Conversations With William M. Hoffman; John Corigliano, Pt. 1 Of 4

And the Oscar goes to John Corilliano for the red viral. This is the first Oscar for John Corilliano and his second nomination. He was nominated in 1980 for scoring all two states. Welcome to Conversations. Lehman College's series of discussions with major theatre and musical artists of our times. For the first of a four-part chat, our guest today is the celebrated composer, winner of both an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize from Music, my old and dear friend and collaborator. I have the great honor of presenting the Lehman College Distinguished Professor John Corilliano.

I don't know how to do this because your career is so gigantic and our friendship is so enormous. When did we first meet 1964? No, no, no. Actually, we were still in college. So, 1959, 58, 58. We met in 1958. You were at Columbia studying music and I was at City College majoring in Latin. Right. Don't ask me why. And we've maintained practically a daily conversation since that period. Right.

Not only that, I mean, as you know, you're my best friend, but in addition to that, I love the idea that we've worked together so many times in so many different ways. And it's especially with the ghost, of course, but even song cycles, individual things, projects. It's been wonderful. So, we're going to approach this in a multifaceted sort of way, basically chronological. And I thought I'd let our audience know just some of the, a few of the awards you've garnered over the years, just to orient those who don't know your career. And I'm going to have to read it because there's too many to, there's a Pulitzer Prize that you got for Symphony No. 2, an Oscar, which we showed, you accepting for the red violin. Grammys for a rage of remembrance in Symphony No. 1 and string quartet, the string quartet, the first composer to win two Grammys.

International Classical Musical Award for Ghosts. A crowd, the prestigious Grauamire Award, what was that for? That was for the first Symphony. That was for the first Symphony. And you were elected to the American Academy of Arts and Institute of Arts and Letters. Right. Well, this is just one of many. These are just a few of very many awards. I thought we would start by finding out where you were born. That's easy. I was born in Manhattan, but actually lived in Brooklyn when I was a kid. What part of Brooklyn? Where Emma's Field used to be. I was across the street from that. Flatbush. And I went to high school in Brooklyn. And my high school music teacher, who was the person who encouraged me to be a composer. Mrs. Bella Tillis is still hail, hearty, and more active than I will ever be. And every concert, every place I go, she's there.

She's amazing. And she was the one who got me interested in being a composer and gave me the confidence to do that. Now, you come from a musical family. Would you tell us something about your family? Yeah, my parents, my father was a violinist. He was the concert mass of the New York Philharmonic for 26 years, starting in the early 40s, right through the end of the Leonard Bernstein era. My mother was a pianist, and she never played concerts in public, but she was a terrific pianist. When I wrote my violin in piano sonata and dedicated to my parents, they actually both played it. So I had a lot of music around, mainly with my mother and her teaching. She did a lot of teaching. And my father playing solos with the New York Philharmonic and going to hear him when he played concertos. So it was active. I met a lot of great legendary figures, like Fritz Chrysler and Bruno Valtor. All these incredible figures that now are just history. When I was little kid, of course, I didn't know that at the time.

They were just my father's friends. Your father was John Coriano Sr. He was, and I was junior until we came to an agreement. And that was after I wrote the violin sonata. We agreed that the recording of the violin sonata, because my father recorded it, would be John Coriano Sr. and by John Coriano Jr. But after that, I was going to just be John Coriano the composer, and he was John Coriano the violinist. Did you sign a paper to that of that? Well, it wasn't easy, actually. It didn't just happen that way. It was a matter of negotiation. Now, I know you also, your dad was concert master for Bernstein and for a Tuscanini as well. Yeah, Tuscanini got him into the orchestra. And I bet him, actually, when I was a kid too. In fact, up here at my Lehman office, I have a signed picture from Arturo Tuscanini to me from 1951, which was the, he gave it to me at Milan in Italy. When I came with my father over on the Edinburgh Festival, was the first festival after World War II.

