Too Much Footage

Joseph Cotten in “Too Much Johnson” (1938).

Filmed in 1938, Orson Welles’ unfinished (and unscreened) silent film Too Much Johnson was shot to serve as the film component of a staged production of William Gillette’s 1894 comedy. It was meant to be shown between acts of the play, and not to stand up as a narrative on its own. The ceiling of the Stony Creek Theatre, in Connecticut—where my own film Orson Rehearsed was screened in August 2021 and where Welles was staging a rare “out of town tryout” before moving the production to Broadway—was apparently too low to allow for its projection, and so Welles’ production debuted without film.

Evidently, there was also the matter of an attorney’s letter that Welles received from Paramount informing him that they owned the film rights. Ironically, both of Paramount’s film versions of the play are now lost. The footage for Welles’ film, shot only three years before Citizen Kane, his explosive cinematic debut, was also believed lost, but in 2008 a work print was found in a warehouse in Italy.

Members of the Wintergreen Festival Orchestra affectionately dubbed the “Tramp Orchestra.”

The original score for the film was by Paul Bowles, who published fragments of it as the suite Music for a Farce. My score builds on the array of themes and gestures that I have built up over a five year period composing scores commissioned by, and premiered by members of the Wintergreen Music Festival Orchestra (which adopted for these ongoing projects the name “The Tramp Orchestra” over the years) under the direction of Erin Freeman, artistic director of the Wintergreen Music Festival, where it has become a tradition to have a silent movie evening in a tent high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Previous scores that I have provided include The Tramp, City Lights, A Dog’s Life, and a score to the Barrymore classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Out of that process also grew the score to my “operafilm,” Orson Rehearsed, which is available on DVD and CD.

I determined not to watch the public domain footage available for download on the internet before scoring it. The result was that my sense of it grew as I scored it, from left to right. For Too Much Johnson, I crafted simultaneously the film score and a free-standing concert music work called Moviola that celebrated the traditions, concerns, techniques, aesthetic, and ebullient joy of scoring to picture. Really, it is for me something of a composer’s holiday, and I relish it. (The score to The Tramp, of course, also serves as a piano concerto, but that’s another matter, as is The Passion of Jekyll and Hyde — with which I am still tinkering—which serves as the instrumental spine of a combination live opera performance and screening.)

“Listen for a mashup at one point of “The Star Spangled Banner,” Ethel Smythe’s “March of the Women,” “Frére Jacques,” as used in the Mahler Symphony No. 1, “Three Blind Mice,” and Nino Rota’s “Godfather Waltz.”

Marc Blitzstein, author of The Cradle Will Rock, in an uncredited role in “Too Much Johnson.” (Wikipedia Public Domain image)

I flew through the Welles third, started feeling the “padding” of unnecessary extra “beats” in the second, and, upon reaching the “Cuba” footage, realized that I was going to have to take a heavier hand. I decided not to provide intertitles, as they exert a powerful influence on narrative design and structure; I had music for that. Unless one knows the play, the film will make only the sort of surreal sense that many early silents do—it’s a chase, you know? And there’s a bad guy, and a Harold Lloyd-like (very) young Joseph Cotten, Welles’ wife, his friend and producer John Houseman obviously having a ball, and an uncredited bit part for Marc Blitzstein as a Stevedore.

I have followed the lead of previous film editors who’ve taken a hand to cutting it with the important difference that I cut it to work best with music. Only the first third had been closely edited by Welles. Acutely sensitive to the death by a thousand cuts inflicted on Welles for the rest of his career, I left that third alone, of course. There were no intertitles (which Welles had planned), and alternate takes were placed back-to-back for future reference in the second third. I omitted most of the alternate takes and chose the one that I liked best in this part of the film. The final “Cuba” section of the film consisted of long, repetitive, unedited establishing takes; closeups and reaction shots were made for only the last few beats in the pond. I took a scissors as I scored the film to the last twelve minutes, cutting about ten minutes of repetitive coverage, and emulating the Chaplin and Keaton leavened with Soviet montage editing voice that Welles himself used in the first section.

p/c: Michelle Merrill

The film as I have cut it runs 48 minutes; the concert work runs 24—exactly half as long. The music? I would describe it as a nostalgic love song to the artistic world of the 1930s, disarming, affectionate, and gleefully subversive in the technical virtuosity with which it manipulates themes, allusions, history, and style. I know that my dear friend Lukas Foss would have been delighted by the fact that the more one understands how music functions, the more fun the score is to listen to. I really, really enjoy provoking snobs who feel entitled to call out what they subjectively deem cliché; those who conflate “classism” and “taste;” and those who contrive through those conflations to twist music to chauvinistic, or exclusionary effect.

Maestra Freeman and the Tramp Orchestra will premiere Moviola, my score to the public domain silent film Too Much Johnson, to film on 22 July as part of the Wintergreen Music Festival. Popcorn, mountain air, dusk falling as the orchestra tunes up, dogs running in the fields, young children wandering about, and a top-notch chamber orchestra of terrific players playing challenging (but satisfying to play) music joyfully composed to a fascinating and funny silent by one of the greatest filmmakers of all time made in the months before international fame came to surround him: that’s my idea of fun.

More about Too Much Johnson here.

