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

A And the Oscar goes to John Coriliano for the red viral. This is the first Oscar for John Coriliano in his second nomination. He was nominated in 1980 for scoring altered state. Welcome to Conversations.

Lehman College's series of discussions with major theater and musical artists of our times. This is the last of a multi-part series with our guest, The Celebrated Composer, John Coriliano, who won both an Oscar and Pulitzer Prize for Music. John is my old and dear friend and my collaborator, and now my colleague at Lehman College. Welcome again. Thank you. We've covered a lot of territory in our discussions, and I wanted to know what you're working on now. Well, I'm not working yet because of school and travel and all of that, because it's kind of difficult to work for me. For me, I don't work very well if I'm not up in my country place, and I have like a full week with nothing to do. If I have to get into the spirit of writing, and the first couple of days are wasted, if not three or four, and then by the fifth day something starts to happen, so if I'm already through all the things you know exactly. You have to call me up and say, I can't compose anymore, and would you be my friend?

No, I'm not going to do this and all that. We've been through that together. Yeah, it's difficult for me, and so the summer is with my time that I really can do it. But I'm trying to do something to get out of writing for the same venue, in a sense of concert audience. I liked writing the film. That was fun. I did a years ago a rock pop thing called the Naked Carmen, which is kind of outrageous, and you know I've tried in certain ways to get away from the idea of the concert hall. Well, because for two reasons, one is I think it's healthy for me. There's a reality quotient involved. If you always write for the concert hall, you tend to narrow rather than widen your vocabulary, because it is a certain, you know, it is what it is. And you lose track of the rest of the world, and that's most of the world, that's 98% of the world. So writing for things outside the concert will give you a sense of perspective, which is very good for your music and good for you as a human being, I think. I think it's important to do.

And in the case of me right now, I feel like I've written a lot of repertoire for the concert hall. I have a lot of orchestra pieces and concertos, symphonies, you know, tons of stuff for them. And I want to go someplace else for a while. But so I'm going now into the world of the concert band. I've never really written pieces for them. I arranged one of my four hand pieces for them. That is, because he will dance, and it gets done a lot, but it's not like I set out to imagine what would a band do. I mean, the concert bands in America and all over the world, in the schools of America, the universities, are really sensational. They can play anything. They did a transcription of the hardest movement of my first symphony, and played it like it was nothing. And they really rehearsed. There's another whole problem with the symphony orchestra. And that is, like when I was in LA, we had one rehearsal once they have to do it. Thursday dress, concert. Now, that's a 40-minute new piece. That's not enough time for the players. It really didn't know what's happening.

But because of the restrictions of the union restrictions and time restrictions, you basically, they're reading music. And when they play a Beethoven symphony, they know it, and they can start writing and polishing it. When they play a new piece, what's on the page? What notes are they? What rhythms are they? That uses up most of the rehearsal. So they don't get to the point of refining it. In the concert band world, because it's part of a school curriculum, and because it's just not part of that economic problem of the orchestra, they really rehearse. So it's exciting to write something that you could do things for, that you really can't ask at all, because you don't have the time. In the case of this piece, I'm envisioning a large band with actually an additional 15 or so trumpets, which they're giving me, because you can ask for that in these schools. They'll get them. And it's called circus maximus. And the whole idea is that the audience is in the middle of this grand circus maximus, which of course, as you know, in Rome, was originally a chariot racing thing in the piazza novona, and became this kind of tournament, cup, competitive sport kind of thing.

And, you know, watching Jerry Springer, as I always do, of course, wouldn't miss it. But watching it, you do get a real idea when the crowd saw chanting as they did this morning, against one person or four, another person. You really have the idea that you're in the middle of the colosseum, watching something happen. And the next step, of course, is to death their life. Now it's just embarrassment, but it can go further, and the reality shows it will go further. So it's kind of the parallel between these enormous cultures that have gotten grown up so much, become so sophisticated, and yet so decadent at the same time, and also the amount of information. Again, Rome was the center of everything. Everything came to Rome. Rome knew everything. Now, everybody knows everything with the computer and, you know, being on the net. It's staggering. So the idea of, there's one thing called channel surfing, one movement. And the whole idea of the amount of information that will jolt at you from one source,

and then you turn the press button, and something else will come at you. Press another button, and there's another whole world, you know, people dying in a flood, a soap commercial, you know, a comic section of Seinfeld, the torture in Iraq, and they happen every few seconds. And it's that kind of overload that I think we can do. So I'm going to have 11 trumpets around the audience in the first years of the balconies, and above that four saxophones in a base here, and two horns there, and two clarinets there, and every question is all around the audience, a marching band, and a band on stage. And I have to write all that this summer. It's going to be, it's going to kill me, but I'm going to do it because it's interesting. It sounds like this is an extension of what you've been doing all along in the clarinet, concerto, and the placement of the horns in the calendar. Always in a very limited way, because when you deal with an orchestra, and you know this rehearsal problem, you can do that in a very limited way. Here I can really do it, because I know they're going to rehearse it.

