Conversations With William M. Hoffman; John Corigliano, Pt. 2 Of 4

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

APPLAUSE That's interesting to you again. Last time we talked, we mainly concentrated on your earlier part of your career and on smaller pieces, relatively smaller pieces. But in the 80s, you started to do much larger scale pieces and you wrote the first of your film scores for altered states. Can Russell's incredible movie altered states for which you are nominated for an Oscar? How did you, how did this come about? Well, actually it was a wonderful story, it was a kind of movie Hollywood story. I had written in 1977 my clarinet concerto for the New York Philharmonic and my father had died in 1975.

And I had never had a piece played by the Philharmonic or conducted by Leonard Bernstein, their conductor. And they asked me to write a clarinet concerto for their clarinetist, Stanley Drucker, who I had two clarinet lessons with when I was in high school and then my clarinet was stolen out of my high school gym locker. And I just sort of gave up the instrument. But the thing is that the wonderful thing is that that piece really was a great moment for me because I was writing for my father's orchestra. And conductor Leonard Bernstein, Stanley Drucker, who is still in the New York Philharmonic and has been there over 50 years, is still the first part. He's a great artist. And the second movement was an elegy in his, my father's memory because he died in 75 and I wrote it in 76. What happened was that Zuberneta played the piece with the Los Angeles Philharmonic a year later. So that means that 1978, the LA Phil programmed with their first clarinetist, Michelle Zukovsky, the clarinet concerto.

And Ken Russell happened to be in Hollywood filming, altered states, and if you know Ken Russell, he is obsessed with music and composers. He knows more symphonies of Bioskovsky than I certainly ever would and just about every orchestral work ever written. He's a big classical music fan, a lot of his films, the tricovsky film, Mahler films, Strauss films, I mean they're all connected with music. And so he went to the LA Phil just because he had an evening off, and because they were doing Strauss Zarathustra, which is this monster piece that Ken loved, and he didn't know my clarinet concerto. But it was on the same program. So the first half, he heard Novature, then my clarinet concerto, and somehow the light went up, often as brain at that point. And then Zarathustra, and the next morning I got a call from Warner Brothers saying, would you be interested in flying to Hollywood to meet Ken Russell to talk about scoring a movie, a major movie? Well, you know, yes.

That's the answer to that. And of course the treatment, which is something we never get. But I mean there was the first class, fair and the limos to take you to and from and all of that sort of stuff. And, you know, swimming pool. Oh, yes, yes, definitely. It was, you know, the Beverly Hills Hotel and all of that. But the great part about it was, well there were two things. One is Ken Russell really loves music and wanted me to go as far out as possible in this piece. The reason he wanted me to do all to the stage was because the clarinet concerto has a very wild, dissonant, crazy, alliatoric moments that are, you know, quite otherworldly. And this was a very strange kind of horror movie, so realistic movie about being locked in an isolation booth and having, you know, hallucinations. And he could see that in my piece. And so he said there are going to be like 10 minute sections with no words. And of course for a composer to do that in a film, that's pretty great. No words. I know you like that. Thanks.

I love your words. So, no, only yours. It really is great when you're composing a film because usually what happens is you are basically sound effects under dialogue. You know, you rise up when they stop and you come down and this was not the case. So, I said yes. And then I once, I realized what really happens with these films and it's quite fascinating is the second that you say yes and you sign a contract to do that. You become the property of Warner Bros. 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I was in the middle of composing my pie-piper fantasy, my fluke and share to which the Philharmonic just did earlier the season. And so right at the cadenza, I had to stop that. I had to start writing this huge score, which turned out to be, you know, an hour and something of music written in two months, which for a classical composer is unbelievably short. But not only writing it, but getting daily changes by Ken notes from the music editors, script rewrites. The movie was shot, but things were re-shot.

There was scene missing. You'd see suddenly scene missing, but you write through that, but you don't know what it's going to be. And then you write the whole thing and then you record the whole thing and then they try it out of town and they re-edit the movie because this scene should be short and the scene should be lengthened. But you have the same music and suddenly it has to fit all sorts of different places. So I learned a fascinating education in what it's like to be a composer in Hollywood, which is wonderful in a way, terrible in another way. A highest pressure you can possibly imagine because you're the last thing before they have the film come out. They've already spent $50 million or $100 now or $200 or whatever. And they're waiting for you to finish to mix it with all the dialogue and sound effects to make a print to see if it's a success. So the director is actually quite paranoid by that time. He really is. I've now done three films. They get very crazy because the studios are after them and they don't know if it's going to be a success or a failure. And the pressure is on and they run out of money.

