In one of the most egregious examples of “Friday news dump” I have ever encountered, it was announced yesterday evening that Philadelphia’s University of the Arts will be closing, EFFECTIVE NEXT WEEK (June 7, to be exact). The reasons given are ongoing financial challenges (which have apparently escalated) and declining enrollment.
To add to the university’s woes, it has been stripped of its accreditation, over some business about not following “proper protocols.” Definitely consult some reputable news sources about this. I may be a journalist, but I am not an investigative reporter. I thought it more important that I get the news out there than to hold back until I can get to the bottom of everything.
The axe has fallen so quickly, everyone has been blindsided, including both students and faculty. The school will not be offering courses in the fall, and summer classes are cancelled.
This is the second major Philadelphia arts educational institution to announce its impending closure this year. In reading about this latest catastrophe, I only just learned that the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will be closing at the end of the 2024-25 academic year! PAFA is a 200-year-old institution. (UArts has been around for nearly 150.) I hope and pray that the PAFA museum will continue as a separate entity. Again, the information may be out there. I haven’t had time to research it. The school closure was announced in January. [EDIT: It appears the museum will remain open.]
What will happen to UArts’ Greek Revival main hall on Broad Street or the Frank Furness arts compound on Pine is anyone’s guess. Hopefully they are already protected as historically significant. But I don’t count on anything anymore. I envision a façade being preserved as some grasping entrepreneur pounces to open the next trendy, destined-to-be-closed-within-two-years wine bar. Or salivating developers rubbing their hands over the sweet tax breaks they’ll receive in opening up Furness Condos. That stretch of Broad – which by the way is on the same block as the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts – can’t even seem to sustain a Wawa or a parking garage/Starbuck’s.
The crater left by the closure of the University of the Arts, both in terms of real estate and the Philadelphia economy, is incalculable. Aside from the vacated properties themselves, there are soon-to-be-withered partnerships the university cultivated with other institutions, lost revenue from shows and performances that will be no more, countless vacated rentals currently occupied by UArts students, no more visiting parents, and no more student spending.
And that’s just the financial impact. Among the school’s alumni are filmmakers Joe Dante and the Brothers Quay, children’s book authors and illustrators Stan and Jan Berenstain and Katherine Milhous, movie poster legend Richard Amsel, cartoonists Frank Modell and Harold Knerr, wrought iron master Samuel Yellin, muralist and designer Miriam Tindall Smith, composers Vincent Persichetti and Marc Blitzstein, mezzo-soprano Florence Quivar, and pianist Natalie Hinderas – admittedly, a mere scratch of the surface.
Again, I am not the last word on these subjects, so please do your own research, both in terms of the University of the Arts and the fate of all those marvelous canvases housed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
That Philadelphia is losing two venerable art schools, with such long and rich histories, is staggering. As a resident of Philadelphia for over three decades, I admit I have an axe to grind with that hellhole, but I wonder just how much blame, in this instance, can be put on Philadelphia, how much is poor management, and how much is simply emblematic of the times.
We are living in an age shockingly bereft of creativity and original thinking. The nail that stands up is quickly hammered down. Computers and finance are perceived as more attractive prospects – “sure things,” if you will – while the arts, as they always have been, are unpredictable, with career paths impossible to predict.
All I know for certain is that a city cannot sustain itself on trendy restaurants and sports teams alone. There needs to be a balance with institutions that foster an inner life. A city without art is a dead city. It is a city destined for bad things. Philadelphia should consider wisely before allowing this to devolve into a land rush for corporate carpetbaggers and opportunistic developers.
Well, there’s something you don’t experience every day. I was sitting here in the kitchen, doing some work on the computer, as a fox was grazing out under the birdfeeder. Then came the rumbling, as if one of those road-repaving behemoths were grinding through the neighborhood. Except there are no roads back here. The fox took off into the woods and the building shook for a good minute, I’d say. By then, all the neighbors were out, looking around, and the texts began to fly. A 4.8 magnitude earthquake, reported to have originated near Lebanon, NJ. Not something we experience around here every day, thankfully. No apparent damage, no loss of power. I felt sheepish even googling it, as the results turned up images of yesterday’s massive quake in Taiwan.
