Daron Hagen

[3] Hagen began composing prolifically in 1974, when his older brother Kevin gave him a recording and score of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd.

[4] Two years later, at the age of fifteen, he conducted the premiere of his first orchestral work,[5] 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.

[3] 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).

Hagen moved to New York City in 1984 to complete his formal education as a student at Juilliard,[9] studying first for two years with Diamond, then for a semester each with Joseph Schwantner and Bernard Rands.

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.

[34][35][36] Hagen crafted the music (which combined live players with an extensive Electroacoustic soundscape) and libretto, shot over 30 hours of film, directed the staged iteration at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, Illinois (in a joint production of his own "New Mercury Collective" and the Chicago College of Performing Arts), and served as both film and soundtrack editor.

[38] Hagen's music is essentially tonal, though serial, pitch class, and octatonic procedures are customarily used for psychologically and emotionally fraught passages.

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.

"[45] "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.

"[48] 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.

"[49] "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.

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.

[12][13][14] 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.

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.

[60] While in its college workshop production at the University of Texas, the characters were felt by one graduate student to "come across as flat and largely unsympathetic and so frustratingly spineless that it's hard to care about them,"[61] when the work was given its professional premiere in spring 2015 under Hagen's direction by Kentucky Opera, professional critics noted that "[its] complex score works to underline issues with leitmotifs, musical cues assigned to different characters, and music that never settles or rests.

... Hagen's score feelingly captures the deep contradictions of its story and its characters in music that evokes the beauty and mystery of an exotic landscape, the dangerous and deceptive sensuality of its inhabitants, and the intense violence that is always just beneath the surface of a culture that threatens and terrorizes women.

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).