden. Even if I removed the band world from the equation by re-arranging it for orchestra in the pit, Bandanna will never find its niche, perhaps because people like categories and the music draws equally from jazz, musical, and operatic idioms.

Thanks to the efforts of Michael Hitchcock, Paul Kreider, Thomas Leslie, and (owner of my former exclusive publisher, E.C. Schirmer) Robert Schuneman, among others, I was able in 2006 to conduct a complete recording of Bandanna (available on the Albany label) that I felt invalidated the criticisms the score had received.

The reception accorded the staged premiere was counterbalanced by the recording’s accolades from major magazines like Opera News and industry experts like Henry Fogel, who understood what Muldoon and I were trying to achieve. “Bandanna,” Fogel wrote in Fanfare Magazine, “is a poignant, dramatic, and moving new opera, one that belongs in the repertoire not because it deals with the politically hot topic of illegal immigration, but because it is powerful music theater.”

Among my operas, Bandanna shall always have been for me that problem child—the one that was too much like me to get perspective on; the one I listen to even now, 20 years later, through rueful tears as it gallops off into its own, self-immolating sunset of love and loss.

Learn more about Bandanna here.

Beauty, Despite All: On the Generosity of Teachers

This essay appeared first in the Huffington Post on 11 August 2016. Click to read it there here.

Wallace Tomchek at the Chicago Hilton, summer 1997. (Photo: Earl Hagen)

THEME

I was drawn to the piano at the age of seven because my older brother Kevin, whom I idolized, was a gifted pianist. At the beginning of my first lesson, our piano teacher Adam Klescewski sat me down on the piano bench backwards and commanded me to sing an A, which I did. I possessed absolute pitch. I grasped immediately the concept of sharps and flats, and demanded to know what was between the notes. I now retain excellent relative pitch—where did the “perfection” go? I wonder. He taught me the names of the lines and spaces in the treble and bass clefs: “Every Good Boy Does Fine; FACE; Good Boys Do Fine Always; All Cows Eat Grass.”

I didn’t like practicing. (I still don’t.) I began paying my other brother Britt—who ratted me out anyway—a dollar to tell our mother that I had practiced. He’d tell her anyway. Then, he’d say, “No-no-no, this time I promise I won’t tell her you didn’t practice!” So, what began as a bribe turned quickly into extortion. Even early on, Britt had skills. After a few months, the little spinet with the feather-light action lost its appeal. During my final lesson, I noticed digits tattooed on my teacher’s forearm. The same afternoon, I discovered on a very high shelf, along with a lot of other books about the Holocaust, an oversized book of tenebrous, horrifying concentration camp photographs called Despotism. I returned to the book obsessively. That a man who had experience such horror could make such beautiful music, create such beauty, despite all, seemed unimaginable—just impossible to me.

VARIATIONS

Shortly after that, I quit the piano for trumpet. Well, I longed not so much to play the trumpet as to be Herb Alpert. I thought there was no cooler man. Anyway, I at least wanted to be the sort of boy that played the trumpet.

Between gigs, dashing, floridly over-qualified Harry Shoplas taught band at Linfield Elementary School. He played a shiny Selmer trumpet, which he often carried tucked under his arm as he walked the school’s halls, leaving behind him the smell of Aqua Velva and valve oil. The female teachers must have regarded him ravenously. Between classes, he smoked cigarettes in a basement lair that he shared with Norman Cummings, the second-coolest teacher at the school.

Harry sized me up and handed me a euphonium I think because I was overweight and looked like I could lug it back and forth to school. He quickly switched me to alto saxophone—Britt played the baritone saxophone in Harry’s dance band and I aspired to playing with him. I loved the smell of wet reeds, and the taste of the cane, but I could never get the thing to play softly. Our fifth grade band concert closed with a Bert Kämpfert tune called Spanish Eyes, which I recall vividly because it was the last thing I played on the saxophone.

