Don't Miss the Opera in the Pit

This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 3 September 2014 in an earlier draft. You can read it there by clicking here.

Most orchestras actually play mainly beneath the stage. Here is a pit orchestra arrayed in front of the proscenium.

I am occasionally asked, on panels, and in master classes, why it is important for an opera composer to write well for the orchestra, do their own orchestrations, and use it for more than mere accompaniment to what’s going on twelve feet above.

I reply that an understanding of the orchestra’s role in opera is a prerequisite for crafting the very finest, and the most sophisticated, operatic scores. I stipulate that it is in the subtle use of orchestral colors and textures that much of the composer’s capacity for the telling of truth to power is made possible. The way the composer uses the orchestra is one of the chief things that differentiates opera from music theater.

It is in the suave use of the orchestra that a composer can artfully conceal many of her most provocative and innovative musical and psychological ideas while appearing on the surface intending only to entertain and divert. This is not sly, but it is often misunderstood as being too eager to please by people who tend to find dissonant music more serious than consonant music. The willingness to throw the audience a bone simply acknowledges the fact that sleight of hand must sometimes be used to disarm before the fool can whisper the truth into the king’s ear.

The role most composers and audiences are comfortable having the orchestra play is that of the story’s omniscient narrator. Things become more interesting, though, and more like actual human experience, when the music is in “disagreement” with the action onstage; it may also be telling the truth in a situation where the character is lying to themselves, or others. Portraying characters in denial, underpinning crossed emotional transactions, and tracking the progress of seduction—these are “what’s going on in the violas.”

It is in the orchestra that the churning, subliminal, notated subconscious of the drama—intuited but largely unnoticed by the audience—occurs. Occasionally, the orchestra may tell another story entirely from the one unfolding on stage; certainly, one of the reasons operatic villains are so fun is that the audience potentially hears all the (beautiful?) voices in a psychotic’s head!

When the orchestra is dealt in as an active and equal dramatic player, one risks melodrama, since the action onstage is being experienced by the audience from the orchestra’s point of view (POV). When the music precedes the action, melodrama results (example: sting chord, followed by a character singing “you MUST pay the rent!”). When it is simultaneous, “Mickey Mousing” results (example: well, the music one hears anytime Wylie E. Coyote heads over a cliff, is crushed by an anvil, and so on). It is in every way a more substantial and rich emotional and aesthetic experience when the orchestra is employed in a rather more filmic fashion, the music’s POV shifting continuously, fluidly, in order to frame, comment upon, deepen, and enhance the drama. 

What’s the difference, then, between a film score and an opera score? Besides the obvious fact that an opera is sung, not all that much, except that the composer sits in the driver’s seat in opera. The composer in opera is the chief dramaturge and chief visionary. For that reason, the opera house was built to bring to life not the director’s vision but the composer’s. In film, a music editor translates and transmits the director’s wishes to the composer, who then executes music that may in fact save the scene, elevate it, and even be the thing that makes it truly great. But, no matter how galvanizing a film score is, the vision remains the director’s.

John Williams’ Star Wars soundtracks are held together by an extraordinarily complex web of motives, themes, overlays, and thematic transformation made all the more impressive by the fact that, because of the nature of the movie industry, he has had to pen them so quickly. Would he even be interested, one wonders, in writing an opera? I hope that he does. As obviously capable of it as he is, is he even interested in taking the wheel?

I admire Howard Shore’s scores for the Tolkien movies. They, too, partake of the operatic conventions of leitmotifs and thematic transformation. Shore’s opera, The Fly, for the Los Angeles Opera, however, could have used a music editor. Too often, the music refused to take center stage. At this point, it seems to me though that the closest heir to Erich Korngold (who came to film music after international success as the youthful genius composer of Die tote Stadt) is Andre Previn, whose operatic scores (A Streetcar Named Desire—hampered only by a libretto that one assumes is so true to the Williams play because the estate insisted upon it—and Brief Encounter, more loosely based on the Coward play, and in every way lighter on its feet) are technical marvels, fluid, with a flawless sense of dramatic timing, and an effortless command of harmonic ebb and flow. It is unfair of me to wonder aloud why Mr. Previn doesn’t seem to my ear to allow himself the fervent, sophisticated tunes that he did in his film scores when he writes opera.

Some composers generate in the orchestra a neutral sea of sonic gesso over which float patches of “parlando recitative” of either “right” or “wrong” notes (a sort of elevated, sing-song dialogue that constantly reaches toward, but never achieves, actual melodic interest, since memorability invites comparison to other tunes the auditor remembers—fondly or not) that do not differentiate the characters. Forcefully memorable underscoring can invite the charge of having composed “melodramatic” music, a charge that cannot be refuted, since it is sort of like asking someone when they last kicked their dog. Another popular modernist strategy is to provide music that remains ironically detached from the onstage drama no matter what is going on – music that is reassuringly “abstract,” that never risks being outré. Conversely, sometimes a strategy is pursued where, no matter what is going on onstage, the music remains stubbornly in its own world, even if it is ugly.

The better an opera composer gets at fully exploiting the orchestra as an equal player in the gesamtkunstwerk, the more the audience trusts her. On the one hand—the hand that matters—the composer’s musical message flows all the more freely into the audience’s heart and mind; on the other, the composer has concealed her craft so well that non-professionals who need to “hear the cogs grind” in order to feel that they’ve been in the presence of “inspiration” suspect that they’ve been manipulated by “mere technique.”

Some folks distrust composers who handle the “seams” between big set pieces well; they want their “stand and deliver” performance moments followed by an orchestral button that invites / enables / triggers applause. I wonder whether this impulse arises from the same place that causes my six-year-old to look away and fidget when an adult is admonishing him—it’s just too much.

Some audience members have difficulty understanding that the music they are hearing at any given moment is sometimes the character’s music, not the author’s, and that the POV of the orchestra, and even the music, may not be omniscient at all. Because of this, critics who either don’t understand, or are unwilling to go along with that the idea of a shifting POV, have sometimes misunderstood the musical rhetoric of contemporary scores, pronouncing them at best “eclectic,” and wondering aloud whether the composer has “an original voice.”

The next time you attend the opera, as the lights dim and the orchestra strikes up, why not determine to devote that evening an extra measure of attention to the opera going on in the pit? Given half the chance they deserve, those people down there might just steal the show.

Opening Night

Whether they were trained at the Curtis Institute or the School of Hard Knocks, on a Broadway Accompanists’ Bench, or by Peering into a Moviola, every composer thinks that they can write a great opera. Some have. Most haven’t.

At 50, after having composed eight commissioned large (and small) operas (and hours of symphonic works, ballets, chamber music, and song cycles), I’ve Merrily, and Not-So-Merrily, rolled through my “Hills of Tomorrow” phase, my “Franklin Shepard, Inc.” phase, and passed through to the other side-to what happens after the curtain falls.

That’s when I realized that the more that I think I know about music, about theater, about the union of words and music, about what a dramatic beat is, the more arrogant I am. I’ve learned to mistrust actors’ tears (and my own). I’ve found humility as an author, standing at the back rail of theaters, looking out over an audience, and taking their pulse, riding on it, as they ride the pulse of the show itself. Or not.

Despite having “arrived” as an opera composer in 1993 with the international critical acclaim that greeted the premiere of my first opera, Shining Brow, the night that I finally knew that I had arrived (in my own mind, at least) was May 8, 2010.

Commissioned by Seattle Opera, my seventh opera, Amelia, had taken from first sketches to the night of its premiere at the McCaw Opera House in Seattle-nearly six years to compose. The culmination of my life to that point as a composer, Amelia was about to be launched with a $3.6 million production by one of America’s largest companies.

