William Hagen at Tippet Rise 2024

William Hagen at Tippet Rise

Sunrise at Tippet Rise

My relationship with Tippet Rise started because of Ysaÿe’s “L’Aurore” from the Fifth Sonata. I was (and am) so amazed by how perfectly Ysaÿe captures the energy of the sunrise, and it is easily one of my favorite pieces for solo violin. Being the nature lover that I am, instead of imagining the sunrise illuminating the skyline of Manhattan, I thought more of my early morning drives up Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park.

I started to imagine a music video of Ysaÿe 5 shot in the mountains, and when I voiced this idea to my manager, he immediately thought of Tippet Rise. Luckily for me, the team at Tippet Rise was enthusiastic about the idea from the start, and in short order we had a plan to record and shoot this video. It’s a thrill for me to see the idea come to life!

I’m so thankful to the team at Tippet Rise for taking my idea and running with it.

—William Hagen

Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No. 5 for Solo Violin in G Major, Op. 27, I. L'Aurore

Dawn

Eugène Ysaÿe was the most famous and most admired violinist of his day. And what a day it was! Franck wrote him a sonata for his wedding. Saint-Saëns said that Ysaÿe was his greatest interpreter. Casals said that Ysaÿe was the first violinist to play in tune. (Cathy and I once heard a violinist play the Paganini Etudes for the Italian ambassador in a church in Paris. The pieces were brilliant, except they were all a half-note flat. No one seemed to know. That was the standard, until Ysaÿe.)

Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann came to his concerts. He taught Milstein, the great Russian virtuoso, and Gingold, the concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra under Szell, who himself taught every great violinist of our day: Joshua Bell (conductor of St. Martin in the Fields), Joseph Silverstein (concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), Arnold Steinhardt (the great violinist of the Guarneri String Quartet).

Ysaÿe taught William Primrose, founder of the great Primrose Quartet; Jacques Thibaud (of the famous Casals–Cortot–Thibaud Trio), and the composers Bloch and Enescu. He taught Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, who began the great Queen Elisabeth Competition in his honor. He debuted Debussy’s string quartet. Chausson wrote his great Poème for Ysaÿe.

Ysaÿe touched the past as well. Joachim—the Mendelssohn protégé who debuted Beethoven’s violin concerto, recommended Brahms to the Schumanns, toured with Clara Schumann, and debuted Brahms’s Double Concerto—was a great friend and collaborator of Ysaÿe.

In our day we remember Ysaÿe for his virtuoso miniatures, along with those of Sarasate, Kreisler, and Wieniawski.

But Ysaÿe had another side. He composed music that suggested Schoenberg, the music of the future.

It is this side which is on display in the first movement of the Fifth Sonata, “L’Aurore” (Dawn).

“Dawn” is an introduction; it leads into the familiar virtuosity of the “Danse rustique” in the second movement.

But “Dawn” also stands alone as a metaphor for the birth of music.

It is similar to the opening of Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (popularized by Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey), where an obelisk of incomprehensible knowledge is created by music.

The sun dawns on a primal world, desolate and stripped of all the social niceties of salon music.

Single, drawn-out bowings rise into the sky, with many missteps: nature without the manipulations of any imposed, man-made harmony. Ysaÿe is saying that tonality (for which he was famous) is an overlay, a mask we create to hide the terrifying reality of an empty universe.

But as the blood rises with the sun, a melody is born at 2:50. Something lives in the air that is not tragic, that is encouraging. Out of those plangent early misconceptions, those blunders of light, come warbles, birdsong. As the video suggests, animals begin to stir, bringing a sense of a world beyond the blackness of night. Trills and chromatic slides yawn and stretch, hinting at a familiar world.

Around 3:10 the bow begins to sally out into an undiscovered country. The trills become expectant. They seem to be incubators, out of which launch rays of increasingly adventurous euphonies.

At 3:15 the scales lengthen, and hopeful glistenings of light are represented by pluckings on the strings.