The New York Philharmonic came over to Europe and we went over on the Queen Elizabeth and came back on the Queen Mary. And my father and I took a train down to Italy to find his relatives stayed with Tuscanini for a day in his house. And he gave me this picture, which is now in my studio. For those in our audience who aren't familiar with those names, these were the greatest conductors. The greatest musicians in the world, absolutely. Horowitz, I knew very well, and Tuscanini and all of those guys. When did you first know you wanted to be a composer? Well, I wasn't sure about wanting to be a composer. I wanted to be involved in music and I did not want to be a performer. Why not? Because when I was a little kid, and you picture me at seven or eight years old, I would go here, my father played a concerto with the New York Philharmonic. And there he was, nervous all year, because he was practicing for this.

And say he was going to do the Brahms concerto or something, and he'd be playing that piece. I was too nervous to sit in Carnegie Hall and listen to it live, because I had heard him practice it so much. And I knew the difficult passages and the things that were going to really make him tense and that he might miss. And being a half-empty, water glass kind of person, I always worried about what he was going to miss. And so I would sit in the green room, which is backstage, and listen to him play it on speakers. And then I would hunch myself over at the difficult passages, and when he got my would sit up, and then I'd hunch myself over. You know, I was like that. And then the next morning, you know, while he was asleep, eight in the morning, I would run out, and by the New York Times, the Herald Tribune, the Journal of American, and see what they said about him. Because you just get reviews the next morning in these papers. And if it wasn't good, if there was anything negative, I knew that for the next month it was going to be a very unhappy time. So the idea of actually doing that myself, standing on a stage and performing, was impossible. I couldn't consider it. Yet I love music and want to be involved in it. I improvised on the piano.

I remember you playing jazz a lot. I did. I played jazz, and I played everything by ear. I didn't read music really until I got into college barely. Because my mother gave me two piano lessons, and we had a fight, and that was the end of my piano studies. But I used to play by ear, and love that, and love improvising. You know, I'd say, okay, now I'm going to be Chopin, so I play something that sounds like Chopin or Brahms, or Pop Music, or whatever. And really, not until I got into high school, and was encouraged by Mrs. Tillis, who I mentioned earlier, who had a lot of faith in me and really said, you really can do what you want to do. Did I start making up music? And in fact, made up the alma mater for the school at that time. And they made it with high school alma mater. It's probably my opus one. Bob or Streisand go to that? No, you and your asthma. But Woody Allen went to me. Okay. Well, now is a good time as any to hear the piece that, if I remember correctly, Bell Tillis commissioned your first piece. Wasn't that from Hill?

Yeah, she didn't actually commission it. What happened was I got out of college, and I wanted to write it for her. And I called her up and said, can I write you a piece? You have to understand the midwood chorus learned by wrote, basically, a few of them read music, but, you know, most of the kids didn't. And she said, don't make it too hard, and don't make it too long. Well, it turned out to be a 17-minute piece, which they had never sung anything, 17 minutes long. But it was not too difficult for them, and she gave the world premiere of that in midwood high school. And I wrote it for her, and it's still in Thomas' poem about his youth in the farm, Fern Hill, where he would go every summer. And it says, you know, time held me green and golden. And it talks about youth that way. And I thought it would be a wonderful poem for young people to sing. And then we hear it. Thank you.

Thank you. That became part of, later on, it's in the Dylan Thomas trilogy from the state. Right.

I love Dylan Thomas' poetry, and actually, besides you, I think I've said Dylan Thomas most. And what happened was, at various points of my life, I set poems that dealt with that same time in the poet, Dylan Thomas' life. Fern Hill was about his youth, and I wrote it, you know, just as a young man trying to write music. Then he wrote a piece called Pullman October, which was the celebration of his 30th birthday. community's society of Lincoln Center for their opening season. And then he wrote a poem, a very sad poem called, this was called, Pullman his birthday, about his 35th year. And his, you know, alcoholism and depressions and finally seeing the beauty of life again. And I set that for the National Cathedral and did all three of them in 1976. And it became a trilogy, which I finally completed in 1990s with the prologue of Dylan Thomas opening both the opening Fern Hill and Pullman October. So it became a full evening.

And each part of the pieces was written at a various different point in my life. And it talked about a different point in Dylan Thomas' life. And all starting with Fern Hill, that you wrote for Mrs. Tillis at Midwood High School. I think you remember Mrs. Tillis. Oh, every time I go to one of your concerts, I left her. And I was curious, who were your role models in this early time? Well, I got interested in composing in classical music and no music, contemporary music. In a rather strange way, it was in high school. My mother decided that she would give me a birthday present and she gave me a choice. And actually she gave me two choices. One was a reclining lounger, which I always wanted because I love the climbing. And the other one was a high-fi set in those days, Monroe, but the LP record was invented so high-fi. And lucky for me, I picked the high-fi set because I don't know what I'd be now if I had picked the other one.

