Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - John Corigliano, Page 2

MAGNUSSEN:	You were born into a musical family, and your father was the concertmaster for a long time for the New York Philharmonic. Was the composer useful back then? And if so, how did this change?
CORIGLIANO:	Well, it really didn't change quite then. I think the repertoire got frozen because the orchestra got frozen. Around 1900, the symphony orchestra reached this very large romantic orchestra proportion. And any new instruments introduced after that really did not become a part of the orchestra, including a few things from before, like the saxophones. While Debussy, Milhaud and Prokofiev wrote for saxophones, they're still not real members of the orchestra. They come in as guests. The biggest change introduced in the 20^th century was electronics- that is, amplification. The whole idea of treated sound, reverb, echo, and various other things you could do electronically. The orchestra and classical music in general put up a very big barrier to that. It was a kind of "anti-Christ" - we do not deal with amplification. But the rest of the world has not known that and has gone on dealing with it for the last 75-100 years now. So we're dealing with a hundred-year tradition in which people are used to hearing things come out of speakers, and are used to hearing singers even in a room this big - pop singers singing with a piano with a microphone, so they even hear that through speakers. Their entire lives are that, and I think the crisis that's happened in the concert hall has been the avoidance of a very important issue, which is the separateness that is happening between concert music and the rest of the world's music. A big part of that separateness has to do with the simple idea of amplification.
MAGNUSSEN:	That's interesting. Your Bob Dylan songs, some of which are on the concert tonight - are meant for amplified soprano in the orchestral version.
CORIGLIANO:	Right.
MAGNUSSEN::	You don't see this every day- a piece that's written for orchestra and vocalist, where amplification is specified in the title.
CORIGLIANO:	Well, I've written for natural soprano. I mean, my opera The Ghosts of Versailles - some of you know that - is written for singers without amplification on the stage at the Metropolitan Opera, carrying over the orchestra. The orchestration is therefore very carefully made so that the singer can be heard at all times. But the problem with the Bob Dylan cycle was that the jargon - the language of Bob Dylan does not meld with an operatic-projected voice. And I am not one of the many composers that ignore that. I cannot have someone say, "I think I'll take three halcyons," and do that with a mezzo soprano with a huge vibrato and an orchestral chord. It doesn't make sense to me. At all. So if you are using contemporary language, then you should sing in a more contemporary way. And the way that you sing without forcing that voice into the kind of vibrato and tessitura it must be in, in order to project - the way you do that is to amplify it. So these Bob Dylan songs, when they're done with a piano, can be sung without amplification. When these songs are performed with orchestra, however, the amplification makes it possible for the soprano not to have to sound operatic, which would be anathema to the whole idea of the Bob Dylan songs. I think that today's composer notices this. The problems exist in the fact that today's concert halls are not even built with wiring for amplification. Every time you do something which requires electronics - and I've done a few things- it's a problem. I did a piece called Vocalise for soprano, orchestra, and electronics, with instruments and speakers around the hall. And Avery Fisher Hall, modern hall that it is, has to drag in cables on the stage. The cables go down where the audience walks. The speakers are put up here and there. They're not permanent fixtures. I was talking on the phone to Michael Tilson Thomas last month, and he told me about the new hall he's building in Miami for his New World Symphony. And I said, "Well, Michael, is it wired so that you could do video and audio and have little plugs and all that?" And he said, "I don't know." And I thought that's the first thing I'd want to know, because any 21^st century hall should have a natural acoustic, but it should also be prepared to have jacks all over the place so that one could do recording, television, or anything else that comes along. I think that is a major problem - the bulkiness of electronics being added to the orchestra.