Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - John Corigliano, Page 6

MAGNUSSEN:	What was your artistic reaction to the events of September 11^th?
CORIGLIANO:	Well, I didn’t write a piece specifically about that. I was in New York at the time and got a phone call, and there I was on the upper-west side watching the television as if I were in Ohio or in London . It was very bizarre knowing that was happening downtown. A friend of mine who called me, Bill Hoffman, lives down there and was looking outside his window at the World Trade Center and describing it to me so that it really was real. But it had an unreal quality because of the way news is reported now. We see so much of this kind of thing that there’s an unreal quality to real things. So it was very surrealistic for me to feel the tragedy and yet to see it in that artificial way in which we get to see all news now, and we don’t know if it’s real or not. I did not think of writing a piece for it, and I haven’t yet. I think it’s too close to me. I’m glad that there were pieces written about it, and we all know that there are a bunch of pieces written. The Philharmonic asked me to write one, and I said I wouldn’t know what to do yet. I just don’t know what to do. First of all, because it’s the beginning of something, not the end of something. September 11^th was the beginning of a time that has no end, so I feel like we’re in the middle of something, and I haven’t been able to figure out how to address that.
MAGNUSSEN:	There was a point around 1975 – the time of your Oboe Concerto, or the Dylan Thomas Trilogy – when you were experiencing a sort of dissatisfaction with the music that you had been writing up to that point. And I can’t imagine that, looking at some of your work before that time, like the scherzo in your Piano Concerto. You had some wonderful things going on.
CORIGLIANO:	Well, I think the dissatisfaction was due to two things. One is that I felt that I was not in control of the big shapes. They were in control of me. That is, by adopting conventional big shapes, I felt that huge decision of, “What happens from here to here,” that I was not making, and that was the one I wanted to make. And the other thing had to do with the idea that all the pieces I had written before that time were pieces that I wrote because of those five lines with those clefs, and those sharps and flats, and pitches, and bar lines. I wanted to explore what it was like to imagine music without being able to write it down, and then find a way to write that music down. And if it was conventionally written down, all the better. But if it wasn’t, I’d have to find a new notational way to tell musicians to play what I wanted. I felt I had boxed myself in, in other words, and I wanted to open it up. If you play the piano, and you write by only playing the piano, then your piano technique is going to influence the way you compose. If you use Sibelius, which is a notation software program for computers, and you write music by typing it in with a Sibelius method, it’s going to give you a kind of music that that does well, a kind of music that it doesn’t do well, and a kind of music it can’t do at all. And so your composing is influenced by the mechanism. I wanted to open it up and say, “Okay, what happens if there’s no mechanism, and I just imagine something like a glob of purple that slowly turns orange and then gets tentacles and falls down slowly in a minute’s time. What does that sound like?” And so I’d draw a picture of it doing that. And then I would say, “What would happen if I had all like instruments playing these notes, and then some of them would diminuendo to nothing, and the others would start moving down these trails and paths?” And then I would write that down. And then I’d say, “Do I do that in a beat time, or do I do that with a cue? How do the players know how to do this?” And I would evolve it. In The Ghosts of Versailles, the ghost music was evolved very much from these ideas of pictures. So I think in 1975 I was just realizing that the standard notational system was inhibiting me. And my technique (and the idea that I did it more at a keyboard than not) was inhibiting me. And I’d get away from those things and just go inside my brain. And I did most of my composing lying on a bed with a pillow over my head so that I didn’t hear any outside noises. And what I would do is lie with a pillow over my head. I still do, and sometimes I fall asleep. (laughter) Those are the good moments. The other ones, I would just try and imagine something. I’d try to visualize what it looks like, see what it sounds like, find a way to write it down, either in words or pictures, encompass it, and finally find a way to make that playable for musicians.
BORISKIN:	And you’re not speaking metaphorically about this. As it happens I just got the newsletter – I don’t know if you even know about this– from the American Composers Forum, which is a wonderful composer service organization. This is the November/December 2005 issue, and there’s an article by Alex Shapiro who studied with you. She talks about having private lessons with you at Manhattan School of Music. And she writes, “John taught me how to hear and compose from the deepest part of my instinct by avoiding the use of staff paper and piano until much later in the writing process. He suggested that long before touching a page of manuscript paper, I lie down, relax, and simply hear” – I was so stunned to read this.
CORIGLIANO:	I’m consistent. [laughter]
BORISKIN:	Thanks to John Corigliano, there’s going to be a whole generation of composers that are just lying around. (laughter) Or well rested. “I lie down, relax, and simply hear, in detail or not, the piece I intended to put together. Once I had a sense of the energy and movement of the piece, the next step was to pick up a blank pad and some colored pencils and create a visual representation of the music as it came to life in my head. John suggested following this free abstract drawing by writing a narrative of what transpires during the piece” – this is just what you said – “and using a list of adjectives and adverbs to guide what I am searching to reveal emotionally. Only after all of these steps should I approach the keyboard or score pad and commit to musical notation. This was priceless advice,” she writes.