I know they're going to know it. What are you asking? What are you asking? The marching band will be part of it because that's part of the life force. So you have all long believed in the theatricalization of musical forms. You know musical forms are theatrical. Sonata form is a theatrical form. People think Mozart, when he wrote symphonically, was different than when he wrote operatically, not a bit. Sonata form is the oppositions of the opposites. The idea of one theme has one character, and tempo the other theme has another one. When you place one, you go to the other, then you battle it out in the development, and you restate it. Well, that's about the superimposition of opposites, which is- In theater is about. In theatrical terms, we call our conflict. Yes, conflict. And without conflict, you don't have drama. You don't. But you see, all the forms came out of the need for conflict, and the idea of different ideas, and then the idea of things coming back, security. I mean, there are two polls here for human beings, not just music people.

One is safety and security, which is repetition. When things repeat, you feel secure, and you get to know them, and you're contented. The other is adventure. The new and the unexpected. And the balance of those is what makes art and life. I mean, if you go to work seven days a week, it gets pretty boring, and you want out. If you go to vacation for seven days a week, you get confused. By the third week, you want to go back to work and get back into the grind in a sense of ritual. So the idea is new material, like vacationing every day in different city, is okay, but too much of it is confusing. Repeated material is okay, but too much of it is boring. And it's that alternation of being and yang that make art. Plus loud and soft, high and low, slower. Fast. Again, all the opposites and conflicts. And that's what you need to think about when you write. Right. Is those opposites and how you're balancing them? Be aware of that. And I think that's a very important job of the creator.

What else are you planning to do in the future? Do you have any other points? Yeah, I do. But you're involved in it. That's right. You have to do some work, then we can work. Can we talk about that? Well, I don't think we should talk about the plot or anything. We want to write a musical for theater singers, but not hairspray, although I loved hairspray. Don't get me wrong. I loved it. I can't write hairspray. It's just like I can't write the Bob Dylan things. I can't write that. I'm going to be writing a strange hybrid of a piece, and Billy couldn't either. I know him. He says he can. But the minute he starts to write, and all these layers of meaning come in, and he says, I'm just going to be down and dirty now, and then of course it's down and dirty with a really strange moral twist and a turn of words that turns into something else. So we're going to work, and we're trying to use a small as opposed to this gigantic opera we do. We want to do something better. Yes. Anything, any people more than six on a stage, I think, is going to be overwhelming. And few instruments.

Very few instruments. I mean, it's popular in my lesson, I think. I was in LA again, and people were saying to me coming over, oh, when is the ghost going to be done? Oh, we love the ghost. And I said, never. You're not going to see it. But we love it. It was so great. I said, it doesn't matter. Well, it was too expensive. Why do you think I fantasized about going to what I call the last performance of Beethoven with this incredibly ancient orchestra in their 90s, and the last violinist dies during the performance as the last audience member dies? Yeah, I know what you mean. Why would this happen? Well, I wouldn't want that to happen, of course, because Beethoven's is so great. But you know what I'm driving. You know what I'm driving. You know what I'm driving. The balance is, again, it's about balance.

Why did this happen? Why is classical music in such? Why do so many orchestras dying? I think that the problem this problem we're having now, the 21st century, has very much a lot to do with what started there as a romantic vision. And in music, we really need to look to Wagner for that. Because before that, people wrote music to God. I mean, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and all of them. But Wagner really wrote music as a God. He encouraged that, he believed that, and the people around have certainly believed it. And although he did want to reach a large audience, and he tried to vote for his political reasons, I think that the philosophy of that is very destructive to art itself, and certainly did great damage in terms of classical music. Because down the road a few generations, what started to happen was composers started to realize that if they were understood by their audiences, that they would not be perceived as God's.

And in fact, that the incomprehensibility that they could have by certain ways of composing and methods of composing was actually an asset. And became their God-like status. Well, yes, because if we understand, I mean, just logically, if I understand somebody, he's not a God. If someone speaks in a kind of vision that I do not quite understand and elevates himself to God's status, that person can be looked at as a God. And the less he is comprehensible, the more respected, in a sense, the higher moral plane that that is, is God-like figure. And I think the destructive quality of that is, and it's been to all art, but certainly classical music, is that many composers do not try to be clear, and say they do that because they have more integrity, that being clear is pandering to people that I wish to say what I wish to say, and I'm not addressing anyone because I don't care, because I am a God. And the result has been that the audience has been denied both intellectual and emotional substance.

