You Sing Beautifully

“YOUTH, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace,
         force, fascination?

Day full-blown and splendid—day of the immense sun, action,
         ambition, laughter,
The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep and
         restoring darkness.”

— Walt Whitman

Long have I unpacked Walt Whitman’s lines, which I first read when assigned Leaves of Grass by a beloved English teacher but which I — all of sixteen and enmeshed in the white-hot burn of the first four words of the poem — sped by without taking note. A year later, reading through Ned Rorem’s “art song” setting with a friend as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, I’d grown slightly more mindful, and at least made note of the next six lines.

Two years later, during a lesson at his apartment in New York, Ned presented me with a sheet of yellow foolscap on which he had typed (with his trusty Royal portable) the same poem, decreeing that I should “have a go at it.” I had miraculously left Wisconsin behind and settled in Philadelphia where, setting the poem to music myself, I realized that, in life, at least, I had of course skipped lines two and three and was living — at full bore — lines four and five. As the decades passed, the poem stuck with me. My appreciation of lines two and three grew. At the age of sixty, I revisited the poem, and created, with Gilda Lyons, a new setting of it called Restoring Darkness for solo voice, which filmmaker H. Paul Moon and Gilda captured in an extraordinary single shot soon after its completion. The final two lines, of course, were now my focus, and the key to my understanding of this sturdy, wise piece of writing.

As an American composer born in 1961 I am a Latchkey child—a member of the first year of what is typically referred to as Generation X—sandwiched between the Millennials and the Boomers, my relationship to what constitutes “beautiful singing” has matured along lines parallel to my maturation as a person.

As a sixteen-year-old composer manque, I was enmeshed in the white-hot burn of the first four words of the poem. Singing was just that. I was taught to sing “correctly” and “well” in the Lutheran and Anglican choral traditions by superb chorus teachers, but I also grooved to (and appreciated the artistry of) “off the voice” folk singers, Bob Dylan, and the first generation of amplified rock musicians whose vocal training was often nil. By the time I landed in Madison, I was earning beer money plowing through the Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias with voice majors, having for years appreciated the exhilarating vocalisms of Cathy Berberian, the magnificently balanced tone of Barbara Streisand, the splendid phrasing of Frank Sinatra, the emotionally undeniable wisdom of Maria Callas, and the nuanced, Fellini-esque meta-authenticity of Peter Pears.

Two years later, studying with Ned, I learned (but was not taught) why Samuel Barber’s vocal writing was considered more “elegant” than Gian Carlo Menotti’s, and, with gently relentless reminders, encouraged to find Menotti’s vocal writing somehow “theatrical” in nature and therefore less refined. I had already accompanied many of Ned’s early, Billie-Holiday-meets-Francis-Poulenc songs (which I adored) and had begun to process why, when prominent “vocal coaches” were invited to coach Rorem or Barber, they usually chose Barber. But I was in the full flower of lines four and five, composing my first big opera, Shining Brow, and, from today’s standpoint, the vocal writing that I consciously emulated combined Benjamin Britten’s muscular modernism and Stephen Sondheim’s theatrical practicality.

Age came to me “with equal grace” when I rejected the hierarchization that vocal partisans place on “singing styles.” I remember the moment. It was in Texas sometime during the 90s. I had been engaged to present a masterclass at a college that was producing one of my operas, and was coaching a young singer on a performance of Ned’s “Early in the Morning,” which I had been coached on by Ned a few times over the years with various singers. The delightful vocalist was crooning away at a moderately slow clip (I approved—after all, the Holiday factor, on which Ned doubled down when he sang his own music at the piano), finished, and it was time for me to speak up. I recalled that Ned — every single time I played it for him — always had two things to say: “play it faster, and don’t ‘sell’ it.” So, I told the singer the same thing, making it clear that the comment came from Ned, not me. The singer sang it again, faster, and without the Holiday vibe. It sounded more like the way Ned would have liked it; but it didn’t sound the way that singers like to sing it, and audiences, by and large, prefer to hear it. Behind me, in the back of the room, the singer’s teacher (or coach—I don’t recall which) nodded vigorously “no-no-no.”

Ever since, all “singing styles” have had, to me, “equal, grace, force, fascination.” I mix “singing styles” not only as an efficient way to help mainstream listeners to differentiate characters and to subvert the conception of what constitutes “class,” but to invite audience members with preconceived notions of what constitutes not just “good” and “bad” singing, but “good” and “bad” taste out of their intellectual and aesthetic complacence—to move them to embrace a broader conception of what constitutes “beautiful singing.”

Although the difference between musical theater acting singers and operatic singing actors is not absolute, musical theater acting singers typically lean into characterization and operatic singing actors focus, because their audience requires it, on beauty of sound. A musical theater singer can be a Stanislavskian, or a Method actor, literally feeling the emotions that the character is experiencing, because their audience interprets their “getting choked up” as emotional authenticity. 

To maintain proper alignment of the instrument, most opera singers are taught that they cannot risk allowing a Strasbergian remembrance of experience to get them literally verklempt. Consequently, Classical acting is their usual go-to, as it requires “sticking to the script,” which composers and conductors appreciate. The chamber musician in them cottons to the sort of finding of truth through ensemble building of the Meisner method. Authenticity through collective imagination allows the muscles to remain aligned, and the voice to emerge, physically “unaffected” by the emotion conveyed.

So, what’s the point? I don’t compose for the singers that I can afford, I write for the people singing. Sometimes I get it wrong. But I try to learn from the experience. Once I wrote a role for a Big Star who, in the practice room, sang the role for me as I wrote it for them, but—when they stepped on to the stage—reverted to the way they had sung the role before I had coached them. It was a heartbreaking moment, because I had given them material that would have changed the course of their career, paving the way to the character roles that would have continued to feed them artistically into their sixties, even seventies. But they had mouths to feed, management with which to contend, a public that had decided who they were. Singing is a brutal profession.

