Composer Daron Hagen’s memoir, Duet with the Past, was released this spring. A rare look at the depth and breadth of an artist’s experience, we had a chance to ask the author a few questions and get an understanding of how the book came to be.
In just the first few pages of the book, the stories you’re sharing are immediately intensely personal. Will people who know you—colleagues, peers, friends, family—find this surprising, or is this your m.o. in everyday life?
As a protege of Ned Rorem’s during the 80s, and then, as his friend from the 90s-onward, I observed with keen interest the interplay between “public” and “private” Ned: as a public intellectual of a variety that is now largely lost in American culture, he published “intimate” (some would say naughty) diaries that readers familiar with the form recognized as highly-stylized accounts of his private life, and not “actual” truth. By the end of his long career as an essayist and diarist, his last volume of diaries was titled, “Lies.” Now, that, if you deconstruct it, is a pretty interesting title for a work in a subjective literary genre. Either he was throwing in the towel, or throwing down the gauntlet—who knows?
All that is to provide context to this: I am, and always have been, an intensely private person and cope, as so many people do, with intense social anxiety. I am shy. The challenge is to overcome the shyness to get to one’s own truth, and, after getting to that, continue reaching. When I teach, I try to help my pupils get to their own truth (which of course is always changing for them): often it takes them a long, long time to get other peoples’ voices—louder voices, more appealingly-packaged “truths”—out of their heads. In short, I don’t think that the tone, language, or “voice” of the book will surprise anyone who knows me. It is, for better or worse, written in my voice.
You mention your family of origin’s Lutheran background and that you attend many Sundays. That was another surprise since we know you as more of a concert composer, and yet faith is ostensibly a big part of your life. What do you make of that? Do you see a distinction between sacred and secular music, or does it all occupy the same plane?
We identified as Lutherans when I was a kid; but my family didn’t attend church steadily. I attended a Lutheran mission church during my senior year of high school because my girlfriend’s parents were devout. My wife was brought up Catholic. When we went to the Catholic Church to ask them to marry us, I was told that the fact that I was divorced would require all sorts of institutional mumbo-jumbo, so two newly-minted Episcopalians were struck when we were married in our home church, Church of the Messiah, in Rhinebeck, New York. While my schedule doesn’t allow me to attend every Sunday, I am fairly regular in my attendance, and I find inspiration in the liturgy, the service, the Process of churchgoing. I’ve never seen any distinction whatsoever between sacred and so-called secular music; music of every sort speaks to the soul—what could be more sacred than that?
What prompted you or how did you make the decision to write a book? How was the experience of writing a memoir different than writing music? How was it the same?
I wrote the book primarily to leave a record of who I thought I was, and what I thought about, for my sons who will—or will not—read it when they get older. They are being, as I was, brought up to venerate and devour books, so I’m pretty certain they’ll read it. I have always found the process of writing prose exactly the same as writing music. I guess that it is just the way I think.
You write about lessons with Ned Rorem and the complete preparedness he required of a student (the passage where you said something to the effect that you had better have everything notated as perfectly as possible comes to mind). Is this something you incorporate and expect in your own teaching? What other strains from previous teachers do you readily see in your own teaching and other artistic work?
Bernard Jacobson, in his superb Foreword to the book, compares and contrasts my intent and impact with Ned’s. I shared my prose with Ned , but, really, our letters were the way that we wrote about writing to one another—as any people who love writing can’t help but do when they correspond. The love of writing I got from my mother, and from my high school writing teacher, Diane C. Doerfler—both forever in my heart. Every composition teacher teaches differently. The way I teach has almost nothing to do with the way I was taught by Ned, and Diamond, and Lenny. I sometimes hear myself sounding a little like Lukas Foss, but that’s a good thing.
