Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - John Corigliano, Page 5

MAGNUSSEN:	John, you have a lot of works being played by symphony orchestras (of course, not enough, right?)
CORIGLIANO:	Never enough. [laughter]
MAGNUSSEN:	So it seems to me that somebody in your position would be a resource for the orchestra administrator who might want to solve these problems.
CORIGLIANO:	Well, I think that as a composer, one of the things I take as a challenge is to make the concert hall special again. And I think that in Beethoven's day, the concert hall was special. You couldn't hear music outside of a concert hall. So the minute you entered a concert hall, you were in a magical place. But it is no longer a special place. So a lot of my pieces take the physicality of the concert hall and try to use it in some way - spatially, dramatically, theatrically - with a symphony orchestra, and with an audience, and with a two-day preparation time, and try to figure a way in which something can happen in that hall that can't happen in the house. So you'll have works like my Clarinet Concerto that has an antiphonal toccata in the last movement, where things move to the left and the right in terms of sonorities on the stage; sets of antiphonal drums; five French horns around the back of the audience play, two trumpets in the back of the audience play to the two trumpets on the stage, two clarinets on the top to the soloist, and so on. Or in the Pied Piper Fantasy where the soloist has a "pied piper" costume and there's lighting, and very often there's dance with that. If not, there's a place near the end where the soloist picks up a tin whistle and plays a children's march, and groups of children in the audience answer them, and they come on the stage and play with the piper. Then they snake their way through the audience as the orchestra is playing, and the march is playing going out, and the lights are dimming, and it becomes a kind of "happening" concert. It's a 40-minute flute concerto. Other pieces, like Circus Maximus, do that. Not every piece. But I love to say, "All right, I've got a space. I've got 90 musicians. I've got an audience sitting here, a conductor there. What can I do to make this a special place again?" Rather than, "Now will begin the downbeat of my first symphony, and the proscenium is there, and I do this, and those are the rules." And I think that Beethoven and other composers would have done that too if they were in our century, because they would have seen the need to revitalize something. And I also think the idea of programming - all of this comes from the idea that classical music is a European art form, and that what we need is a great European maestro to come and show us how to do it best, and then we will all appreciate it. Back in the ‘40s and ‘30s, the American composers were creating an incredible repertoire of great music, and Aaron Copland was one of the leaders of this. But many of them - Copland, Samuel Barber, Charles Ives, Howard Hanson, Walter Piston, Bill Schuman - these were enormously big vital American symphonic works, many of which are not played now, but they are absolutely great pieces. After the war, a kind of universal language of composition developed, which was no longer American and no longer European, and it swept away the idea of this American music. So now young American composers are doing very eccentric things. But before that all happened, the world was pretty much a place of one way of composing. It took away our specialness. But I think we had it for a certain amount of time. If Leonard Bernstein had lived longer - that one man just simply living longer - he would have done a lot of important things for contemporary music and for our contemporary musical life, as an educator and as a unique visionary. If he had had his health - and many conductors live to their 90s, so he should have, as well - we would be in a different place today. We need a person who can stand up and say, "This is our music. Listen to our music," and let that happen. We don't have that right now. We really don't. We don't have a single spokesperson - you know, that Carl Sagan type. Someone to come and really let us know and help us in this path of realizing how fascinating the music of our country is. And it is fascinating at this particular moment.
BORISKIN:	Well, even in the larger sense, you're absolutely right. Bernstein was sort of the first star American performer who helped to break what was basically an inferiority complex - a cultural inferiority complex. That's why we had all these European music directors here, because there weren't any Americans supposedly who could measure up. And we're still dealing with that. One doesn't want to sound too chauvinistic or jingoistic about this, but it's amazing to think how many small orchestras even in this country are led by European maestros who have virtually no connection with their community. And worse than that, no connection with America 's creative and cultural life. And so of course, if you've got somebody who's coming in just to do eight concerts a year from Rome or Leipzig or wherever, and they have no familiarity with some of the extraordinarily rich American repertoire, past and present - they are not going to be in a position to suggest it, they're not in a position to program it, and this contributes to this vicious cycle that we're dealing with of a lack of leadership, as you call it. And I would also take this leadership void to a larger national level of debate in the arts. But when we think about some of the really vicious and spurious attacks on the NEA ten or fifteen years ago which helped to change a whole sense of funding the arts in this country, you have to think that if there were one or two recognized charismatic leaders - not only performers and composers, but administrative leaders too - who were able to take a position, that a lot of these off-the-wall attacks on funding for the arts in this country wouldn't have happened. They would have shriveled from ridicule, if nothing else. I mean you could see a debate like this happening in France , and the intelligentsia in France simply skewering - not even answering the argument, but skewering it with ridicule. We just don't have that.
CORIGLIANO:	May I say one thing? I believe, yes, that the government of course should help the arts. What worries me is the question of who's giving the money out. And who is friends with the person giving the money out? If you take France , for example, it's pretty totalitarian. When someone gives you money, they don't know whether you're good or not, or whether you're a good person and are going to do this correctly or not, then a lot of corruption can happen with that. So within the idea of support, there has to be a really nice way to spread that support out equally to people, and not to center it, which is what happens very often unfortunately.
BORISKIN:	Yes. And this is exactly the kind of question that should be debated, not the distracting attacks because somebody did one scandalous piece of work, and you're going to kill funding. Yes, there's real debate about how you fund the arts in this country. If you don't have some kind of government funding, then you're going to be relying on corporate funding. Nobody's going to say that corporate funding is that much better. There's a corporate totalitarianism in funding these kinds of things. But these are the questions that should be discussed and explored fully, and not these sort of strange arguments that demagogues would make. We're still at a place in this country where the arts are deemed in many corners of government as not upholding family values. We've heard that many times. I'm not sure how that happened. I'm not sure how that argument was left to stand. What could be more family-oriented than various kinds of art, some more challenging than others? We basically have left this discussion about arts funding, and lots of other areas of the arts get hijacked because we don't have leaders who have a presence, I think, on the scene.
MAGNUSSEN:	I can think of one solution, and we'll hear it tonight. John's song on the Bob Dylan text "Masters of War" is one example that's chillingly honest and to the point. Your setting of that text leaves nothing in question. It's just very powerful.
BORISKIN:	I thought that too, because the Dylan song was written about Vietnam . And as it happens, we find ourselves enmeshed in another situation.
CORIGLIANO:	It's a very appropriate moment for this. But it wasn't written because of that.
BORISKIN:	No, of course not.
CORIGLIANO:	It was written in 2000.
BORISKIN:	Yes, it predates it, but this is an interesting way in which art transcends the times.
CORIGLIANO:	I think art can be political, and I certainly like it when it is. My first symphony was written about friends of mine who had died, and one who was dying of AIDS. And it was an important piece because very often, when the orchestra of a community did it, the quilt came and demonstrated their quilts around it, and even in Europe this happened. And there were fundraisings and information about the tragedy so that it could form a community function. I think the Pied Piper is a good piece for that because the young flutists of a community get to unite with, say, James Galway, and have an experience of growing with a great musician and playing with a symphony orchestra. I think composers should try to be part of a community and give a viewpoint about things that everyone is concerned with, and also see what they can do to draw people from the community into the symphonic world. I think that's part of our responsibility. But see, that's only if you think you have a responsibility, which is what I feel. I feel we have a responsibility to be clear, to say something as clearly as possible. I don't feel as if I am a "composer god". I'm a composer human being relating to other human beings. And I think it's terribly important that we be, you know, useful members of society - which is why I'm looking now to see what I can do to be a useful member of society again.