I mean, they've not been given anything to listen to in many cases. And what happened then is the audience is left. The audience is departed from the concert hall. And the idea of modern music, contemporary music, became an athlete to them. They don't like it and they haven't even heard it. That's the problem now. It's never been the problem once they get in the hall. They hear a piece of mind. I've never had a problem with noise. But beforehand, I will have someone say, oh, I don't like modern music. I'm not going to like what you do. And that's the reason. The reason is that we've taken away something enormously important from them, and that was the ability for them to comprehend and to have opinions. Again, you don't have an opinion about a God. A God is incomprehensible, and you certainly don't make up your mind about that. You worship it or you don't. And that's been the attitude to new music, and very often it new art also, all kinds of art. It's what we have talked about many times. It's the kind of a stench of art that has ruined many a fine work because the enemy is false image of art itself.

Yes. And I think that's what happened to concert music. It's nothing more of a Beethoven. Although Benjamin Britain did say the rock began with Beethoven because the real romantic image of the composer started with Beethoven. But I think that Beethoven's motives were much pure. And I think he was trying to be understood still. Oh, he was. Wagner actually was too. He wanted to be understood, but he also wanted to be a God. And sooner or later they have to separate. You cannot be a comprehensible God. You must be incomprehensible to be a God. And today, many composers, well, less so now, but in the 1950s, certainly. Many composers really felt elevated by not reaching people. I, Pulitzer Prize composer, said to me, I consider my conscience to be a private communication through public means. And I said, well, why should the public go there then? If you're not talking to them, if you're only talking to 10 people there, he said to hear their betters.

Now, this is an attitude. And by the way, thinks of it as a highly moral attitude. You see, there's the irony of all this. That is not thought of as an egocentric selfish attitude which is what I think of it as. But instead as a highly moral attitude and not condescending to appear, to appeal to the people. And I've had that experience many times. I've had a critic of the New York Times say that he reads a word in all my reviews and the word disturbs him. The word is communicates. And this was for a large Sunday magazine article. And the week later when I asked him, what's wrong with my communicating with an audience, he said, well, I was taught interesting word that audiences that composes that communicate with their audiences are pandering and selling out. And I said, well, that's very interesting. Did you say that? I guess you mean that across the board. We certainly know of the world's greatest panderer then, which is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart because he was obsessed with audience reaction.

And he would write his father, letters saying, I went into this town and I changed the last room to the symphony to please the public. And I'm going to do this and change this in my music to get more of an ovation. He would say that all the time. And of course, like anybody in the classical music world, Mozart is worshiped completely. And let's hit him with a force that was quite amazing. And I watched him try to explain that to me. And he actually ended up writing a pretty good article because I challenged that. But usually it's not challenged. Is the attitude different in America than Europe? It's much better here. We see, I think we've gone through that. And I think one of the things that really cemented that was actually the AIDS epidemic in a strange way. Because a lot of young composers were watching the world around them crumble. And the idea of playing with these philosophical values and that all they were doing was posturing and writing, not to say something to people, became really old fashioned and not curdled.

It actually curdled emotionally for them. Here were real emotional tragedies happening around them. Because young people usually don't have that. That happens when you're 70s, say. But it's not doesn't happen when you're 22. And here were 22-year-olds watching their friends die. And I think that it made a big difference because America had that specifically. And Europe did not have that as a problem as much in putting the final kabash on the idea of the great composer apart from society. They said, we want to join society. We want to speak to the audiences. We have things to say emotionally now. Let us get back to that task. Which is very healthy. And I think it is much healthier in the US now. What would you suggest a young composer, a classical composer, should do to pursue a career in music now? Well, I think they should tell you students. Well, I think they have to search out the new venues and deal with the old ones to a certain degree.

Write something for orchestra. OK. But don't make that the only thing you can do. For example, I would say if I were a young composer now, I would probably try to align myself with a great visual artist and produce a new art form for the screens that are going to be on the whole walls of houses. We just know that. We know that in 30 years, the whole wall of the house is going to be a screen. Let alone several walls, virtual reality walls that are suddenly going to expand. Yes, we're going to see adventure. We're going to see this. We're going to see shows made for it, sports made for it. What about art made for it? What about something that is not a visual experience and not a musical experience, but the combination of the two of them to make a third experience that is not ballet, that is not opera. What is something else? After all, things really... Can your album talk about things like that? Yeah, I mean, technically, things change a lot when the technology changes. For example, Liszt could not have written the music that he wrote without the industrial revolution

because the industrial revolution made the steel frame piano and the steel frame piano made it possible to play with incredible force on a much bigger instrument in much lower, much higher than the old pianos. Liszt was able to develop those super romantic pianistic figures only because he had the technology to do it. Now, what do we have now? Technology is changing and we're getting new technology. Shouldn't we take the composers be there? I actually spoke to a record company executive when there used to be record companies that had some sort of executives that were not just doing pop. You know, you ought to make a think tank with composers and visual artists and get together and talk about what's going to happen when these two come together and have art already being written for it, even though it isn't even there yet. See, I'd like people to be ahead of their time that way and then write your string quartet and write your symphony, but know that the major force you can do is to open up the new technology with art

