Daron Hagen
Music
Spring 2025
Composer / Filmmaker / Author – Founding Director of the New Mercury Collective – United States
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Hagen’s debut in 1983 as the youngest composer ever premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra launched an international polymathic creative life as a celebrated composer, pianist, conductor, college professor, concert impresario, festival artistic director, foundation president, stage director and auteur operafilm-maker — all recounted in vivid detail in the 2019 “ruthlessly honest and beautifully written” memoir, Duet with the Past.
Hagen will be film-editing I Hear America Singing, the final installment in The Bardo Trilogy, a sequence of composer conceived, written, directed, and edited opera-films that include Orson Rehearsed (2018) and 9/10: Love Before the Fall (2023) devoted to the exploration of the liminal zone between life and art, and life and what comes after. He will also be working on a collection of first-person essays about the nascent opera-film genre, which will also include his libretti and screenplays.