Alone, it had been part of my job to walk nearly every foot of McCaw during rehearsals, in order to ascertain what the audience would hear and see from every angle. I had “infiltrated” the theater just as I had the vast old Oriental Landmark movie palace of my youth. The dream of being a world-class opera composer that I had formulated there 32 years earlier, lying on the Oriental’s stage on my back with a heap of musty safety curtain beneath my head, fingers interlaced at the nape of my neck, watching films from behind the screen, had become reality.

From where I stood in my tuxedo at the orchestra pit’s rail, looking up into the slowly filling 2,800 seat theater, it looked as though the house had sold out. The seats formed a wine dark sea of plush red velvet.

The susurrus of the audience’s pre-performance chatter washed over me. Happy, confident, I turned my back on the audience, looked into the pit, reached down, and shook the concertmistress’ hand. “Thank you, Emma,” I said. “My pleasure, really,” she smiled, returning to her seat. Classmates from conservatory days now members of the Seattle Symphony looked up and smiled; I waved and smiled in return, grateful.

I glanced down at the opera’s full score on the conductor’s podium. Amelia was my sixth opera, so I performed a private ritual by discretely tapping the wood of the pit rail six times for luck. The jitters came. Turning back to the house, I let out a very long breath.

My very sanity — the way I crafted it just behind my eyes — was on the line: the future, the present, the past, the living, the dead, the imaginary, all coexisted simultaneously in the opera, just as they did in my head. I was sharing not just my vision, but also my truth. The critics would soon slap me down in the morning, but, for now, it was my turn to sing.

I remembered the night before my first Juilliard audition in July 1979. I stood at the lip of the Uris Theater pit, desperate for someone to talk to, and poured out my anxiety about the audition to come and my excitement at standing right where I was during the intermission of Sweeney Todd to its surprised, amused keyboard player.

Reflexively, I turned back to the pit and made eye contact with David McDade, the opera company’s chief accompanist, seated behind the piano. He smiled up at me in return, mouthed, “In bocca al lupo” silently. I smiled in return and mouthed, “Crepi!” Chuckling, he gave a little wave and looked back to his music.

In a few seconds, the houselights would go “to half,” and Gerard Schwarz would walk briskly to the podium.

I looked back at the audience, and tried to recall the instant that I became aware that music was always flowing through my mind.

Was it the night Father commanded me at age five to sing Friedrich-Wilhelm Möller’s saccharine ditty “The Happy Wanderer” again and again for the only house guests I recall our family ever having entertained? After the first half dozen times, I realized that Father was drunk, and that nobody was listening; in fact, people were embarrassed for me as, crimson with shame, terrified of what would happen to me if I stopped, I sang on and on.

Maybe it was when I was nine, bundled up in winter gear on the school bus, my warm breath as I quietly sang steaming up the window. I sang then because it made me feel better. Does it still? At what point did the melodies I sang become my own? Were they always?

I headed for my seat. Catching my wife Gilda’s eye, I nodded, noting with pure joy how dazzling she looked in her opera gown. I took my seat next to her on the aisle-a composer’s privilege. My brother, my nephew, and Gilda’s generous and loving family surrounded us.

“Am I crazy?” I asked myself as the oboist gave the “A” and the aural primordial soup that a professional orchestra creates in response as they tune before the entrance of the conductor bubbled gently up from the pit. I thought of Monteverdi’s Orfeo: “... che tosto fugge, e spesso a gran salita il precipizio è presso.”

I adjusted my bow tie and cummerbund. Both were tight. I had come to Seattle to attend rehearsals, revise as necessary, to learn as I always did, by observing the process of discovery, and staging. Wife and son in New York, I had returned to a quasi-feral state during the past six weeks — the debilitating insomnia, the depression, the dizzying mood swings, had all roared back.

I felt lost, alone and agonizingly overexposed.

I felt the Koi jumping in my stomach. “Do I simply suffer from a peculiar form of Norwegian Lutheran Histrionic Personality Disorder?” I wondered, half-serious, the sweat beginning to pool under my collar. “Is it so important to me that this opera be a success that, even if it is not, I will make it one in my mind?” I had judged colleagues harshly over the years who I felt had “gone around the bend.” Perhaps I had finally reached that point myself.

I thought of my 20s, of how I was once jealous of others’ self-absorption because I was certain it held as I believed mine did-secrets of self-knowledge. I assumed that the self-absorbed held, so closely and tenderly, many brave secrets and thoughts that would heighten and illuminate my search for identity. The enormity of deception was due-like my current jitters-to my own arrogance.

As it happened, either these people had checked out, gone benignly insane, or had closed up for sanity — it was as simple as that. At the heart of the Sphinx, through the labyrinthine passages, was the rifled vault of a dead pharaoh — no more. My frustration and anger were comical. In sadness, I had grown up.

I thought of my infant son Atticus, asleep now in his crib back in the rented house on Queen Anne. We had decided that he was too small to witness the shooting of the Vietnamese girl at the end of the first act. Still, I felt him there with me, seated contentedly on my lap, his fingers curled like a frond around the thumb of my hand, golden hair wild and falling in ringlets on his tiny, strong shoulders. Forever in my mind it will be my boy to whom Amelia coos, “Hi, baby” at the end of the opera.

I twisted around and looked up into the balconies, checked my watch, and mastered myself. It was time to let go of my own concerns and to be the professional that I had worked so hard to become. My responsibility was to gauge the effect as an author that the opera was having in real time on the audience around me and to make mental notes of changes I needed to make in order to improve the piece.

People quieted.

“Worrying once again my ‘barb of sorrow,’” I thought ruefully as the house lights dimmed. I whispered the most fleeting of prayers, squeezed Gilda’s hand, and blinked hard as in silence the curtain glided upwards.

---

Amelia has received a number of revivals and was singled out by Opera News as “one of the ten best operas of the first decade of the 21st century.”

This essay first appeared in the Huffington Post on 19 April 2012. Click here to read it there.

Shut Up and Sing

This essay first appeared in the Huffington Post on 7 November 2014. You can read it there by clicking here.

Daron Hagen accompanies Gilda Lyons at the Hudson Opera House in Hudson, NY. Spring, 2014. (Photo: Chris Lyons)

A singer singing is naked. The singer is the matador to the listener’s bull. A pianist can still depress the keys, a violinist still stop the strings, even a wind player can still count on the instrument to respond if they are ill. But a singer’s body is her instrument — a fickle one at that. A cold, a tickle, even a stressful day, can turn a singer’s instrument against her. Since even the tone — deaf can sing, the potential exists for there to be enjoyed a more immediate, stronger sense of identification between singer and listener than possible with any other instrument. How moving and human the singer’s lot: as over time her experience and artistry grow, her instrument decays!

My six-year-old son, to whom my wife and I sing every night, is extremely outgoing; yet, when his mother sings in public (she is a trained opera singer and composer), he writhes with discomfort. It is as though the act of singing to others creates such an intimate transaction between his mother and the audience that he feels that his own privacy is somehow being compromised. Our three-year-old son, to whom we also sing, reacts to his mother’s public performances by growing preternaturally still, and watching her as though she had transformed into a magical creature, which she has been, in a way.

Singing is more than standing up in church and faking the words and melody of a half-remembered hymn because somebody’s made off with all the hymnals in your pew. It is more than Pavarotti’s voice sailing out into the 3,800 seats of the Metropolitan Opera House. (The visceral effect, by the way, if you haven’t experienced it yet, of sitting a dozen rows away from the stage at a place like the Met and hearing an opera singer fill the place with the unamplified sound of their voice is more physically exhilarating than being at a rock concert.) It’s more than covering show tunes in a bar, or the lobby of a hotel. More than....