MAGNUSSEN:	So you were teaching in Manhattan School in the early ‘70s, right? Was it until 1975 or 1978?
CORIGLIANO:	I have no idea of dates in the past. I can never remember them. But it was a long time ago, that’s all I can say.
BORISKIN:	It’s interesting to hear different composers’ takes on things. Copland had always written at the piano, and he never wanted to confess to that. He wrote about this in his memoirs, and said it was only when they – the younger composers – found out that Stravinsky admitted to writing at the piano that they felt it was okay to admit that, because there is a notion that you shouldn’t need to necessarily rely on an instrument as such a tangible tool. But he said once they found out that Stravinsky did it, they thought it was okay.
MAGNUSSEN:	Well, Copland studied with Boulanger as so many composers of that generation did, and the French system discourages this dependence on an instrument. In the conservatory exams, for example, you’re put into a little room with a table and paper and a pencil to write. They call it a mise en loge. You not allowed to have an instrument.
BORISKIN:	Well that’s your mind at work. That’s the training at the conservatoire.
CORIGLIANO:	Well, I think they’re both valuable. I mean I use the piano when I’m writing something very harmonic. But it’s very bad if you’re writing something textural because it’s not a texture instrument. So if you’re writing pitches, and you want to hear what they sound like– fine. But if you want to hear a wash of sound doing something else, you can’t do that on a piano. And if you try to do it, you’ll get a different sound. They’re incompatible. So you use anything you want when it suits what you want in that piece. But for the first conception of a piece, I think a piano is bad because you get caught up in details.
BORISKIN:	And now a lot of young composers are getting caught up in the details of computers. The analogous argument with kids using calculators… At some point you have to be able to know the operation and be able to do the operation yourself. The calculator is a great tool, and it’s a great facilitator, but it’s not great if you’ve only learned to push buttons and have something else go through the process. You have to do it. At some point, you have to be able to do it. I’ve seen works by younger composers that I know were written on computers, and they have relied too much on the computer solving problems for them. And you look these scores, and you know that this is going to be physically impossible to bring off, whether it’s from a technical point of view or an aural point of view. You know that the instruments will not do this. The computer can do anything, or almost anything. And certainly from a technical point of view, a computer can spit out notes in whatever wild kind of configurations you want. But assuming that you have a human performer in mind at the end of that, one needs to take that into account. I’m not talking about simplifying writing...
CORIGLIANO:	You can right a high “G” above the staff for the trumpet marked pianissimo, and the computer will play it for you. It’s just the living human that has a little difficulty with that.
BORISKIN:	Exactly.
CORIGLIANO:	You know, I’m convinced that Beethoven’s deafness made him even a greater composer than he was. It’s partly because he forgot that people couldn’t play perfectly, so he’d write the Grosse Fuge, for example, which is so hard for any human being to play. But in his head, I’m sure he heard it perfectly played. And you know in the Ninth Symphony there are 2,000 high A’s for the sopranos and marked piano – anyway, every way, over and over again. And I’m sure, in his inner ear, when he was listening to this piece, they were perfect. And then you get out to a real bunch of sopranos in a chorus and have them do it, and you see what life is all about. I think over the years from when he started getting deaf to where he wrote those pieces, he kind of idealized the performances, so they all became perfect for him. And now a lot of performers are spending their professional lives trying to realize what Beethoven had imagined, and yet his imagination had left reality for many years because he couldn’t hear the actual sound. It became a perfect sound in his head, and computers can do that too. They can make the perfect sound. And then you get to the rehearsal and you hear in the living sound that it is not quite that. There are all sorts of things like that. I think that we should make use of everything. I think this is an age – it’s a really interesting age. People say, “Where is the future of music going to be? Is it going to be into 12-tone, tonal this and that.” And the answer, I think, is that this is the Age of Information. It is the age of the ability to gather total information. And creative people– if they don’t lock themselves off from the information– can absorb so much just like a computer can, that the results of listening to music from all sorts of non-western sources; microtonal music as well as tonal music; harmonic music; and Gregorian chants; and quartal music and this music and that… and the combinations that happen as a result will be very interesting, as the giant computer of our brain amasses this information, reprocesses it, and decides what it wants to reflect of it. The composers are going to have quite different voices from each other, because the number of influences will be so large. And they will be influenced by everything, whether they like it or not, which will make for a very interesting time. We have had dogmatic times in the past – dogmatic people either writing tonally or 12-tone dogmatic people, the serialists, or the minimalists rather recently, who were very dogmatic about this being the way music goes. And I think that hopefully – I’m certainly hoping for this – hopefully there’s not going to be one way this music goes. Because that kind of “blinders” view is very destructive to not just art, but the whole idea of communication.