As for “strains” —or “influences”— I realized back in the early 80s that I needed to write what I wanted to hear—that it wasn’t in me to package myself into some “Transatlantic” accent suitable for academic and high-end symphonic audiences. Ironically, this made me an outsider, the way that Lukas Foss’ stylistic restlessness made him one. Critics (and colleagues) spend a lot of time trying to track influences from one artist to another: this is a waste of time and actually quite hurtful, because Excellent Work is regularly being sidelined and dismissed by clever careerists in positions of power under the guise of saying that the work is “second-hand” or “derivative.” There’s nothing new under the sun, but the Process of making new things is an honorable and noble one. The rest is politics, not Art.
What did you learn about yourself, particularly as a composer, through writing this book?
I never thought life as an artist was about external validation, necessarily, or fame, or power; but it took a long time, and decades of careful observation of my sister and brother artists (as well as myself) to understand in my bones that “Art will take care of itself. Critics and colleagues will carp. Life will go on. One’s ‘best’ work will be met with skepticism and incomprehension. So relax: concentrate on people and process.” That’s in the book!
What was the process of writing the book like?
I diarized obsessively from 1979-2009. I stopped diarizing when my first son was born a decade ago, and work on the book took the place of keeping a diary. It was written on legal pads on airplanes, in hotel rooms, and at artist colonies, and I flight-tested some of the longer set-pieces on my website blog and during a stint writing for the Huffington Post.
Let’s say someone is getting ready to read the book—they know your name but maybe aren’t as familiar with your work. Do you recommend they start with the book or explore your music first? Do you have a shortlist of pieces to listen to that would add context and make reading the book a more complete experience?
I wish there had been a book like mine out there when I was a composer in my late teens. Part of the function of it is to provide what’s now called “intellectual history” at a time when young American composers often don’t know what they don’t know and so don’t care that they don’t know. Always there is the temptation—particularly now—to proclaim the Year One. This is because it is easier to do that then it is to figure out what one’s progenitors did that might—gasp—actually have been helpful or insightful. In my teens, the enormity of what I didn’t know about music and musicians and the life I was contemplating hit me with the force of a hammer. Artists reinvent the wheel. Really understanding that is a good beginning. One reader in Germany told me that it was taking him a long time to read my book because every time I mentioned a book, an author, a painter, or a piece of music he didn’t know, he set my book aside to read the other book or listen to the piece. He’s my dream reader.
Critically-acclaimed composer, operatic polymath, and writer Daron Hagen (b. 1961) is the creator of five symphonies, a dozen concertos, 13 operas, reams of chamber music and more than 350 art songs. “A composer born to write operas” (Chicago Tribune) whose music is “dazzling, unsettling, exuberant, and heroic” (The New Yorker), “Hagen’s music represents a considerable artistic achievement of uncompromising seriousness” (Times Literary Supplement). His “theatrical audacity,” and “gift for big, sweeping tunes” (New York Times) underpin work that “is both highly original and gripping; restless, questioning music that never loses its heart.” (Opera Now Magazine). Opera News describes his opera Amelia as “one of the 20 best operas of the 21st century;” NATS Journal of Singing calls him “the finest American composer of vocal music in his generation.” “To say that Daron Hagen is a remarkable musician is to underrate him. Daron is music,” wrote Ned Rorem in Opera News. His “ruthlessly honest and beautifully written” memoir, Duet With the Past (McFarland, April 2019) “takes him from his haunted childhood to the upper echelons of musical life in New York and Europe” (Tim Page).
Born in Wisconsin, Hagen studied composition with Ned Rorem at the Curtis Institute and David Diamond at the Juilliard School, and then worked privately with Lukas Foss and Leonard Bernstein. During the 90s, he worked as a copyist and editor for numerous concert composers and Broadway shows, including Elliot Carter, Virgil Thomson, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Disney; he also taught for a decade at Bard College, and served on the faculties of the Curtis Institute, New York University, and the Princeton Atelier, among others. He now divides his time between composing, directing, and writing, co-chairs the composition program at the Wintergreen Music Festival, and serves as a member of the Artist Faculty at the Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.
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