Slaves picking cotton, convicts paving a road, Verdi telling Truth to Power in the opera house, a recording of Blind Willie Johnson, singing and playing the blues, traveling outwards into the universe aboard the Voyager spacecraft.

Infants, bleating the falling minor third of “mama, mama” are singing the first song, the cry for sustenance, and for protection. The analysand’s primal scream for an audience of one and a punk rocker’s heavily amplified, larynx-rending snarl into a microphone for an audience of a hundred are — to me, at least — indistinguishable.

Voices singing together in perfect accord combine the raw, atavistic power of the urschrei with mankind’s equally fervent desire to civilize itself. Whether it be a a 9th century Gregorian chant intoned in an eerie unison “straight tone” (no vibrato), or a good-looking pop star whose voice is being transformed by a real-time audio pitch corrector (which sounds disturbingly like monks singing, if you slow it down enough) into something serviceable (by that I guess I mean “marketable”), it is still singing.

In instrumental music, the combining of genres, techniques, and styles is already fully accomplished. Jacob Druckman was lauded during the ‘80s for drawing from the acoustic orchestra sounds that other composers were creating in the electronic music studio. Years ago, Thomas Newman’s extraordinary score for the Pixar cartoon Finding Nemo smoothly integrated sound effects, electronica, and suave orchestrations by opera composer Thomas Pasatieri. When I orchestrate my operas now, I customarily integrate pre-recorded sounds into the live orchestra to enlarge the expressive pallet available. Audiences are entirely comfortable with it.

Whether it be an avant-garde artist like Cathy Berberian creating vocal fry in a concert hall (“laryngealisation” to voice teachers; sounding raspy like Bob Dylan to civilians) and sound effects for her husband Luciano Berio in the ‘50s or a ‘90s hip-hop artist beat-boxing into a microphone in a New York subway, it is still singing.

Contemporary music utilizing “extended vocal techniques” (what listeners usually identify as sound effects) is comfortably within the wheelhouse of a group like the King’s Singers. They can deliver the urban gloss of tight ensemble groups like Take Five and Manhattan Transfer, and give a group like the Swingle Singers (whose performance in Berio’s game-changing work for orchestra and voices Sinfoniafrom 1969 shaped forever the way I would think about voices) a run for their money. Each of their performances is a masterclass that young startup ensembles like Roomful of Teeth would do well to attend.

Daron coaches a young singer during a masterclass at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia as part of the Russian Opera Workshop. (Photo: Laura Meirson)

Among other things, the following story describes what singing means to me:

In October 2007, I found myself in the Adler and Sullivan designed Auditorium Building in Chicago. Completed in 1889, since 1947 it has been home to Roosevelt University where, for the semester, I was serving as the Chicago College of the Performing Arts’ composer-in-residence. I was teaching a floor below where Sullivan had mentored a young apprentice named Frank Lloyd Wright.

A singer, a flute player, and a pianist arrived for a coaching of a song from my song cycle, Dear Youth. The song was called “The Picture Graved into My Heart.” It set the words of Hannah Ropes, a nurse, and consisted of her description of a young, dying soldier in her care. I composed it in January 1991 at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The tattoo accompanying diplomatic and military maneuvers had begun with Iraq’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. I wanted to pen an anti-war piece that juxtaposed letters and writings from northern and southern mothers to their sons during the American civil war.

The trio performed the song. After a beat of silence, the singer began to sob. I opened the tattered copy of the EC Schirmer edition of the cycle I’d had since they first published it. “That line kills me,” she said. “Which one?” I asked. “Oh, the wondrous manly beauty,” she said. “I have a brother in the army. I can’t stop thinking about him when I sing that line.” The pianist and the flute player looked away. “Let’s talk about the technique of creating the moment as a singer,” I said. “Perhaps that will give you a place to go to keep something of yourself in the moment.”

She nodded. I plunged in. “The line should start low and soft as you sing the word ‘oh’ in a normal voice,” I began. “You shouldn’t try to project the low C# — it’s a pillow-talk intimacy. You should only add volume as your voice moves into your chest while sliding upwards through the minor ninth in a moaning portamento to the fermata-lengthened D.”

She sang the line and smiled. “Okay, now what?” she asked.

“A full-voiced throb should enter your voice then, when you can feel the diaphragm beginning to tug because your air is running out. You should feel risk there: the audience intuits that you are running out of air as you shift into your head with the last of your breath; your body and the audience’s bodies share not just the reflexive response to the human moan, but the terror of running out of air.”

She sang the line a few times. I leaped up and cried, “Yes, yes, yes, can you feel that?” I pressed my hand on her abdomen. “You were scared, weren’t you? You were scared you were going to run out of breath. It made me apprehensive, too. That’s a good thing.” She looked doubtful.

“But my teacher tells me that the most important thing is to always sound good,” she said, doubtfully. “I know,” I agreed. “And that’s the rub. Only you can decide what ‘good’ is. Does Tom Waits sound good to you?” She was silent. “I love Tom Waits’ voice,” I said. “I love the authenticity of his voice. The challenge is to sound good and to be true to yourself so that you remain authentic. Let’s move on.”

“The flute should enter just at that moment, matching the timbre of your voice,” I counseled. “The wail should pass without fuss, normal voice and diction taking over as a breath is taken and the words ‘the wondrous manly’ are clearly enunciated — ‘wondrous’ is a word that speaks for itself; it doesn’t need any help from the composer or the singer. There you should make a slight stress, a little vibrato on the word ‘beauty,’ like the woody, thick vibrato you get high on the violin’s G string, even a sob, before the last of your air is gone and the line ends, not tapered off, but snuffed out.”

They performed the song a couple of times, thanked me, and left. A moment later, the singer returned, cheeks wet with tears. “Thank you, sir,” she said, squeezing my hand. Then, urgently: “I love the songs so much.”

After they left, I sat alone, far from home, emptied. An elevated train rattled past on the Loop a few stories below. I asked myself how I could possibly take myself so seriously; I knew exactly how good Dear Youth wasn’t. As though in answer, I heard a few bars of Schubert’s intimately majestic song cycle Der Winterreise drift up from a practice room one floor below. 

I remembered myself singing, at the age of five, in an endless loop, The Happy Wanderer, at Father’s command. He was proud of me, right? Or was he making fun of me? My ridiculous little penny whistle soprano voice piped on —

“Oh, may I go a-wandering
Until the day I die!
Oh, may I always laugh and sing,
Beneath God’s clear blue sky.”

Hot tears of embarrassment and rage and stubbornness coursed down my cheeks. I was terrified of what would happen if I stopped, ashamed of wanting to stop. I thought at that moment: wasn’t that what being a professional composer had turned out to be?

The answer was simple: shut up and sing.

Torke in Tahiti

This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 14 November 2014. Click here to read it there.

Daron Hagen and Michael Torke. New York City, fall, 2009. (Photo: Gilda Lyons)

“Maybe music is a refuge for me: it’s not for me to say, but people might find more of a generosity of spirit in the music, than they say they are missing in my person. Who knows? The music is like, ‘Here’s a phrase. You know what? I’m not ashamed; I’m not winking,” said composer Michael Torke.

The ear-splitting bellow of a truck’s horn, five floors below, on Broadway, made the window rattle and drowned out his last words. A few snowflakes eddied outside. It was an afternoon in January 2012. We sat chatting in my studio in Hamilton Heights about his latest CD, a self-produced project called Tahiti, released on his own label, Ecstatic Records.

Michael laughed. Deep dimples bore into his cheeks. He repeated himself: “What I said was, ‘Here it is. This is who I am’.”