But it had a 15-inch woofer in those days. That was very nice. You could really get low bass sounds. And there was a demo disc of capital full-dimensional sound recordings that had the gunfight scene from Billy the Kid of Aaron Copeland. And I played it and played it mainly because of the bass drum in the gunfight, which resonated through my neighbor's houses. And then I started wondering about how brilliantly Aaron Copeland was able to make a very simple chord, just a simple chord, sound fresh just by spacing it differently. And so I go to piano, I try to space it that way. And then I try to get some of the other ideas of how he cut one little beetle off a rhythm and made it sound fresh again. And so I started getting more of his music, and then I started getting scores. And then from that I went to Stravinsky, Copeland, Bernstein, and right into the American composers. You know, barber and piston and all of that. So in my early years I loved Americana. Let's put it that way.

The music of America from, say, the 40s, which to me had a real honesty and beauty and freshness. And wasn't full of that kind of overall angst, emotional thing that European music was. It had an optimism, which I really loved. Now, you've liked one of my poems very much, and I was honored that you said it. You like the poem of mine, the coasters. And then you asked me for a few poems on my subject, and then you set the whole thing. The whole thing. Well, what I loved was he wrote a poem called The Unicorn, and it was Billy grew up near the coasters. And so he spent a lot of time there. And it was a poem about the Unicorn Tap Street, which is in the coasters. The famous one, The Unicorn, with the fence around. You know, that very beautiful one. And it was a poem about The Unicorn and the philosophy of the medieval times that love goes.

And the site goes from the object, from the eye to the object, rather than the other way around. We see, the vision proceeds from the object to the eye, rather than the other way around. Which has to do, in a sense, with a kind of love that is rather, shall we say, obsessive? Obsessive. And romantic love. Yeah, it was very romantic, and it was a wonderful poem, but I didn't want to just set that. And he set that in a certain time of year. And so I said, why don't we write a song cycle together? And what you would do is write three other poems about three other kinds of love. Like, one of them is a Christmas song about religious love, and it's a gospel thing, really. It's really a wonderful one, Christmas at the coasters. All about the coasters, and all about different kinds of love, and all about each one, a different season. And that was my first song cycle. That was the first time I wrote anything for Voice and Piano. And do you remember the premiere of that? No.

Oh, I would have to tell you. No, not at all. Well, what happened was, this is my beginnings with the distrust of the media, let's say, in a certain way. But what happened was, it was Sunga Town Hall. Oh, no. Yes, you remember now. Oh, no, I'd like to remember. The mezzo soprano who sang it didn't want to use the music, which I completely approve of. But she also didn't know it, which I don't approve of, and the music would have helped. So what happened was, she got up there, and there were whole audience, and where we were for our song cycle. She'd forgotten the order of the word. So she put the words of different orders, so it sounded more like Richard Stein than Bill Hoffman. And then, of course, the notes followed, and they were a kind of improvisation. And he was looking at me during the performance of going like this. I still remember your own, like that. I mean, it was a delivery was rather strident. And it was amazing, because she didn't like confidence. She didn't like confidence. And the New York Times loved it. That was my question of the media. I said, what would they have said if they heard our piece? I don't know.

But that was a memorable premiere. I think after that, we should hear a little bit of it. Oh, God. We'd queue it up, please. This one's played, right, and sung by a baritone, though. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. I run into countless performers who've performed that. It's amazing to me.

And it's very gratifying. It does get performed a lot. And one of the reasons it does, I might add, which is rather tricky of sharing my publisher, is it has a lot of changing time signatures in it. And they were worried that the singers wouldn't buy it, so they took them all out. And so there aren't any. There are no time signatures in it. And singers don't notice that, and they think it absolutely fine. They just, the quarter note is this, and eighth note is this, and everything works out fine. But I had put all these, you know, 7, 8, 4, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, and they just said, look, ignorance is bliss. Get rid of them. Earlier you mentioned that you wrote a piece for your dad. Yeah. Would you tell us about that, how that came about? Well, again, none of these were commission pieces, because when you start as a composer, you know, nobody commissions you. It's only me later. And I had wanted to write a piece, obviously, for my father and also for my mother.