One afternoon, Shoplas took our band to a Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concert that included the Largo of Antonin Dvořák's Ninth Symphony. Nixon had just won the ’68 election and my favorite toy was a plastic Apollo 7 model. But it wasn’t snowing; it was warm, and raining pitchforks. Small and awestruck in a plush red velvet seat in Uiehlein Concert Hall, I was mesmerized by the conductor, Kenneth Schermerhorn. He cut a strikingly handsome, athletic, charismatic figure, and when he raised his arms it was easy to imagine that he was celebrating the Eucharist. In fact, he radiated the authority of a minister, but his back was to us, and there was a sensuality to his movements when he initiated the glittering array of brass instruments, sumptuous strings, and bird-like woodwinds that stirred me. The concert hall was like a cathedral, the audience like a congregation, and the communion—despite the profane context—spiritual. As Stephen Colburn played the ravishing English horn solo in the Largo of the Dvořák, I felt a lump in my throat, a profound sense of longing, the feeling of being tugged out of myself and suspended in midair. That was the moment, at age seven, that I knew that, no matter what, I would be a composer.

On a September afternoon 35 years later, Kenneth and I lunched before a concert on which he conducted my Much Ado overture with his Nashville Symphony. Did he remember the fan letter from the dazzled child who couldn’t find a word grand enough to describe how moved he had been by the experience? He laughed and said no. I told him what I had written: “Dear Maestro, your performance last week was just superfluous!” He exploded in grainy, rueful laughter, and mused, “How like coming home it feels to finally work together.” “And how ironic, under the circumstances,” I replied, “that the Largo was adapted into a song by Harry Burleigh called Going Home.” “Indeed,” he agreed, smiling. We swapped stories for another hour, laughing until we cried. “I am neither a young nor a healthy man,” he sighed, wiping his eyes, “but I am glad that we are finally sitting together now at this table.”

In retrospect, I’m not surprised that—sitting in Uiehlein Hall trying to decide which of the many instruments on stage I would most like to play—I decided to become a composer first and a performer second. It was because Father had unintentionally taught me that although Power can compel, it does not last; Mother had by example taught me that Authority could inspire, and therefore last forever. Like Love, Authority must be earned. Every time a new piece of music is read for the first time the composer starts with all of the Power and no Authority. If the music inspires and moves the performers, then the composer’s Authority grows. If it does not, well, as Virgil Thomson once told me, “Don’t worry about withdrawing pieces, baby; they have a way of withdrawing themselves.”

I received a lot of encouragement from my grade school teachers. When Jesus Christ Superstar dropped in the States, Kevin bought the LP’s. Mr. Germanson allowed me to play it for the class. When I followed that up by playing the “God Said” trope from Bernstein’s MASS, though, letters from angry parents prompted a telephone call from the principal, Mr. Buege (pronounced “biggy”) to Mother, whom family lore holds told him that it was 1968 and that he had better get hip.

At ten, when the other adolescent Lutheran boys were getting their first frisson from contact with the King James Bible, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Principals of Orchestration called out to me at the Brookfield Square Mall Walden Books. I carried it around everywhere the way a gunslinger packs his pistols.

Music was my religion, but I had still to find a proper celebrant. Wallace Tomchek was the first person I met with the requisite charisma. Wally taught chorus and drama at Pilgrim Park Junior High School. A short Jewish homosexual who closely resembled Norman Mailer with curly auburn hair and a slight potbelly, the ferocity of Wally’s passion for—and absolute commitment to—musical excellence was terrifying and irresistible. I loved him for it. When I was 15, He taught me, and accompanied me in performing, the first art song I learned and sang—Norman Dello Joio’s 1948 There is a Lady Sweet and Kind. Wally introduced me to the world in which poetry and music inextricably intertwine.

One afternoon, he called me into his office and commanded me to recite my (then) favorite poem. I launched into James Weldon Johnson’s great narrative poem The Creation. After I had declaimed about ten lines, he cut me off. “Really?” he asked, incredulous. “That’s your favorite poem?” I shrugged. “Well. Okay,” he said. “Now set it to music.” Over the next few months, I made of it an ambitious piece of juvenilia—a 25-minute-long cantata for four soloists, mixed choir, five violins, piano, and large symphonic band.