Yeah, they run out of money and that's when you meet them. That's when they meet you and boy, it could be very high pressure. But it was wonderful and I must say I really loved doing that and I've written two other scores as you know. But I don't tend to do that a lot, mainly because I love the concert world number one. And number two, there are so many films that I think that Hollywood people could do better than me. I would only do a film like The Red Violin where I really thought I could be of service because they're so good. I mean, I've a former student, Elliot Goldenfall, who won the Oscar last year for Frida and who's just, you know, he studied me for seven years at Manhattan School and he went into film composing and he's composed the most brilliant films. And there are a lot of those people that are just great. So I don't really need to do that unless it's the right one. I think with that introduction we should see a piece of altered states. Okay. Okay. It was during this era that both our careers started to lurch into the improbable and exciting and wonderful.

And in 1979, we were commissioned to write the ghosts of Versailles. And actually, you were commissioned and you chose me as librettists. I know how this came about, but I don't think our studio audience or our home audience knows this. Would you tell us this about this, John? Well, actually, the ghosts of Versailles was the first opera of the Metted Commission in the quarter of a century. And therefore, it became very important. It was also commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the Met, even though we were a few years late as I remember.

We missed that. We missed that. But they loved us for that. They didn't love us for that. But what happened was I was talking to James Levine about writing a piece for Soprano and orchestra, who was the reigning diva then, who I loved. And he kept bringing the subject round to opera. And I remember Darren Copeland's words. And he said, don't write an opera. He said, whatever you do, he said, you'll get your six performances. And that'll be the end of it. And he said, meanwhile, you could have written three good symphonies to get played by everybody. So I was shying away from it. And he was talking about that. And I was talking about voice and orchestra for concert performance. And then he said, well, if you weren't going to do an opera, what would you do? And I said, well, frankly, I'd write a boofa, which is a common opera. And he nearly fell off his chair because in many ways, that was the last thing he would expect from a contemporary composer. Because contemporary music is always about man's inhumanity, the man, and death, and horror, and waste, and all of that.

And the idea of humor today. And he said, why on earth would you do such a thing? And I said, because, well, first of all, I love the great boofas. I love the Mozart and Rossini comic operas. I think they're some of the best operas ever written. And I love the idea of writing a piece that'll make people laugh at Metropolitan, which is such a serious place. I mean, at one point, we have a Turkish embassy scene that we wrote. We're going to show that. You're going to show that? With 40 kazoos designed as Arabic oboe's played to interrupt a chase scene with a 35-foot posher. I mean, we just had the most marvelous time saying, this is the met. We can do things at the met that are so outrageous, mainly because they're done at the met. If you did that someplace else, people say, oh, that's nice. But to go into that sacred temple of seriousness, because even the boofers, they don't laugh at them. I wish they would. But they don't. Everything's got to be so serious. And I thought, this is a chance for us.

And Bill, who's a fabulous playwright and poet, and whose works, therefore, make music for me. Because even when he writes a play, it's like writing an opera. He has quintets. He has counterpoint. He has all those things. So we got together. We talked about bringing Figaro in all those characters from the Mozart and recini opera, back to life, and putting them in a world of space. And Bill gave me the answer. I said, I don't want to write a piece that takes place in 18, in 1756. I want to write a piece in which I can be there. And then suddenly be someplace else, Bill. Where can I be? And Bill said, well, I can give you two places, the world of dreams or the world of ghosts. And that's how we came up with the ghosts of Versailles. So the whole evolution of this happened because we're good friends. We're good friends. We talk. He understood me and I understood him. And we trusted each other. And I have to say that for a librettis and composer, that is the most important thing of all.

