Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - John Corigliano, Page 7

MAGNUSSEN:	That reminds me of an interesting moment when David Diamond was at the end of his time at Juilliard. He had formed some sort of informal "anti-box-notation gang."
CORIGLIANO:	Yes, because I used boxes. I was the villain.
MAGNUSSEN:	John's notation often puts notes in boxes. Sometimes with staves, sometimes with non pitch-specific gestures...
CORIGLIANO:	It's a technique I devised. And David thought I was - I don't know why, because he and I loved each other. I thought he was a wonderful man. And all of a sudden he was doing that, and so I walked over and said, "David, why are you doing this? I love you." I put my arms around him and gave him a hug, and then he just smiled, and that was the end of that. [laughter]
MAGNUSSEN:	You didn't hear any more.
CORIGLIANO:	No, it was okay after that. I think he just wanted some reassurance. Because I said, "I love your music. It's not a war. It's just that I'm doing different things." That's the sad part, when it becomes either/or type thinking.
MAGNUSSEN:	That particular kind of notation appears pretty early in your scores. I think even in 1981 - "Hallucinations."
CORIGLIANO:	Oh sure.
MAGNUSSEN:	What was it like introducing that and then having to explain it to players? Do you still have to explain it?
CORIGLIANO:	Yes, you still have to explain everything. One of the reasons is that orchestras like to ask questions because then they don't have to play. [laughter] So even though they know what something means, they like to ask questions. And even if you have an asterisk next to it and you explain it on the music, they still want to ask the question and hear you explain it to them. But the actual truth is, orchestras see standard notation all the time. And then they see these things from time to time, and they see so much music every day, and every week, that they do need reminders. But I always put it in their music. It's not like they have to ask a question. If you have a note pointing up this way [shows a triangle with his fingers], it means the highest possible note. You give that to a string section, and you'll get many different notes up high - next to each other, but not the same note. If you want to write all those out, you can do it, and then the players will struggle to find certain notes, but in fact that isn't the purpose at all. It's just a cluster of high sounds. The new notation makes it easier for them to play and understand what the gesture is. So I use those new notations when I feel it's appropriate. Altered States was a movie score I wrote in 1979, and it opened in 1980. One of the things about that score was that it was a very busy movie. Ken Russell directed it, and it was a very wild science-fictiony thing. Paddy Chayefsky wrote the screenplay, and then Ken Russell kicked him off the set, so they took his name off it, and it was Bill Hurt's first movie, and Ken Russell had gone to hear my clarinet concerto at the Los Angeles Philharmonic with Zubin Mehta conducting, and that's how I got the job. He called a day later and wanted me to come and do it, because he wanted these sounds I had which were very unusual. So I wrote the piece. And one of the things I thought was, "He wants an hour-and-a-half of solid music, and I have two months to write this." So I took a pencil and a piece of paper, and I wrote at the top of the paper: "Motion Sonority." What I meant was a single symbol that would have a lot of motion attached to it. For example, if you write a note, and you write trill: "tr". Then they go [makes trilling sound]. Or if you put three lines through something, it's a tremolo. You'll get a tremendous amount of activity with a single symbol. And I thought if I'm going to write this piece, and it's going to have to have the motion the film does, and the rushings, and all of this, I have to develop some other symbols like a trill or a tremolo, that can tell them to do something, so that a lot of notes will be played because of this single instruction. So the boxes and all of those things really came out of thinking that way: What can I write as a single symbol to get a tremendous amount of activity? This director wants and he needs to have a lot of bustle in his score, which would be a 500-page score of millions of notes if it were all written out. And the orchestra would also be trying to play it all, when actually I only want, for example, a bubbling cluster of music. So I put a "C" and a "G" with a box around it, and I say: "Play between and including those notes as fast as possible, constantly changing the patterns." Then they all play that - all 20 people. You get exactly the same thing as if I wrote 20 different parts for people playing terribly complex patterns that are changing in those notes. So that was the beginning of this notation. It was partly to find a simpler solution to the problem. And always - the other thing is - whenever I go to an orchestra, I like to go up to any of the players and say, "Do you know anything new about your instrument. Anything unusual?" And they'll find, by fooling around with their instruments, an unusual sound. And they'll say, "Yeah, if you hold it here and you press this key and do this, listen to what you get." And so I say, "That's great." And then I have a little tape recorder and we tape it, and then I write down how to do it, and I take it home, and it becomes part of a sonic library. Players discover all sorts of things about their instruments.