I began setting poetry to music, grafting my tunes with the poetry I have most loved. My first settings were of poetry by Poe, Whitman, Rossetti, Frost, and Joyce from a Harcourt anthology of British and American poets edited by Louis Untermeyer that I turn to for poems to this day. I have since set over 250 poems short and long, written dozens of works for chorus and multiple voices, and set libretti by Edward Albee, Barbara Grecki, Rob Handel, J.D. McClatchy, Gardner McFall, Paul Muldoon, and myself.

The challenging, college-level choral repertoire Wally taught us was both sophisticated and eclectic—Gesualdo madrigals, slick “swing choir” arrangements of tunes like Johnny Mercer’s Dream in nine part close harmony, and a yearly fully staged musical with orchestra which he designed, directed, rehearsed, and conducted. He also encouraged me to direct: I recall with particular fondness directing, among other things, a production of Thornton Wilder’s The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden for him.

I was fifteen when Wally took our class on a field trip to a screening of the movie version of the musical 1776. William Daniels’ portrayal of John Adams—part Orson Welles, part William Shatner—enthralled me. I adopted as my credo an actual Adams quotation: “There are only two creatures of value on the face of the earth: those with the commitment, and those who require the commitment of others.” I solemnly swore to myself that for the rest of my life whatever I lacked in musical talent I would make up for in hard work and commitment.

It being the bicentennial year, Wally mounted a patriotic pageant called Spirit of ’76, “a rock celebration for young Americans,” with music by gospel songwriter Paul Johnson. Our troupe toured around the southern half of Wisconsin, performing it in American Legion halls, high schools, and nursing homes—even the Milwaukee County Mental Health complex. I recall a performance there, gazing out over the audience of six hundred psychiatric patients, gripping my microphone in as close an approximation of Mick Jagger as I was able, and squealing “let freedom ring” in my white polyester pants and bicentennial logo tee shirt. Halfway through my number, careening up the center aisle, arms flapping like the wings of a pelican, a lone patient joined me—delirious, rapturous—in song. He was exquisite, florid, a soaring thing in his own universe. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. As I launched into the chorus, I glanced at Wally, whose arms flapped also like a pelican’s wings in front of the little pit orchestra. At that instant, two orderlies converged on the patient. Every eye onstage and in the audience followed him as he was frog-marched out of the auditorium, ecstatic.

Afterward, Wally drew me aside . “Did you see that?” he exulted, eyes glittering. “Did you?” “How could I miss it?” I answered. Wally continued, ignoring me, “Remember that moment! Look at what he achieved! Think about what you just witnessed, what you—what we all—just went through … together we made that moment! Sure, the stakes change, but the hands don’t! Now that’s live performance!” Whether seated in a Greenwich Village piano bar covering show tunes while coping with “handsy” patrons, putting my own operas over from the piano for wealthy commissioners, being admonished to keep better time by ballet teachers, playing at villas in France and Italy for diplomats and scholars, performing onstage at Curtis or countless other concert halls, accepting the condescension of famous singers with big egos while coaching them, accompanying Gilda in Nicaraguan folk songs on a frail German spinet for a tombola in Nicaragua, or guiding my sons’ small fingers through “Twinkle, Twinkle” at the family piano, Wally’s exhortation has never been far from my mind.

That year Wally raised the money to bring the Florentine Opera’s young artists out to Pilgrim Park Junior High School to perform Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium. It was the first opera I saw live. The performance, the entire student body, was riveting. To this day I remember the haunting refrain, and the music to which it is pinned: “Toby, Toby, are you there?”

