Recent Pasts 20/21 Words Series - John Corigliano, Page 8

MAGNUSSEN:

We're running close to our time limit, and I'd like to get some questions from the audience, if there are any.  Yes?

AUDIENCE
MEMBER ONE:

This is regarding the prep time of an orchestra: if they really wanted to do a modern work, couldn't they get the music a couple months ahead and practice it to make better use of time in the rehearsals?

BORISKIN:

Can I give you the musician's union telephone number?

CORIGLIANO:

I wish that happened.  Occasionally what'll happen, if they have a particular work - especially by someone like Stockhausen or something that's very difficult - the year before they will plan an extra rehearsal into the budget to do that.  But doing things two weeks before - that happens, but usually with standard repertoire. 

The week that Barenboim conducted my first symphony (with the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday recording, Friday recording, Saturday recording live performances), that Wednesday night he had a special rehearsal for Brahms' Second Symphony because two months later they were going to play it someplace.  And they were just learning what page they were on with my symphony. 

I think the priorities were not quite right with that.  The priority was to do the Brahms perfectly two months later, and the fact is that my symphony being recorded live one day later was not the priority.  So you have to look at the maestro's view of it, and it doesn't always go your way.

BORISKIN:

Can I just say I was really only being half-facetious when we were talking before about the weight of the existing concert structure, and the framework, and these big organizations like Sony and BMG beginning to collapse under their own weight.  One of these encrustations that especially symphony orchestras are dealing with is the really rigid rehearsal framework that makes your suggestion about making better use of rehearsals - which on the face of it is perfectly reasonable - unworkable. 

Basically James Levine is trying to do this with the Boston Symphony.  He doesn't need a music directorship of a major orchestra.  He's got the Met.  He can conduct any orchestra in the world.

CORIGLIANO:

But what he's doing is using up their endowment. [laughter]

BORISKIN:

Right.

CORIGLIANO:

It's true.

BORISKIN:

Well, they had a special contribution for all of this extra flexibility.  But when you think about the weakened labor movement in this country - the steel workers, pilots, and the mine workers- one of the last remaining strong labor unions in this country is the musician's union.  Because you can almost literally not land an important orchestra job anywhere in this country, in any major city, without being a member of the union.

And the work rules are in existence.  There are good reasons.  Listen, I'm an old line bleeding heart, and so I speak with some sadness about how this has so constrained any kind of flexibility in preparing new works and giving extra time here, taking it from there. It's a big problem.

AUDIENCE
MEMBER TWO:

This is sort of a follow-up to that discussion earlier on about how computers can play any sequence of notes you care to have them play perfectly, when it comes to the human performer, perhaps the music doesn't come out quite so perfectly as you had imagined it.  Also, computers don't typically belong to unions. 

Does this suggest that the future of music lies in computers performing the music, rather than humans?

CORIGLIANO:

Wow. Well, you know, we are poised at this very moment- with several enormous cases and things -at just that question.  We have the Radio City Music Hall situation where the orchestra went on strike, and the administration has said: "Oh, go ahead.  We'll use recordings.  We don't need you."

I don't know what's going to happen.

You can also take one or two violins, and by amplifying them and playing them against each other, you can sound like a violin section now. 

AUDIENCE
MEMBER TWO:

Maybe you could say:  What would be lost?

CORIGLIANO:

Well, there is a difference in the sound.  There really is.  I mean, a Stradivarius doesn't sell for three million dollars for nothing.  And when you have 18 first violins, and 16 seconds, and 14 violas, and 10 cellos and 8 basses, and they all are instruments of considerable complexity regarding their overtones, and they play a simple C-major  chord in a room with resonance.  A computer really doesn't have that.  It just cannot do that.  It can sample that sound, and play it back.  But it cannot really make music in that same way. 

However, that's a very fine distinction.  And there's no question that that's why the Broadway theaters and all are having these rules about how many people have to be hired as musicians if you're going to do a show - even if they don't play - just to keep that going.