Now I am at the “millions of suns” stage of my life as a vocal composer. Long as my stance has been that there is only singing that lands and singing that doesn’t, and that abstract “beauty of sound” is a precious thing, but it is not the Only Thing, I have come to feel a bit like Gusteau in Ratatouille, who feels that “everyone can cook.” No, I am not a gourmand; of course I can tell the difference. But I am drawn to authenticity above all. The rest is exquisite artifice. If I hear you sing, and I tell you that I think you sing beautifully, I mean it.

Time and David Del Tredici (1937-2023)

It was always time with David. He bent it; he warped it; he turned it around back on itself; he lived outside of it; he could practically stop it with music; in life, he ran with it until he ran out of it.

The day in March 2019 that my memoir was published and offered up to the crickets I put all my handwritten diaries—over thirty years’ worth of scribbling—into banker’s boxes and sealed them up. I traded the false specificity of reportage for the even more subjective truth of memory. Now I must pour, as Ned Rorem and his teacher Virgil Thomson used to, through the index of my book to fix events in time. I recall reading the words that I wrote about David to him over the telephone and asking whether he thought they were okay before sending off the manuscript. (He did.)

So, on this March 2024 morning I tried to find my letters to David (and his to me) and discovered that I’d have to move two portable air conditioners, a box fan, and two suitcases to get to the file drawer in the storage closet in which letters from all the D’s in my life ended up so I gave up. They’re in there—all the postcards with Mad Hatters and March Hares stamped on them, words jumping off the page limned in multiple colors (he always had a glass or peanut butter jar filled with different colored pens and pencils on his desk at whatever artist colony or home he was working) with little, crazy asides added in at the last moment. Anyone who received a letter from David knew they could expect an illuminated manuscript of sorts. He took time to write them. They were vibrant, gossipy, funny, and sweet. His communications were always labor-intensive; details mattered: sometimes a sentence would march on in blue ink and end with a single bright red exclamation point.

Since I no longer particularly trust my own memory, I paged through my “Work Log and List of Themes,” a notebook I’ve kept since July 1976 (and which, ominously, is entirely filled up, with no more blank pages to accommodate new work—a nightmare scenario for someone as superstitious and obsessive as me), to determine which artist colonies (and when) David and I had had overlapping residencies over the years (since I always finished something and made note of where I was when I finished it) to fix some dates in advance of a chat with his biographer the other day. So, the chronology of this Mad March through Time is underpinned by the several vignettes that I included in my memoir and the (many more) exactly-dated marginalia (“Sang through this with DDT in the music room,”  or “Bowings revised per DDT,” and the like.) from my “Work Log.”

David and Daron publicizing the New York Philharmonic premiere of Daron’s Common Ground as part of the 1990 Horizons Festival, Lincoln Center, NYC 27 July 1990. p/c: The New York Times

The central pillar of our relationship was our shared love of Yaddo, the storied artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, at which we met during June 1984. I was between studies at Curtis and Juilliard, footloose, fueled by an entirely impractical sense that it was my time. While being shown around the place by painter Nancy Brett, who was serving that summer as a Special Assistant to the President, I was led into the mansion’s Great Hall to the sound of a Mendelssohn “Song Without Words” wafting out of the spacious music room. I had arrived just before dinner and David, as was his custom, was relaxing by running his fingers through the piano repertoire for the pleasure of our, as he announced when Nancy introduced us, “fellow inmates.” That infectious, unforgettable smile! The mischievous grin. A sparkle in his eyes second only to Otto Luening’s. Nancy left us, and David, reaching for a well-worn edition of Haydn symphonies reduced to four hands, asked archly whether I wanted to be on the bottom or the top.

I was, as so many other musicians were, enchanted. I took the left side, hoping that hitting an occasional bass note properly might keep me in the game, and we were off. After a few minutes, I realized that he was gradually speeding up and that his left hand was dropping down between mine and adding bits of my right-hand part that I was leaving out to (let’s face it) survive. It was an exhilarating, joyous display of raw talent. My heart began racing. For a few more minutes I survived on adrenaline until, suddenly, he simply began playing everything up a step. That was it: I was thrown from the horse. He’d exceeded my keyboard skills and, laughing so hard that I teared up, I got up and told him that I had to unpack. “Welcome to Yaddo,” he said, laughing.

Former president of PEN, poet and author Richard McCann, filmmaker Sharon Greytak, painter Michael Flanagan, David and this young composer immediately became constant dinner companions. Over the years, David, Richard, and I remained close friends, and served for decades together on the board of Yaddo. It turned into quite an important summer for me, as I also met poet Gardner McFall, who graciously allowed me to set her poem, “Sonnet After Oscar Wilde,” which I sang immediately upon completion, with David accompanying. Twenty-three years later, Gardner, who was also by then a board member, bravely mined her own life story when she wrote the libretto of our opera Amelia for Seattle Opera.

The Tower Studio at Yaddo, where David Del Tredici often worked. p/c: Daron Hagen

David and I overlapped several times during the 80s at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and MacDowell—always the four hands, me sight-reading through whatever song he was working on and ending up laughing with joy; him sightreading whatever song I was writing and me singing them. “Why do we have to write for singers?” he would ask, “We know they can sing it beautifully; but isn’t it more fun to hear someone who can’t sing perform it?” (I couldn’t help but notice that the thought had come to him after accompanying me.) In 1990, David was serving as composer-in-residence for the New York Philharmonic, and, although he never took credit, likely made possible my music’s debut with the Philharmonic—a piece called Common Ground, which had recently been awarded the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize.

