1 September—The Yale School of Music’s 2022-2023 Concert Season schedule arrived yesterday, first one since the novel coronavirus panic, Tony Fauci, and King Ned Lamont closed down Connecticut unnecessarily. A picture of an attractive woman with an early 20th-century hairdo covered the whole verso (back side) of the front cover.

The first page told me that “[A]fter almost two years away, we are excited to welcome you back to Yale’s concert halls. . . .” You bet! Further down the page, “We are particularly pleased to present a performance of the Piano Concerto in C minor by Helen Hagan (pictured), who, in 1912, became the first Black woman to earn a degree from the Yale School of Music.”

My first reaction was, why the hell do they mention Helen Hagan’s Color, why is race such a big deal, why should it even matter? Upon further consideration, my second reaction was, what the hell, like it or not, it’s the new way of life (especially at universities like Yale that are afraid of being thrown off the wokewagon) and essentially no worse than newspapers telling everybody the ages and addresses of people in news stories even when that information is totally irrelevant. Maybe, maybe not.

My third reaction was to divert my gaze back to Helen Hagan’s picture, which for some reason was printed in brown, and—hmm, now you mention it, she does look somewhat Negroid. Not that it matters, but shame on me for even thinking that.

Never having heard of Helen Hagan, I naturally turned to Wikipedia, where I learned that “Helen Eugenia Hagan (10 January 1891 – 6 March 1964) was an American pianist, music educator and composer of African descent.” From Portsmouth, New Hampshire, then New Haven, before she attended Yale. Yale BA in music, 1912. Studied in Paris before and at Columbia after World War I. During the Great War, Gen. Pershing personally asked her to entertain our troops in Europe.

Helen taught at a black college in Texas, was a choir director and church organist, died in New York City when I was still living there. But evidently she didn’t rate an obit in The New York Times. Once again, that overrated rag was caught with its pants down. (Unless Helen Hagan’s NYT obit simply didn’t make it online. I’ll never know.)

(But the NYT made up for it—not—a couple of years ago with Helen O’Hagan’s obit. She had been Saks Fifth Avenue’s publicity director and best friend of Claudette Colbert and died at 89.)

Just for the fun of it, I blew the dust off my several real-book music biographical references. None even mentioned Helen Hagan.

What’s worse, even if Helen Hagan composed more than one piece, only one appears to have survived, the one that’s going to be performed at Woolsey Hall by the Yale Phil on 21 October, with musicologist Samantha Ege (currently a junior research fellow at Lincoln College, Oxford, who’s into “underrepresented musicians”) tickling the ivories. Did I write that?

As it happens, Dr. Ege’s piano performance is on YouTube. So naturally I listened. I don’t know if Samantha Ege is reading Helen Hagan’s original unorchestrated version or a reduction or something else. In all events, being totally devoid of musical talent, I’m nevertheless an excellent critic. Aren’t we all?

So here goes: While Helen Hagan’s piano concerto is monotonously derivative of Franz Liszt’s less brilliant piano pieces and therefore nothing to write home about, I’d nevertheless like to hear more of her stuff. Make that her oeuvre, since this is a classy review. The concerto is not at all unpleasant. And any other works of Helen Hagan are likely to be equally not unpleasant . . .