Daron Hagen

Daron Aric Hagen (born November 4, 1961, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is an American composer of contemporary classical music and opera.

The youngest of the three sons of Gwen Hagen (a visual artist, writer and advertising executive who studied with Mari Sandoz) 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, 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 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, 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. When he returned to the United States, Hagen studied privately with Bernstein, whose guidance during the composition of Hagen's Shining Brow (1992)^[1] — the opera that launched Hagen's career internationally — prompted him to dedicate the score to Bernstein’s memory.

His first composition to attract wide attention was Prayer for Peace, premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra (1981)^[2]; the New York Philharmonic commissioned Philharmonia for its 150th anniversary (1990) ^[3]; the University of Wisconsin Madison School of Music commissioned Concerto for Brass Quintet for its 100th anniversary (1995); 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, Michael Ludwig, 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).^[4]

Hagen is currently at work on a new opera entitled Amelia for the Seattle Opera^[5], a violin concerto for Michael Ludwig and the Buffalo Philharmonic, and a fourth (choral) symphony for the Albany Symphony Orchestra. 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. Also active as a collaborative pianist, conductor, and stage director, Hagen has lived in New York City since 1984.

An educator and advocate of young composers, he 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). 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.^[6] 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 art song; he is a member of the board of directors of the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera and was elected a Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo in 2006^[7].

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,"^[8] 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."^[9] "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."^[10]

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)."Cite error: The <ref> tag has too many names (see the help page). 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."^[11] "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.^[12] 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 music 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."^[13]

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 Foundation commission and prize, multiple prizes from the Broadcast Music Incorporated and ASCAP Foundations including the ASCAP-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."^[14]

• List of compositions by Daron Hagen

• 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.

• Daron Hagen Website
• Daron Hagen's Blog Memoir
• 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.
• Daron Hagen at allmusic
• Worldcat listings of published works by Daron Hagen
• Seattle Opera's Amelia Opera Web Page
• Naxos interview about Shining Brow with Hagen and Muldoon

• Audio Samples of Hagen's music