When David went away on sabbatical during the 90s I’d teach for him at City University of New York. Composition lessons, of course; but also counterpoint and orchestration. I was also on the faculty of Bard College at the time (and for a couple of semesters, the Curtis Institute), and he enjoyed, I think, the fact that I, like him, didn’t consider myself an academic. “Teaching gives me physical pain, doesn’t it you?” he once asked as we packed his station wagon—he off to another colony, and me back to the Upper West Side and a semester of filling in for him. He was only partly serious. David could be a superb teacher. And when he went to artist colonies he—like me—always worked like a dog. We’d run into one another raiding the refrigerator either very, very late or very, very early—the only two “inmates” still awake and working and ask one another how it was going. “I can’t tell you or it will turn to shit,” I would say. And he would say, “I know. Hide the erasers.” If there was cheesecake or dessert of any sort to be had, we’d finish it together. Always, the next day, I’d be jogging it off; David would be pumping iron at the local gym.  I sent him five or six of my students when it was their time to move on over the years and don’t regret it.

Time together at the keyboard was something he shared with lots of other musicians, and I am sorry if I give the impression I was the only one who enjoyed the privilege. I loved him for the force of nature that was his talent, the grace with which he carried it, and the super-hard work that he did, year after year, to honor it. He modelled a working composer to me more than Ned or Virgil because he kept revising and improving everything. Like everyone who knew him, I am devasted by the irony that a man who exulted in the lifelong physicalizing of his music at the keyboard became afflicted with Parkinson’s Disease.

During a visit to Sag Harbor in the mid 90s, I recall him playing the entirety of his opera Dum Dee Tweedle and experiencing more keenly than ever how his obsessive use of melodic and harmonic sequences (either telescoping them to run faster through diminution, or more slowly through extension or metric modulation) skewed one’s perception of time. My memory’s a little foggy, but I think that when he finished, I felt as though he had been playing for about forty minutes only to look at my watch to see that 90 had elapsed. Repetition was talismanic for him as a composer, I think; it could summon emotional lightness or darkness. If tonality was redemptive to him, then his compositional apotheosis came through such a profound compression of harmonic and melodic movement that it felt dissonant—Liszt on steroids.

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DDT 80th Birthday Concert, Joe’s Pub, New York, NY March 2017. p/c: Tevi Eber

By the late 90s, we were performing fundraisers together for Yaddo—he would be paired with the extraordinary, luminous John Kelly; I’d pair off with Paul Sperry, or whomever was singing in whatever opera I was working on. I recall an event at Harold Reed’s, for example, where he performed his Acrostic Song (literally all over the keyboard) and I followed by accompanying myself in some simple, tender settings of Paul Muldoon’s poetry. “How can you be so simple?” he asked. “That terrifies me.”

When Muldoon and I underwent the premiere of our opera Bandanna in Austin in April 2000, David wept afterwards, told me that he knew what it had taken to summon so much darkness in the final scene. “Of course, nobody is going to get it,” he said. I was astonished when he said, “Tonight, you are my hero.” Stephen Sondheim is said to have decreed that, on opening night, one should simply note that a work is “brilliant” to the author. “Criticism later,” he is supposed to have said. I agree. I was touched that David stood by his assessment of Bandanna. I recall—listening together to the entirety of my latest opera, A Woman in Morocco at his apartment in Westbeth—David pointing out exact measures that I had forwarded musical arguments begun in Bandanna fifteen years before. “Diminished seventh chords are very dangerous because they can go anywhere,” he observed. “Yeah, either they can go Salome or Salome at the Super 8 Motel,” I replied, which made him giggle.

One of my treasures remains the fragment of manuscript that he gave me after a particularly athletic read-through of a song in 2002-ish that he subsequently dedicated to me called "Now You Know" during which I had broken down, laughing with tears of joy & disbelief. I think that he wrote "pre-Hagen sketch” on it because I told him that he was absolutely nuts to ask a singer to do something. Over dinner: "Do you DARE to accept the dedication of this song?" he asked. It is my ardent hope that he didn't change a thing on my account.

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I began to sense time beginning to run out on us as early as July 2005, when Gardner and I were at Yaddo working on Amelia and David accompanied me in the music room where we first met as I sang our first, trial aria to see how it landed with the other guests. In the aria, a father pictures himself as looking down on his loved ones from the stars after his demise. By the time the aria had been folded into the opera and premiered, my first son had been born. Came along another, and a move from Manhattan to the country. David and I saw one another less frequently. He still went to concerts—what a champ! But I had stopped. They didn’t feed my work the way that they did his. Ours became primarily a relationship of letters and telephone calls.

Still, Gilda Lyons and I would catch up with David every year at Yaddo’s annual meeting. Lord, how David loved Gilda, and how deeply they intuitively understood one another. We performed a version of David’s Acrostic Song together for him on a concert in Gilda’s Phoenix Concerts series in New York (alongside the world premiere of “Emily’s Aria” from Ned’s Our Town) that I had confected and he observed, with mock horror, “Now that you have had your way with my music, shall we continue to speak?” “Was it okay?” I asked. “It was wonderful, but why did you reharmonize me?” “Because I could,” I replied. The twinkle.

At the premiere of David Del Tredici’s “Herrick’s Oratorio” in New York City, 20 May 2023. p/c: Tevi Eber

I am still having trouble coming to terms with the fact that David is not down in the Village, pulling reams of notes out of his piano at Westbeth, or making little forts with walls comprised of different sorts of jelly jars and vitamin bottles at the breakfast table at Yaddo, or jogging in the woods at MacDowell, or lurking by the driers at VCCA in the wee hours looking for leftovers in the fellows’ refrigerator. When Cantori premiered his Herrick Oratorio in May 2023, it was a chance to say goodbye. David, a Catholic, ever the subversive, had woven Martin Luther’s Mighty Fortress into the finale of what was effectively his final public statement. I had driven in from the country for the premiere and was shocked, but not surprised, by the toll that Parkinson’s had extracted. As ever, his talent dazzled, and I told him so. “You’re up to your old tricks, messing with my sense of time,” I said. He had been, but the path we had traveled together, our shared Mad March, was running out. Nothing between us had changed, but everything around us had. He pulled me in close and said that he loved me and that I should take care of myself and Gilda and the boys. The twinkle was still there.