The next year, I began putting together a music curriculum myself to run in tandem with my high school classes, enrolling in advanced music theory instruction at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. I was the youngest “adult student” division pupil of Judy Kramer, a no-nonsense, practical musician of great gifts and determination. She assigned Roman Numerals to chords in order to chart harmonic progressions. I bought Arnold Schoenberg ’s Fundamentals of Musical Composition at Schwartz’s second-hand bookshop on Wisconsin Avenue. “Why,” I asked her, “are the numerals Schoenberg assigned sometimes different from Vincent Persichetti’s, or Bruce Benward’s, even though the music is the same?” “Good question,” she replied. “It cuts to the problem with musical analysis.” I sprang the answer I’d formulated the night before: “So you’re saying that music theory is sort of a confidence game. If you can intimidate people into thinking your analysis is correct, then you are correct.” Judy looked out the window and thought a moment before answering. “No theoretical analysis can be empirically proven to be correct except by the terms of the system in which it is defined,” she said slowly. “And, even then, argument is possible.” “So,” I pronounced, gimlet-eyed, with all the grim cynicism I could muster at fifteen, “music theory is people talking about music instead of making it.”

I began composing during classes. (I still dream that I haven’t graduated high school for lack of attendance.) How peculiar I must have seemed, corralling friends after school and asking them to show me how their instruments worked, telling my best-intentioned math teacher (a fascinating man, really, who had taught in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil) Max Hilmer, that “a composer doesn’t need to be able to do trigonometry” when he wondered how someone who could teach himself FORTRAN and COBOL over the weekend in order to ace a computer science exam could exhibit no interest in (or talent for) higher mathematics.

View fullsize

My good friend (Kay's successor) Phil Olsen sent me this scan of a 1979 arrangement of Carole King's 1971 song "You've Got a Friend" that I did for Kay and the chorus. I had just turned 16. I think I based it on a tremendous arrangement that Kay had a recording of -- was it the Air Force Men's Chorus? Anyway, there are a couple of things about having the music that make me smile now. One is my scrawled admonition at the bottom of the page (I was the pianist) "Watch Hartz!" (see, I WAS watching!) and another is my notation "Piano does anything to D-flat over E-flat" four bars before the end.

I’d become so immersed in composing that even the superb musical standard set by my high school chorus teacher Kay Hartzell seemed too low: I was an obnoxious sixteen-year-old, tending bar at night (I was underage, yes), composing during my classes, still fiercely attached to Wally, watching Kay for the slightest musical infraction. I pushed Kay hard to let me write for the chorus, and was furious when she seemed unmoved by the penciled scores that I tossed at her like a young Berlioz before the academy.

When Judy found out that I was having no success in interesting Kay in trying out my music, she wrote a letter to my high school guidance counselor. It read, in part, “I feel that Daron is receiving negative input, as far as his talents go, at school which is a shame. … It is to the advantage of most musicians to read through different styles of music, in addition to material being prepared for performance, and what could be better than the music of one of their peers?” A few months later, Kay relented, and graciously permitted me to conduct in concert the chorus in one of my early compositions.

The instruction I had been receiving from Judy, coupled with the obsessiveness with which I was composing—typically five or six hours a day—vaulted my composing skills way beyond my keyboard skills. To mend that, I began piano lessons with Duane Dishaw, a sweet-natured young man at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Father ferried me to them, forty minutes in each direction. During my lesson, Father waited for me in a tavern and drank. Duane, like my piano teachers, was impressed by how comfortable I was at the keyboard. What he didn’t know was that this was because, the previous winter, Mother had caused Father to agree that, if I were seated at the little spinet in the front room, I could not be disturbed. I began not just composing and practicing at the piano, but eating and doing my homework there.

Because of my love of voices, words, and drama I was drawn to opera. Then, as now, I sang my vocal music, accompanying myself at the piano. Then, I did it because I sensed that the singer and the song must be one. Now, I do it because I know that melody (and by extension all music, arising as it does from the act of singing) must be created acknowledging the physical effort required to produce it. How a singer feels physically when performing a phrase is a crucial manifestation of how he feels. I considered and failed to adapt Cheever’s short story O City of Broken Dreams as a one-act opera, then began sketching a dramatization of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. I abandoned that in favor of Through the Glass, into which I poured everything I was absorbing by listening obsessively to Kevin’s LP’s of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, and Peter Grimes, Giacamo Puccini’s Turandot, and Kurt Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny.