Duet with the Future

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

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

There are lots of different kinds of writing. Most don’t require any bravery—criticism least of all. Publishing a memoir is scary; it is one of the kinds of writing that requires courage. I found mine. My book wasn’t confessional—there were no surprises in it for people who knew me—but it was intended to be a work of art that would, in Cesar A. Cruz’s words, “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” I spent the first three months of 2019 finalizing the manuscript, and then correcting proofs, making an index, gathering permissions, choosing photos, and so forth. Sending off the final galleys to the publisher, I thought of the story of the annoyed senior composer who, having just played a recording of her work for an impertinent student in a masterclass, responded to his glib vitriol with a mild, “Next time, you write it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stands a Boxer

This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 6 August 2015. Click here to read it there.

Daron Hagen and Laura Jackson discussing the "Sky Interludes from Amelia" at the Wintergreen Festival in August 2015. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

Daron Hagen and Laura Jackson discussing the "Sky Interludes from Amelia" at the Wintergreen Festival in August 2015. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

As conductor Laura Jackson conducted the Wintergreen Music Festival Orchestra the other night in the “Three Sky Interludes” from Amelia, my 2010 opera for the Seattle Opera, there were several times when she cued the players with what shall have been for a boxer a lethal uppercut. Wiry, and as precise in her movements as a boxer, she was as accurate as a surgeon; the musicians under her baton responded with enthusiasm to her beat’s clear precision. Wielding the baton sometimes like a rapier before the massive sound that I had called for, and sometimes like a matador’s cape, she coordinated and shaped the combined efforts of an all-star orchestra comprised of professionals from orchestras all over the country. She did it on 36 hours’ notice, at fellow conductor and festival artistic director Erin Freeman’s invitation, filling in for a conductor unable to appear.

When the players then went into the ring with the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, I felt as though my heart would break. The terror of those opening bars, the music sounding so like fists crashing on a closed door, visceral in the extreme; my seven year old son, attentive, tucked under my arm, had never heard the piece before. His eyes shon as he whispered to me, “Papa, did you write that?” Beethoven wrote it, I told him. He’d been brought back to life by the men and women we had gotten to know and make music with during the past two weeks at the music festival. “Why?” asked my son. He wants to talk to us, I replied. He wants us to share his feelings, the things that were best about him. Listen, I told him, and, if you’re ready to hear what Beethoven has to say, you’ll hear him. 

I blame the whole “Artist as Hero” trope on the writers like Romaine Rolland who fashioned Beethoven into the Pugilist shaking his fist at Destiny many imagine him today as having been. Poor composer Anton Rubinstein, who had the bad luck to follow Beethoven by only half a generation, and who is said to have physically resembled him. Comparisons were inevitable. Every composer since has been saddled with comparison to the Great Fighter.

At this point in my life as an American composer of concert music and opera, I feel as though I’ve gone more rounds than I can or want to remember. An entirely new generation of sparring partners surrounds me — new arts administrators who were in grade school when I had my first bout with the Philadelphia Orchestra; punch-drunk mid-career composer and performer colleagues whose fists are still moving as they take blow after blow from a culture that seems no longer to value what they do; young composers to whom history is irrelevant and the idea of being a gladiator for one’s art narcissistic or naïve. 

Walk away, I tell myself, when another board knocks down or guts an opera company or orchestra because a new business model (usually something better suited to commercial art or manufacturing, and always about goosing the box office and paying artists less) is needed. And then I hear Beethoven lay it down with any number of his pieces and, shamed, I get back in the ring. Knocked down by the simple facts of life of the contemporary music world, I’ll read about a foundation that has decided to pour millions into reviving opera as an art form, and I’m not so much given hope as given a kick in the behind. I get up. I think about the people who buy tickets to concerts, or help support their local performing organizations. Acknowledging the hubris and futility of assuming even the stance, I begin another piece.

I’m too old now, I’ve got too much invested, have gone too many rounds, to walk away. Of course there is tenderness, and there is solace, and communion, in art; but the ones who make it are assumed too often, it seems to me, to be “playing,” to not be serious, to not understand business, to be overgrown children in need of handling. If only we’d gotten real jobs. 

It is regrettable that so many smart critics and composers elected at some point to adopt the defensive, (even passive) artistic stance that meandering note spinning is aesthetically superior to writing soulful melodic lines. Maybe the whole extended metaphor occurred to me just now because to my left at the concert sat the dozen young composers who had come to study with me this summer. I observed them as my piece unfolded; I watched them thrill to Beethoven’s stirring soul, summoned up for us by the conductor and orchestra. I thought about how I must seem to them (I don’t teach; I’m a full-time composer — a concept completely alien to them) when I talk about the struggle during the 80s between composer practitioners of Modernism, Minimalism, Romanticism, and Post-Modernism. “Do you fight about the future of music?” I asked them, realizing that they, by and large, actually don’t. 

The fight, in any event, should never have been about style. What were we doing back then, fighting with each other as the audience listened in, bewildered? And it should go without saying that the fight should never have been taken to the audience. The fight was and remains a struggle simply to survive, to make art while raising kids, paying mortgages, caring for elders.

This summer’s dozen young composers have not yet entered the ring. They’re free. To them, all art is equal. I spent my time with them trying to give them the skills they’ll need to stay that way. Keep swinging, I tell them. As it turns out, my pep talk is premature. They haven’t yet begun to take a beating. I’m afraid they’ll have to learn for themselves that making Art is not about fighting to live an Examined Life; it’s about fighting to survive. Making art is not a competition between artists, but our culture loves to celebrate winners, and where there are winners there are the others. Being told you’re a loser by your culture is a blow, whether it is true or not. Surviving as an artist shouldn’t be an exercise in taking it on the chin, but it is.

Stands a boxer.