The last earthquake I experienced was in Philadelphia in 2011. I was sitting at my desk in my third-floor walk-up and felt this gradually intensifying shuddering. But if you’ve ever lived in Philadelphia, you know how it is: there are all these barbaric workmen always up to something. I thought maybe somebody was jumping around on the roof again. Then the vibrations increased, and I looked over at the plants in the window, and they were moving all over the place. Particles rained against the dropped ceiling.
Somebody was walking down the street, and she started to look around. Already by that point, I suspected an earthquake. I thought maybe I had better head for a crossbeam, but by the time I got to the front door, it had stopped. I went down to the street and saw three people standing on the corner. We exchanged notes, and were relieved to find that our experiences had not been unique to our respective buildings. For once, Philadelphia landlords were not to blame.
A short while later my phone rang. I saw it was the number of a certain radio station I was working for, at the time, but then when I picked up, it was this completely strange woman, calling for her daughter. It was disorienting for both of us at first, but then we realized the phone signals had somehow become scrambled. We laughed about it for a bit. She was calling from 17th and Race. I was at 11th and Pine. She said she was sitting at work and could see the buildings across the street move.
After that, I tried to call out, but was unable to get a signal. The phone didn’t work again for about an hour. In the meantime, I just sat there at the computer and listened to the helicopters.
That was a 5.8 magnitude earthquake out of Richmond, VA.
My best wishes for everyone’s safety, and my heart goes out to those who live with the looming threat and destructive force of the real thing.
If Daron Hagen weren’t a composer, he would be one hell of a writer. He IS one hell of a writer. I already knew that, from the too few times I’ve visited his blog. But I finally got around to reading his memoir, “Duet with the Past,” last month, and I have to say, it is one of the best-written books, fiction or nonfiction, I’ve read in a while.
I would think it would be an absorbing read for anyone who would chance to open the front cover, but it is especially compelling for somebody with a deep interest in mid-century American art music. Not that Hagen is of that generation – he’s only a few years older than I am – but his experiences as a student, composer, and copyist brought him into contact with an astonishing array of legends and luminaries of the era, including Leonard Bernstein, Ned Rorem, David Diamond, Virgil Thomson, Gian Carlo Menotti, Lukas Foss, Eugene Ormandy (and Philadelphia’s associate conductor William Smith), Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Jack Beeson, and Aaron Copland – as well as Joan Tower, David Del Tredici, Michael Torke, and Aaron Jay Kernis, among others.
The writers he’s known and collaborated with include Paul Muldoon and Gore Vidal. My friend and colleague, Kile Smith, gets a few mentions (Hagen once worked with him at the Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of Philadelphia), as does pianist Hugh Sung (who I finally just met for the first time a few weeks ago). The ghost of Marc Blitzstein, with whom Hagen in his youth is said to have borne some resemblance, also frequently rears his head.
All fascinating, of course, but Hagen’s story is even more riveting to me personally, as it seems he and I have lived parallel lives in a flabbergasting number of ways. Although I was never conscious of our paths having actually crossed, they must have. There are just too many shared interests and common hang-outs. You might say ours is a story of near-misses and there-but-for-the-grace-of-Gods.
Hagen arrived in Philadelphia only a few years before I did, to study at the Curtis Institute of Music. My college girlfriend worked at Curtis. He and I both like reading and books and are viscerally affected by the power of the written word. I worked in at least six bookstores in Philadelphia, one of them managed by Rorem’s niece. (Rorem was one of Hagen’s principal teachers.) One of the book shops I owned was within a block of Curtis. We’ve both amassed sizable libraries.
We both lived in the same neighborhood (as did, later, Jennifer Higdon), although perhaps at different times. But if you live in Center City Philadelphia, an expanse of less than 30 blocks and perhaps ten blocks up and down, you pretty much see everyone.
We were both regulars at the late, lamented neighborhood greasy spoon, Little Pete’s, on South 17th Street above Locust (right around the corner from Curtis), and Hagen totally nails the vibe, recollecting the smell of burnt coffee, the lime-green wrap-around counters, and the drunks nodding over their eggs in the wee hours of the morning. One of those drunks could very well have been me, on the way home from McGlinchey’s, prior to standing on a street corner with a friend and conversing volubly until the skies began to lighten. I read a substantial portion of “Les Miserables” there, and D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love,” and Edmund Wilson’s “Axel’s Castle,” the letters of Abelard and Heloise, and a charming book of essays, “Dreamthorp,” by Alexander Smith.
We also both clearly love classic movies. Hagen grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, within driving distance of a faded movie palace turned into a repertory house, and he writes lovingly of his experiences there. If I were to do the same, it would involve two or three such theaters I haunted during my teens and 20s.