Is that mutual trust? Because I can't very often play what I'm writing for him. Because it's between the cracks of the piano. It doesn't exist unless an orchestra plays it to people saying it. And he's got a trust effect that I say, no, I need more here, less here. And I've got a trust effect. He says, this will play. This will be funny. This will work. To me, it's a question. The words and the action create a superstructure for the piece. Yes. That I have to feel that the composer can do something with. It's very hard. He works the way I do. And not all composers work this way. Most playwrights kind of do because you have to. We have to have a plot. But since there's no plots and symphonies, many composers can pose some bar to bar. They write something they like. They add something. They add something. And they don't quite know where they're going. But they know that they've gotten someplace. And then they'll try to go someplace else. But I build and architect the music before I find the pictures and the rhythms, the notes.

And the whole thing, I have to be clear why I'm writing this piece, what it's going to be, what the shapes are, when things are going to return. I have to do that. And Bill and I think that way. So we were able to build the piece before we wrote the piece. It sounds as if we wrote an entirely boof opera we didn't. It was the overall picture. It's a very serious opera about evolution versus revolution. And a historical piece. And I thought we should show some of it. And as a matter of fact, as I mentioned, we're going to show the very end of the piece of the act one finale. Which is the crazy funny part. In act two things get very serious. The French Revolution becomes real. The executions become real. And everything turns and changes realities. It's like pure indella. It really is a very interesting way that the characters are suddenly turning to other things. But act one is primarily a boofa. And the end of this is a lot of fun. We couldn't explain how we got there.

And we were having a lot of fun. And so did the Med have a lot of fun. When they learned it, they had a good time. I must say, yeah, they were not happy with the delay. And all of that. But once they got into the piece, we really had to. They were behind it. Great rehearsals of whole time. Yeah, roll them. Let's see what's going on. Let's see what's going on. I think we had 125 people.

And that was not designed by Julie. Julie, Julie. Julie, Samore. Who directed Lion King in Frida. She was supposed to have co-directed Ghost of Versailles, but that didn't work out. But she did contribute some wonderful things like the idea of a 35-foot posh with somebody nestled in his arm, ringing a bell. It was a hoot. I can tell you when that valkiri came out with, this is not opera. You know, it's a Tristan chord. I kind of slotted me. All during this era, starting from 1980 on, we were, a lot of us in New York, were gradually becoming aware, though, a very ominous development, namely the AIDS epidemic. It was a gradual awakening to this.

Starting in 1979-80. And I know for myself by 80-81, I had already begun my play as is, that eventually was on Broadway, on the subject. And then you got very, you were involved with expressing your feelings about the epidemic as well. And that affected many of us in the New York Arts community, very deeply in the country, of course, as well. Would you, this became the, I don't know how to put it, but your first symphony, the background of the first symphony, was the AIDS epidemic. Well, it was about, it was actually not the AIDS epidemic, what it was was that I learned that my closest friend of 35 years, friend I knew as long as I knew Bill, was diagnosed with AIDS, and this was in the 1980s. And was told that, you know, with AZT,

he could live for two years. And he was a wonderful pianist, concert pianist, fabulous pianist, played my piano concerto, all my piano music. And we were great friends, and I would get on the phone with him, he lived in Chicago, I lived in New York, and talk of my music before I wrote it. And when I learned that, and thought, I'm about to begin, a major work for Chicago Symphony in Sir George Sholte, and I'm not going to write a concerto for orchestra. I must write a symphony about my friends. I'm lost in this friend I'm losing. And so it became a, like the quilt. It was very similar to the quilt for me. It was, the first three movements are about three lifelong friends. The first being this friend of mine, Sheldon, who died a week after the premiere, but lived to hear it. Well, we saw him. He was at the, at the dress rehearsal, I remember. And he was... Oh, yes, he was a dress rehearsal. Way 75 pounds. And, you know, he lived long enough. He lived long enough. I think that kept him alive. It kept him alive very much so. And then other friends,

and then in the third movement, it was about a friend of mine who we also knew from college days, an amateur cellist, and then I began a quilt in which I had his cello teacher who died, play its duo with him, and then the English horn, and the clarinet, and the French horn, all sing epitaphs for friends. But it's a symphony, and it doesn't have words. And not only that, but these friends are private in a sense. It doesn't matter their names. Nobody's going to care or know about that in a sense. It's out of loss. And I had to think of a way of getting inspiration for each friend. And I asked Bill whether he would write epitaphs since he knew these people, with their name and something about them. And he did. And then I set those in these instruments as melodies, and I took the words away, leaving the melody. So in the symphony, they become melodies, without the words. And after the piece was played, we got a commission from three male choruses,

