World Premiere: Timothy Hagen’s Concerto for Flute & Chamber Orchestra
By Sarah Hollandsworth
When Timothy Hagen took the stage in February to premiere his Concerto for Flute and Chamber Orchestra with the Dubuque Symphony, it was clear the audience was about to witness something extraordinary. Hagen wasn’t just the soloist—he was also the composer, channeling a rare tradition of composer-performers who not only create but also bring their own works to life. What followed was a stunning display of virtuosity and emotion, as Hagen’s performance brought his new concerto to life with a depth and passion that instantly established it as a significant addition to the modern flute repertoire. It was an honor to be in the hall for such a historic moment. After the final notes lingered in the air and the audience rose in a standing ovation, I had the privilege of sitting down with Hagen to explore the creative journey behind this remarkable piece.
About the Commission & Premiere
Q: Can you tell us how the commission came about? What was the initial spark that led to the idea of composing a concerto for yourself to premiere with the Dubuque Symphony?
A: I’ve wanted to write a concerto for the flute for as long as I can remember, and I’ve always said the first one would be for me. I’ve long been attracted to the 18th-century notion of the professional musician as someone who isn’t siloed in performance, composition, education, etc., but rather who excels in all those areas. The concerto was a way of harnessing a host of skills across areas, both to challenge myself and to make the kind of artistic statement that rarely gets made anymore. How often do you get to hear a concerto soloist play their own work? Mozart and Beethoven—hugely aspirational figures—did it all the time. The most recent figure in that vein I can think of is Rachmaninoff, and you have to go back nearly a century for him. I wanted to be a part of that history and knew I was ready to take that step, so when William Intriligator, our Music Director in the Dubuque Symphony in Iowa where I am principal flute, asked me to choose a concerto to play with the orchestra, I decided to be brave and suggest I write one. Fortunately, he took me up on it, and that’s how my Concerto for Flute and Chamber Orchestra came to be premiered this past February.
Q: What was your initial vision for the piece, and how did it evolve over time? Were there any surprises or discoveries along the way?
A: I admire great actors and writers, and whenever I watch interviews with them, they talk about how the characters they create dictate choices for them. They don’t impose choices on those characters. I feel similarly about composing. I always start with what I think of as an emotional or narrative sketch of the piece. What do I want to say? What choices are best for making sure I am really heard by an audience? This usually determines things like large scale form and harmony. Then, along the way, I stumble across surprises, like realizing a passage I thought was the beginning of a piece is actually the middle. This happened with my piccolo/piano piece, In a Yellow Wood. The concerto, however, played out very closely to my original idea. Early in the process, I conceived a three-movement form with a cadenza. That morphed slightly into four movements with the cadenza becoming an entire movement in the final version. This probably contributed to the fact that I was commissioned to write a 20-25 minute work and ended up with half an hour of music.
Q: What was it like preparing for the premiere as both the composer and the soloist? Did you experience any unexpected challenges or freedoms in wearing both hats?
A: I wouldn’t say I experienced any unexpected challenges, but in hindsight, it’s clear I still didn’t really understand the magnitude of the challenge before I started writing the piece—and I think that’s good, actually. When there are things we really want to accomplish in life, we can sometimes be scared away from them by the level of challenge they present. In this case, I just jumped into the work once the opportunity presented itself because I knew I could do it. I knew it would be massively challenging, like climbing Everest, but I chose to spend my time climbing instead of feeling small in the shadow of the mountain. It ended up taking over five months, between writing, editing, formatting, and preparing parts. That alone was exhausting, but then I was left with just four weeks to learn the piece. I wanted to make an artistic statement rather than a virtuosic one that capitalized on my strengths as a flutist and hid my weaknesses, so I didn’t write with the flute in my hands. This meant I really had to learn it after I wrote it, and it turned out to be virtuosic anyway because some of the musical ideas I wanted to communicate required gymnastic playing ability. That said, there is freedom in knowing you chose to create a challenge for yourself, as opposed to confronting a challenge someone else has put in front of you. There’s tremendous power and confidence in throwing down the gauntlet for yourself.
