When I was sixteen, having just conducted the premiere of my first orchestra piece with the local youth orchestra, I knew nobody in the music world outside of Wisconsin. My family was artistically inclined, but it was the 70s: my attorney father was scrambling to establish his law practice, and my mother had given up her fine art pursuits for a career as an advertising executive. What to do with the boy whom music had grabbed by the soul and yanked? My mother sent a letter to Leonard Bernstein, along with a cassette tape of my orchestra piece and a copy of the score. She had learned somewhere that the maestro’s childhood piano teacher had become his private secretary, and that a letter sent to him would likely be seen first and passed along (or not) by her. Importantly, she addressed the envelope, and her cover letter, not to Bernstein but to Helen Coates, his teacher.
Wise Miss Coates understood her famous pupil and recognized in my music nascent potential. She passed it along to the maestro. He listened to it, and, with characteristic generosity of spirit, wrote my mother a letter that said, in part, “Your son is the Real Thing. He is a Composer.” A path had been identified, even a direction given: “I think that Daron should study with my friend David Diamond at Juilliard.” With that letter, Bernstein was transformed in our worldview from a two-inch-tall figure from an alternate reality twitching on the screen of our black-and-white Magnavox television into a person, a teacher.
My road now had a beginning. There remained an intellectual disconnect for me between the life I was leading—composing and practicing six or seven hours a day, writing poetry, enjoying life as a midwestern kid at a Big Ten college—and the life led by the likes of Bernstein. I auditioned at Juilliard and was told that I was not yet ready, so I enrolled for two years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where I was first introduced, through conducting lessons with Catherine Comet, a pupil of perhaps western music’s most influential twentieth-century music teacher, Nadia Boulanger, to the exacting standards that I would need to exceed, should my path be extended. Of course, Bernstein had known her, and had even transcribed her dying words: oral history. I read in Atlantic Magazine that writer and composer Ned Rorem had been engaged to teach at the Curtis Institute and, on a hunch, applied. Ned invited me to study with him—he took on the role of teacher, I the protégé. I hit the Road.
But I was still entirely unprepared for the psychological impact that standing in the common room of the Curtis for the first time had on me. I was like a minor-league baseball player handed a bat at Shea Stadium. The enormity of not just my good fortune but also the responsibility that I had been given to swing for the bleachers, for, should I actually connect with the ball, everyone in the music world could, potentially, be in the stands, and see it fly out of the park and into history.
That’s why we study with teachers, and why the oral history passed along in lessons is the good stuff. Ned used to tell me about working for his teacher Virgil Thomson; a decade later, there I was, working for Virgil at the same table Ned once did, looking out over Manhattan’s Upper West Side from his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel. And then, after Curtis, Juilliard, and studies with Diamond, and analyzing the Rite of Spring with him from a score with Stravinsky’s own markings in it from when he went through it with David. And then, sitting next to Bernstein at his home at the Dakota on the piano bench, playing and singing my first opera for him, the maestro pointing out the passages that reminded him of Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein.
The Road behind me was clear: Boulanger, Copland, Bernstein, Rorem, Lukas Foss and Diamond, me. I never lost sight of who I was. It had always been me on the Road. But these men had set me on it, kicked me, shoved me, helped me, and hurt me. The way ahead was my Road. Thirty-five years later, their voices are still with me, as my voice will echo faintly in the ears of the hundreds of students I’ve taught. It was always about the Road. Think of this book as a map.
—Daron Hagen