I was also composing for orchestra, but I’d never played in one. It was time to change that. Harry Sturm, assistant principal cellist of the Chicago Symphony under Fritz Reiner, was hired by the City of Milwaukee to run something called the Park Promenade Youth Orchestra. I played piano in it that year. He must have liked the rake of my sails, for he took me under his bow, devised for me an introduction to the ways of the orchestra. First, I was to play piano in the ensemble for a concert. Second, I was to station myself in various parts of the ensemble and listen to how they interacted as he conducted rehearsals for another concert. Third, I was to take lessons in the rudiments of conducting from his assistant, Michael Kamenski. Fourth, I was to compose, rehearse, and conduct the premiere of a new composition. The result was Suite for a Lonely City—the piece that Mother sent to Leonard Bernstein that inspired a letter from him that changed my life. In his review of the concert, Jay Joslyn, the Milwaukee Journal critic then, wrote that I must have felt like Moses atop Mount Pisgah, looking down from the podium into an orchestral Promised Land as I led my fellow teenagers in the premiere. I really did.

A few months after graduating from high school, I proudly accepted my first professional fee as an orchestrator from John-David Anello, the founding conductor of the Milwaukee Pops and the Florentine Opera Company. Anello was one of Father’s clients. I recall vividly his conspicuously large, majestically chiseled head. He had deeply-set eye sockets, thrusting cheek bones, a noble nose, and a very high, broad forehead atop which flowed backwards a leonine mane of hair. His hands were enormous—bony, gnarled joints bulged like rings from his very long fingers. He was so ugly that he was beautiful. Father took me to his gracious home on Milwaukee’s lakefront one evening after one of our rare joint-appearances at a Mensa meeting. He was a true basso profundo, whose velvety voice rolled out like thunder. Really, he was quite grand. He led Father and me into his study and then turned and asked Father to wait in the next room, which I liked. “My boy, I conduct the Milwaukee Symphony in some outdoor concerts each summer for the county—something I call ‘Music Under the Stars’—and I need somebody to arrange a Burt Bacharach tune for one of them. Your dad says that you can do it.” His heavily-lidded eyes met mine: “Can you?” I was thrilled. I still have the municipal pay stub. The same summer Anello also gave me my first professional conducting lessons, and my firstmusic-copying gig—extracting the solo piano part for the Yellow River Concerto. Several decades later, his daughter contacted me, explained that she now conducted the orchestra at my old high school, and commissioned a piece!

CODA

In 1997, the Chicago Opera Theater revived my opera Shining Brow at the 1400 seat Merle Reskin Theater. The Reskin had risen, by way of the Blackstone, from the ashes of the Iroquois Theater, in which 571 lives were lost in a tragic fire in 1903. It was a perfect venue for director Ken Cazan’s revival.

As the opera’s composer, it was indisputably my Green Room, I thought, happy, secure, with my librettist Paul Muldoon at my side. I wore my first tuxedo, picked up from the tailor at Brooks Brothers only hours earlier, and purchased with some of the cash left over from my retirement annuity. I was about to excuse myself in order to attend an alumni event organized by Curtis across the street at the Hilton when my father and Tomchek entered.

My father had driven Wally, the charismatic chorus teacher who first introduced me to music as a religion when I was fifteen years old in 1976, and who I had not seen in two decades, from Milwaukee to Chicago to attend a performance.

“You look like a young Napoleon in that tuxedo,” observed Wally as he hugged me. His snowy white hair and beard, closely cropped, smelled of lavender soap. He wore a baggy blue sweater with coffee cups of various colors embroidered on it. I laughed, asked, “Did Napoleon wear tuxedos?” “It does look good,” admitted Father. “Where did you rent it?”

“Dad,” I said, placing my fingertips to my temples. Wally motioned for me to sit down. I declined, motioning for him to sit down in my place. “Your father Earl dragged me down here,” said Wally, half-serious. “He told me I couldn’t miss a revival of Shining Brow.”

“You know,” I told him, tearing up, “I think of you, Wally, every time the curtain goes up on one of my shows. I think of how you told me that my responsibility was to ‘make beauty, despite all.’ I’ve tried. I’m trying. Thank you for everything that you taught me.” He removed his round, wire-rimmed glasses in order to wipe tears from them. “Well,” he looked away, “you have no idea how proud your Father is of you. You have no idea.”