If I had not been walking out of the church with a friend I would have had to have stopped to steady myself, because, for the first time since hearing David play Mendelssohn before meeting him in June 1984, I felt that David’s time had run out. I was gutted. It wasn’t until an hour later, driving up the Palisades to the country, that I was able to reconnect to the fact that I am blessed to actually have some more time in front of me, with skinned knees and tree forts having given way to basketball and  girlfriends for my sons, and mid-career engaging Gilda. Music remembers absolutely everything, I thought, and it has its own relationship with time. Messiaen knew it; David lived it. To me, a talent like David’s is evidence of the Unseen. And now it is time for me to learn how to let David go. Because there are among us many more forces of nature like him who can use a hand: some of them are very young not just in spirit, but in fact. Help them; lift them up, I thought, the way that the simple fact that talent like David’s existed lifted me. I’ll close with that.

Auteur Independent

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

1. Welcome to Ristorante Passaggio

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Combining Videography and Cinematography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Coordinating Visual Language, Character, and Musical Structure

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

I bookended the narrative with two extended pantomimes underscored with sustained strings. At the beginning, I used the time to introduce the audience first to the mute characters, and then to the other diners. I began with a warm, lingering medium establishing shot of Orfeo behind his bar pouring wine from a beaker that ended with the light grace note of his dazzling smile in order to establish him as the story’s witness. As for Charon, who appeared as a card identifying him by name flashed on the screen, I knew that, for those who remembered their high school mythology, his role as conveyor of the dead would be a clue to what was to come. For the rest, his role would become clear while it did to the characters in the story. Charon was introduced in John Ford cowboy shots warmed up by a two-shot with Lulu, who acted as a sort of metaphysical Miss Kitty to his Marshal Dillon. The supers, or “Anime di Passaggio,” after being introduced individually in dirty closeups, served thereafter as sometimes-engaged observers in the “magical,” somewhat out-of-focus background of medium and wide shots, and staged throughout to provide three-tiered visual compositions. Finally, a subtitle identified the woman singing a song on the radio about a boatman—a setting of Christina Rosetti’s famous poem, “Ferry Me Across the Water”—as Eurydice. Coupled with a card that identified the restaurant as Passaggio, and the bartender’s name being Orfeo, the action’s location in Purgatory, or the bardo, is made clear to those familiar with Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Combining Analogue and Digital Elements in the Soundtrack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Slippage and Feedback

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

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

6. Singing Actors and Acting Singers

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

Although the difference between musical theater acting singers and operatic singing actors is not absolute, typically, musical theater acting singers lean into characterization and operatic singing actors focus, because their audience requires it, on beauty of sound. A musical theater singer can be a Stanislavskian, or a Method actor, literally feeling the emotions that the character is experiencing, because their audience interprets their “getting choked up” as emotional authenticity. 

In order to maintain proper alignment of the instrument, most opera singers are taught that they cannot risk allowing a Strasbergian remembrance of experience to get them literally verklempt. Consequently, Classical acting is their usual go-to, as it requires “sticking to the script,” which composers and conductors appreciate. The chamber musician in them cottons to the sort of finding of truth through ensemble building of the Meisner method. Authenticity through collective imagination allows the muscles to remain aligned, and the voice to emerge, physically “unaffected” by the emotion conveyed.

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

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

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

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

7. Perpetual Soup

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

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

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

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

On Ned Rorem's Our Town

When Thornton Wilder’s 1938 meta-theatrical triptych of portraits of American Life Our Town (which, no matter when it is staged, always takes place in 1938) was produced at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, twenty years had passed since the American Dream had been convulsed by the “War to End all War.” That which burns away any Rockwell-esque nostalgia and powers the drama of the play is the “Damoclesian sword” that was the rise of fascism and the impending outbreak of World War II—only months away. The audience was invited to grieve for the characters from the moment that they met the omniscient, fourth-wall-piercing character of the Stage Manager. It was in the air: Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, (with Blitzstein and Orson Welles on stage essentially splitting the role that Wilder would transform into the Stage Manager for his Our Town) had electrified the American theater during summer 1937. Louise Talma (the only composer besides Hindemith to convince Wilder to pen a libretto, in German, no less—for her earnest, turgid Alcestiad—in the ’50s) told me at Yaddo during the ’90s that “Thornton certainly knew Marc’s opera. The Depression was winding down. We saw Hitler coming to power. People were mourning Good Old Days that never were.”[1]

Arguably, Wilder’s “continual dryness of tone”—as he described it in the introductory note to the 1938 “acting edition” of the play—found its ideal composer in Aaron Copland’s seminal 1940 musical score (dedicated to Leonard Bernstein) for the original film.[2] Copland, according to Vivian Perlis, stated, “For the film version, they were counting on the music to translate the transcendental aspects of the story. I tried for clean and clear sounds and in general used straightforward harmonies and rhythms that would project the serenity and sense of security of the story.” Rudolf Bing, then general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, approached Copland in 1951 with the idea of expanding his score into a full-length operatic version. Wilder, according to Perlis, quashed the idea, responding, “my texts ‘swear at’ music; they’re after totally different effects.”[3] What was required, as Wilder wrote in his introduction to the play was, “the New England understatement of sentiment, of surprise, of tragedy. A shyness about emotion ... a sharpening and distinctness of the voice.”

