Daron Hagen

See also: Category:Operas by Daron Hagen

Daron Hagen in 2006.

Daron Aric Hagen (pronounced /ˈhɑːɡən/ hah-gən^[1] born November 4, 1961 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin), is an American composer, conductor, pianist, educator, librettist, and stage director of contemporary classical music and opera.

Biography

Early life and education

Daron Hagen grew up in New Berlin, a suburb west of Milwaukee. His social circle consisted primarily of children his own age from the village of Elm Grove and Brookfield. Hagen was the youngest of the three sons of Gwen Hagen, a visual artist, writer and advertising executive who studied creative writing with Mari Sandoz and enjoyed a successful advertising career as Creative Director of Exclusively Yours Magazine and Earl Hagen (an attorney). Hagen began composing prolifically in 1974, when his older brother gave him a recording and score of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd. Two years later, at the age of fifteen, he conducted the premiere of his first orchestral work,^[2] a recording and score of which came to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who enthusiastically urged Hagen to attend Juilliard to study with David Diamond. He took composition, piano, and conducting lessons at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music while attending Brookfield Central High School.

After two years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his teachers included Catherine Comet (conducting), Les Thimmig and Homer Lambrecht (composition), followed by three years of study with Ned Rorem (with whom he developed a lifelong friendship)^[3][4] at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Hagen moved to New York City in 1984 to complete his formal education as a student at Juilliard,^[5] studying first for two years with Diamond, then for a semester each with Joseph Schwantner and Bernard Rands. After graduating, Hagen summered as a Tanglewood composition fellow before briefly living abroad, first at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and then at the Rockefeller Foundation's Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy, where he has twice been a guest. Between 1984 and 1998 Hagen was also a frequent guest at the MacDowell Colony. (For over twenty-five years, Hagen has also been a frequent resident artist at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.) When he returned to the United States, Hagen studied privately with Bernstein,^[6] whose guidance during the composition of Hagen's Shining Brow (1992) — the opera that launched Hagen's career internationally^{[7][8][9][10]} — prompted him to dedicate the score to Bernstein’s memory.^[11]

Educator and arts advocate

Hagen served in 2007 as composer in residence at the Music Conservatory of the Chicago College of Performing Arts. He has served as the Franz Lehár Composer in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh (2007), twice as Composer in Residence for the Princeton University Atelier (1998, 2005); as Artist in Residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (2000–2002); Sigma Chi-William P. Huffman Composer in Residence at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio (1999–2000); Artist in Residence at Baylor University, Waco, Texas (1998–1999); on the musical studies faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music (1996–1998); as an Associate Professor at Bard College (1988–1997); as a Visiting Professor at the City College of New York (1997, 1993–1994); and as a Lecturer in Music at New York University (1988–1990).^[12]

As Artistic Director of the Perpetuum Mobile Concerts (1982–87) he premiered compositions by over a hundred American composers on concerts produced in Philadelphia and New York.^[13] Hagen served as President of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation (2004–07) in New York City, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging the performance and creation of opera and art song; he is a trustee of the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera and was elected a Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo in 2006.^[14] Hagen has been a featured composer at the Tanglewood, Wintergreen, and Aspen music festivals and since 2008 has served as artistic director and head of faculty for the Seasons Fall Music Festival^[15] in Yakima, Washington.

Hagen is married to composer, vocalist, and visual artist Gilda Lyons. He has two children—Atticus and Seamus—and has lived in New York City since 1984.

Musical Style

Hagen's music is essentially tonal, though serial, pitch class, and octatonic procedures are customarily utilized for psychologically and emotionally fraught passages. Polytonality figures prominently in the major operas as a mechanism for manifesting the interaction between characters. His music is particularly noted for its lyricism, emotional accessibility, and elegant craftsmanship.

Hagen, considered by some "the finest American composer of vocal music in his generation,"^[16] has remarked, "I love voices and I like singers, and along with the intersection of loving music and words and singers, I adore the process of composing and going through the production of musical theater. There is the communion of people coming together to commit to undertaking a work of art that is larger than any of us."^[17] "Using his gift for composing vocal lines, [Hagen] produces songs that flow lyrically and illuminate texts with unerring musical and dramatic aim. His scores are full of extensive markings, requiring singers to use variety of tone color to achieve the emotions inherent in the texts."^[18]

His operas embrace a particularly broad stylistic spectrum. In Shining Brow "Hagen's baseline idiom," writes Tom Strini, "seems to be modernist-expressionist, tonal but freely dissonant. He sets all sorts of influences, from barbershop to ticky-tick dance music against that idiom, to underscore character and crystallize the period (1903-'14)."^[19] In Vera of Las Vegas, Hagen, writes Robert Thicknesse, "blends idioms — neo-Gershwin, jazz, soft rock, Broadway — with soaring melodies that send the characters looping off in arias of self-revelation."^[20] "Bandanna is neither fish nor fowl — as fierce as verismo but wrought with infinite care; a melding of church and cantina and Oxonian declamation," writes Tim Page.^[21] Catherine Parsonage expands upon this assessment: "[it] is wholly convincing as a modern opera, ranging stylistically from the music theatre of Gershwin, Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, to traditional mariachi music and contemporary opera of Benjamin Britten. Hagen, who served his apprenticeship on Broadway, acknowledges that holistically the piece falls between opera and musical theatre. 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."^[22]