And I was working at WQXR, the video station of the New York Times then, and programming and writing. And I started writing it then, and finally had to leave QXR to finish the piece. And my father and my mother both didn't want me to be a composer. For a variety of reasons. I mean, in those days, a composer was, composing was mainly 12-tone music. The audience has hated the music. The performance didn't like it. The reviewers didn't like it. And they said, why do you want to go into something like this? And I said, because I want to, and that wasn't a good enough reason. So my father's way of discouraging that was that when I finished the piece, which took a full year to write, and gave it to him, he just said, I look at too much music, and, you know, I just see too much. I'm not going to look at this. And he put it in his drawer and closed it. And that was the end of that. You know, he didn't want to look at it. But I think it was a good thing in the long run. What happened was, I entered the piece in the second annual

Spoleto Festival International Champion who's a competition in Spoleto Italy. The judges were Samuel Barber, Walter Piston, you know, John Carlo Manati, and it won the first prize. He still didn't say a word. But I went over there and heard the performance. And it was wonderful. My first time in Europe, 1964, came back. Then I was told that the concert mass of London Symphony Orchestra was going to play. London. Now he was the concertist of the New York Philharmonic. Still not a word. He played it in London. Then Roman Todenberg, the violinist in Boston University, scheduled to play in Boston. And by that time, a lot of my father's friends were saying to him, you know, you're sons and others getting around, aren't you going to look at it? And so he took it out of that closet and started practicing it. And he gave it to New York Premier, and he recorded it,

and he played it for the rest of his life and changed his view on my being a composer. But I'm glad it happened that way. Because in a way, first of all, I'm glad he had to do it instead of just did it as my father. And then that we were able to have a musical relationship after that, that he not only loved the piece, but he became encouraging to me as a composer. So it all turned down to be fine. At the time, it was kind of painful though, I wouldn't have. I think we should hear a little bit of it. Can you cue it up, please? That was my father playing, by the way. That recorded.

I remember your dad very well, and he was a difficult man. He was tough. He was tough, just one of the great violinists. He was a great violinist, and also in the great tradition. He actually studied with the legendary Leopold Hour, who taught high fits in Milstein and all the great violinists, who was a Russian teacher, and who Tchaikovsky had dedicated his violin concerto until the hour said it was unplayable, and then Tchaikovsky crossed the dedication off, of course. But I mean, he was the legendary teacher, and he had that incredible grand manner, which really was wonderful. So your background was classical, and yet you already had a bent for the contemporary, and so your career was launched. Well, there's no such thing as really launching a career as a composer, because you just got to build it slowly. It doesn't launch, unfortunately.

It's no, unless you write a two-hour piece that gets played by the New York Philharmic as your Opus One. But basically speaking, you start out with little pieces, you get friends to do them, or people you know, they get played, somebody else hears about it and says write me a piece, and little by little you build catalog of pieces, and then it happens. But there's no single event, I don't think ever, that's launched the composer. Yours was a gradual infiltration. Yes, infiltration is the word. An inventory territory. An inventory territory, yes. Well, you're right. Of course, that's because I was always a sort of a rebel, and when I went to Columbia in the 50s, the music department basically taught 12-tone music and serial music, and there I was composing stuff like that, and they were saying, why are you doing this? And of course, one of the reasons was because you're telling me not to, the same reason I went into composing. I mean, I'm very rebellious about that.

I'm not going to be told what kind of music to write, but in addition, it's the music I loved. So I just kept changing, and I've changed a lot as a composer, but always out of curiosity, not out of kind of need to do something because other people want it. John, I'm getting the high sign to wrap up this segment, and I can see that this is going to be a terrific series, and we're going to go to three parts. Okay. So it has been a great pleasure reconnecting with you this way. This is a unique way, a new way of us talking together, and to hear about the rest of your incredible career. Thank you, John Coriano, and our studio and home audiences for joining us today. We hope to see you again soon for further competition. Thank you. Thank you.