As Richard Wilbur wrote in “A Courtyard Thaw”:

No blossom, leaf, or basking fruit

Showed ever such pure passion for the sun

As these cold drops that knew no root

Yet filled with light and swelled and one by one

(or showered by a wingbeat, sown

From windbent branches in arpeggios)

Let go and took their shinings down….

Ysaÿe is painting here the dew vaporizing from tree branches, the night’s ice warming into sparkles and flickers as it melts into day.

At 3:26 a note is born, a link to memory, to tradition, to the repeating exaltation of sunrise.

This is the crux of the piece, a revelation that, out of nothing, out of mists and shadows, can emerge a new day, a world filled with hope.

This crucial note repeats, and its octave. From this point, the strings swell with energy. The violin pulses, first with questions but then increasingly with harmonic triumphs. The fire feeds on itself as the daylight expands, and the air is suddenly filled with breezes, with glories and insights. An eagle looks on, intrigued.

The music is touching familiar polyphonies now. The arpeggios descend to the ground only so they can rise finally into the heights, and the day is born. As Orpheus does every day in Marcel Camus’s 1959 film Black Orpheus, William Hagen has played the sun up.

—Tippet Rise co-founder, Peter Halstead

Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No. 5 for Solo Violin in G Major, Op. 27, II. Danse Rustique

The “Danse rustique” from Ysaÿe’s Fifth Sonata is a marriage between the seemingly disparate worlds of Ysaÿe’s refined classical background and a rustic folk dance tune. Written on the page with the precision and thoughtfulness of the great classical composers, in performance it sounds like the spontaneous improvisations of a folk musician.

As I walked from my cabin to the Olivier Music Barn for the recording session, the sights, smells, and sounds of the expansive landscape at Tippet Rise brought the “rustique” character of this music to life for me in a spectacular way. A breeze carried the beautiful scent of the cottonwoods my way and made the spring wildflowers dance amongst the grass as birdsong cut through the sound of shimmering leaves. A “rustic dance” of the Tippet Rise landscape. I find it very special to think that a Belgian composer’s music written a century ago and a continent away could feel so natural and fitting thousands of miles away in Montana.

This was an unforgettable project that I’ll always cherish.

—William Hagen

Ysaÿe: Sonata

Hagen

The Performance and the Artist

Ysaÿe’s tone and his charisma brought a humanism to the mathematical algorithms of even serious music like Bach, as cairns suggest human forms in the fog to Inuit people in Alaska.

This film is a tribute to those cairns, to the immanence buried in meadows, to the spirits in scales, to the Thunderers of clouds and keybeds, to the deeper shadows buried in the highly rational and cerebral virtuosity of Ysaÿe’s rustic dance.

The video technique pays homage to the pathetic fallacy, as Bobby Darin’s song “Listen to the Rhythm of the Rain” suggests that rain and Bobby’s tears are entwined.

The pathetic fallacy was coined by the great art critic John Ruskin in 1856 in the third volume of his work Modern Painters, to criticize the tendency among the Romantic poets like Keats and Shelley to attribute human qualities to nature.

At Tippet Rise, though, Symbolist conceits assume a more realistic identity, and nature plays a visible role in the emotions of both audience and musicians. The pianist Lucas Debargue asked us to tour the ranch before his concert so he could evoke it later in his playing.

In the deeper structures of the sky, quantum physics today proposes a wormhole which links disparate timelines in universes which are traveling at different speeds. ESP and premonitions are thus scientific breaches in a wall which separates us from other, equally valid realities.

Our video team, in collaboration with the brilliant Utah virtuoso William Hagen, have thus devised a program where music transmutes into nature, and vice versa.

Using the linguistic technique hypallage, Horace speaks of the angry crowns of kings, meaning the kings are angry, not the crowns. He misplaces his modifiers, transporting feelings from people to things. Virgil and Proust also use this transference to change dimensions linguistically. Musical grammar transfers an angry sky to harsh violin chords. Sky and violin are transposed: a preamble of rolling thunder under roiling skies anticipates the musical fireworks to follow. Dark clouds themselves transition through the darkness of the theme to the backdrop of the Beartooths from inside the Olivier Music Barn as the rustic dance begins.

