Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - John Corigliano

Good afternoon.  Thank you for coming out this cold day.  It gives me great pleasure to introduce both of my guests who are here for a conversation about the past, the present, and the future - Michael Boriskin and John Corigliano.  First, though, I'd like to say a few words about them.

Michael Boriskin is Artistic and Executive Director of the Copland House and Cortlandt Manor, the longtime home of composer Aaron Copland.  And he is also the founding pianist of Music from Copland House, the group that will be performing some of John's music, and also the music of Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky later on this evening (and also tomorrow).  Michael was actually here two years ago with composer George Perle, so it's nice to have you back.

BORISKIN:

John Corigliano has won many awards for his compositions in the orchestral, chamber, opera, and film worlds.  He is Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, and he's also on the faculty at The Juilliard School where I had the distinct pleasure of participating in his graduate seminar.  That was 12 years ago now- a long time ago.  So it's a privilege to have you here, John.

Twelve years ago, one of the first things that you did in your seminar was to present a position piece - your reaction to the dearth of new Broadway musicals being produced then.

Yes, I did.  In addition to that, I was also concerned with the fact that the composers in the seminar felt, as many people do, that their job was to compose music, and it was someone else's job to make sure that the music happened.  And with the standard repertoire the way it is now on Broadway - what I guess I was meaning by that statement was that we reached a point on Broadway where there was a standard repertoire, just like there is in symphonic music.  We may have our Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven, and Bach, but they have their Rogers & Hammerstein, and Cole Porter and the many other various musicals that have now become the standard rep.  And the new repertoire suffers very much, because there's a sure-fire hit that can come back from 50 years ago - like The King and I, which just opened up a while ago - whereas you take more of a risk when you produce a new piece.

So all the creative people on Broadway are posed with the same problem now that we've had for the last 80 years in the symphonic world, which is: Are we really needed?  And how do we make ourselves visible to a world in which the basic practice is performing the familiar? 

And so the seminar got a budget from The Juilliard School for a concert.  And the composers came to my apartment every Monday evening to meet and decide on an idea for a special concert that would somehow wake up The Juilliard School.  (Because if you go to Juilliard, you know there are posters all over the school of graduation recitals and little concerts.  And there's a concert an hour - three concerts an hour, in fact.)

 So what can we do to make our concert special?  And they had to think of an idea of what kind of concert it should be, write music for that kind of concert, publicize it with posters, get to radio stations and other venues- as you remember- working with the stage crew on how we're going to get things in and out, physically how the production is going to be, and in fact learning the whole process that comes into putting on a concert.  And I thought it was important for the students and for me too, of course.  It was important for every living composer to get out of the idea that we compose in our room, we send our music out, and they'll call us when they're ready to perform it, and we attend that. 

So that was a world that most students had not been in, but I thought they really did enjoy putting this together and learning more about production.  And several of the students have gone into the idea of actually producing concerts after their graduation, which is quite nice.