Daron Aric Hagen ( ; born November 4, 1961) is an American composer, writer, and filmmaker.
Biography
Early life Daron Hagen was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and grew up in New Berlin, a suburb west of Milwaukee. 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 MagazineExclusively Yours and Earl Hagen (an attorney). Hagen began composing prolifically in 1974, when his older brother Kevin 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.Yale University Oral History of American Music Interview . Retrieved December 11, 2013. He studied piano with Adam Klescewski, and studied composition, piano, and conducting at the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music (where his teachers included Duane Dishaw and Judy Kramer) while attending Brookfield Central High School.
Early career After two years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his teachers included Catherine Comet (conducting), Jeanette Ross (piano), and Les Thimmig and Homer Lambrecht (composition), he was invited to attend the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia by Ned Rorem (with whom he developed a lifelong friendship). While a student of Rorem's at Curtis, he studied piano with Marion Zarzeczna and also studied privately with Lukas Foss. 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 was 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 1985 and 1998 Hagen was also a frequent guest at the MacDowell Colony.MacDowell Colony Website. Retrieved July 16, 2021. When he returned to the United States, Hagen studied privately with Bernstein, whose guidance during the composition of Hagen's Shining Brow (1992) — the opera that launched Hagen's career internationallyOestereich, James. "Review/Music: Shining Brow; Frank Lloyd Wright Joins Opera's Pantheon", The New York Times. Retrieved August 2, 2008. — prompted him to dedicate the score to Bernstein's memory.
Arts advocate and educator
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. 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; from 2000 to 2018 he served as a trustee of the Douglas Moore Fund for American OperaDouglas Moore Fund for American Music Website. Retrieved April 21, 2014. and was elected a lifetime member of the Corporation of Yaddo in 2006.Yaddo Website. Retrieved November 2, 2020. He is the founding artistic director of the New Mercury Collective, "a laboratory for artistic exploration, creative risk-taking, and performance in which its members can collaborate on the creation and performance of post-genre works combining theater, music, and emerging technology for audiences of all types."New Mercury Collective Website. Retrieved July 4, 2019. Hagen has been a featured composer at the Tanglewood, Mostly Modern, Ravinia, Wintergreen, and Aspen music festivals, and has served as artistic director and head of faculty for the Seasons Fall Music FestivalSeasons Music Festival Academy Website . Retrieved February 25, 2010. in Yakima, Washington (2008–2012). He served as co-chair of CompositionWintergreen Music Festival Website Retrieved June 15, 2015. for the Wintergreen Summer Music Academy in Virginia (2015-2025).
Faculty appointments include a stint as composer in residence at the Music Conservatory of the Chicago College of Performing Arts that led to an invitation to join the artist faculty there (2017–2023) "in a multi-disciplinary position created for him that enable[d] him to share his skills as a stage director, dramaturge, composer, and social activist with students from throughout the Roosevelt University community as they shadowed him and collaborate in the development of a new Hagen opera each year."BWW Newsdesk (2017). "Daron Hagen Joins Faculty at Roosevelt University's Chicago College of Performing Arts", Broadway World. Retrieved October 18, 2017. He has also served as the Franz Lehár Composer in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh (2007),University of Pittsburgh Composition and Theory Department Website. Retrieved April 21, 2014. twice as composer in residence for the Princeton University Atelier (1998, 2004–5);Past Atelier Artists - Lewis Center for the Arts. Retrieved July 16, 2021. 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).Press Kit at DaronHagen.com
Compositional style and methods Hagen's music is essentially tonal, though serial, pitch class, and octatonic procedures are customarily used for psychologically and emotionally fraught passages.Classical Composers Database. Retrieved July 8, 2012. It is "notable for its warm lyricism, but his style defies easy categorization. While his works demonstrate fluency with a range of twentieth-century compositional techniques, those procedures are secondary to his exploitation and expansion of the possibilities of tonal harmony, giving his music an immediacy that makes it appealing to a wide spectrum of audiences. His music is broadly eclectic, drawing on a variety of styles as diverse as jazz, Broadway, Latin music, Italian verismo, and soft rock." According to Hagen, "Polytonality figures prominently in the major operas as a mechanism for manifesting the interaction between characters." Hagen, asked at one point by Bernstein to complete Marc Blitzstein's opera Sacco and Vanzetti, acknowledges a debt to Blitzstein's music: "I find the musical DNA of which it is composed indispensable. Strands of that DNA — strict adherence to economy of means, a passion for combining words and music, the belief that music can promote social justice, an abhorrence of pretension — are woven contrapuntally, inextricably, into the music that I compose, and have been, nearly from the start."
Hagen's vocal music is described in The New Grove as "the cornerstone of his compositional output." He 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." "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."
His operas embrace a particularly broad stylistic spectrum, and often "straddle the divide between the opera and musical theater worlds." 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)." 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."Thicknesse, Robert. "Vera of Las Vegas", The Times. Retrieved September 7, 2008. "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. 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,Daron Hagen's Blog Memoir . Retrieved 8 July 2012. 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." Hagen's effective fusing of many styles into a coherent personal vision is recognized by a 2014 American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award that acknowledges the "outstanding artistic achievement [of] a composer who has arrived at his or her own voice."Oteri, Frank. sixteen-composers-receive-aaal-awards-totaling-175000, NewMusicBox. Retrieved March 28, 2014.
In 2007 self-publishing enabled Hagen to become one of the first American opera composers to make evolving performance materials for the opera Amelia (and all his successive works) available exclusively in an online environment: "The opera's principals were given access to a password-protected website on which Hagen placed pdf files of Amelia's vocal score. When he modified a scene, he simply uploaded an edited file, and an automatically generated message informed the cast of the change."
Critical reception According to Opera News, "to say that [Hagen] is a remarkable musician is to underrate him. Daron is music." The NATS Journal of Singing has described Hagen as "the finest American composer of vocal music in his generation."
Hagen's debut opera Shining Brow premiered in 1993 to universally glowing reviews in the international press. When the Buffalo Philharmonic released the first recording on Naxos in 2009, David Patrick Sterns noted in The Philadelphia Inquirer, "the ceaselessly inventive score hooks you early on, easily embracing a wide range of predominantly tonal modes of expression, from barbershop quartet to Der Rosenkavalier quotations. The music's theatrical timing and naturalistic sense of language – so problematic in other contemporary operas – feels effortlessly right. Dramatically speaking, the portrayal of the great architect is so unflinching that Wright (played with many layers of irony by the excellent Robert Orth) borders on being too unsympathetic to carry this sizable, two-act opera. Particularly effective is the musical creepiness that sets in as Wright's high-ego world grows refracted from reality.".