Such correspondences aren’t only scientific and cinematic; they exist throughout history in animism and immanence, where society, as the Duke says in As You Like It:

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Indian and African cultures believe there are spirits in trees, as Francis Kéré’s pavilion, Xylem, is a tree taken apart. Aside from animism, Francis celebrates also the practical aspect of trees: in Burkina Faso people meet their girlfriends under trees, community elders confer under trees; trees provide shade against the sun; they hold water in the soil with their roots. They are also symbols of the forests we are losing every year.

In Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, the Inuit and other peoples of the Arctic understand that rocks can be mistaken for people in the mist, as John Luther Adams’ piece, Inuksuit, is a conduit where sounds and emotions originate in cairns, which mark the threshold of the spiritual landscape of the Inummariit — the Inuit who know how to survive on the land. Inuksuit, or cairns, indicate a place where life is renewed, where spirits radiate from stones, where decisions are made, and where festivals are held.

In the 20th Century, the Ojibwe communities of Canada conceive of weather as personal. Storms are people, ‘Thunderers,’ sounds that talk between the clouds. Wind isn’t just a sound, though, but a person. In the same way, musical notes create entire worlds in the space of a short piece, as in Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata No. 5.

Ysaÿe played in a beer hall band so renowned that Liszt, Joachim, Anton Rubinstein, Clara Schumann all came to hear it. It eventually outgrew the bierstube and became the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

Ysaÿe was a great virtuoso and composer of brilliant showpieces, his sonatas being an homage to the Etudes of Paganini, the encore showpieces of Sarasate and Saint-Saëns; but he was more than that; as a teacher, Ysaÿe taught the great string players (Primrose, Milstein, Gingold ) who in the 1950s and 60s passed on to us his goal of summoning up intangible feelings with tangible notes.

Like Fauré and Debussy, his composition was influenced by Baudelaire. He was a Symbolist, where notes stood in for the essences of, for instance, night and snow. At his death he was working on a piece called “the virgin of the stones,” hinting at sermons in stones, spirits in trees.

This film, then, evokes chords deeper than its surface.

In our video, William begins the second movement of the sonata, the Dance rustique, surrounded by the Ojibwe Thunderers. When the music calms at 00:45, William finds himself transported to the lush aspen grove around Francis Kéré’s Xylem, his deconstructed tree.

When atoms change orbits, they release energy. William switches levels as a new energy courses into the music. As the theme develops at 1:04, William progresses up the hill to the fields past the Huffman cabin, built by early 1900s settlers on the Johnson Ranch quadrant of Tippet Rise.

At 1:21, William is back in the barn, the lawns and snowcapped Beartooths behind him out the window, although this time they are almost painted on the glass by the brushstrokes of condensation.

At 1:37, cumulus clouds roll in rapidly and thunder is heard as the first theme subsides.

At 1:45, the violin begins complex variations in thirds which question and take apart the structure of the original theme. For this very intellectual moment, William plays in the dark, so that sight doesn’t distract from the music.

Scales lead back to the outdoor storm at 2:43, as the music becomes expansive, sounding more like a concerto than a sonata: clouds scud, break up, and darken. This is an orchestral moment. The violinist and the sky begin to merge as night grows.

At 3:29, a dreamlike passage moves the piece into an ethereal realm, removed from issues of technique and virtuosity. At 3:37, the dark of the barn returns as the music turns meditative and fugal, falling down the keybed in plucked strings (one of Ysaÿe’s innovations) to the reprise, at 4:14, of the original Roma theme, emerging from the dark of the barn into the broad light of the groves around Patrick Dougherty’s Daydreams.

At 4:34, a sliding chromatic scale plunges us into the coda and, again, as the pace increases, William’s site moves into the higher fields, flashing between dark and light, and then revisiting each of the sites of the short video in a visual fireworks matching the dizzying fingerwork on the violin. The last 45 seconds are a tour de force, the expected brillantine finish to this happy dance of the sky and land.

After the last flourish of the bow, for 10 seconds we hear running water, wind, thunder, and then the deluge: nature’s applause.

The synergistic cinematic style of the film offers a working parallel between music, land, and film, three objective correlatives working together.