I noted the broad, intelligent forehead, the intense, probing eyes — one moment warm, the next as cold as a shark’s — intense, perhaps wild, emotions kept under strict control. To me, he was still 22, the other young Wisconsin-born composer winning a BMI Student Composer Prize at the Warwick in 1984. 

The truth is more interesting, and tougher: Michael Torke has walked the maverick’s path. He’s an original, and he’s a true artist. He dropped out of Yale in order to stay on top of a white hot career kicked off by two of the finest concert works of the ‘80s — Vanada and Ecstatic Orange. 

His early pieces concerned themselves with a fistful of techniques with which he treated dissonant, often octatonic, suitably “modern” sounding pitch groups — cellular development, Minimalist repetition, “abstract” melodies, punchy, arresting post-bop rhythms subdivided at the sixteenth note. 

But then — an artist to his core — he began deploying the same techniques to the less dissonant, “tonal” sound worlds of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. Works like Ash and Bright Blue Music disappointed some colleagues, even as they delighted civilians — particularly ballet audiences. He peeled away from his prestigious publisher, Boosey and Hawkes, years before other independently minded composers of his generation did so with theirs. 

During the past decade, Michael’s been seriously involved in vocal works. His opera Strawberry Fields has gained a secure place in the repertoire. Since opera’s my favorite wheelhouse as a composer, this latest part of his career has fascinated me even more than the previous phases. Like most composers, Michael derives instrumental concert pieces from their operas and musicals.

Fiji, the largest piece of the new release, was composed around the same time as a theater work called called The Listener. I asked Michael if the two shared any ideas.

“Some of the themes [for Fiji] did come from the failed musical I wrote with Craig Lucas, called The Listener, for the Juilliard Centennial,” Michael agreed. “The show was produced with their senior drama class of sixteen hotshot actors, all very good-looking, none of whom could sing. Music was just not emphasized in their training. Craig wrote the lyrics and the book. Mark Wing Davey was our fearless English director. It was a musical with a rock band in the pit. At the time it was very exciting. But it was deemed controversial: there was nudity on stage, and it was a bizarre story about a virus that gets into your brain and makes you behave irrationally. Joe Polisi, the President of the school came to opening night and pronounced it the worst travesty in the hundred-year history of Juilliard! Our scheduled tour to Chicago and LA was promptly cancelled. And then soon after, Craig and I parted ways. Craig wanted to refashion the whole thing, but I had run out of steam.”

“Well, we’ll always have Fiji,” I quipped. “You know, Tahiti as a record has an unusually highly produced sheen, even for your releases, which are always aurally impeccable. In fact, it sounds like the Burt Bacharach mixes from his great instrumentals during the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. How hands-on were you during the recording process and especially during post-production?”

“Well,” Michael replied, “the magic of this album was in post, and the producer I worked with, Mike Maguire took more of a pop rock approach to making a master tape than the classical models that I was used to. I’m glad you mentioned Bacharach, because after hearing the first edit, that’s what I said to Andrew [Cornall, at the time about to named head of worldwide A & R for EMI], ‘What I want to do is something that sounds like those famous late ‘60s recordings that Bacharach did.’ That was the model.”

“One of the things I find most gutsy about this release,” I opined,” is that you are so compositionally ‘open’ about the ‘70s sounds we grew up with. Frankly, I love them, but they also give me panic attacks.”

Michael laughed. “Great! I love it! Another LA friend of mine said ‘Well, Michael, you write muzak for intellectuals’.” 

The dimples pierced his cheeks. There blossomed a crimson blush, and he put up his fists like a prizefighter for an instant before dropping them. “It’s more complex than that, though. For example, the music for the movement called ‘Farewell’ comes from the climactic moment from the Craig Lucas musical when the three murderers — who have suffered the brain damage — which causes them to commit their crimes, sing a trio of their misdeeds.” He sang, “‘the headlights shined on me and I stuck the knife into the body.’ The music was all about murder with the most heinous details. In the musical, it’s supposed to be this dramatic moment because they’re singing this very romantic song that is about killing. This was Craig’s vision. But to me it was a kind of elegy. If you remove that dramaturgy, it actually sounds like a reflective farewell. I thought it would work at the end of Tahiti.”

Cultural reference points in Torke’s music are always deftly alluded to — as subtly and as tellingly as Strauss’ in his operas. But Michael limns these artifacts without rancor, condescension, or (particularly in the case of Tahiti) irony. More to the point, he does so without shame, without post-modern winking. In this I feel a great kinship with Michael. 

I recall vividly Ned Rorem, opening night of my opera Vera of Las Vegas at Symphony Space warning me that some people would call the score “cheap” because they didn’t understand it. As Tim Page wrote of my opera Bandanna, “It is neither fish nor fowl — as fierce as verismo but wrought with infinite care.” More time will have to pass before this sliver of the American repertoire is given its proper due. I do believe, however, the current generation of emerging American composers who’ve managed to free themselves of the voices in their heads that are not their own—happily eclectic, what-you-hear-is-what-is-there, benefit from the aesthetic groundwork done by Michael’s work.

When an artist has consummate craft, as Michael does, the ability to say anything he needs to say in any way under the sun, and the courage to say, “Here it is. This is who I am,” attention must be paid. Honor is due.

Bernstein's Seemingly Simple Song

In 1971, the year he became the first music critic to receive the Pulitzer Prize, Harold Schoenberg wrote of the premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS: “So this MASS is with it — this week? But what about next year?” Bernstein, though lavishly honored during his lifetime by those who admired and respected his music, his music-making, and the comet-like intensity of his life force, was never awarded the Pulitzer, and it wasn’t until 1981 that the American Academy of Arts and Letters invited him to become a member.

When I was eleven years old, my brother, who two years earlier had turned me on to Jesus Christ Superstar, played me MASS. He was old enough to be worrying about the draft; we watched the numbers climb under the little black soldier and the little white soldier just over Walter Cronkite’s shoulder with horrified fascination. I brought the big, floppy LP’s of  MASS with me to Linfield School, taught “God Said” to my classmates, and led them in a rousing rendition of it on the playground during recess, prompting a call home from the vice principal (who had not one ironic bone in his body) to my mother, who, laughing, no doubt told him to get “with it.” 

My MASS, the one spinning away in 1972 on the turntable in my parents’ den, began with self-consciously complex, Internationalist “new music” babbled away in Greek — the furthest thing from the traditional classical music, show tunes and rock-n-roll to which I, as a Lutheran kid from Wisconsin related. It was exotic, but it didn’t make me feel anything. That the Celebrant should clear the air with a single swipe on the open strings of his guitar expressed clearly what this MASS was going to be about: modernist music would express “Life After the Bomb,” decadence, agnosticism; tonal music would express innocence, faith, rebirth. There would be no attitudinizing, no proselytizing; no value judgments made on different styles of music in this score; as Bernstein famously pointed out at the Grammys decades later, there would be “only good music and bad music.”

With joyous, Rock God open G’s and D’s on the guitar, the Celebrant cuts through the quadrophonic Modernist cocktail party of the cacophonous pre-records that serve as a prelude, spelling out “G-d” in music with the middle left out in the traditional fashion, just as Bernstein leaves the third out of his chord. It’s an innocent, pre-musical place; a chord that anyone who can pick up the guitar can strum without knowing how to play. So begins a supposedly “simple” song that is a textbook example of what a composer can do when he has the craft to conceal his craft. It’s Matthew 21:16. And, to the annoyance (and exquisite embarrassment) of so-called subtle thinkers like Tom Wolfe and Harold Schoenberg, Bernstein actually meant it.