Wally died a few months later.

Adam, Wally, Kay, Harry Shoplas, Harry Sturm, Judy, Michael, Duane, Maestro Anello, all firmly and with great compassion, laid the foundations for my life as a musician. Looking back now at the age of fifty-four at what they gave me, it takes my breath away: every one of them taught me to create beauty, despite all. 

Remembering Gian Carlo Menotti on His 105th Birthday

This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post, which published it on 7 July 2016. You can read it there by clicking here.

The Curtis Institute of Music, where Gian Carlo Menotti met Samuel Barber, ultimately joined the faculty, and where Daron Hagen went to school.

Today would have been American composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s 105th birthday. His operas were awarded not one, but two Pulitzer Prizes—the first for The Consuland the second for The Saint of Bleecker Street—in the 50s, when the award meant very different things than it does today. An Italian by birth who, despite retaining his Italian citizenship, proudly referred to himself as an American composer, he wrote for NBC the infectious Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, along with two-dozen other operas.

The attitude most “serious” musicians have towards Menotti’s music is neatly summed up by an exchange I spotted on a colleague’s Facebook wall this morning: “You’ve never seen my eyes roll more than when I had to, under contract, conduct that miserable Amahl,” wrote one person. The next comment in the thread offered a very, very dry response: “Well, Amahl is, for better or worse, in the repertoire, and you were paid, weren’t you?”

The Medium was the first opera I saw live. Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera sent its young artists out in a touring production to junior high schools. It was evident to me even at the age of fifteen that the money had been drummed up to bring them by my fearsome chorus teacher and guru, Wally Tomchek. The performance, on the school stage before the entire student body, was riveting. To this day I remember the haunting refrain, and the music to which it is pinned: “Toby, Toby, are you there?” A composer who can manage that feat deserves complete respect.

In fall 1981, fresh from Wisconsin, I began the happiest six months of my youth. My elation, following acceptance to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music to study composition with Ned Rorem, was generated by the wild knowledge that my childhood dreams were in fact coming true, that the sky was the limit. I possessed the nascent understanding that, with unstinting hard work and commitment, anything was possible. It was incredible; an Icarus-like high that, being my father’s son, carried with it a specific sort of dread that the bottom was going to fall out, and that everything would turn to bad—which it did, twelve months later, when I cradled my mother’s head in my arms as she succumbed to cancer.

That winter, Curtis invited Gian Carlo Menotti to come for a few weeks. During his time in Philadelphia, he coached performances of his music, attended a concert of his orchestral works (including the hauntingly beautiful ballet score Sebastian), and gave my best friend Norman Stumpf, me, and Robert Convery composition lessons. Norman and I took Gian Carlo to lunch at the once magnificent, still dustily opulent Barclay Hotel, then home to Philadelphia Orchestra music director Eugene Ormandy and his wife. The almond-mauve, curtained dining room was appointed like an interior from Visconti’s film of Death in Venice crossed with the funeral parlor in Tony Richardson’s film of The Loved One. “So what would you like to know?” Gian Carlo Menotti asked, taking a seat and wiping his lips delicately with a napkin.

“Opera,” Norman said, “we’ve got to talk about opera.” “Right,” I agreed. “Why don’t we talk about la parola scenica?” I asked. “Ah,” Gian Carlo smoothed the tablecloth with his long fingers as though creating a space, “you are referring to Verdi’s phrase—well, let me tell you….” He began with Verdi, pinpointing the key phrase of music in his favorite scenes; then he moved on to Richard Strauss. His description of collaboration was trenchant: “A stage director looks at a scene one way,” he began. “The composer looks at the scene in another way. The librettist sees it a third way. The composer must craft a scene so clear in intent that all three are compelled to agree.” 

Dessert demolished, coffee drunk, Gian Carlo called for fruit. Eyes twinkling, he said, “Boys, I know that you invited me to lunch. But this is my hotel, and I have already told them to charge it to my room.” He raised his hand peremptorily. “Don’t spend your money on an old man; spend it on something fun.”