Fast forward. Wilder said no to many composers during his lifetime, though he did permit Jerry Herman and Michael Stewart to turn The Matchmaker into Hello Dolly and, in 1965, did grant rights to Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green to adapt The Skin of Our Teeth into a musical. Musical theater collaborations are fickle—everything’s got to fall into place or the producers bolt and the soufflé falls. Everything didn’t, and the project collapsed. When Lenny returned to Wilder, seeking operatic rights, Wilder shut him down. We are the poorer for his decision.[4]

I studied with composer Ned Rorem during the early ’80s while a student at the Curtis Institute, and served as his copyist for half a decade after that. I knew his music from the inside out, and I knew particularly well his short operas. Art song composer nonpareil, he and Kenward Elmslie had adapted August Strindberg’s Miss Julie in 1965 with mixed success, and many thought him not suited to the demands of large-scale lyric theater. But Ned persevered, and garnered universal praise from opera stalwarts when, in 1994, he returned to Miss Julie, trimming it into a “taut and persuasive” 90-minute one act, according to James Oestreich in the Times.[5]

J.D. (Sandy) McClatchy, the svelte poet, erudite editor, and versatile librettist for Little Nemo in Slumberland (Daron Hagen), Miss Lonelyhearts (Lowell Liebermann), 1984 (Lorin Maazel), Dolores Claiborne (Tobias Picker), and A Question of Taste (William Schuman) among others, and I met when translator William Weaver commissioned me to compose some songs in memory of James Merrill—Sandy was Merrill’s executor. I admired his libretti and told him so. He said that Tappan Wilder had agreed to loosen the bonds on the Our Town rights, and that he, Sandy, was looking for the right composer. How, he asked me, would I proceed if I took on the job? I don’t recall now what I said, but I do recall ending the conversation by saying, “You know, the man you’re looking for is really Ned Rorem. Ned’s Quakerism provides the proper emotional repose; his age the appropriate cultural reference points. Most importantly, he’s entirely secure in his own voice, and will be comfortable letting Wilder’s play take the lead.”

I doubt that Sandy chose Ned because of what I said, but I knew then (and now) that I was right.Our Town the opera was premiered by Indiana University Opera Theater with student singers and orchestra on February 25, 2006. Its professional debut was at the Lake George Opera on July 1, 2006. Intended from the start to be a chamber opera, the orchestration is small, and the scoring is light and transparent throughout—consistent with a work best suited to young voices. The formal structure follows Wilder’s play closely. Minor deviations from the original play seem to have been made (the fleshing out of the role of Simon Stimson, the creation of choral numbers, for example) to provide opportunities for musicalization. Rorem moves in and out of speech and utilizes more elevated recitative (parlando) than in his previous theatrical works.

Playing through Ned’s first manuscript vocal score with Gilda Lyons shortly after he finished his first draft, we pounced upon the opportunity of giving the concert première of the (now classic) aria for Emily. (Notably, the opera’s only freestanding set piece.) In it, the ironic union of opposites that make the opera Our Town the immediate American classic that it is were on full display—economy of construction, absolute, unwavering resistance to unnecessary emotionalism, frankly open textures, wisps of Poulenc at his driest, and the sort of stunning Protestant hymns that only an atheistic alcoholic Quaker whose life partner was a church organist can pen. Everywhere in the music there is a sort of cool, self-contained regretfulness—the regret so central to the play’s initial impetus, a regret so intense as to border on dread—that perfectly underpins and undercuts the sentimentality of the portraits.

Rorem uses three compositional strategies to hold the opera together structurally, track the story’s narrative, and to keep his musical rhetoric coherent.

First, he manifests Wilder’s “emotional shyness” with abrupt stylistic cross-cutting (in mid- thought, sometimes in mid-musical phrase) between Americana (Thomsonian faux-Protestant hymns, plush sustained cinematic strings, Copland-esque woodwind solos, Ivesian collages), transatlantic modernism (the tartly-scored “sting” chords, jagged, off-kilter ostinatos in close- canon, denatured melodic fragments in place of memorable tunes), and Gallic lyricism (rapturous string obbligatos, sudden snatches of emotionally-vibrant melody, Debussy-esque orchestration).

The first sixty seconds of the opera deftly arrays all three techniques. The pungent bell-tone chord that strikes 5AM declares that Our Town is part of a continuum of American operas that frankly destabilize traditional harmony by thrusting, like a billy to the ribs, an unresolved fourth into the triad. Blitzstein’s poisoned capitalists, Bernstein’s tragic suburbanites, my tormented architect, and Rorem’s dread-filled citizens of Grover’s Corners all inhabit the same American operatic landscape. Ned immediately crosscuts to another of his favorite tropes—the faux Protestant chorus underpinned harmonically by parallel unresolved sevenths in the bass—before overlaying a sudden, Gallic, sensually-arresting obbligato in the high strings. When the action begins, the parlando (passages of elevated speech that do not quite rise to song) section that follows is typical of the handling of dialogue throughout the opera: The characters unpretentiously skitter halfway between speech and recitative over a plush, comforting pad of sustained, Copland-esque strings.

Second, throughout the opera, beginning in the background during the first moments as a woodwind obbligato like a nettlesome foreigner, is a “deedle-dum” figure that unmistakably evokes the falling motif associated with the doomed nuns in Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites[Fig. 5]. Rorem’s personal association with the motif inspired him to quote it in his own song, “For Poulenc” [Fig. 6], and, over the years, a dozen instrumental works, large and small. In the score of Our Town, it completes its transit (in Ned’s life as a composer and in his catalogue) in his characterization of Emily [Fig. 7].

The motif evolves inexorably over the course of the opera, generating tension the way that someone playing with their hair during a serious conversation is at first slightly distracting and, over time, enervating. It begins to take on a life of its own as the second act unfolds, the curling of melodies in the background behind the characters’ parlando turning in on themselves in an Ouroborus-like way, transforming the fragments into slowly unraveling ostinati that are both claustrophobic and comforting—like the family life Rorem’s music limns. Characters begin taking on the background ostinati and incorporating them into their parlando in odd melismatic passages that heighten words in a baroque fashion. As the second act closes and the young couple marry, the dread given us by the first acerbic chord of the opera returns, literally underscoring the fragility of their happiness. A violin solo gives another fleeting taste of sensual pleasure before Rorem snuffs it as, again, “too much” to close with an anything but comforting, dread-filled, Ives-ian mash-up of the “Mendelssohn Wedding March.”

Pedal points in the strings, quizzical quasi-chorales in the winds and brass, the “deedle-dum” curling wind obbligati, all return in the third act; the opera continues to unfold, but all the vocal lines are heightened above parlando (they’re taken closer to “song” and effusive tunefulness by making their tunes less abstract and more traditionally singable and giving the phrases more melismas) in a way that they weren’t in the first two acts. This “gradual emotional warming” manifests Ned’s third, and most subtle, strategy for giving the opera emotional depth, the character of Emily emotional verifiability, and the piece a satisfying emotional trajectory.