The Celebrant enters on the fifth in G major with the word “sing.” The C-sharp that follows is both the Marc Blitzstein / Bernstein signature interval, the one used to poison the harmonies in Blitzstein’s opera Regina and to organize the drama in West Side Story and anything but simple: the word “God” has been placed on the “forbidden” tritone, rife with ambiguity and harmonic instability, ready to modulate into any key; it’s a note of many colors, but, in the event, serves as a “passing tone” to the words “simple song,” which pass in four beats through iii, and a feint toward the dominant of A minor before settling on the relative major of A, C major, the subdominant in G major, for the word ‘lauda,’ and a tender plagal cadence back to G.

And so it continues, sounding like a pop song and functioning all the time in the way Bernstein himself did, on several levels at once, a semiotician’s dream: entertaining and illuminating, clever and heartfelt, knowledgeable, but filled with disarming wonder, revealing the obvious without embarrassment or cynicism because the most important things bear repeating. 

The next section frankly “comps” the way a novice guitarist might, or like a cocktail pianist in C major, disarming the listener but keeping things unsettled with an E-E flat cross relation (the “happy” major third alternating with the “sad” minor third) and the insertion of a tritone again, like a little musical question mark, on the word “praises” before adding a Pan-like flute, in G minor, playing a “fill” on the melody to which the words “sing God a simple song” were sung earlier over “All of my days.” Deft touches that only a composer who knows the repertoire and who knows that the mass has always been the best show in town would think of abound, like having the strings enter to halo the words “Lord” and “God.” There is in this opening number the allusiveness of Richard Strauss as Bernstein taps every high, medium, and low cultural reference point rattling around in his overflowing imagination in an ardent desire to land with everyone in the Congregation.

I intuited this at eleven, spent the eighties learning how composers like Bernstein did it, and the nineties coming to terms with something (learned) in me that felt that it was all somehow too facile in its execution. I can’t help comparing Bernstein’s virtuosic compositional display to most of the theater music I hear these days being passed off as visionary and shake my head.

Ned Rorem told me once that my music was most effective when it was simple, stipulating that writing complicated music was a lot easier than not. I was too young when he said it to me to understand what I know now: he meant that my music was best when it appeared to be simple. It is more important to be understood than it is to be loved. Or respected. Now I understand that it required a sort of courage for a man of Bernstein’s sophistication and time to drop in that little soft rock “boom-chick,” in the B section, to gently touch on the jazzy major seventh with a grace note on the word “help,” to push the jazz gesture just a trifle harder on the “sting” beneath the final “laude.” What critics like Schonberg deemed self-indulgent lapses in taste are revealed, in hindsight, to be the unapologetic gestures of a master.

The other shoe drops during the Sanctus, when the Celebrant plays two open E’s on an acoustic guitar, thinks out loud the solfège syllable “mi” on the pitch E, to which it corresponds, and then freely associates that “Mi alone is only me. But mi with sol,” he continues, moving to the G, “Me with soul,” continuing the pun, “Mi sol Means a song” and he uses a commercial pop release into C major, but equates God with C major as he has throughout the piece, unfolding into a delicious C major triad, then building on it, using more sophisticated compositional tricks like a sprung bar of five beats on the word “grow” for text painting, climaxing on a high G (a “sol”) on the word “soul” before, unable to restrain himself, he is absolutely compelled to launch into “Kadosh! Kadosh!”

I experienced a frisson at eleven, as I sang along in my swimming trunks on the floor of our den, and just did, when I sang and played through it at the piano a few moments ago, aged fifty-three, my seven year old son, across the room, building with Legos, singing along.

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I couldn’t have felt more validated when Catherine Parsonage wrote about my opera Bandanna, “Hagen’s style encourages audiences to be actively involved in constructing their own meanings from the richness of the textual and musical cross-references in his work,” for I believe this is exactly the sort of open mind Bernstein penned MASS for. Performances at the Vatican and around the world have guaranteed its place not just in people’s hearts, but in the repertoire. Most emerging composers in their thirties — the pitched battles between the modernists and the traditionalists long since over — consider the prim reviews MASS received (if they consider them at all) with detached postwar amusement.

Over the years, I have turned to Benjamin Britten for his cool, brutally elegant characterizations and the finest personal lexicon of articulation markings of any opera composer. I’ve reached out to Richard Strauss for the emotional and psychological subtlety that his quicksilver and quicksand-like chromatic harmonies convey. And I turn to Bernstein when I need a reminder of how a composer must not leave anything on the field.

Composers tell one another the story of Paul Simon asking Bernstein for lessons and Bernstein turning him down, telling him that lessons would “ruin” him. I have a poet colleague of the highest calibre who, in late middle-age, rather than concentrating on his forte, climbs up on the bandstand to play the pop songs that he has co-written with friends. While I love and admire him for this, I do insist that pop songs and complex operatic arias are only occasionally of equal aesthetic sophistication. Writers and amateurs (bless them) are permitted to feel otherwise; composers, having learned how the spell is created, are not.

Because instinct and talent will carry you just so far. Even though you don’t have to be able to read music to write a great tune, one of the lessons that Bernstein’s “Simple Song” teaches is that you need more than just a true heart and a clever mind to compose music of a calibre equal to the finest visual and literary art. One needs the craft to conceal one’s craft.

Bernstein, at his best, reminds me that you have to know what you’re talking about before you shake your fist at the Man. He reminds me that, as a composer, one must take the risk of really being oneself, how one must view musical and professional authority figures with a critical gimlet-eye, take the risk of having people whose opinion you admire wonder aloud why you seem to need to be “with it,” so that, if everything aligns, music might just carry one up to that celestial high G-D.

• This essay originally appeared in the Huffington Post on 17 March 2015. To read it there, click here.

• An abridged version of this essay has also been reprinted in the Leonard Bernstein newsletter Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs.

Against Two-Tap Opera

Part One: Play the Clarinet in the Room

The dazzling young opera singer portraying Lizzy, the eponymous writer in my opera A Woman in Morocco, which I was in Louisville at the Actors’ Theatre stage directing for Kentucky Opera, sat down at the portable Remington, fed paper between the rollers, looked up, and asked, “Now what?” I offered motivation. “No,” she laughed. “Not why. How. How do I work it? I’ve never use a manual typewriter before.” 

The opera’s conductor laughed when I told him. “I recall teaching one of my protégés how to use a rotary phone; he kept looking for buttons to push.” “Boy or girl?” I quipped. “Ah, it was not a ‘princess’ phone, if that’s what you mean,” he replied. Now, on our iPhones, smaller than the communicators Shatner and Nimoy once brandished, we can assign Siri not just a gender, but an accent. The telephone in my hotel room blinks, but I don’t bother with it, since who would even think to call the hotel’s switchboard to reach me?

Composer-Director Hagen with the stage manager, lighting designer, and sound designer of A Woman in Morocco during production in Kentucky. (Photo credit: Barbara Grecki)

After six hours working in the darkened Jory Theatre with the three gifted young women lighting, stage managing, and sound designing the opera, we took a break. Asked one, “Do I pronounce your name Hay-gen or Haw-gen?” I laughed, and answered the latter. “I’m sorry,” she was quick to respond. “Not at all,” I said. “Here’s a quiz: how do you pronounce the name of the guy who wrote ‘West Side Story’?” “Easy,” said another, “steen.” “Nope,” I said, “stein.” “No way,” said the third, incredulous. “Way,” I replied. “I remember how much it used to aggravate him that people messed it up.” Silence. Quietly, the stage manager remarked, as though I might perhaps be a reanimated denizen of Jurassic Park, “You knew him?”

