Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - John Corigliano, Page 4

MAGNUSSEN:	The third movement in Circus Maximus is entitled "Channel Surfing." When I saw that I thought: here's a title that really says something about the way John Corigliano is embracing change.
CORIGLIANO:	Well, Circus Maximus is a piece that refers to the crumbling of an empire and entertainment. Entertainment is kind of distraction as the empire crumbles. Because the original Circus Maximus in Rome seated 350,000 people every day for a thousand years. And they had chariot races, and they had jousting, and they had all sorts of competitions. It was like the coliseum, except it was a big large oval so they could do a lot of races and things. And it literally functioned for a thousand years, which meant that millions and millions of people would be entertained. Even as the barbarians were breaking down the gates of Rome , the entertainment was going on. And I took that very much as a sign today, that we don't condemn these glorious things - this little iPod I'm carrying, and my little phone that can do anything, and my computer, and the 500 channels of television, this and that... because it is pretty glorious. On the other hand, this all is distracting us from the knowledge that it might end with a gunshot, and that everything could change. We have this constant need for excitement, thrill, and change, but we never really have the peace to think about what's really happening. So Circus Maximus is that kind of piece. And in that particular movement - "Channel Surfing" - literally, the five different groups surrounded around the hall each have various musics, and when the conductor goes like this, another group plays, and channels, and surfs, and it can happen at any moment. So it's the idea of being bored with this, going to that, and in the middle of that, changing to that, and in the middle of that, changing to that... until a kind of cacophony results from the intense need to have it all and be entertained by everything all the time - at once. This is part of that piece, yes. And I think that piece meant a lot to me in terms of realizing where we are, and perhaps where I want to go after that.
MAGNUSSEN:	Will you write another band piece?
CORIGLIANO:	I would love to write another band piece, but I have to think of one to do. It takes me a while. I'd like to work in musical theatre, even though it's absolutely dead in terms of the kind of composing I might do. But I'd still like to try a piece out and do it, but I need my collaborators for that - you know, someone to write words so I'm not doing that. And so I'm kind of in limbo right now, just looking around.
MAGNUSSEN:	Bill Hoffman was a longtime collaborator of yours.
CORIGLIANO:	Yes, and he's been working on an idea we had for a musical theatre piece for two years, but I haven't seen anything. The problem is that Bill likes to work with a commission. And as even Steven Sondheim told me the other day - we were talking about Bill and all this, and I told him about it - he said, "You know, I never got commissioned. We had to write these things- and then see if anyone wanted to do it." And it's not the money part of the commission, it's the pressure part of the commission that he needs, which I understand. I kind of need it too.
MAGNUSSEN:	The deadline.
CORIGLIANO:	Yeah, the deadline. When you don't have that, you can write the same eight bars of music for the rest of your life and make it better and better, because there's no time for you to say this has to go in. And so Bill doesn't work well without a deadline, and musical theatre doesn't have deadlines in that sense of the word. So, we'll see. Something will happen. I'm not going to worry about it. Well, I am going to worry about it, but I'm going to try not to worry about it, let's put it that way. [laughter]
MAGNUSSEN:	Speaking of finishing pieces, there's this funny story that Morton Feldman used to tell about a painter who would work in his atelier, and he's always slightly drunk. And so he's been painting over and over on a canvas, and when he finishes a bottle of whiskey he has to go downstairs to get the next bottle. While he's gone, his colleagues take the old painting off the easel and replace it with a fresh canvas. And then he emerges with his next bottle of whiskey. He looks a little bit confused at first, but then just resumes painting with the fresh canvas. The first one is finished, sort of by default. Do you tinker with your scores before you finish your compositions? Do you always know when something is done? You've spoken about a sense of architecture as being important...
