Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - John Corigliano, Page 3

MAGNUSSEN:

The opera world seems to be adapting more quickly than the symphonic world, in terms of electronics.  You have John Adams' new opera with a huge soundscape in the beginning and the end.  In Jake Heggie's opera, Dead Man Walking, there are also electronic sounds. 

CORIGLIANO:

Opera was always ahead of the symphony world in terms of innovation.  There were trombones in the opera 200 years before they were in the orchestra.  Every single thing that became part of the orchestral thing happened way after it was introduced in opera, because opera is theatre. 

BORISKIN:

It's the theatrical element.

 

CORIGLIANO:

Because of the theatre and the element of theatre, opera was very adventurous in many ways so that the symphonic world has had to catch up.  So it's just part of the history of opera - instruments being used all the time that were never part of an orchestra.

It's true. Opera is ahead of the symphony.  And the other thing about opera is that the halls today are so much bigger than the halls originally envisioned to do these operas. The singers' voices are human.  They don't get bigger.  And sometimes you have a situation where there are 4,000 people in a hall, and you realize that in Europe , where it was first performed, there would have been 900 to 1,200 people in a hall.  So in that situation, the idea of amplification seems very logical because it's not in a hall it was written to be played in.  It's in a hall that has nothing to do with the idea of matching a natural voice and instruments.  You have to boost sometimes just to preserve that balance that was natural in the small European halls.

 

BORISKIN:

That's an important point because these large halls here are very much an American concept.  We do everything big in this country.  But even some of the most prestigious venues in Europe - opera houses or symphony halls (I've played in a lot of symphony spaces overseas) - they are often 1,500 seats, and that's the largest concert venue in the town.  And some of these are in very good-sized towns. 

The Bavarian Opera in Munich , for instance, is one of the most important houses on the continent, and it's not a large house.  Glyndebourne is not a large theatre.  So somehow this notion of economics and doing it big has pushed us to these 3,000-4,000-seat opera houses and symphony halls, as a matter of course.  And it creates a lot of problems that you don't think of - starting with getting all of those seats occupied, and what do you have to do to achieve that, and how it affects your programming, and how does that affect your interaction with your audiences.

I think everything that we've talked about so far is so reflective of the larger issue of concert music being frozen in time in so many respects: from presentation, to repertoire, even to our notions of having a properly-wired theatre in the year 2005.  We are trying, some of us, to drag concert music, which grew up largely in the late-18th and 19th centuries -into the 21st century.  And certainly in terms of concert music, we are trying to reconnect new creativity with this unbelievably rich old repertoire so we can maybe break away a little bit from this re-run mentality that - in a lot of ways, I think - is crippling our presentations.

 

CORIGLIANO:

I agree.  In fact, there's another thing about the size of audiences- not just in the concert hall, but also in the media. 

For 13 years beginning in the 1960s, I worked on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. I worked on Vladimir Horowitz's show for CBS.  I worked for NBC Opera Theatre when they did Boris Godunov, and when they commissioned operas by Menotti and other people. All of these shows were on the big networks. 

Later on when Baryshnikov wanted to get onto a network, he had to team up with Liza Minnelli because Baryshnikov wasn't a big enough name.  Today, you can't even get on PBS.  PBS' Antiques Road Show is much more important than concert music.  You'll see no full operas because it's too much for them. You have to go into the subcategory of the cable networks - the art cable networks - because PBS demands a larger viewership than they can get from, say presenting an opera at The Met.  So in addition to the concert halls, the media has larger and larger needs because of the expense.

 

BORISKIN:

It's a vicious cycle, because the less concert music and opera figures in the mainstream media - I'm not talking about the culture pages of The New York Times, but the mainstream media - the less it's out of the radar of everyday life, the less people are aware of it. 

I remember a few years ago, a friend of ours got us a subscription to Time Magazine.  We're pretty well read, and we don't really need Time Magazine.  But it was nice to have.  And I started thumbing through it every week when it came, and for close to three years, I remember thinking that there was not one article about concert music or opera in Time Magazine.  There's no classical music writer, there's no concert music writer regularly assigned to that beat anymore - in either Time or Newsweek or the U.S. News & World Report. 

Finally there was an article about an opera, a rediscovered opera that was done in a concentration camp for four kids to be performed by kids.  And it soon became clear that the only reason that article was there was because Maurice Sendak took on the project and was designing the sets and the costumes and all of that.

And I got to the end of the article, and there was not one mention of the composer.  The composer's name was left out- the primary creator of this piece.  So I did something that I had never done before, which was to scribble off a letter to the editor.  It was a very short letter, and the gist of it was that one can't imagine an article about the then-current revival of "Long Day's Journey into Night," being written about without mentioning Eugene O'Neal, for example.  The next thing I know, the letter's published.  It's down at the bottom of the list of letters - it's a six-line letter.  And I started getting calls from people all over the country. "Oh, great to see your letter," and all of this stuff.  And it brought home in a small but very tangible way how important this presence - this mainstream media presence is - and what we have completely lost.  If all of these people can see a tiny letter after three letters about Brittney Spears and respond to it, it shows that people are not only reading the features, but they're reading the letters.  And we miss out on it - we're in a real state of disadvantage, when what we do is completely off the mainstream radar.