Our upbringing was also eerily similar, with artistically-inclined, nurturing mothers and fathers ill-equipped to manage their impulses. I have to say, I was much luckier than Hagen was with how my situation turned out, as my mother got my sister and me away before any lasting physical or psychological damage could occur. Nevertheless, Hagen and I are both prone to nostalgia (though it’s possible I may be the more sentimental of the two of us) and melancholy. We’ve both gone on some legendary benders and stared into the abyss.
So, yes, perhaps the reason the book connected so well with me is because I identified so personally with many of his experiences.
Unlike me, Hagen managed to harness all those disparate elements and will himself into an artist of merit. Talent is great, but you also need drive, and Hagen’s work ethic, in all weather, is to be admired. He’s managed to build up quite the catalogue, especially, but by no means exclusively, as a successful opera composer. I’ve had several of his pieces in my library for years, and played a few on the radio. I could swear, at some point, I may even have introduced a concert broadcast of his opera “Amelia.”
Since finishing the book, I’ve ordered his four commercially-available operas (“Shining Brow,” “Vera,” “Bandanna,” and “Orson Rehearsed”). I am sorry so many of his major works have yet to be recorded. I would love to hear those he describes as Korngoldian – even his overture to “Much Ado About Nothing,” written for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which earned him much scorn for being so frothy and allegedly lacking in substance. I assure you, Hagen has composed plenty of substance. Are composers not allowed to enjoy themselves once in a while? Tragically, the handwritten manuscript for a “Much Ado” opera he had been at work on was left in his room at the Hotel Warwick (across the street from Little Pete’s) as he fled Philly in humiliation, and the opera is now lost.
But no matter what adversity life tossed his way, Hagen just kept churning out music. I honestly don’t know how he’s done it, subletting his living spaces (and with them, apparently, his adorable, impressively long-lived cat, Clara, always there to nuzzle him on his battered return, who made it to 24 and enjoyed the first year of Hagen’s happy, stabilizing marriage) to take off to Europe or for residencies at artists’ colonies, burning through all his money, but somehow always landing on his feet with a plum commission and finally finding domestic happiness in Rhinebeck, New York, near Bard College (where I travel every summer for the Bard Music Festival), in a quaint Victorian home with his loving family. (I have eaten at the Tivoli restaurant he mentions in the book, where he and Joan Tower dine.)
He’s not afraid to share his missteps, but if nothing else his life story demonstrates that even when you bottom-out, if you just hang in there, things might work out all right in the end. Talent and hard work are important, but luck, or chance, if you will, will always be a deciding factor. Life after all is a game of Chutes and Ladders. Hagen’s similes are less trite than mine, but he would be the first to admit he’s waded through quicksand on occasion, sometimes because of bad choices, sometimes not, only to have been lifted on the wings of angels. (His wife is composer, vocalist, and visual artist Gilda Lyons.)
By coincidence, Hagen’s latest album, “The Art of Song” (recorded at Curtis with Lyons one of the singers), was just released by Naxos within the last couple of weeks. Words and poetry have always been central to Hagen’s inspiration (which likely explains, in part, why he himself is such a good writer), and opera, song, and large-scale cycles comprise a significant portion of his output. As stated in the promotional material, “Divided into four ‘life seasons,’ this richly emotional cycle embraces themes that range from the human cost of America’s politics since the Civil War; the rueful wisdom of aging, love and nostalgia; and on towards tragedy, faith and an acceptance of nature’s cycles.”
Hagen can be nostalgic and hardnosed, pensive and reckless, ugly and beautiful, vainglorious and modest. But who among us has not been?
He writes with all five senses. Proust had his madeleine; Hagen had… well, everything apparently. We’ve all had the experience of certain scents conjuring memories, but Hagen, it seems, never forgot a smell, whether it be that of a dusty curtain in an old movie house or that distinctive blend of aromas that characterize any city. You can tell he’s always been a faithful journaler, which is only one more thing to admire. (Regrettably, my own very sporadic attempts have never made it past a few entries.)
He also has a good mind for similes and metaphors and all those tools of master storytellers and literary artists that make their work that much more engaging and enriching.
Not that the subject matter is always delightful. Hagen can be brutally honest, and it’s not always pretty. But in his writing, as in his music, he is dedicated to serving truth. He does so with enviable recall, a powerful command of observation, often great sensitivity, and a poetic disposition.