After making us promise to remain in touch, he rose gracefully from his chair and glided out of the dining room. Deprived of his gravity and glamour, we felt like men in a lingerie shop, surrounded by elderly Ladies Who Lunch poking at their salads and stout executives tucking into their steaks. I slipped a pear into my jacket pocket on our way out. Walking down Locust Street, Norman and I were pleased to have unanticipated mad money in our pockets.

Literally skipping down the sidewalk, I began, “I feel…” and Norman continued, “…As though the world…” patting first his tummy and then his wallet. “…Is our Oistrakh,” I completed.

Five years later, in lieu of enrolling in Arnold Arnstein’s hand music copying course at Juilliard (on to which I had moved after graduating from Curtis), I agreed to join his team of union copyists in preparing the performance parts for Gian Carlo’s Goya —his final, giovane scuola-style opera and, in the event, a star vehicle for the great tenor Placido Domingo. It was a harried, hair-raising project: music sometimes arrived from Gian Carlo on the day that a scene was scheduled for rehearsal. In November I travelled to Washington to attend the world premiere.

Scarcely a soul argues that most of Menotti’s later musical work (his libretto for Samuel Barber’s Vanessa is the equal of Onegin’s, in my opinion) was substandard, but New York Times music critic Donal Henahan’s astonishing cruelty in describing Goya as “a rather stupefying exercise in banality ... a parody of a Menotti opera” was, even then, so brutal that it shocked people. At the time, I found the review (slipping the word “rather” in like a shiv before the word “stupefying,” as though Menotti had failed even at being entirely stupefying) insolent. But I was still too young to understand how profoundly disrespectful Henahan was being, and how wounded to the core—after two-dozen operas and a lifetime of service to his art—Gian Carlo really was.

The pain in his voice on the telephone when I reached him at his hotel the morning it ran in the newspaper was heartbreaking. “He’s just a critic. You’re Gian Carlo Menotti,” I sputtered uselessly, unable to believe that somebody who had accomplished so much could be so hurt by someone whose opinion mattered so little in the end. I realized during the next three or four beats of silence on the line that I had overstepped. What did I know about life at his age, his level of achievement? What did I know about his art, his soul, really? Nothing. I was twenty-five and had accomplished little; he was seventy-five, had founded two music festivals, written two-dozen operas, and won two Pulitzer prizes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that what I say doesn’t matter.” “Ah, caro, someday you’ll understand,” Gian Carlo sighed.

Thirty-five years later, I do.

"Pairings" Concert: Lyons-Hagen Duo

Watch the entire recital by clicking on the image above.

Downtown Music at Grace and the Phoenix Concerts Present

PAIRINGS

Gilda Lyons, voice |  Daron Hagen, piano

27 May 2015  |  Grace Church, White Planes, NY

I.
"The Waking Father" Daron Hagen, Paul Muldoon @ 0:29
"Ballad of the Bombadier" Marc Blitzstein @ 2:38
"Losing My Mind" Stephen Sondheim @ 6:46

II.
"XII" David Macbride. Akiko Yosano @ 12:07
'La Flor de la Canela'" Chabuca Granda @ 16:28

III.
"The Marriage" Ken Steen, Denise Levertov @ 21:36
"Hold On" Gilda Lyons, Pueblo Indian @ 23:43
"Holy Thursday" Daron Hagen, Paul Muldoon @ 27:25
"No Me Quitte Pas" Jacques Brel @ 30:27

IV.
"Seven Times" Gilda Lyons, Anne Sexton @ 35:38
"Moll’s Song" Marc Blitzstein @ 37:42
"Nickel Under the Foot" Marc Blitzstein @ 39:28
"Pirate Jenny " Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, trans. M. Blitzstein @ 41:52

"Flights" Concert: Lyons-Hagen Duo

Watch the entire recital by clicking on the image above.

Downtown Music at Grace and the Phoenix Concerts Present

FLIGHTS

Gilda Lyons, voice|  Daron Hagen, piano

18 May 2016 |  Grace Church, White Planes, NY

I.

Bring a Torch / Charpentier | Navidad Negra / arr. Hagen @ 2:07

II.

