Daron Aric Hagen

The music of composer Daron Hagen draws on sources from soft rock to serialism. He writes music in many media but has focused especially on vocal music and opera. Hagen (pronounced HAH-gen) was born in Milwaukee in 1961 and grew up in suburban New Berlin, Wisconsin. His mother was an artist and advertising executive, and his father was an attorney. Hagen began writing music in his early teens after his brother gave him a recording (with score) of Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. His early music came to the attention of Leonard Bernstein, who urged him to study with David Diamond at the Juilliard School. Hagen entered the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music, studying piano. He went on to the University of Wisconsin and, after two years, to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where Ned Rorem became a teacher and mentor. In 1981, Hagen's Prayer for Peace had its premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra, making him the youngest composer premiered by that ensemble since Samuel Barber. In 1984, he finally took Bernstein's advice and rounded out his education at Juilliard, studying for two years with Diamond and then Joseph Schwantner and Bernard Rands. Hagen was often a guest at the MacDowell Colony, an artists' residency program in New Hampshire, and he is a lifetime member of the Corporation of Yaddo, a creative community in Saratoga Springs, New York. A series of honors, including the 1983 Charles Ives Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, brought Hagen's compositions wider attention. He has written music in many genres, but works for voice are most prominent in his output and include many song cycles, choral works, and 14 operas, cantatas, and musicals. Hagen's music is essentially tonal but includes passages making use of 20th century compositional techniques, including serialism, as well as popular and jazz influences. Hagen has stated that he regards polytonal writing as an effective method of characterization in dramatic works. His orchestral work Common Ground (1990) won the Kennedy Center Friedheim Award. Hagen received a National Endowment for the Arts production grant for the revival of his opera Shining Brow, based on the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Hagen earned a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 and won the Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014. His 2013 opera, A Woman in Morocco, dealt with human trafficking. More than 50 of Hagen's compositions have been recorded, including Orson Rehearsed (2018), which became the basis for a "filmopera" in 2020 and 2021. Hagen issued a memoir, Duet with the Past, in 2019; it was published by McFarland & Company. His 2019 song cycle, The Art of Song, for small vocal ensemble and piano, was recorded by the Lyric Fest ensemble and issued in 2024 on the Naxos label.
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