In the opera, in order to flesh out the doomed, touching fantasy self-image based on Bette Davis constructed by one of the men in their final love scene together, I had the character quote lines from the final scene in Now, Voyager where Davis and Paul Heinreid say goodbye over cigarettes. I saw it in a grand old movie palace as a teenager and wept not just for the characters in the story but for the actors’ understanding of camp, modulated to the the very highest degree. Directing the scene, I asked the men if they’d ever seen it. No. “Dial it up on YouTube as soon as you can,” I enthused, you’ll love it; it will make this scene totally pop.” I hope that they did. 

“How much history we pre-internet types must seem to carry around in our brains to the Millennials,” observed the conductor. “Now, that which fizzes in social media and art on the surface is enough for them most of the time. If they need to know more, they can Google it.” I volunteered how Maurice Abravanel (whom spellcheck helpfully just corrected to “sabra engel,” by the way) used to stroll around the grounds of Tanglewood, a sort of peripatetic Groves Encyclopedia whom young musicians (including myself) with a passion for oral history plied with questions, which he understood it was his role to answer with dignity and wisdom. 

The other night, I stood in the middle of the empty stage of the darkened theater alone, a cup of coffee in one hand, the vocal score of my opera in the other, and reflected again upon not just how much accelerated the loss of our memories has become as a species, but how much more important the acting out of sophisticated, grown up, adult stories that reflect the multiple layers of meaning, intention, motivation, and memory has become, now that the Internet offers a pat answer for everything within two taps of an index finger. 

Like education, opera is one of the “magic bullets.” How quickly we are no more. Indeed, we are no more more quickly than ever before. The stories we tell, live, replete with mistakes, and wreathed in the inherent risk of live performance, vividly engage peoples’ mature hearts and help to grow the poetic memories of folks starving, if only instinctively, for more than “two tap” answers. 

America now leads the world in the development of opera. Our country needs opera companies more than ever to not simply spend their time rushing through development easily marketable one-offs by rookie composers. We must encourage the composition of subtle, emotionally and psychologically verifiable original stories told with sophisticated music that does more than reveal commonly known operatic tropes, as the saying goes, to our current condition. Otherwise, the Two-tappers win, and we should all hand our clarinets to someone who will play them.

Part Two: That High G

In rehearsal  just before the running of the Kentucky Derby, I realized just how much opera singers and thoroughbred racehorses have in common.

Perched on my director’s stool with the score of my opera before me like an eagle on the ramparts of Tara, a few feet to the right and behind my conductor, I observed as a fistful of young opera singers (accompanied in what is called a “piano dress” rehearsal by a valiant woman attempting to recreate the sound and activity of a full orchestra on an out of tune spinet that belonged in a saloon scene out of an episode of “Gunsmoke”) enacted a scene in which the soprano (lover of the tenor), drugged with kief, is delivered by same tenor into the waiting arms of the villain (the baritone, of course, lover of the tenor).  

The conductor’s baton swished from side to side, up and down, impatiently, like a lion’s tail, pushing the drama forward through complex, churning music counted out in rapidly-shifting meters. The singers, their peripheral vision noting from whence the conductor’s next cue was coming, their ears tracking the ebb and flow of the music, listening to their colleagues’ voices for their entrances, for clues toward line readings (remember, they’re also expected, during ensembles, to make chamber music together), also executing the “blocking” instructions I’d given them that stipulated where they should stand, and what they should do, hurled themselves into the moment. They did this while singing incredibly loudly, requiring the physical stamina of athletes and the calculated madness of stunt pilots. And, yes, they were also acting.

The stage manager, directly to my right, her finger poised over the return key of her laptop, counted down to the pre-recorded electro-acoustic music I had created months before that would begin exactly at the moment the tenor’s knife touched the baritone’s throat, mixing with the voices and orchestra to yield a filmic sound-web of electronic effects, acoustic instruments, and voices.

The other villain of the piece (another baritone) paced back and forth off to the left prior to bursting “onstage” at the appointed moment, working up his energy like a batter just off the baseline preparing to engage the pitcher.

The stage manger’s finger fell, the tenor pressed the knife to the first villain’s throat. The woozy soprano slumped to the bed. The second baritone hit the stage like a prizefighter entering the ring. The conductor’s baton slashed downwards like a machete on a coconut. The piano jangled. Unable to control myself, I whooped for sheer joy.

At that instant, the first baritone, a big, handsome guy aware of his looks who had so far done a perfectly good job during rehearsals, behaved professionally, and received direction civilly, began singing the rush of words that would culminate in a suitably high note to end the scene. As a composer who’d been to this circus a fair number of times before, I’d chosen a note of sufficient altitude to showcase the singer and to close the scene with a bit of the musical “special sauce” that opera lovers attend the opera to enjoy. My eyes narrowed as I prepared to enjoy the moments at I had created.

At that moment, everything shifted, and the hair on my arms stood up. Instead of the sensible note I’d chosen for him, he reached for a high G. And, instead of “cutting off,” or stopping, after the duration I had judiciously crafted for his character, he turned to me, looked me right in the eye, and, with a matador’s gesture of flicking his cape before a bull, he just held the high note. And held it. And held it. Like a horse running for pure joy, he opened up and just Blew us all away. 

Perhaps I was put in mind of it because I was in Louisville on the day before Derby Day, when the women draw from boxes on the top shelves of their closets, or from under their beds, the glorious hats that they don for Churchill Downs. In any event, I suddenly thought of those mornings when, as a young composer at Yaddo thirty years ago, in Saratoga Springs, on property adjacent to the famous Saratoga Race Course there, I’d pack coffee in a thermos, and bagels in a basket, and meet a composer friend named Louise Talma before dawn and walk to the (then) waist high fence that separated Yaddo from the track itself, droop our arms over, and watch as as, the sun rising, the steam rising from their backs, the Great Animals’ trainers led them around the track.

No spectators. No jockeys. No owners. Just the track, the lively morning air, and a palpable sense of wild, free, physical, and pre-spiritual happiness.

I thought then of the morning Louise and I watched as a horse, a Famous Horse with everything to lose, for sheer joy, the cold morning air causing his breath to come out as steam, the sun a sliver of gold behind him, no trainer, saddle, bit, or jockey in sight, sped toward us on the track, as silent and as weightless as an eagle soaring off the ramparts of Tara. He swept by us in near silence, and continued off into the mist. 

I was 22 years old. The world was just opening up before me. That High G.

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Learn more about the opera A Woman in Morocco here.

This essay was syndicated in the Huffington Post, which published it in two parts on 14 May 2015 and 8 May 2015 . You can read it there by clicking here and here.

My Rosebud

This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post, which published it on 1 September 2015. You can read it there by clicking here.

Gwen Hagen, in a publicity still from her years as an actress.

I’m writing a libretto about Orson Welles right now. Searching, as so many have, for Welles’ Rosebud has made me think about my own. So I wrote to a trusted friend and asked him what he thinks has inspired my life’s work. “Loss,” and “endurance,” he replied. “In the true midwestern spirit, living through what comes.” 

Not surprisingly for a composer, sound figures centrally in my memories of childhood. At age eight, during the summer of ‘69, one of the most comforting sounds I knew was the sound of Mother’s manual Royal typewriter. The telegraphic patter, a rush of keystrokes followed by the thud of the space bar; the zestful (or pensive, or trepidatious) winding sound followed by a sharp click as she pulled on the return lever and hauled the carriage back to begin a new line. The whirr (or whine, or snarl) as a sheet of paper was pulled out; the stuttering sound as a new sheet was fed to the beast.