 

 

MAGNUSSEN:

That reminds me - the libretto for your opera begins with these wonderful words sung by Louis XIV: "The queen languishes in despair.  She clings to the past.  A commoner is courting her, but will he have her?  I don't care.  Let him have her." 

And this commoner is of course -

 

CORIGLIANO:

Beaumarchais - who was a commoner, but a rather brilliant one.

 

MAGNUSSEN:

Should this commoner be read as pop culture?

 

CORIGLIANO:

In a way, the French Revolution was about the aristocracy in the popular world, but it was also about some other rather interesting things.  To me, the French Revolution symbolized a kind of change.  How one changes.  And the French Revolution's idea of change was violent: destroy the past and build on the rubble. 

And so while it was a very important thing to have happen, it was not quite like the American Revolution, and certainly not like the Soviet to Russian revolution that happened in the last 15 years with no bloodshed whatsoever, where Leningrad was returned to be St. Petersburg . I was interested in that because there are a lot of parallels in art between the artist as a destroyer of the past (build on the rubble), or the artist embracing the past and going into the future. I'm one of the latter in terms of my philosophy. 

So I was raising this issue through the French Revolution, but it was really about how we change. How do we embrace new things? How do we look back?  Do we just destroy everything and say it's all wrong?  This is what's right, this is what's wrong?  Or is that indeed some sort of fundamentalism?

 

MAGNUSSEN:

It makes me think of your Circus Maximus, this huge piece for band - for multiple bands, right?

 

CORIGLIANO:

Well, one very large one.

 

MAGNUSSEN:

One very large one, but they're spaced out.

 

CORIGLIANO:

They're spaced all over the hall. 

It's a piece I wrote because - and this is the interesting thing again, having to do with economics and the orchestra - I could never write a piece like that for the symphony orchestra because it involved people spending too much time to learn the music.  And because of rising expenses in our concert world, it's gotten to the point where every week you put on a program with a new show of a whole evening.  So you begin your week on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday night you play your first concert.  That means that you first see the music on Tuesday, which means that whether it's Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which every member of that orchestra knows and can start right in playing, or whether it's my Circus Maximus, which has a list of instructions on how to play it, with new ways of playing the instruments, and the players having to listen for this cue before doing that - they still only have the same amount of time to do it.  This makes it very difficult economically for the major institutions of the past - the orchestra, for example - to learn new music.

It's impossible really for a group of players to learn certain things, and so there are certain things I could never do with an orchestra.  I could do up to that, but I could never go further.  When I wrote for this band, which is the university band from Austin - and they played, I must say, as well as any major orchestra - I was able to write things which they had to memorize.  They had to look at people.  Remember a tempo when the conductor cued them- the whole bunch- and come in together.  March while playing.  And react to players across the hall.  So I was able to be creative in a different way because the obstacle of the practical, very limited orchestra world was not my problem then. 

Circus Maximus is a piece I have great fondness for.  It's being performed quite a lot now by the bands.  I was in Phoenix two weeks ago, and then I go to Ann Harbor in three weeks and they'll play this piece.  And it's a very difficult piece.

I guess we're saying that where we're going is not where we were.  Maybe the orchestra is a limited institution and can play a little bit of contemporary music.  But maybe the composers have to find other paths in this day where they can express themselves that reach people in another way. 

Certainly the band audience is used to hearing new music, for example.  Whereas the concert hall audience has, because of certain composers and philosophies that had to do with negating the communicative ability intellectually to the audience, certain negative thoughts of that kind resulted in an audience that is prejudiced against a new piece before they hear it, and this audience has to be won over in the concert hall.  That's just the way it is - we all know this.

When you go to the band world, they're excited by a new piece, just like the concert world was in the 1920s in Paris .  They're excited about a new piece.  So right away you have: 1) an excited audience; 2) you have a conductor that is not a maestro, that is really interested in learning the piece, because he's not worried about the Bruckner Symphony in the second half, because there is no Bruckner Symphony; 3) and a band has the time to practice it over and over again and really learn it.  And I think after that experience, my desire to compose for the orchestra has diminished enormously - let's put it that way.

Young composers are finding other avenues, and those other avenues could be chamber music groups of unusual combinations.  They can be electronics plus chamber, video plus music... 

Most of my students have websites.  And if you go to their website, you can play some of their music and listen to it.  Their bios are there.  This couldn't have happened 20 years ago.  So while the big monster institutions are decaying, merging (like Sony joining BMG), and some are even going out of business, the small ones and the individual composers are actually poking their heads up from this rubble and saying, "No, we're doing just fine.  We're putting out our own records."  Because today, it's easy to put out your own records with a little thing this big.  The technology is so extraordinary.

So I see it as not a negative thing, but as an incredible time of change, probably the biggest in artistic and musical history, in which our world in 20 years is going to be unrecognizable.  And it's very interesting for me to see how that change is happening, and it's very difficult for me to see where I would fit in. 

That's why I'm not writing any music now.  For anybody.  I'm just thinking about where I want to go and what I want to do.  Because I don't want to do what I did, and I'm trying to find out where I can be valuable. 

So we're in a different time; we're in a very interesting time.