This is how he did it. Gradually, Rorem invests the chorus with more and more emotional warmth so that they—in death, but not in life—create the sort of musico-emotional landscape into which Emily can step. The apotheosis of the opera is, of course, Emily’s aria, wherein Rorem combines at proximity all the musical gestures laid out in the first two acts. In this, the “eleven o’clock” spot, he gives Emily the only unabashedly rapturous music in the opera, and on the most regretful sentiment: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” The composer’s self-control in finally allowing us to “feel” is masterful; the effect is devastating. His obvious identification with Emily, Poulenc, and the nuns is an astonishing personal revelation for a composer so famously public in his prose and yet so resolutely private in fact. Emily concludes, as Ned (a writer who eschews exclamation points and composer who famously hates repeating words, breaks his own rules) sums up a world-view, “That’s all human beings are. Blind!”

But why did Our Town need to be made into an opera? Just 80 years have elapsed since the 1937 premiere of Wilder’s play, yet a 1938 audience’s dread is like that felt in many quarters in 2017. Spring 2017 may find Americans in greater need of the sort of narrative that Our Town provides than they have been since the ’30s. The “Damoclesian sword” of rising fascism has returned with a vengeance; we’re told that we’re not experiencing a Depression, yet unemployment isn’t being measured in a way that considers how many people have simply stopped looking for work, or the fact that retired people are working at Walmart to supplement their pensions. The Peterborough, New Hampshire, that Wilder used as a model for Grover’s Corners had faded to the margins by the time I began visiting the MacDowell Colony during the early ’80s. Nobody in Wilder’s play could afford to live in the Peterborough of today.

Ned has told me that Satie’s Socrate may be “the greatest of all operas.” Certainly, he exploits in his score for Our Town the same kind of baroque cantata textures and affects as Satie did in his 1920 masterpiece and that Wilder (according to Mabel Dodge)[6] most preferred. But the Rorem and McClatchy Our Town also contains—in the propulsive, off-kilter ostinati percolating uneasily beneath the Nantucket matter-of-factness of its musical surfaces and its stubborn unwillingness to wear its heart on its sleeve—an astonishing undercurrent of unanticipated, and highly effective dramaturgical fury.

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This article originally appeared as the liner notes to New World Records 80790-2 [2 CDS] world premiere recording of Ned Rorem and J.D. McClatchy’s opera Our Town, based on the play by Thornton Wilder.

Footnotes

1. Louise Talma in conversation with the author at Yaddo, summer 1995.

2. Thornton Wilder’s “Some Suggestions for the Director” from the 1938 “acting edition” of the script.

3. Vivian Perlis quotes Aaron Copland in a letter to the New York Times, January 31, 1998.

4. Tappan Wilder, program notes for “Thornton Wilder and Music,” a program by the American Symphony Orchestra, December 19, 2014.

5. James Oestreich, New York Times review of the Manhattan School of Music production of the revised Miss Julie, spring 1994.

6. Mabel Dodge is quoted by Tappan Wilder in his American Symphony Orchestra program note.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 TFM: How difficult is it to fund indie films?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 TFM: What is your next artistic project? 

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

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

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

TFM: Why do you make films? 

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

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

Remembering Mel Rosenthal (1940-2017)

For my particular friend Mel Rosenthal, photography was an instrument for social justice. His Leica thrust before him like Quijote’s spear, he hurled himself into the back of squad cars in the South Bronx to raise awareness of social issues surrounding poverty and equality, into the Tanzanian countryside during the 70s to document medical care, into the Nicaraguan countryside to witness the effects of the revolution there. Mel was incredibly well-read, and taught English at Vassar for a few years. (We were both devoted readers of the Aubrey-Maturin books, which Mel could quote at length.) “Antonioni’s Blow Up blew my mind,” he told me once over Mescal one winter during the 80s at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. “I didn’t have a damned clue, but I knew I needed to be a photojournalist.” In time, Lisette Model mentored him. He was Susan Sontag’s age, and had a huge crush on her; he used to tease me about the fact that I, 22 years his junior, had one, too. 

He joined the faculty at Empire State College in 1975, and added artist mentor to his folio. But he never considered himself an academic. “I’m a messenger,” he told me once. “You touch people with notes; I do it with images. I take their pictures and give them back their image; you listen to what they say and give it back to them in music.” He was a poet addled by one-hundred-too-many waltzes with malaria, kicks in the ribs in pursuit of a shot, and the broken heart of a man who couldn’t—wouldn’t—forget the things he’d seen. Another winter in Virginia, we wept together, tenderly passing pages of our mutual friend Jerome Badanes’ just finished manuscript of The Final Opus of Leon Solomon to one another as Jerry sat, head in his hands by the fire, vulnerable and over-exposed. 

Mel was a clear-eyed sentimentalist who could handle himself. When Gilda Lyons and I married, Mel—to our astonishment and trepidation—volunteered to photograph our wedding. In the event, Mel covered our wedding like an infiltration of enemy territory. Shoulder to shoulder with my bride before our priest in Rhinebeck’s Church of the Messiah, ring poised over her extended finger, I looked into our priest Gerald Gallagher’s eyes and followed his gaze downwards to see Mel, flat on his back at our feet, framing up a Gregg Toland-style hero shot. Gallagher, a tolerant, intelligent man, whispered, “Mel, I’m not sure that this is appropriate.” Swinging the camera away from his face with an enormous grin, Mel wasn’t about to take orders from a priest. “I don’t work for God … or for you, Jerry” he said, and got back to it. “The guys with the Berettas on Bathgate trusted me,” he told my father-in-law Bernie at the wedding reception, “because they knew I was a stand-up guy.” “But you still know why there’s a bat leaning against the wall by my front door,” Bernie, a classics scholar from South Buffalo, observed, in return. “Of course,” Mel laughed.