I could tell how her work was going just by the sound of her typing. Even when it was going badly (longer pauses, more cigarettes, the sound of her chair as it screeched when she got up to look out the window) it made me feel safe. She nearly always cooked at the same time. For some reason, I remember the smells mostly of cabbage, roast beef, baking bread and stews. She listened to the Paganini violin concerti, one after the next, or the local classical radio station, WFMR or Frank Sinatra singing Cole Porter. 

I worked hard not to disturb her, but I was only eight, and, if it was summer, I’d inevitably ask her one too many questions, derail her train of thought and pull her out into the sunshine, where she’d set me a task pulling weeds as she tended her magnificent irises. The hotter the sun beat down, the more intense the smell of the cocoa bean shells that we used to pick up in great sacks for free at the Ambrosia Chocolate Company in the Menominee River Valley and spread on the gardens like mulch. Massive broods of cicadas sang, their husks mixing in with the cocoa bean shells when the nymphs burrowed up out of the ground, moulted and reached maturity. 

She was beautiful, and she knew everything. I was her smart son, and I wanted to learn everything. I was adored. I could read just enough to make my way through a few paragraphs now and then. The language was grown up: adult dialogue about being unfaithful, or desperate or simply puzzled. I still recall fragments of stories about handsome young men standing at the screen door, restive wives left on their own with their children and a copy of A Room of One’s Own, moths throwing themselves at flames, and the folly of parenthood. I remember how the stack of manuscript pages grew and disappeared into large manila envelopes, which she sent to magazines in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.

That winter, dread-filled, Mother fielded a series of increasingly upsetting telephone-calls from her beloved brother. A sensitive fine artist and chronic alcoholic, Keith had taken commercial work as art director at the Chicago Tribune. During the last, he confessed that he intended to take his life. 

I was still too young to be left at home alone. I don’t know where my brothers were. There was no time to get a babysitter. My parents took me with them as they proceeded from one bar to the next, one hotel to the next, in downtown Milwaukee, looking for him. In the end, they found him in a room at the Ambassador Hotel on Wisconsin Avenue. He had washed down a lethal dose of chloral hydrate with vodka.

They emerged, holding hands, from the hotel. It was the single time I saw them touch affectionately. Frightened, I curled up in the back seat wearing my brother’s coonskin hat (Daniel Boone was our favorite television show) and pajamas. I watched through the car window as my distraught parents talked with the police. At that moment, I knew that tragedy had, for the moment at least, made me superfluous. Cold. The blood-clot-red rotating lights of the police car. The wondering why an ambulance was required to convey a dead person.

We drove home. In the front seat, in their own world, my parents spoke in subdued, strained voices. The words were indistinct, but the music was like a transmission heard from far off in space — little vocal jabs, sighs, murmurs and upward queries. Pauses, followed by a tumble of syllables met with another silence. The streetlights came on as we drove west towards the suburbs. The javelin-like flares of light hurtled across the hood of the car as, from under a blanket in the back seat, I watched them pass by overhead.

“Let it go,” I heard Father say to Mother. I listened to the “kuddah-CHUNK, kuddah-CHUNK” tattoo the tires made as they passed over seams in the concrete.

“Just let it go.”

Gwen Hagen at the age of 16.

Crackle of gravel in the driveway. The ticks and sighs of the hot engine as it cooled. The slam of the screen door as Father heaved my uncle’s suitcase into the foyer. He went to the kitchen, sat heavily at the table and poured himself the first of the only three drinks I ever saw him pour in our home. (Our second and third were the night Mother died.) I played with the horse track betting stubs that fell out as Mother, tears running down her cheeks, silently unpacked her brother’s clothes for the last time, throwing away, one by one, his suits, still smelling acridly of booze, aftershave, cigarettes and stale sweat.

As the years went by, Mother continued to write, to sculpt, to raise her children, to cope with her husband. Her rejected manuscripts were returned in big manila envelopes. Not one was accepted. In fifteen years, not one. She had stopped saving the rejection slips when I was twelve. 

How quaint, how ridiculous, her return address must have seemed to the clever kids in their early twenties culling submissions to The Saturday Evening Post, Dial, Saturday Review and The New Yorker.

The rejection letters (from the same magazines that I have friends and colleagues published in and working at today) that she used to read, standing in her Midwestern kitchen, surrounded by children, the smell of pot-roast and a self-medicating bipolar husband running to fat, could only have been devastating.

The other day, thinking about Rosebud, I thought not of a burning sled, but of a sheaf of papers being reduced to pulp.

Now, I am a reasonably successful mid-career composer of opera and concert music in a world changing so fast that it would have made Mother’s head spin. She’s long gone, of course. But she’d adore my children; she’d be so proud of them. And of me. She would love my wife, as do I, passionately. I take comfort in that. I do remember, with gratitude, on summer days at our home in Upstate New York, as I compose in the house and my boys, now the age I was then, sing in the backyard with the cicadas as once I did. Does the sound of my composing at the piano, counterpointing their play as once the sound of Mother’s Royal typewriter did mine, move them as once I was moved?

I also remember the summer day in 1976 when I stood in the rain in my swim trunks and watched as Mother dumped everything — her manuscripts, the rejection slips, the pretty letterhead and the Royal typewriter — into a garbage can at the head of our gravel driveway. Last went the clay and the tubes of paint. I stood there, watching the rain make the ink on the pages run, and then turn the paper into pulp.

I think about that rainy day when I sit on a committee judging applications for a prize or commission. How easy it was to dismiss her work, unread; I see it done sometimes by some of the people with whom I serve on panels.

I think about that day when, on occasion, I sit across the table from a smug, careerist, entitled punk with money, a degree and connections.

With fury undiminished by the passage of half a century, I think about Mother walking slowly back into the house and stopping when she saw me moving toward the garbage can, intending I suppose to fish some of the things out.

The fact is, Mother was a good writer. And her work with Mari Sandoz helped her to become an excellent one. But the truth is that that fact may not have been the deciding factor in the end.

“Leave it,” she commanded, her voice tired, and remote. “Let it go.” Rain fell straight down.

“Just let it go.”

###

Gwen Hagen with her brother Keith in Milwaukee.

Despite the fact that three act structures are out of fashion these days, my second act—my current career as a composer and my life as a man and father—clearly represents my mother’s third, and final act. 

The morning in 1976 after she dumped her dreams of being a fine artist (in the form of her Royal typewriter, art supplies, and manuscripts) in the garbage was a hell of a dramatic act break—a tableaux in which a young mother commanded the son looking on—in whose arms she would in six short years die—to “let it go” as the rain fell straight down and her discarded manuscripts were reduced to pulp.

What became, then, of Gwen Hagen, the “Rosebud” of my article exploring why I compose music, and why the career I have as a composer of concert music and opera has assumed the shape that it does?

Well, the next day she took a job cleaning toilets and changing bedding at a Ramada Inn hotel managed by her brother Garth.

In “My Lost City,” F. Scott Fitzgerald observed that we all live suspended between past and present, and carry the burdens of both. Proust reminds us that when we think we recognize something essential in someone we are, in fact, reaffirming our primal impression of them—an ultimately self-serving exercise that transforms them, in memory, into the person we need them to have been. Accordingly, when I limn the astonishingly quick climb up the “Mad Men” ladder Mother made during her second act, it is not from the point of view of the child I was then but of the man I’ve become. 

In truth, money forced Mother to get a job just as it compelled her sensitive visual artist brother to set aside his artistic aspirations to draw women in their underwear as art director for the Chicago Tribune. 

Father had left the service and earned a law degree, while fiercely courting Mother. Newly-minted a member of the bar, he had hit the lecture circuit for the American Bar Association, in Mother’s words, “part Atticus Finch, part Clarence Darrow,” admonishing nascent lawyers to remember their ethical responsibilities. He had also hit the bottle. 