MAGNUSSEN:	That's like Edgar Varèse. He would walk around everywhere with a tape recorder.
CORLIGIANO:	Yes, it's interesting that these things they consider accidents, ugly sounds, or mistakes- these can be really wonderful if you learn to control them. In Altered States, one flute player told me that if you take the flute, and instead of blowing across the top, you blow into it like a trumpet, and buzz your lips, you'll get major 7^th below this note in the bass clef - so middle "C" will be a low D-flat - and it will sound - I mean I heard it and it sounded like an ancient horn. It was the weirdest sound. So I wrote that, and that went into the Altered States score among other things. I was in Morocco and heard the oboists there playing a folk oboe called a raita (or Ghaytah). And it was basically a double-reed with a string around it, inserted into the wooden cylinder, just like an oboe. But they had a plastic disk about 2-inches in diameter. The reed came through that, and they put their lips on the plastic disk and they blew their cheeks out and got this very raucous wonderful kind of weird strange sound because it was constantly changing it's intonation by very little bits, because it wasn't controlled by the lips. Today's oboists use their lips on the reed - the embouchure - and they get a beautiful sound. But I was able to say, "I want you to play in an Arabic manner (like the last movement in my oboe concerto), so place your lips on the string of the reed where it's bound, past the reed, blow your cheeks out, and play without touching the reed." And they get this same kind of sound. I heard it in Morocco- in Marrakech- when the snake charmer was busy there with this oboe playing, and I looked to see how he was playing it. And I said, "Well, all I have to do is get an oboe player to take the oboe reed deeper into the mouth and touch the strings so that there's no vibration of the double reed that he touches, and we'll get the same sound." And it does. It's nice. I used it in my opera. I also used 50 kazoos in my opera, another favorite instrument, to simulate Arabic notes.
MAGNUSSEN:	Not many people notice those, right?
BORISKIN:	John, if I could say, it's fascinating to see how concerned you are with what happens to your music after it leaves your care, after you're done with it, and after you launch it out into the world. I see this from having worked on your Bob Dylan songs, and having eavesdropped on my colleagues' rehearsals of some of the other pieces that we're going to hear this evening. But you've got great respect for performers, and I think this comes through very clearly. John, unlike a lot of composers, I must say, is very engaged in the whole process of composer to performer to listener. The thing that struck me, as I spent time with the Dylan songs, is how clean the document is - the music document that I have here. It's so carefully marked, and not in fussy ways, but in ways that seem to be seeking (a) to get your notions across, and (b) to help the performer have a notion of what you're trying to do. That's part of the trick of notation - conveying this language, this ambiguous language, a language that lends itself to many interpretations - conveying it to a stranger (the performer) because he's gotta rely on me. And this is another interesting facet, which is sometimes remarked on with the, shall we say, fate of new works. If I go out on stage and make a fool of myself and play John's piece badly, or a piece of George Perle's or anybody who you're not necessarily familiar with - the audience will blame the composer.
CORIGLIANO:	Absolutely. It's happened. I have had improvisations beautifully reviewed by the New York Times. [laughter]
BORISKIN:	I hope it doesn't happen tonight and tomorrow night. [laughter] But the fact is that you, the audience, don't know the piece and you make assumptions. You blame the composer - "Oh, that piece wasn't very interesting." Sure, it could be the composer's fault. But a lot of times, through those restrictions of time, economics, the practicalities, the messy rough-and-tumble of daily concert and rehearsal life - it's the performers. We didn't have enough time for it. We couldn't assimilate it in the way we have, at this point, assimilated Beethoven and Schumann and Debussy and all of the great composers and near-great composers of the canon. Whereas if I go out and I make a fool out of myself in the "Emperor" Concerto, you're likely to say, "Wow, that guy really had an off night, didn't he? He's not very much of a pianist." So we have a palpable responsibility- especially with the composer sitting next to us or in the same hall- to put this piece across, to sell the piece, to do it in such a way that we convey its vibrancy, energy, and expressivity. And John, you are so good - we haven't had a chance to talk about this- but you are so good in that. There's a place in one of the songs that we just did where the piano left hand is marked at one volume level, and the piano right hand is marked at another volume level. He's trying to convey bells. And meanwhile there's a third part in the piano which is marked at another volume level. And that's duplicating what the singer is doing, and she's at yet another dynamic level, because the piano - that third piano part is just shadowing the singer. Your specific directions clarify our work. We still may not get it because we're all human beings, and it doesn't make it any less difficult to do these things. But the document is so terrific. And that's what our challenge is.