Pre-concert Talk at 7:00
The Philadelphia world premiere is followed by the Brooklyn premiere on June 5, 2020.
This new concert-length song cycle features the verse of poets that for Hagen have fueled a lifetime of song composition. Co-commissioned by Lyric Fest and The Brooklyn Art Song Society, the new work is scored for vocal sextet in various solos and ensemble movements, accompanied by piano four hands. With sopranos Justine Aronson and Gilda Lyons, mezzo-sopranos Elisa Sutherland and Meg Bragle, tenor James Reese, baritone Steven Eddy, and pianists Laura Ward and Michael Brofman.
PROGRAM NOTE
Nearing the age of sixty, I’ve been taking stock of how I began composing, what I’ve done, where I am, and whether there is somewhere still for me to go. Since the age of fourteen, when I fell in love with the inextricable union of words and music through performing Norman Dello Joio’s art song “There is a Lady Sweet and Kind” with my terrifying and inspiring accompanist and teacher Wallace Tomcheck, I’ve been steadily at it. By the age of forty I’d penned about four hundred art songs, having begun by drawing texts from an anthology of English and American poetry edited by Louis Untermeyer that I still occasionally turn to to this day, despite having enjoyed the enormous privilege of having poetry written expressly for me to set by collaborators from Paul Muldoon to Gore Vidal, from Mark Campbell to J.D. McClatchy and Gardner McFall.
Decades ago I shed the orthodoxies that shaped my first musical responses to words. I reach now without limitation toward whatever makes me hear music and helps to tell a story that connects. As I grow older, the line between what constitutes art song and lyric theater has all but disappeared, to the extent that my multi-media opera Orson Rehearsed, a 70-minute journey through Orson Welles’ mind during the last moments of his life, could be a movie, a stage spectacle, a staged song cycle, a website, or … simply a magic trick. In the end—after writing a dozen operas and as many big song cycles—it seems to me that the narrative that a composer contrives when choosing to sequence poems by various poets into a cycle is pretty much the same as the process of writing a treatment for an opera without sword fights and the need to show rather than tell.
The cycle was first performed November 4, 2019 at Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia, by Justine Aronson and Gilda Lyons, sopranos; Elisa Sutherland and Meg Bragle, mezzo-sopranos; James Reese, tenor; Steven Eddy, baritone; Michael Brofman, Laura Ward, piano. Co-commissioned by the Brooklyn Art Song Society and Philadelphia’s Lyric Fest to provide an evening-long work for six singers and piano four hands that will inevitably be perceived as a summation of what I am about as a serious vocal composer, I’m skeptical about offering a “play by play” in the form of how I collected the poems and what sort of psychological narrative I’ve constructed.
I offer instead that The Art of Song is sort of a sixty minute opera in four acts for dozens of characters set in lots of locales and eras. Part One struggles with the difference between “speaking out” and politics, and the intersection between citizenship and art in pursuit of peace between people; Part Two seeks inner peace through mindfulness and love; Part Three essays aloneness and death; Part Four centers on the everyday human struggle to find rebirth in the processing of dreams lost, regained, and treasured.
—Daron Hagen, August 2019