When he left the Bar Association and entered private practice, our comfortable upper middle class lifestyle collapsed. Although my brothers and I were able to continue to attend the superb Elmbrook schools in which my folks had moved west of Milwaukee to enable us to enroll, our Frank Lloyd Wright-style modernist cedar home, situated at the end of a cul-de-sac (and smack-dab in the middle of a flood plain), became a financial Albatross around my parents’ necks. The dishing of Mother’s artistic ambitions coincided with Father’s return home from Chicago (where he had for years been living weekdays) full time. His sons, whom he disciplined brutally, didn’t like him much. 

After a few months changing linens, Mother landed a job at an advertising agency; she began a six-year hopscotch from one employer to another—paste-up artist to copywriter, layout designer to graphic artist, account manager to art director. In time, she landed a job as Art Director at a glossy regional ad-driven magazine called Exclusively Yours.

With Mother in the financial driver’s seat, my brothers and I watched Father gradually corroded by a toxic stew of narcissistic frustration and alcohol. The booze robbed him of moral authority with his children; our increasing size took domination through physical intimidation off the table. We were lost to him. Mother had long been the only reason any of us interacted: she became the only reason we ever interacted at all with Father, whose loopy orbit, as far as we were concerned, was taking him out beyond Pluto. 

She was by all accounts great at an incredibly stressful job. She took immense satisfaction in her career. That doesn’t change the fact that, like many children of folks who worked in advertising during the 60s-70s, I find the television series “Mad Men” excruciating to watch. It is, of course, dead spot on. If Father’s drug of choice was alcohol, hers was, alas, physician-prescribed Valium. That, and three packs of Pall Mall cigarettes a day at the office. 

Like my brothers, I encouraged Mother to divorce Father. Unfortunately, Wisconsin law at that time made it next to impossible for her to extricate herself financially from him. She was trapped. 

I am grateful to her for insisting, whether it was true or not, that she had not remained with Father during my high school years for my sake. I am aware of how fortunate I am to have come to know her for the wise, wry, brilliant woman she was. During those years, she and a treasured High School teacher named Diane Doerfler together molded me in such a way that, to this day, not only do I adhere strictly to the way of “the examined life,” but I still collaborate far more easily with powerful women than with powerful men.

With my mother and nephew Ryan, the morning of the day she died.

Ned Rorem invited me to study with him at the Curtis Institute of Music. I was, for better or worse, securely launched on the coast as a serious composer. Mother engaged a lawyer and prepared at last to leave Father. She even discussed with Ned plans to move to Paris and to begin painting and writing again—a third act!

A month later, five years after the Royal typewriter and the manuscripts went into the garbage, she was diagnosed with lung cancer. A year later, in 1982, she died in my arms. The opera composer in me recognizes that as being one hell of a second act curtain.

Too Late to Take the Fifth

I’m guilty. I freely admit it. I still believe in orchestras and composing symphonies. As I write this, I’m flying to Phoenix to hear Michael Christie conduct a young soprano named Victoria Vargas and the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra in the debut of my Symphony No. 5.

What in the world is a symphony, anyway? Virgil Thomson, listening to my first symphony, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1991, told me that a symphony is whatever the composer says it is. My mentor David Diamond, whose tenth symphony I likened to “a massive tombstone suspended over the audience” in a review for Ear Magazine (He was far from amused; I was very young.), called my second symphony, premiered by the Oakland Symphony in 1993, “a brilliant, idealistic hot mess.” (He was right: it was an enormous aesthetic belly flop — but, oh, the splash it made!) My third, premiered in 1998 by the Wisconsin Philharmonic, as far as Ned Rorem was concerned, finally “got it right — but it’s no Aaron (Copland, not Kernis), Schuman (Bill, not Robert), or Harris third.” (One reason composers avoid using the term “symphony” is that critics still prostrating themselves before the classics come loaded for bear and who needs the hassle?) I was busy writing operas for the next decade. My fourth was premiered in 2009 by the Albany Symphony and included (as if only to make it that much more unlikely to ever be repeated) a huge chorus. The conductor, during a preconcert talk we gave together, wondered aloud “why composers bother to write symphonies anymore.” 

Why bother? Because, for better or worse, the symphony remains the greatest technical and aesthetic challenge and resulting statement that a serious composer can attempt outside of opera — and I’ve already written nine of those. 

Virgil’s quip notwithstanding, symphonies do tend to have a few things in common besides their composers’ lofty ambitions. Because symphonies tend to be long, they require of the composer a command of large-scale musical structure — form remains the great fascination of all mature artists. The moniker itself invites comparisons with the great symphonic works of the past and accepts the proposition that a serious composer is more than just a “visionary” unknowingly reinventing the wheel, but rather part of a continuum much larger than they, just as a parent is. In short, writing a symphony means that you still believe in them. And I do. 

The big, quasi-nationalistic, possibly “preposterously public” American symphonies of the 40s, written when such “Big Statements” were still “okay,” remain our country’s noblest contribution to the west’s musical repertoire, despite the long aria of denigration sung by the generation of modernists writing huge chamber works that followed. That generation, by and large, avoided writing them. Copland’s “uncommon man,” which he folded into his third symphony, and which he never intended in a gender-specific way, sings out with undiminished brilliance, the pilot fish commentaries upon it that have followed notwithstanding. 

“Why did you write this?” asked Leonard Bernstein when I played him a recording of the last movement of my second. “Because if I’m gonna fail, I want to fail big,” I responded. “Good man,” he said. I was in my 20s then, and the stakes then were so much smaller. I’m still amazed that so many composers and conductors think that it is “contemporary” to put wrong notes in or reckon that the inability to modulate from one key to another suavely constitutes anything but a musical handicap. 

Claude Debussy avoided the issue by calling his symphony “La Mer.” David Diamond, like Gustav Mahler before him, dreaded coming to the point at which he had to decide whether to exceed Beethoven’s nine with his own tenth. Composers can be pretty crafty in their avoidance: sometimes they sidestep a tricky number (not to mention potentially unflattering comparisons) by calling their new symphony “Das Lied von der Erde,” for example, or — like Rorem and Schuman — “String Symphony.” Bernstein, Copland and Rorem titled three symphonies by number each. In any event, Roy Harris wrote 18; Shostakovich 15; Vincent Persichetti and Peter Mennin composed nine. Brahms could not bring himself to exceed four. God bless Alan Hovhaness and his 67 (or maybe 73!). 

Victoria Vargas,  Michael Christie, and Hagen during rehearsals of Symphony No. 5.

There are many kinds of hubris to which a serious, ambitious composer can succumb. One is thinking that one has written a great opera the first time out. Another is undertaking the writing of a fifth symphony, knowing in your bones that Beethoven’s hangs, at once weightless and all-heavy, over you like an enormous tombstone. 

I recently read this truism, attributed to Curtis Institute of Music opera department head Mikael Eliasen: “I’m so often frustrated with contemporary music. How can one truly communicate through the arts after the devastation of the Second World War?” Re-creators ask this question. It made me recall that Witold Lutoslawski posed virtually the same question to me during a lesson in Evian in 1983 while looking through one of my pieces. Then, he closed the music, looked me in the eye and answered his own question: “The answer is to create works of art. Create. Or the bad guys win.”

That’s why I’m on a plane to Phoenix. I still believe in symphonies, the repertoire, the arc of history and the Big Statement. Guilty as charged. Too late to take the Fifth.

 This essay is reprinted from the Huffington Post, which published it on 8 October 2015. You can read it there by clicking here.

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The entire article can be read by clicking here.