The film changes sites as the music changes levels, grounding the Symbolism of Ysaÿe’s dreaming, Romantic age to the austere modern architecture of his Rustic Dance. The film’s style would resonate, I think, with Debussy and with Baudelaire, and we want to thank William and our audio-video team, Monte, James, Kevin, and Jim, for weaving together an imaginative accompaniment to Ysaÿe’s gorgeous showpiece. Their visual dance is more than rustic: it evokes the cycles of the earth itself.

—Tippet Rise co-founder, Peter Halstead

William Hagen has performed as soloist, recitalist, and chamber musician across the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. In 2022–23, William performs with orchestras around the United States, makes his debut with the Orquesta Filharmónica de Bogotá, and performs as soloist and chamber musician in several countries in Europe.

As soloist, William has appeared with the Chicago Symphony, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Detroit Symphony, Frankfurt Radio Symphony (HR Sinfonieorchester), San Francisco Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Utah Symphony, and many others around the globe.

As recitalist and chamber musician, William has performed at venues such as Wigmore Hall and the Louvre, and collaborated with artists such as Steven Isserlis, Gidon Kremer, Edgar Meyer, and Tabea Zimmerman, among others. He maintains an active schedule on both sides of the Atlantic, making frequent trips to Europe and cities around the United States to play a wide of repertoire.

William Hagen Profile

In 2020 William released his debut album, Danse Russe, with his good friend and frequent collaborator, pianist Albert Cano Smit. The album is available on all streaming platforms.

A native of Salt Lake City, Utah, William began playing the violin at the age of 4, studying the Suzuki method with Natalie Reed and then Deborah Moench. He studied with Itzhak Perlman and Catherine Cho at the Juilliard School, Christian Tetzlaff at the Kronberg Academy, and was a longtime student of Robert Lipsett, studying with Mr. Lipsett for 11 years both at the Colburn Community School of Performing Arts and at the Colburn Conservatory of Music. In 2015

William won Third prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels.

William performs on the 1732 “Arkwright Lady Rebecca Sylvan” Antonio Stradivari, and on a violin bow by François Xavier Tourte, both on generous loan from the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation.

Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No. 5 for Solo Violin in G Major, Op. 27, I. L'Aurore

Performed by William Hagen

Produced in-house by Tippet Rise Art Center.

Recorded and presented in 8K.

Director / Cinematographer / Editor / Colorist: Kevin Richey

Recording Engineers: Monte Nickles, Jim Ruberto

Audio Editing: Monte Nickles, Jim Ruberto

Audio Mix and Mastering: Monte Nickles

Production Stills: Rhema Mangus

Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No.5 for Violin, Op. 27

William Hagen

Eugène Ysaÿe: Sonata No. 5 for Solo Violin in G Major, Op. 27, II. Danse Rustique

Performed by William Hagen

Produced in-house by Tippet Rise Art Center.

Recorded and presented in 8K.

Director / Editor / Colorist: James B. Joyce

Director of Photography: Kevin Richey

Recording Engineers: Monte Nickles, Jim Ruberto

Audio Editing: Monte Nickles, Jim Ruberto

Audio Mix and Mastering: Monte Nickles

Photography: Matt Clayton, Erik Petersen, Craig White

Production Stills: Rhema Mangus

Technical Specifications

Recording Engineers: Monte Nickles, assisted by Jim Ruberto

Sound Editor: Monte Nickles

Denoising: Jim Ruberto

Mixing and Mastering Engineer: Monte Nickles

Performer: William Hagen

Producer: Monte Nickles

Recorded in AURO-3D® for immersive playback in 32-bit 384kHz DXD format.

Microphones:

Main array:

Left, Right, Center, Surround L & R: DPA 4041

Height: Front L & R, Rear L & R: DPA 4006

Spot mics on Violin:

Left, Right: AEA N8

Left, Right: Neumann U67

Microphone preamps: Grace Design M108

A/D Conversion: Merging Technology HAPI and HORUS

DAW: Merging Technologies Pyramix

William Hagen at Tippet Rise