In the Orchard with Dad / Glen Roven @ 5:48 | The Apple Orchard / Lori Laitman @ 7:05 | Fukushima Prayer / Paula Kimper @ 10:53

III.

List Poem @ 14:42 | Dragon / Gilda Lyons @15:48 | Bein' Green / Joe Raposo, arr. Hagen @ 19:24 | Maybe This Time / John Kander, arr. Hagen @ 23:10

IV.

Spring Will Come Again/Psalm 23 / Leonard Bernstein @ 27:20 | Quiet Quiet Heart / Daron Hagen @ 30:30 | Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament / Traditional @ 33:18 | Danny Boy  / Traditional, arr. Hagen @ 37:18 | Whiskey in the Jar / Traditional, arr. Hagen @ 41:22

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

This essay first appeared in the Huffington Post on 2 May 2012. Click here to read it there.

My mother, Gwen Hagen, in the 1940s.

“Where,” asked the elegantly dressed matron of about 80 yesterday in Virginia, “do you get your ideas?” At my side, soprano Caroline Worra and pianist Tracy Cowden, the artists whose performance had just brought my brand new song cycle so vividly to life, smiled. Post-concert reception in full swing, together we enjoyed the pleasant canapé, cabernet, and camaraderie. I squeezed the stem of my wine glass a little more tightly and thought of a small terracotta sculpture of me that my mother created during the summer of my ninth year.

Forty years after it was created, atop the bookshelf of the Manhattan bedroom that my sons share, the sculpture sits. There’s a mischievous smile on the boy’s face. He has a secret — a merry one — and he looks as though there is nothing he’d like more than to share it.

I remembered Mother, smoking Pall Malls, and fashioning the gritty clay on the back porch of our rural Wisconsin home. I recalled seeing my form slowly take shape beneath her expressive hands. I remembered the shrill metallic burr of the dog-day cicadas mingling with the purling of Paganini Violin Concertos — to which we listened, Mother having been a violinist well into her teens — one after another, as she worked on the statue for the entirety of that idyllic summer.

When my buddies swung by and asked me to evacuate the back porch for the woods so that we could play Last of the Mohicans, or Star Trek, or Rat Patrol in the woods, Mother said, “Listen, go ahead if you like. But if you want it to look like you, you have to stick with it; don’t be surprised if it starts looking a lot like your brother Britt.”

At one point, while modeling the feet, she simply sliced them off with a bit of cutting wire and dumped them into the clay pail. I fished them out, saying, “They look fine to me.” “Yes, they’re okay,” she replied, “but they’re not your feet.” “But nobody will know that except us,” I protested. “But we’ll know,” she sighed. “Where’s the satisfaction in not getting it exactly right?”

She draped a wet cloth over the statue, and for the next few days executed sketch after sketch of first her own feet, and then mine: “I’ve got to freshen up my skills so that I can understand what a foot really looks like,” she explained. Resuming her sculpting, she was happier with the results: “Let’s roll up your pants a bit, like Tom Sawyer,” she said. “Now that I’ve captured your feet, I want people to see them.”

As far as I was concerned, we were done. There was more: “Inspiration is the secret,” she whispered. “Otherwise, this will just be a statue of a little smiling boy. What do you want your secret to be?” I was a serious child. “How can a statue have a secret?” I asked. She didn’t answer. “I could be hiding something behind my back,” I ventured. “Good,” she laughed. “Don’t peek; I’ll put something in your hands behind your back when we’re done working on the front.” 

In due course, the piece was finished and fired; when we picked it up at the kiln, I learned the boy’s secret: he was clasping an enormous toad. I also learned that all good works of art require six ingredients: hard work, love, dedication, discipline, craft, and a revealed secret. 

I smiled at the woman, relaxed my grip on the stem of my wine glass, and began to try to answer the question I had been asked. I began by asking myself where my mother had gotten her ideas. Where? Well, she shaped my image because she needed a subject, she loved me, and because I was available. And, to this day, that’s where I get my ideas, too.

The statue by Gwen Hagen described in this essay.