It's an artificial situation right now.  The people who come to see, for example, a Broadway musical, are not coming because of the orchestra.  Therefore, the logical part is: "We don't need that if we can substitute electronically."

On the other hand, it's a better and more beautiful sound.  But Steven Sondheim seems very happy with his new production of Sweeney Todd, in which the actors play instruments.  And there's something like 11 instruments in the whole thing - Patti Lupone plays the tuba as Mrs. Lovett.  I mean it's quite bizarre. I'm going to see it next week.

So people are trying to think of solutions where they mix the musicians up, but there is still a certain rigidity. For example, when City Opera had a two-week period where the musicians were free, we did a thing called VOX for several years, playing contemporary operas.  For the first couple of years, they wouldn't let us give recordings out. They were very rigid about it, and I thought: "You can't even sell Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, recorded by the most famous conductor now.  You just can't sell enough to put it out.  What's going to happen financially that'll be so terrible with a sight-reading of new music in a church that you pick up to at least give the composer something? What do you think's going to happen?"

On the other hand, those rules have been deadly, and they're closing up things.  There are places now in Europe where the orchestra is hired for a concert - and they give as much rehearsal as it takes to do it. 

That's a nice solution. A Belgian group called I Fiamminghi was hired to do a recording of my music, and it was very interesting because we had to stay longer in the recording session.  The musicians wanted to take things over.  They said: "No, I can do that better.  I want to do it again."

You'd never say that here.

BORISKIN:

You can't do it here. [laughter]

CORIGLIANO:

If the clock were ticking, they wouldn't have cared.  It would have been over.  The second hand would have hit, and they would have stood up and said, "That's your problem." 

Here.  Play the piece.  We'll give you the money.  You accept the contract.  Rehearse it.  Play it.  And there they were, keeping us, in the recording session because they weren't satisfied.

I think, somewhere, we need to remember that musicians are a real important part of this, artistically, and that they should have some say, and be as passionate as one hopes they were when they started doing this.  Not going into this to see how much money we can get, and how little work we can do.

Some orchestras are probably going to have to collapse before this happens.

AUDIENCE
MEMBER THREE:

I had a comment and a question.  I am a musicologist, and I wanted to write an article on Shulamit Ran's opera Between Two Worlds (The Dybbuk).

CORIGLIANO:

But you can't get a recording of it.  I know.  She can't either.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE:

Even for scholarship, you can't. 

CORIGLIANO:

No, she can't get one.  It's locked away.  It's there, but it's locked in a safe.

AUDIENCE MEMBER THREE:

You can only go to their office and watch it, but you can't take it.

CORIGLIANO:

That's right.  It's crazy.  It's completely insane.  I know all about that case because Shulamit's a friend of mine and she says, "I cannot have a recording of my own opera.  They won't let me have it."  Yes, it's pathetic.  It's terrible.  And inexcusable.  And you know, it kind of makes you say to those musicians, "Ten years from now when you open your violin case on Michigan Avenue and hope they throw dollars in- think of that moment.  You, who were so rigid.  And you said ‘No'.  Think about that.  Because your inflexibility is having horrible results.

BORISKIN:

Well, it's made it impossible to hear a symphony orchestra.  In most places in this country - any place but in their own home concert hall - broadcasts are basically non-existent because it costs too much.  There's a premium that goes to the musicians just for broadcasting a live concert.  We know that the recording industry is in collapse in this country, and led by symphonic recordings because it's gotten so expensive through some of these work rules we've been talking about.  So you can't hear them on the radio.  I mean, your local orchestra, even if it's a very good one, is not making recordings anymore because it's prohibitively expensive. You're stuck with just going live.

Maybe there is the notion that, "Well, if we cut out all of these other ways of hearing the orchestra, they'll have to come to our concert hall."  It doesn't work that way.