In the interviews I’ve seen, he’s as thoughtful and well-spoken in life as he is on paper.
There are plenty of samples of his music posted online and a lot of recorded interviews. You’d be doing yourself a favor by getting to know Daron Hagen.
I first encountered Robert Moran’s music while browsing through the bins at Tower Records Classical Annex, then located at 6th & South Streets in Philadelphia. As was the custom, new recordings would be played over the sound system on the sales floor. On this particular occasion, one of the clerks put on “Arias, Interludes and Inventions,” a suite from the opera “Desert of Roses,” Bob’s take on the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1992. Before I was wholly aware of what was happening, my heart had melted all over the polished hardwood floor. I floated to the counter to inquire what it was we were listening to, and an instant sale was made.
I first encountered Robert Moran in person a few years later, when he wandered into my original bookshop on South 17th Street. I didn’t recognize who he was until he handed me his credit card. “Robert Moran?” I said. “Any relation to the composer?” That kind of question has led to its share of enduring friendships. It turns out people like being recognized. (The exception was a certain principal of the Philadelphia Orchestra, who slinked out as soon as he could, never to return again!)
Although a small business owner, with all of the nightmarish zoning and tax obligations that entailed, I was also still very much a bohemian, with my living space extending off the back of the building, all German Expressionist-like, at the end of a long, crooked hallway, separated from the sales floor only by a magic curtain. On certain winter afternoons, you could smell the crock pot percolating in the kitchenette, not far from a mass of black mold that had formed around one of the many leaks in the stucco ceiling. (No stucco in the immaculately redone retail space.)
My record collection, already substantial, was rather modest by comparison to today’s library (which continues to expand with a tenacity any mold would envy). I laid my hand on Bob’s CD and was back in a flash.
He took the booklet and inscribed in his florid hand:
For Ross –
What a lovely
Surprise!! Wonderful
Luck – your
splendid Bookstore –
Robert Moran
Oct. 15, 1997
Phila
Bob gained notoriety in the late 1960s and early ‘70s through a series of “events” incorporating, respectively, the cities of San Francisco (“39 Minutes for 39 Autos”), Bethlehem, PA (“Hallelujah”), and Graz, Austria (“Pachelbel Promenade”). These involved tens of thousands of performers.
For “39 minutes for 39 Autos,” he enlisted skyscrapers, airplanes, radio stations, musicians, dancers, and yes, automobiles, to create a one-of-a-kind, purely-of-the-moment spectacular of light and sound. Sooner or later, such a thing was bound to occur to a composer living in San Francisco in 1969.
But he actually could could write music, too. Classical music’s merry prankster studied twelve-tone technique with Hans Erich Apostel in Vienna, before being accepted into a composition class of four at Mills College, where he was taught by Darius Milhaud and Luciano Berio. His classmates included Steve Reich, Phil Lesh, and Tom Constanten. Lesh and Constanten went on to play for The Grateful Dead. And Reich? Who knows what happened to that guy.
Bob was also influenced by Minimalism and became a friend and collaborator of Philip Glass. (On my wall is a signed poster for their collaborative opera “The Juniper Tree.”)
Last year, he composed a monodrama for God – yes, you read that correctly (in case you’re interested, God is a baritone) – and a 20-minute choral work, “Circles of Iron.”
He continues to experiment with aleatory, or chance elements. With Robert Moran, you never know what you’re going to get. In his more puckish moments, he might write for 39 autos, giant puppets, or an electric popcorn popper. But then there are times when his natural gift for lyricism will melt your heart.
Happy birthday, Bob! Let Bob eat cake!
Lo and behold, Robert Moran is the subject of today’s Composers Datebook, broadcast on classical music stations nationwide. Listen here.
Yesterday, I was in Philadelphia to meet composer Robert Moran for lunch, and we wound up at Indian Restaurant (yes, that’s the name) at 1634 South Street. We were the only ones eating in, until the arrival of a third diner, who couldn’t help but overhear our fascinating conversation, as we sat in the window of the otherwise empty establishment. This is how we came to meet Darlene Drew, a musician, it turns out, in town with a touring production of “The Lion King.” That’s Darlene in the pit, during the show, playing no fewer than 13 ethnic flutes! She’s been doing this for 20 years, and has received a fair amount of press for it, as here, in Salt Lake City…
