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North American Works Directory Listing
| Composer: |
Daron Hagen
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| Composer Bio: |
One of America's most respected and prolific full-time composers of concert music and opera, Hagen's music enjoys more than a hundred performances a year. All seven of his operas, Amelia, Shining Brow, Bandanna, Vera of Las Vegas, New York Stories, The Antient Concert and Little Nemo in Slumberland, are currently in production internationally—some under Hagen's stage direction or under his baton. His songs and song cycles are too frequently performed to track.
Hagen's list of commissioners and premiering ensembles is extensive and includes The Philadelphia Orchestra, The New York Philharmonic, The National Symphony, The Milwaukee Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, The Albany Symphony, The Seattle Symphony, and The Buffalo Philharmonic. Most recently, Hagen has written concertos for Joel Fan, Gary Graffman, Jeffrey Khaner, Yumi Kurosawa, Michael Ludwig, Sara Sant'Ambrogio, the Amelia Piano Trio, Jaime Laredo, and Sharon Robinson, among others.
Hagen taught himself to read music at the age of 11, began piano lessons at the age of 12, completed his first symphony at 14, conducted his first orchestral première at 16, and at 19 became the youngest composer since Samuel Barber to have a work premièred by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Commissions during his early twenties from the New York Philharmonic and the Kings Singers launched his career before the first of his seven major operas, Shining Brow (1992), garnered international critical and audience acclaim and established him as one of America's most successful and respected opera composers.
He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation (twice), the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet-the-Composer, the Bearns Prize from Columbia University, the Barlow Endowment Prize, Opera America, the ASCAP-Nissim Prize, and the Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize. In 2010, his Suite for Piano was a commissioned work for the Van Cliburn piano competition, resulting in hundreds of performances of the piece worldwide.
Hagen has been a Featured Composer at festivals including Tanglewood, Wintergreen, and Aspen and currently serves as Artistic Director for the Seasons Music Festival. He has served as Composer-in-residence with the Long Beach Symphony and the Denver Chamber Orchestra. As Artistic and Executive Director of the Perpetuum Mobile Concerts in New York and Philadelphia during the eighties, he presented premieres of over one hundred American composers' works.
Hagen's works have been commercially recorded on the Arsis, Albany, Bleecker Street, Bridge, CRI, Josara, Klavier, Naxos, Mark, Sanctus, Sierra Classical, Troppe Note, and New World record labels. In 2009, Naxos released Shining Brow (Buffalo Philharmonic / Falletta) and the complete Hagen Piano Trios (Finisterra Trio). Bandanna was released on Albany under his baton in 2007; Vera of Las Vegas on the CRI label. Nearly all of Hagen's vocal music is recorded and available commercially. Hagen's music is published by E.C. Schirmer, Carl Fischer, and Burning Sled.
Hagen is a trustee of the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera, former president of the Lotte Lehmann Foundation, and a Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo. He serves frequently as an admissions and grants panelist for numerous national organizations including Opera America, the Copland House, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, among others.
Hagen is a graduate of Curtis and Juilliard. He served two years on the musical studies faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music; nine years on the composition faculty of Bard College; as a Visiting Professor at the City College of New York; and as a Lecturer in Music at New York University. He has served twice as Composer-in-Residence for the Princeton University Atelier; as Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Conservatory of Music of the Chicago College of the Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, as Franz Lehar Composer-in-Residence at the University of Pittsburgh; as Artist-in-Residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; Sigma-Chi-William P. Huffman Composer-in-Residence at Miami University; and for a year as Artist-in-Residence at Baylor University.
During 2012-13, Hagen's operas will receive new productions and / or premieres in Austin, Chicago, Como (Italy), Lexington, New York City, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Sarasota, and Sondrio (Italy). LyricFest (Philadelphia) and Virginia Tech will premiere new song cycles. The Hawaii and Seattle Symphony Orchestras will premiere new works. The Voxare String Quartet will premiere String Quartet No. 3 in Washington and release a CD of Hagen's works on Naxos.
Hagen lives in New York City with his wife, composer / singer / visual artist Gilda Lyons, and his sons Atticus and Seamus.
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| Librettist: |
Paul Muldoon
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| Librettist Bio: |
Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University and Chair of the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. In 2007 he was appointed Poetry Editor of The New Yorker. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where he is an honorary Fellow of Hertford College.
Paul Muldoon's main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010).
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. Other recent awards are the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, the 2003 Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the 2004 Shakespeare Prize, the 2005 Aspen Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 European Prize for Poetry. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."
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| Other Artistic Personnel: |
Robert DeSimone (stage director)
Michael Haithcock (conductor)
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| Original Cast: |
William Lewis (Miguel Morales)
Paul Kreider (James Kane)
Kerry French (Mona Morales)
Edward White, Jr. (Cassidy)
Diane Rae Schoff (Emily)
Daniel Terrazas (Jake)
UT-Opera Chorus
UT-Wind Symphony
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| Premiere Date: |
February 25, 1999
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| Producing Company: |
University of Texas Opera Theater
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| Description: |
Bandanna is the story of a chief of police, Miguel Morales, and two officers who once served with him in Vietnam and who now serve with him in a small town on the Texas Mexican border. Jake, who is resentful of Cassidy’s advancement over him, is playing a dangerous double-role as policeman and guide to successive groups of illegal immigrant workers. With the encouragement of a morally bankrupt union organizer, Kane, Jake determines to convince Morales that his wife, Mona, is having an affair with Cassidy. In the end, groundless jealousy provokes Miguel to strangle his wife with her own bandanna, shoot his colleague and ultimately himself. The curtain falls on this desolate scene.
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| Character List (Major): |
Miguel Morales (t)
James Kane (dram bar)
Jake Lopez (lyr bar)
Mona Morales (s)
Cassidy (b-bar)
Emily (lyr mz)
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| Character List (Minor): |
Leader of the Illegals(dram bar); Two Mariachi Singers (male or female duo)
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| Bit Parts: |
Waiter (mute); Young Girl (mute)
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| Reviews: |
http://www.daronhagen.com/index.php?page=bandanna-press
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| Chorus: |
12-40 members
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| Orchestration: |
2 fl (2 picc, afl), 2 ob (Eng hrn), 3 cl (bcl), bcl, 2 bsn, ssax, asax, tsax, barsax, 2 tpt (fglhrn), 2 hrn, euph (opt), 2 tbn, tba, 3 db, timp, perc, pf, hp; onstage mariachi band
An alternate orchestration is available (as of 4/2012) for 16 player chamber orchestra
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| Musical Style: |
The authors recast the story of the Venetian Moor Otello in a tiny US-Mexico border town during 1968 by combining elements of the original Venetian story, William Shakespeare's play, Giuseppe Verdi's great opera, and new, original characters and situations. The opera's unifying concept is the idea of borderlines - between countries, people, life & death, good & evil, morality, amorality, immorality, sanity & insanity. These, and many other dualities, are expressed in the poet's choices of imagery and the composer's musical choices - tonality & atonality, operatic music & musical theater music, pop music & concert music, etc.
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| Contact: |
Carl Fischer, Inc.
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| Address: |
65 Bleecker Street, 8th Floor New York, NY 10012
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| Phone: |
212-777-0900
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What is OPERAAmerica.org?
Spring 2013 Magazine Issue
- Letter from the President/CEO
- Of One: The Quest for Asian Fusion in the Opera House
- Vancouver: Where Nature Nurtures Art
- Inheriting the Wind
- My First Time
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