On Composing for the Flute
Q: As a flutist-composer, how does your perspective shape your writing for the instrument?
A:I know what works well on the instrument and what doesn’t. That doesn’t mean I always make “flutistic” choices when I write, but it at least means I understand the level of challenge present. For the challenging writing specifically, I know what’s doable, and I’m not a savant; if I can learn to do something, then with enough time devoted to thoughtful work, anyone can. I also believe that we performers have the power to affect an audience’s emotional state through our interpretive and expressive choices, so I think about this a lot when I write. A lot of composers stop performing, which means they stop experiencing the performer-audience connection that so viscerally tells a performer what is and isn’t effective with audiences. I’m always trying to imagine what I want the audience thinking and feeling at every point in a piece when I perform, and I bring that sensibility to my composing. It determines every aspect of what I write: rhythm, harmony, articulation, tempo, melody, and so on.
Q: The four movements of the concerto have evocative titles—'Endurance,' 'Doubt,' 'Defiance,' and 'Liberation.' Can you share what each of these represents to you personally or musically?
A: I knew I wanted those three originally planned movements to have specific titles that hinted at their musical origins: Chorale, Ballad, and Bacchanale. The cadenza became a Soliloquy, inserted between the Ballad and Bacchanale. I knew all along that the piece I was writing was more than a set of movements; it was meant to chronicle a journey in the life of a person. This was the inspiration to attach subtitles to each movement. When we are young, we are instilled with certain values and beliefs by the adults in our lives (Chorale: Endurance). As we pass into adulthood, this sometimes leads to a crisis, as we start to recognize that we might be more expansive than those beliefs allow (Ballad: Doubt). We are then faced with a choice: do we settle into who we really are or allow ourselves to be hijacked by what others think we should be (Soliloquy: Defiance)? Freedom lies in acceptance of ourselves, and for me, that’s the only viable option (Bacchanale: Liberation).
Personal Connection & Artistic Intent
Q: You’ve called this concerto a “love letter to the flute community.” What do you hope flutists and audiences take away from this work?
A: I love playing the flute, so I set out to write music that would make other performers love playing the instrument. I wanted performers to find the concerto fun and emotionally satisfying. This translated into some clear musical decisions, like the choice to have a big, mic-drop ending that would make the audience erupt, which is exactly what happened at the premiere performances. This is also why I wrote melodies that are tuneful and singable, the kind that turn into earworms. The flute excels at singing without words, so I felt that capitalizing on that strength would endear the music to performers and audiences alike, and judging from the reaction to the first performances, I’m thrilled to say I was right, and I’m not only talking about the reactions of the audience at large. Flutists in the audience now want to play the piece and think that it should become part of the core repertoire. If there’s a bigger compliment a composer can receive, I don’t know what it is.
Q: Was there a particular moment during the premiere that stood out to you or felt especially meaningful?
A: Despite being 30 minutes long, the concerto felt like a single moment when I was on stage. I think that’s because my colleagues and I were so committed in our performance. The seriousness my colleagues treated my work with was incredibly meaningful and so was the audience’s enthusiastic reception. It was valedictory. I heard accounts after each performance that the audience was raptly attentive—not an easy feat to pull off with a lengthy piece. I had the sense that I had been really vulnerable, that I’d left it all on the stage as some people say, and that the audience really heard, saw, and understood me. It was profoundly empowering.
Looking Ahead
Q: You’re creating a version of the piece for flute and piano — Four Pieces for Flute and Piano. What inspired you to make this adaptation, and how will it differ from the orchestral version?
A: Most flutists don’t get frequent opportunities to play concertos. Since I knew I needed to create a piano “reduction” of the score for flutists who want to enter the piece in competitions, I decided to go a step further and completely rework the piece. The flute part won’t change, but so many reductions don’t simply reduce the forces needed to play the music to a single instrument. To make the piece workable for piano, a great deal of color and vitality is often removed from the music. So, while the Four Pieces will serve as a “reduction,” I’m going to make significant changes that turn the orchestral writing into something much more pianistic, so that the piece can really work in a recital format without people feeling like they’re missing something without the orchestra.
