Program Note:   

The Suite for Cello was composed between May and November of 1985 and is dedicated to Robert LaRue, who premiered it on 11 March 1986 at Lincoln Center's Paul Recital Hall. If the violin suite impresses the listener as a lyrically charged composition buttressed by composition buttressed by strong motivic ideas, then the cello suite forms the next step in an intense reductive process. Each of the five movements shares material from the first measure of the first movement, and the overall effect can be concentration to the point of brutality. Hagen was studying the process of 'cellular development' in the music of Stravinsky and Varese at the time, so his use of a painting by their great contemporary Picasso as a takeoff point for one of the movements is supremely appropriate. If the suite aims to prove the dictum that time in music is equivalent to space in visual art, it also shows how the various levels of a composer's life creatively interlock. The central scherzo is an act of homage to a great composer, the second and fourth are portraits of Hagen and Paetsch and LaRue together, while the outer movements are strictly Hagen's internal thoughts: the public, collegial, and private worlds seamlessly coalesce.

—Russell Platt, 1999