Program Note:

A battered cigar box filled with dog-eared black and white postcards in a seldom-visited attic inspired this humble, intimate suite of haiku-like orchestral movements. The place names and dates provided as movement titles either matter or they do not, depending on the listener’s point of view. For those of us who reflexively flip postcards over in search of the fragmentary, often cryptic messages—so personal, yet so available to everyone—on the other side, I offer the following intentionally evanescent notes.

Yaddo (rhymes with “shadow”) is a densely wooded estate situated next to the Saratoga Race Track in Upstate New York built in 1926 by Spencer and Katrina Trask that, upon their demise, was converted into an artist’s retreat. I love the place dearly. The University of Wisconsin dominates the southern shore of Lake Mendota, on whose opposing shore sits what is left of the Wisconsin Hospital for the Insane. As an undergraduate I often sailed it. Yard for yard, Saint Mark’s Place, in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, may have served as the home of more American cultural luminaries than any other place on the planet. In any event,  I too lived there during the late 80s. Mount San Angelo, in Sweet Briar, Virginia, is home to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where, for many years, artists of every sort (including me) have found refuge, time and space to work, and support. The Dakota is a breathtakingly lovely German Renaissance apartment building in New York City where one of my mentors, Leonard Bernstein, passed away in October 1990.

Selected Reviews:

This intimate music does not illustrate place; it conveys moods and memories about place. Aside from the expressionistic angst of the final movement, Hagen seems to have spent his time in paradise. The first four settings are warmly nostalgic, a flow of chords that glow like coals on the hearth in the wintry works and in summer rise to climaxes as soft as a scattering puff on a globe of dandelion seeds. The idiom here is cozy, somehwere between Barber, Copland and Vaughn Williams. Hagen distinguishes each locale, mainly through emphasis on various orchestral choirs, but they blend quickly into a pleasant reverie.

— Tom Strini, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 10/16/96

Both the orchestra's performance and Hagen's composition were rewarded with enthusiastic applause and bravos by the audience.

— Craig Hurst, The Waukesha Freeman, 10/16/96

An unsettling foreboding sense of melancholy underlies these exquisite orchestral miniatures that effectively counterbalances their overt musical sweetness. There is nostalgia, but not sentimentality; altogether, they leave one longing for more.

— David Hackman, The Staten Island Review, 10/20/98