When the opera I’d written with Paul Muldoon called Vera of Las Vegas debuted at Symphony Space in 2003, Mel decided that he wanted to document it. Gilda stepped in at the last moment to portray one of the Catchalls. Opening night, Mel and I sat beside Leonard Garment, Ned Rorem, and Gary and Naomi Graffman at a catwalk-side cocktail table in the Leonard Nimoy Thalia. During the “Strippers’ Chorus,” Mel’s unerring sense of where the true story lay compelled him to document the following scene not in the opera but arguably more interesting: Gilda was staged with her derriere poised above our heads. Mel’s camera snapped as Naomi observed, gimlet-eyed, to me, “And you’re expecting her to count seven against five, for godsake.” Len, peering up at one of the Catchalls, touched my arm and said, “you’re a twisted man, Daron.” Mel photographed Gary as he gazed at Shequida like a cobra hypnotized by a mongoose. “This,” I replied to Len, “coming from Richard Nixon’s lawyer.” Sound of shutter clicking. “Yes, well—,” Len replied. Mel’s camera clicking again, capturing Len’s pride in his son (my Curtis classmate) Paul, playing a solo in the little cabaret ensemble as he absent-mindedly remarked, “The President didn’t wear fishnet stockings.” Beat. “That I know of.” Beat. Shutter-click. Mel, in heaven, shooting every face, mapping each reveal. Ned, genuinely curious: “How can Gilda sing in that getup?”

Visual artist and professor Bobbe Perry probably saved us all from scurvy one summer at VCCA, building beautiful soups from whence we all spooned wholesome lunches during a rocky period in the kitchen. She and Mel fell in love that summer and made one of the most beautiful couples I’ve ever known. They were like Dickinson’s “two butterflies,” in their questing hearts and profound mutual understanding. Both deeply-committed, sensitive artists who really knew one another. They lived around the corner from us on West End Avenue for years. Five years ago, we moved to the country. “Not enough pavement for me there,” groused Mel when Bobbe tried to get him to their country place. “It makes me tense.” We no longer ran into one another at artist colonies, or late at night, or when the dog needed walking, or over produce at Gourmet Garage, or at friends’ openings, and funerals.

In 2001, at our annual Halloween party, I was Diego Rivera, Gilda was Frida Kahlo, Bobbe was radiance itself, and Mel came as Che Guevara. The tiny apartment was packed with mutual friends and even some people that nobody knew, adult beverages were consumed, everyone was sweaty, Jerry Badanes and absent friends were toasted, righteousness was summoned, at one point the Internationale was sung. He pulled In the South Bronx of America off the shelf and read the inscription he’d written in it the previous March: “For my old loyal shipmate and particular friend Daron. May we continue to have wonderful voyages together. Love, Mel.” I hugged him fiercely. “I was lost on the infinite sea,” I sang into his ear, “but I’ve seen where she’s bound for.” He closed his eyes. He knew the Melville. And he knew the Britten. “There’s a land where she’ll anchor forever.”

We’re gonna be okay, Mel; forever’s a long time, but we know where you’re bound for.

This piece has been syndicated in the Huffington Post. To read it there, click here.

Nicaragua: Barb of Sorrow

We piled into the Jeep that winter morning in 2006 and drove in to Diriamba, the birthplace of El Güegüense, where a traditional drama reenacted each January during the feast of San Sebastián, the city’s patron saint, took place. We would end up at the beautiful Basilica of San Sebastian of course, but first we had to change some money. Diriamba had a bank, or maybe two, I suppose. I never went into them. Why in the world would you buy córdobas at a bank? The best rate to be had was at the gas station on the Carretera Panamericana. One “negotiated” the exchange rate with the Coyotes, scary-looking dudes who stood between the gas pumps, wearing crisscrossing ammunition belts, a wad of bills in one hand and an automatic weapon in the other. Equal parts Malcolm Lowry  (there are literally a dozen active volcanoes in Nicaragua at and given time) and Jim Lehrer (of the Viva Max, not the PBS NewsHour vein), I loved the unhinged madness of my mother-in-law’s birthplace—where gun-toting lunatics fired off shots next to fuel pumps; people bought baggies of pastel-colored mystery booze from street vendors straddling the median strip; we slept with a machete in the bedside table; and the sunrises, every one of them, broke your damned Yanqui heart. I felt intense, crazy pride, as I watched my fearless mother-in-law intimidate the Coyotes into giving her a better rate.

I love the family I've been blessed to have married into, every member of it, with the fierce, wild appreciation and gratitude of a man who never thought he could ever be anyone’s son or brother or husband again. Even after a stroke, Gilda’s father Bernie can still handle himself and quote Shakespeare at length. His wife Gilda was born to the respected Alemán family; they operated Diriamba’s department store, co-owned several small Cinema Paradiso-like movie theaters—and, as I learned the very first time I was shown the town, built the municipal Clock Tower—in nearby Diriamba. Bernie and Gilda met in Upstate New York, where they attended Woodstock, among other things, and earned their teaching certificates. Bernie taught English and Gilda taught Art to emotionally unstable children from troubled backgrounds at Pope Pius XII High School, in Rhinecliff, New York. They retired a few years before Gilda Marie and I married.

Latin America is a bloody clot of Life and Death, Good and Evil, Wealth and Extreme Poverty, Man and God. For me, as it does for many folks, this inspires a heightened awareness of possibility, an intensification of experience that renders emotions more vivid, the appreciation of the fragility of life more sanguine.

We enjoyed a horse-drawn coach ride around the colonial city of Granada—a town dressed for wealthy travelers—and boated on the fresh water of Lake Nicaragua, prying monkeys off our shoulders—a lake so large that you could drop Puerto Rico into it. We trekked up the paths surrounding the active cone of the Masaya Volcano, made our way through the bustling markets of Masaya and Jinotepe, and spent our last morning in La Boquita on a ten mile walk on the beach to the shore’s point (which revealed another point beyond that) at dawn. All the while, we were treated to incredibly lavish and sumptuous meals prepared by our Tia Leyla as well as delicious foods in fine Nicaraguan restaurants.