CORIGLIANO:	Yes, well, that goes hand in hand. In about 1975, I started thinking about composing a different way. What I do since then is I architect the entire piece and then find the music for it. Now when you use the traditional forms of the past, like sonata form and rondo form and all these things, they have built-in architectures. It's kind of like Levittown - you drop your theme in here, you modulate here, you do the right things, but the form is set up for you. It's prefab. But if you don't do that, then you really have to know how to juggle the elements of repetition and familiarity with the unknown and adventure to make forms that really work - forms that have a bearing. And many people - I'm not the first - many people before me have said that music is architecture frozen in a dimension of time. And what I tend to do, when you say a piece should end, is I tend to architect a piece, and I take drawing paper, and I draw it in a time span from beginning to end, and I draw it in intensity level, an idea of when things return - an idea of what happens in this piece, in other words. And I scan it, and I work on it for months. And when that's done, I find the place in the piece I have to begin writing, the place that poses the most problems or will give me those most answers, which is not necessarily the beginning of it. And I start to find the music that is needed for that architecture. However, many composers don't do that. They start out with a germ, with an idea, a motive, a rhythm, something else, and then they say, "What goes next, I'll do this, what goes next, I'll do this, and this and this and this." And a piece gets built that way. And if you build a piece like that, of course, I don't know how you're going to know when it's over, because you're not aware, in a sense, of where it's going until you get there. I think a lot of the problems with contemporary music don't have to do with the relative dissonance level of a piece, because I think today we are able to take any sonority and absorb it if it has a purpose. I think some of the problems are when a piece seems to have no direction. It just simply goes and goes and goes, and we don't feel that it's going to or from anything, or even sustaining to drop off and do something. We feel it is just meandering. And I think people then say, "This bores me." And I have to be honest with you: I'm wanting to be an active listener, not a passive one - and it bores me. Now there's a passive kind of listening that all of us are familiar with because - again, today- music has become a kind of pleasant sound effect when you go to a supermarket, or you're in an elevator, or you're put on hold on the telephone, or you run down the street doing exercises, or you go to the gym. Whatever you do, music will be there, and that music is meant to just give you sound so you don't feel too alone in life, and let it come through you. But you don't really listen to that music actively. That's fine - I don't write that kind of music. And if I'm sitting down and I want to listen to music, that's not the music I want to listen to. On the other hand, if I'm trying to meditate or think of something peaceful, and I want to put on something very peaceful to listen to, that might be the thing that I would half-listen to. But concert music is basically active listening. Especially orchestral and chamber music (without theatre), where you basically see the back of somebody waving his hands and a bunch of people in starched suits sawing away on instruments. You really need to be able to use your mind a little bit - not just your heart, not just "this is beautiful," but- "what's happening?" If you're denied that - and a lot of contemporary music in the early part of the 20^th century denied that to its audience - you're denying the intellectual. And music sometimes is so complex that no other composer can understand it. For instance, in certain pieces where Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland said to me, "I don't understand this," one does have to say at a certain point: "If they don't understand it, it is not music that is communicating intellectually to its audience." I'm not saying everything about a piece should be intellectually comprehensible the first time you hear it. That's impossible. But something should be comprehensible. Beethoven knew that. You always give people something that they can begin to climb the stairs of knowledge on. And then they listen again, and they get more... and that's how we really learn to listen actively. Shutting off all those lower levels of intellectual response unfortunately has done great damage to contemporary music.
BORISKIN:	That's been part of the problem also in maintaining a certain level of active listening. You make a very good point about this difference between sort of casual listening, background listening, and active listening. Part of the problem that we face is the fact that so much concert music, which demands active listening, has been appropriated for the background. So people lose a little bit of that sense that you need to be able to concentrate on something. You need to listen actively. Everything isn't meant to just wash over you and create these nice feelings of relaxation or ebullience or whatever you want to call it. And I have to say that some of this problem is exacerbated by the people within our establishment and within our profession who market what we do in sometimes abominable ways. I'm not talking about the sexy record covers, but rather the notion of how, or what this music is intended for, and how it should be received. It seems to me that one of the big things that we're confronting is a major-league failure of marketing. Some of the most creative work being done in the commercial field in America you will find in marketing. I mean we're loath to admit that some advertisements are great. Sometimes they're so great that you forget the product, but you remember the tactic. You remember the design. But we should only have that problem. We all know this. If you pay any attention to symphonic music, and even opera (maybe a little less so with opera, but certainly symphonic concerts), and to a lesser extent, chamber music concerts, they are marketed the same way. It's interchangeable. You just plug in the composers, but only the composers who were writing up to about 1920. Because after 1920, we don't want to mention their names, or we want to put them in smaller print because we're going to scare away listeners. And the whole notion that you should subscribe, that you should devote 17 or 22 or 6 nights of your life to what's going to be the greatest experience of your life- another masterpiece played again- seems so counterintuitive. And it seems like there's a barrier in the marketing departments of American symphonic world - the American musical world. And I just somehow think we don't challenge these people to say: "This doesn't work. Find something that will really convey some sense of adventure and excitement in this experience." It goes back to what you were talking about with your kids at Juilliard. How do we make this special? It's hard to make it special if your programming, first of all, is so formulaic that you're starting out with an overture, whether it's Rossini or Mozart or Mendelssohn or Weber. And then you're doing the big piece, one of the big star vehicles where a soloist is coming in and usually playing a tried-and-true concerto, and then coming back with a nice big, splashy symphony. It's a little bit difficult to get people excited about that in this day and age, when music is so accessible electronically. All of this comes together. You need to give people a reason to get out of their seats and hear the Mahler Second, because at home they've got CDs of Karajan and Bernstein and Abbado; and they've got a really nice chablis or chardonnay that they've been looking to try, and a wonderful cheese; and they're going to invite some friends over; and they're going to relax in the comfort of their home. They don't have to go out. They don't have to pay parking. They don't have to pay the babysitter. And they don't have to pay $100 for a ticket. What are you going to do to get them into that seat?