Q: How do you see this concerto fitting into the larger flute repertoire?
A: There are hundreds (thousands?) of flute concertos out there, but how many of them actually get played often? A handful: the Mozart concertos, Ibert, Nielsen, Reinecke, Rouse, and Liebermann are the heavy hitters. It was important that my piece have the elements of these masterful works that people love, filtered through my own artistic sensibility. It uses a small orchestra so that the flute can be heard easily, much like Mozart and Nielsen; it is massive in scope, along the lines of Rouse; and it is highly virtuosic, much like Ibert and Liebermann. Though it is an original artistic expression—and the composition I’m proudest of, to date—I view it through the lens of what flutists and audiences love about flute concertos, and I think it has something for everyone.
Q: What’s next for you as a composer and performer? Are there other projects in the works?
A: I finished the concerto in January of this year and immediately went on to write three more works. The first was a piece for bass clarinet, soprano sax, and narrator for my friends Corey Mackey and Allen Cordingley, who are the professors of clarinet and saxophone respectively at Texas Christian University. That piece is called Rhymes for Sufferin’ Times and sets text by Alice Duer Miller, a key figure in the movement for women’s suffrage in the 1910s. The text is both clever and, despite its age, alarmingly timely. After that came Memento for alto flute and bass flute, written for my lovely friends Rose Bishop and Heather Neuenschwander for an upcoming album they’re recording. Now I’m writing a rhapsody on Appalachian folk music for a flute choir out of Chattanooga, led by Nora Kile. I’m jokingly calling it Appalapsody. It’s premiering at the NFA convention in Atlanta this summer, so we’ll see if the name sticks.
Q: What advice would you give to young flutists or composers who want to explore creating their own works?
A: DO IT. I think every musician should write music, even if they never allow it to be heard, because composition gets you all the way inside the creative process. It teaches you things about music that are harder to learn without it, and these things are incredibly useful in teaching and performing. Probably highest on the list is that composing makes you a better interpreter, which in turn makes you a more expressive player.
Q: If you could go back in time and play this piece for one composer, who would it be and why?
A: What a fantastic question! I think I’d want to play it for Bernstein. There are so many references to American musical idioms in the piece, and he was so passionate about our country’s richly diverse musical tapestry. I think he’d get a kick out of it!
Starting in February 2026, Concerto for Flute & Chamber Orchestra will be available to rent for performance and Four Pieces for Flute and Piano will be available for purchase.
Timothy Hagen’s full catalog is available for purchase at: https://www.timothyhagen.com/catalog.html
Praised for his "technical virtuosity and musical sensitivity" (NewMusicBox) and “real flair” (The Well-Tempered Ear), flutist Timothy Hagen is a laureate of multiple national and international competitions, including the Myrna Brown Artist Competition and Australian International Flute Competition. He is Principal Flute of the Dubuque Symphony and Missouri Symphony, and has performed with professional ensembles across the country, including the Minnesota Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Oregon Symphony, Grant Park Orchestra, Kalamazoo Symphony, San Antonio Symphony, and Dallas Wind Symphony. His award-winning compositions are performed by musicians throughout North America and Europe, and his scholarly writing has appeared in the journals of the National Flute Association (USA) and British Flute Society.
Hagen is an instructor for online conservatory tonebase, where his courses can be found alongside those by faculty members from top musical institutions such as the Juilliard School, Rice University, University of Michigan, Peabody Institute, and the symphony orchestras of Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Detroit. His appointment as Assistant Professor of Flute and Coordinator of the Woodwind Area at Central Washington University will begin in September 2025. Hagen has previously taught at Clarke University, Austin Peay State University, Central Michigan University, the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Oklahoma State University, The University of Texas-Austin, and Brookhaven College, as well as in partnerships with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Lincoln Center Education, and Dallas Symphony. He completed his studies at the UNC School of the Arts, University of Southern California, Colburn School, and UT-Austin, and his teachers include Marianne Gedigian, Jim Walker, Philip Dunigan, Renée Siebert, Tadeu Coelho, Chelsea Czuchra, Felicia McNaught, and Tina Ballard.