Musical Works

See also: List of compositions by Daron Hagen

His first composition to attract wide attention was Prayer for Peace,^[23] premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra (1981), garnering him the distinction of being the youngest composer since Samuel Barber to be premiered by that orchestra;^[24] the New York Philharmonic commissioned Philharmonia for its 150th anniversary (1990);^[25] the University of Wisconsin Madison School of Music commissioned Concerto for Brass Quintet for its 100th anniversary (1995);^[26] the Curtis Institute commissioned Much Ado for its 75th anniversary (2000). Hagen's commissions from major orchestras and performers between 1981 and 2008 included orchestral works, four symphonies, seven concertos (for Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Sharon Robinson, Jeffrey Khaner, and Sara Sant'Ambrogio, among others), several massive works for chorus and orchestra, two dozen choral works (including one for the Kings Singers), ballet scores, concert overtures, showpieces, two brass quintets, four piano trios, a string quartet, an oboe quintet, a duo for violin and cello, solo works for piano, organ, violin, viola, and cello, and seventeen published cycles of art songs. In 1990 Hagen began a creative collaboration with the Irish poet Paul Muldoon that resulted in four major operas: Shining Brow (1992), Vera of Las Vegas (1996), Bandanna (1998), and The Antient Concert (2005). "[Writing libretti for Hagen's operas gave] a writer who has had to weather accusations of cerebral detachment and heartlessness the opportunity to indulge in frank emotionalism," writes David Wheatley.^[27] Libretti for Hagen operas have also been written by Barbara Grecki (New York Stories, 2008), J.D. McClatchy (Little Nemo in Slumberland, 2010), and Gardner McFall (Amelia, 2010). He has also written his own libretti.^[28]

Critical reception

Hagen's most recent opera, entitled Amelia for Seattle Opera^[29] starring Nathan Gunn, Kate Lindsey, Jane Eaglen, and William Burden, on a libretto by Gardner McFall and story by Stephen Wadsworth, premiered in May 2010 to glowing reviews in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Seattle Times, among others. Heidi Waleson in the Wall Street Journal described the work as "both highly original and gripping. ... Amelia is a modern opera with traditional values ... Mr. Hagen's restless, questioning music never loses its heart."^[30] Ivan Katz, in the Huffington Post, wrote "Hagen's score is well-composed and, in many respects, a work of genius. He tends to write in a more facile manner for the women, but his writing for the men (especially tenor William Burden) is complex and highly effective."^[31] The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation issued a grant of $500,000 in 2009 to underwrite the first two revivals of the world premiere production.^[32]

Hagen's music has received the Columbia University Joseph H. Bearns Prize, the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Barlow Endowment commission and prize, three prizes from the Broadcast Music Incorporated Foundation and three Morton Gould Young Composer Prizes from ASCAP, as well as the ASCAP Foundation Rudolf Nissim Prize for Orchestral Music, Opera America's Next Stage Award, a production grant from the Readers Digest Opera for a New America Project (1997), a production grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (2005), and the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award for orchestral music. Performances by hundreds of orchestras and soloists in the United States, as well as an increasing number of revivals internationally of his operas have cemented Hagen's status as one of America's most respected and sought-after composers. "To say that he is a remarkable musician," writes Ned Rorem, "is to underrate him. Daron is music."^[3]

Recordings

Recordings of Hagen works may be found on the Albany Records, Arsis, Sierra, TNC, Mark, Naxos Records, and CRI labels, among others. His music was published exclusively by EC Schirmer in Boston (1982–90); and then by Carl Fischer Music in New York (1990–2006); in 2007 began self-publishing under the imprint Burning Sled.

References

• Jens Staubrand: Kierkegaard International Bibliography Music Works and Plays, Copenhagen 2009. In English and Danish. ISBN 978-87-92510-05-1, Including Daron Hagen's LORD, GOD IN HEAVEN from LITTLE PRAYERS, 1994
• Paul Kreider 1999. Art songs of Daron Hagen: lyrical dramaticism and simplicity with an interpretive guide to rittenhouse songs and resuming green. DMA diss., University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona.
• Edwin Powell 2002. Bandanna, an opera by Daron Aric Hagen with libretto by Paul Muldoon commissioned by the College Band Directors National Association: the origins of an artwork with a glimpse at its musical character development. DMA diss., Baylor University, Waco, Texas.
• Jane McCalla Redding 2002. An introduction to American song composer Daron Aric Hagen (b. 1961) and his miniature folk opera: dear youth. DMA diss., Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
• Sarah Elizabeth Snydacker 2011.The new American song: A catalog of published songs by 25 living American composers. Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, Des Moines, Iowa.