San Francisco, New York, and Seattle. They wanted me to write a piece, and I said, look, Bill, let's put their names back, and write a piece about this. And since so many of those choruses have lost so many people, and are losing them, we're losing them by the week, let us write a piece called, Of Rage and Remembrance, in which we say goodbye to our friends, and then near the end, we leave notes to be entoned for various chorus members to say goodbye to various friends of theirs, which became a piece for chorus and strings and timpani and chimes played by the chorus members. And that became a separate piece with its own life, much more in the community, whereas the symphony is played in the concert hall. Let's hear a little bit of the coral piece of Rage and Remembrance. Okay, this I think is a visualization of it done by BMG records before they released that plus the symphony in a recording.

So it's a very interesting, it's like a music video of it. Yeah, they did that to let people all around the country know what this piece is really about. MUSIC It is the season of stone and who doesn't care, at least our people are so much different than us. As I listen to these excerpts that we've been playing, I notice not for the first time

how in your career your skills at orchestrating grew all during this period. You always had a wonderful year, but then I can really say that, in my opinion, you're the best orchestrators in Sorevel. Wow. That's a lot. That's a lot. And what inspires your orchestrations? It's just extraordinary sounds come out of these orchestras and these film scores in the opera. It's just wild. Well, I think the interesting thing about the orchestra is how complex it really is and how wonderful it really is.

And we're used to it making sounds, oboe sounds like oboe, clarinet sounds like clarinet, you know, violin sounds like violins, and I certainly do that. But the wonderful thing is that there are also resources for many other kinds of sounds. The oboe, like those kazoos, the oboe can make that kind of sound by, in my oboe concerto the last movement, putting the oboe's lips on the string of the read, not touching the read and blowing your cheeks out, and it becomes a Moroccan oboe sound. We can have flutes played in the bass cleft by blowing into them like a trumpet instead of a cross, and they sound like ancient horns. We can have strings playing, again, in ways that don't sound like strings. And yet we can merge that with the real orchestra sound that we all know and just enrich the palette and the color. And I think that's something that happened in the last half of the 20th century, and it's something I really enjoy doing is creating the orchestra as the vast resource it really is of making sounds.

The percussionists, I mean, my God, our percussion section is now five times as the size it was 50 years ago, and the number of and kinds of percussion instruments, I mean, I've had to call in a musical saw player or toy pianos or breaking of glass in my manheim rocket overchipper. There's a place where they have to break three panes of glass, and I had to go to Brewster Glass Company in Brewster, New York, to find out how to safely break glass in a big tub so that the player is simply an orchestra and get hurt. This is a major research part of my writing this piece. How do you break glass safely? They say, we do it every day, there's no problem. You lean it this way against this, and then you hit it this way, and then you put that in the score. Yes, of course I did. How to hit it, how to put it in, so it was safe. Oh, yeah. I'm saying there's so many resources of sound, plus the traditional sounds, that when you use them all, the palate can get very full and very interesting. When people talk about this being, you're working in an old medium or an old form, it just daggers me that they clearly haven't heard your work.

Once I had a question asked to me by someone in Colorado, I said, do you just the titling of your pieces has been a disadvantage to you because you call things symphony and concerto, and the younger generation doesn't like those names, and they think they're old fashioned. I said, well, I call them that, but when you hear them, maybe they take you into another world. Electronic music is wonderful, and I've used it, I use it with an expert, because I'm not an expert in that. However, it has its own cliches in the 40 or 50 years that it already has been in existence. There are a lot of electronic music sounds that we now recognize, just the way we recognize orchestra sounds, and you've got to really search and be inventive to be electronic composer that can produce interesting sounds now, because everything develops its own cliches, but you don't need to work in the cliches, whether you're in electronic music or in orchestral music or whatever, you can work out of the box. John, once again, they're telling me to wrap it up, and so I wanted to say it, it's been

a great pleasure to connect with you again today, and we will again, one more time, and I look forward to it. Thank you, John Coriano, and our home and studio audience for joining us today. We hope to see you again for another conversation. Thank you very much. Thank you.