with your intelligence and your talent. There are people writing for the internet. I've seen pieces written, musical pieces, written to be performed on the internet. The internet has actually completely changed everything. The big record companies, for example, don't exist anymore, but individual composers have their own web pages. You go to those web pages and you can rent music performances so they can actually publish your own music because they can now use siberius and make a beautiful score and then you can press a button and hear it because they put those records on the internet. So, and they can sell their records, so even a small, small label can be an Amazon. If you want it, you can find it just as easily as Sony. Now, you just have to type out what you want. And that's different because in record stores, you basically see the big product and then you have to search around the back of the store to see the little bins, the classical music and the distance, you know, when the string quartet's three miles away from anything and you have to find it and you have to know what you're looking for.

Here, everything is access. So, in many ways, I think that's opening up things in a very healthy way. I think the composers today have more chance, first four, they can put out their own records. Recording is so cheap now that you can buy for $500 something that will make a superb recording for you, an actual, releaseable recording. Many years ago, it was impossible to do that. I mean, the old days of LP recording, you know single composer could do anything about it. You had to have a company. Now they can do it themselves. They can have a press, they can put it out, they can design the cover on their computer. It's all over. There's no more, you know, only one way. And it's so much better, and it's so much healthier that I'm very happy. But I think that's where they should be looking right into that same place for how to do their music and how to get their music out. I know you've been lately, you've been learning how to use Sibelius. Oh, God. Yeah, well, you know, that's a generation gap, I think. I just think, I learn it.

I just forget it every day. I learn it and I go back and they say, what is that? You know, so I mean, I don't know. For those of you who've already learned it, Sibelius is the word, is the Microsoft word for writing music. You can write music on it if you learn it. Yes. But I still use a number nine pencil. Now I know I made a pencil and I make my little scratches. And the problem is, I would have to take a year to do that. And I've got to write this piece this summer. And I can't fool around. I can't learn anything. I've got to be giving music to my publisher. And they do it. They put it in computer and get it back to me. So it's not as though I don't get it done that way. I don't do it myself. But it would be great if I could do it. There are a lot of compositional techniques that are very easy on the computer. Not all of them. But a lot of things involving repetition of cells. That's why minimalism is so great on the computer. Because you can copy and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste. And you've got yourself. And here's the insurance companies are now have insurance for carpal tunnel syndrome for minimal, minimal exposure.

It is true. That's the one day derivative. What are some of your favorite contemporary composers? Which one? That's a hard question. I think a piece is more than. But you listen to for fun. What do you listen to? I don't listen to it for fun. And because I'll tell you, the funny thing is when you're working on a piece, you're so obsessed, you can't listen anything else. And when I'm not working on a piece, I don't want to hear classical music at all. And what happens is I listen to most of the stuff because people send it to me. Other composers send it, former students send it. And I go in my car when I go up and back from the country because I know the phone isn't going to ring. And I play my stuff there. And I love hearing my former students going on into such great things or colleagues of mine who send stuff. That's how I hear stuff. Or if I'm researching something, I've heard a lot of band music recently because I'm writing for it. And I just got scores and listened to it just to get my ear and the eye of the score. What does this look like? What does it sound like?

That kind of stuff. But if I'm working hard, I really have to break that at night, for example. My pleasure is not going to go into listen to something. My pleasure is to turn on a big screen television and watch a movie. Really is. And then when I'm stopping, I want to travel to Italy or something. I want to go to concerts. I don't want to go to North Italy. I want to go to South Italy where everything's inefficient and it's wonderful. It takes two hours to have dinner and the beaches there. That's really that and travel and see things in sights rather than getting into my profession more and more and more and more. I think I need to, I really work so hard at it. The break is very important. Even if it's a nightly break, when I'm working, it's a nightly break. When I stop, that's what my first glass of wine. That's my symbol of it's over now. You can't compose any more now that you've had that wine. So now you have a wonderful time. Make dinner. Put on the TV. Relax. Call people. And then tomorrow morning, you'll have to face that again. It's a new day. And the new day and the new impossible wall to climb that you have to climb over.

And so listening to music is in the way, it's easy for me. John, I'm getting the sign to wrap up our final episode in the John Coriano saga. It's been a terrific. It's been very moving for me to get to know you this way now after all these years. Thank you so much. And I look forward to further conversations with you outside of the television. Thank you. And thank you for coming. And thank you for our studio audience for joining us for conversations. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Come to the loved by our flame, release swell. Let's play with the pain we've lost when things play.