Notes

1. ^ Clare, John (2010) (video recording Hagen's pronunciation of his own name in the course of the interview.), Interview with Daron Hagen, San Antonio: Texas Public Radio 
2. ^ Joslyn, Jay (1978), "Young Composer Shows Promise", The Milwaukee Sentinal (1/5/78) 
3. ^ ^{a b} Rorem, Ned (1993), "Learning with Daron", Opera News (April 10): 29–30 
4. ^ Rorem, Ned, The Nantucket Diary, San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, p. 329-603, ISBN 0865472599 
5. ^ Olmstead, Andrea, Juilliard: A History, Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, p. 251, ISBN 978-0-252-02487-0 
6. ^ Secrest, Meryl, Leonard Bernstein, a Life, New York, NY: Knopf, p. 386-87, ISBN 0679407316 
7. ^ Smith, Patrick (1993), "The Fall of Taliesin", The Times Literary Supplementl (5/14/93) 
8. ^ Kerner, Leighton (1993), "The Wright Stuff", The Village Voice (5/5/93) 
9. ^ Oestereich, James. "Review/Music: Shining Brow; Frank Lloyd Wright Joins Opera's Pantheon", The New York Times. retrieved 2 August 2008.
10. ^ Grout, Donald, A Short History of Opera, Fourth Edition, New York, NY: Columbia University Press, p. 767, ISBN 0231119585 
11. ^ Hagen, Daron, Shining Brow (score), Boston, MA: E. C. Schirmer Publishing Company, p. iv, ISBN 0-911318-20-8 
12. ^ Press Kit at DaronHagen.com
13. ^ Webster, Daniel (1985), "3 Musicians Who Are On the Move", The Philadelphia Inquirer (2/16/85): D01 
14. ^ Passaro, Vince (2006), "Yaddo Elects Librarian Susan Brynteson and Composer Daron Hagen Lifetime Members", Press Release (September 25), http://www.yaddo.org/yaddo/BryntesonHagen.shtml 
15. ^ Seasons Music Festival Academy Website, retrieved 25 February 2010.
16. ^ Platt, Russell (1998), "Artful Simplicity: the Art Songs of Daron Hagen", NATS Journal of Singing 55 (1): 3–11 
17. ^ Reel, James (1999), "A Conversation with Composer Daron Hagen", Fanfare Magazine (September/October): 128–133 
18. ^ Kimball, Carol (2006), Song, Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, pp. 347, ISBN 1-4234-1280-X, OCLC 71369185 225969165 71369185 
19. ^ Strini, Tom (22 April 1993), "Frank Lloyd Wright opera powerful, touching", The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_multi=MWSB 
20. ^ Thicknesse, Robert. "Vera of Las Vegas", The Times. retrieved 7 September 2008.
21. ^ Page, Tim; Albany, N. Y. Albany Records (2003), Bandanna Liner Notes, http://www.albanyrecords.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=AR&Product_Code=TROY849-50 
22. ^ Parsonage, Catherine (2006), "Hagen's Bandanna and the Accessibility of Opera", Winds Music Magazine (May): 12–16 
23. ^ Chute, James (2001), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 1-56159-239-0 
24. ^ Kunick, Judith Karp, Ricardo Muti: Twenty Years in Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 53, ISBN 0812214455 
25. ^ Holland, Bernard. "Classical Music in Review", The New York Times. retrieved 2 August 2008.
26. ^ Description of the UW-Madison School of Music 100th Anniversary Commissioning Project at the University of Wisconsin Press Website, retrieved 2 November 2011.
27. ^ Wheatley, David, "All Art is a Collaboration: Paul Muldoon as Librettist", Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, p. 152, ISBN 0853238685 
28. ^ Biography at Daron Hagen's official website, retrieved 2 November 2011.
29. ^ Cullen, Hilda (2007), "Seattle Opera Commissions New Opera", Press Release (March 26), http://www.seattleopera.org/_downloads/press/releases/Amelia.pdf 
30. ^ Waleson, Heidi (2010-05-10). "On So Many Levels, a Success". Wall Street Journal. 
31. ^ Katz, Ivan (2010), "World Premiere of Daron Hagen's opera Amelia", Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ivan-katz-/world-premiere-of-daron-h_b_572396.html, retrieved 2010-06-26 
32. ^ Kushner, Daniel J.,Seattle Opera Receives $500K to Develop New Hagen Opera Amelia, NewMusicBox, 7 July 2009

External links

Biography

• Official Biography at Daron Hagen Website
• Allmusic Biography

Interviews

• 2010 Composing Thoughts Interview with John Clare for Texas Public Radio discussing Amelia, Piano Trios, and Violin Concerto
• 2009 Naxos Podcast interview about Shining Brow
• Seattle Opera's Amelia preview

Publishers

• E.C. Schirmer Publishing, Boston, Massachusetts — for works composed prior to 1990.
• Carl Fischer LLC, New York, New York — for works composed 1990-2006.
• Burning Sled Music, New York, New York — for works composed after 2006.

Writing

• Daron Hagen's Blog Memoir

Listening

• Audio Samples of Hagen's music
• Performances of Hagen works on Instantencore

Persondata
Name	Hagen, Daron
Alternative names
Short description	Composer, conductor, pianist, librettist, stage director
Date of birth	November 4, 1961
Place of birth	Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Date of death
Place of death