Either it was a discarded bone needle of the sort used by fishermen to repair their nets, or it a stingray’s barb, a rusty nail—whatever, the four-inch-long espina passed through my Gilda’s foot like a red-hot knitting needle through butter when she stepped on it in the Pacific surf.

The patriarch of the family there, Ricardo Gutiérrez (Tio), was one of the preeminent horse trainers in Latin America. (In the Spanish style, each dictator, once they become an eminence, keeps horses.) The horse in Nicaraguan society served not just a beast of burden, but also as a mark of culture and prestige. One day we attended the Ipica—a huge equestrian festival—in Diriamba where $100 workhorses were ridden proudly next to $150,000 show horses. Because of his personal charisma, character, and his talent as a horseman, Ricardo seemed to know and be respected by everyone—from the peasant driving his burrow down the street to the President of the country, Enrique Bolaños, to whom we were introduced at one of the house parties to which Tio and Tia brought us during the festival.

The President had served as vice president under his predecessor, Arnoldo Alemán and just begun his term, which ended when Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas came back to power in 2007. He has since retired from politics and runs a non-profit educational foundation. Casually dressed men loosely ringed him with automatic rifles propped against their hips, and came to surround us as well as he—to our surprise—chatted with us for nearly twenty minutes.

Gilda turned chalky, one foot out of the water, the other in. “Don’t move” I said. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. The pain moved across her face like a shadow. I bent down in the waves and felt for her foot as, reflexively, she lifted it.

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Basílica Menor de San Sebastián, Diriamba, Nicaragua, March 2005. (Photo credit: Daron Hagen)

The festival of San Sebastian celebrated the meeting of the patron saints of Diriamba (San Sebastian), Jinotepe (Santiago), and San Marcos (San Marco). Evidently, statues of San Sebastian and Santiago were en route from Spain when the boat carrying them capsized. Fishermen found the statues floating in the ocean, dry and safe in sealed boxes, as close to each of their intended destinations as they could have been. The folklore surrounding them is that, with this history, they must be traveling companions, and very close friends. Each year San Sebastian invites both Santiago and San Marcos, as he is from another nearby town, to celebrate with him in Diriamba.

Blood poured out of both the top and the bottom of her foot and into the water, on my hands, all over her suit. I quickly checked the entry and exit wounds. Clean. Tore my shirt off and bound her foot. It stanched nothing. “I’ve got to get you to the house. Don’t look at the blood,” I said, trying to tie the shirt tighter.

Faithful from each town carried the statues from Diriamba, Jinotepe, and San Marcos to Dolores, a town in the middle of all three Saints’ homes, where the three met and then parade back to Diriamba. A huge Mass was celebrated in the basilica there and everyone processed, carrying the saints’ statues, accompanied by extravagant, beautiful dances and music. Children as young as four years old—dressed up in elaborate costumes—threw themselves into the moment. Faithful of all ages walked on their knees to fulfill promises to the saints. The incredible smells of fresh—and delicious—festival foods like picadillo, chicharrón, yuka, and nacatameles as well as of horses, people and the spent gunpowder of fireworks—all overwhelmed.

“I’m okay,” she protested. “I can walk.” Putting weight on the foot, she nearly passed out. I looked back at the house, across a finger of water and far up the beach. There was no one for three hundred yards in any direction. “I’m going to ferry you, baby,” I said.

We attended Mass in the choir loft above the front door of the basilica with several priests, and five or six members of the family, leaning over the rail and looking down towards the altar. People were packed tightly in as the choir sang. At the customary moments in the Mass, probably three thousand voices inside the basilica, another several thousand outside in the square, sang.

“Sit down, brother,” commanded Christopher gently, as I placed her in a chair on the porch of the little bungalow. He took over. The blood had by that time soaked everything we had on. ‘You look like you’re going to pass out,” he said, seizing my arm. “You should sit down.” My tailbone connected with the ground as I nearly fainted from the sprint up the beach.

The cardinal finished, the procession began. The statues of the saints, covered in ribbons and silver Milagros were carried down the central aisle, preceded by dancers, huge waving flags, drummers, and flute players. The basilica trembled and I felt what it is like when sound itself moves. Deafening fireworks exploded outside, thousands sang, and—a few feet away from us in the belfries—the bells began to peal. It was as beyond the pale as New Year’s Eve in Venice in the Piazza San Marco, but even more intense, with a more fervent undercurrent of religion and danger.

Now that Gilda was safe, my mind began to fly off like a busted kite. “Like stigmata…” I shuddered, trying to steady myself by looking out to sea. The fist around my heart tightened. Blood still pulsed from the wound, but her color was returning. “Kierkegaard called it—what was it—a barb of sorrow?” I was going into shock. “If it is pulled out, I shall die,” I half-remembered.

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Looking southwards toward Rio Mar from Casares. (Photo credit: Chris Lyons)

Every hair on my goose-bumped arms stood on end in the heat as the procession passed out of the church through the doors below. I was guided to a rope like a blind person and directed to help toll the bells. Flying a dozen feet up and down, drowning in the sound of the singing, of the bells, of the blood pounding in my head, I looked first one way to see waves of people reaching up to touch the saints as they pass in the plaza, then another to see the Christ hanging above the altar, hands and feet nailed with barbs of sorrow to the Holy Rood. I looked another way and saw the huge clappers inside the bells, then another and saw the bullet holes pocking the belfry’s inner walls, and then another to see Gilda’s ecstatic face in song.

“In this country,” Chickie remarked as he wound gauze around his sister’s foot, “Death sits right next to you at the bar without asking, claps you on the back, looks you in the eye, and buys you a Toña.” 

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This essay first appeared in an earlier iteration in the Huffington Post. You can read it there by clicking 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.

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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.