This interview was originally recorded on October 3rd, 2024.
The Oral History Project is supported by the Arthur F. and Alice E. Adams Charitable Foundation.

John Corigliano, composer

John Corigliano continues to add to one of the richest, most unusual, and most widely celebrated bodies of work any composer has created over the last 40 years. Corigliano's scores, now numbering over 100, have won the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, five Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award, and they have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world. Attentive listening to this music reveals an unconfined imagination, one which has taken traditional notions like “symphony” or “concerto” and redefined them in a uniquely transparent idiom forged as much from the post-war European avant-garde as from his American forebears.

Transcript

Marc A. Scorca: John Corigliano, thank you so much for joining us today to add to our Oral History Project, with your insight, your reflections on this wonderful art form we call opera. Thank you for being with us today.

John Corigliano: Thank you, Marc.

Marc A. Scorca: You know John, I start every interview with a question, and I'll start it with you too. Who brought you to your first opera?

John Corigliano: Well, there are two ways I saw my first operas. One was on television. When I was a little boy, Amahl and the Night Visitors and The Saint of Bleecker Street were televised on black and white television. And I watched it in Brooklyn with my mother and two handkerchiefs that we passed back and forth; it was so beautiful. That was my first real thought of seeing opera. But then later, my father, who was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, took me to see Madam Butterfly with Licia Albanese. Dimitri Mitropoulos was conducting, who was the music director of the New York Philharmonic, so he wanted to go hear Mitropoulos do Butterfly and also Albanese - and that was my first time in an opera house.

Marc A. Scorca: So clearly, your first exposure to opera on television was a moving experience, and I assume that you were captivated by it when you went to see it in person.

John Corigliano: Oh my God, yes. The television thing was so unusual. I'd never experienced anything like that.

Marc A. Scorca: I don't think people today realize what a role television had in the '50's, the '60's, to bring opera into living rooms. The first time I was transported by opera music truly, was on the Ed Sullivan Show with Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne singing the great Norma duet. Television brought opera into the living room.

John Corigliano: Yes it did, and for me, the close-ups and the ability to hear every word was absolutely marvelous. I couldn't believe it; it was transcendent to hear music and words and drama done at the same time. I'd never experienced that before.

Marc A. Scorca: Your home must have been filled with music. Your father was for - what is it? - 23 years the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic.

John Corigliano: More than that, yes.

Marc A. Scorca: Incredible. And your mother, although she didn't perform, she was a pianist. Did music just inhabit your house?

John Corigliano: Well, there were two houses. My parents were separated a lot of my childhood, and my father lived in the Hotel Woodward, a block from Carnegie Hall in room 711 every year, and my mother lived in Brooklyn on Washington Avenue. And so I spent the weeks with my mother, and she taught piano. So, coming back from school, I would hear piano lessons and Czerny, and all sorts of exercises, and some easy Debussy and Chopin pieces being played by her students. And then I would go see my father, and he'd be practicing for a concerto, and we'd go to a concert at the Philharmonic. And I really loved that.

Marc A. Scorca: Did you think music would be a part of your life from childhood? Did you think about doing anything else in life, or was music 'it' from the start?

John Corigliano: Actually, I wanted to be a cartoonist. These were the days of the great Walt Disney films: Dumbo, Bambi. They were so magnificent, and I found animation to be the most creative art form; anything with animation. And I thought I'd love to be a cartoonist and work on that, but I never did. I never did develop that, but I still feel animation has things that do that nothing else can do. So, that was my goal when I was a kid. I didn't think about going into music.

Marc A. Scorca: What's interesting is - animation, a form of storytelling, just as opera is a form of storytelling. John, did you have an instrument? Did you start out studying to be a pianist or violinist? Was instrumental music part of your early musical education?

John Corigliano: It really wasn't, and the reason is that my mother taught piano, and I had two piano lessons with her, and we had a big fight. And so we didn't go on, and I never learned the scales. I don't know what finger you put on A flat for an A flat major scale. So, I'm completely untrained, but I play by ear. So, I can get around the piano in my way of getting around it. But I couldn't read a Mozart sonata; it would be impossible for me to finger it.

Marc A. Scorca: And your father didn't put a miniature violin in your hands as a kid?

John Corigliano: No, he didn't. He didn't want me to go into music, and my mother didn't either. They wanted something practical in those days: a lawyer, a doctor, some profession that had a certain noble intent, but music was not one of those.

Marc A. Scorca: So, take me on the path to composition. How did being a composer come to be the way you would express yourself?

John Corigliano: This really all happened in high school. I went to a high school in Brooklyn, Midwood High School, and the person who taught the chorus and also a lot of other things was Mrs. Bella Tillis. And Mrs. Tillis recognized talent in me, and she encouraged me to play. She had a thing called the Sing!, and every year, all the four freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior classes would make up musicals, and to common popular music with different words. And I was the pianist for that every year. And she encouraged me, and then she encouraged me to compose. And actually, I wrote the high school alma mater in my last year in high school, which is still there, in Brooklyn. So really, her encouragement was what gave me the permission to really do it. And I went to Columbia (College) as a music major in composition, although I don't think there was a composition major, it was just a music major, and I studied there with Otto Luening, who was one of the first electronic composers with (Vladimir) Ussachevsky, and he wondered why I was not writing the music that everybody else was doing, which was 12 tone serial music. And I said, "Because I find that not beautiful, and I find what I am doing is beautiful to me, so I have to do what is right for me". And he was very supportive. One would think he wouldn't be, because he came from a completely different background, but he supported me all his life. He wrote me when I had pieces performed. He would come to the concerts and write me notes, and he was a wonderful man. He died in his 90's, and til then he was always very, very positive, even though I was taking a completely different path than the path that other composers were taking. Charles Wuorinen was in my class, and you couldn't pick two more different people in terms of music output. But we were all class of 1938, born in 1938. Wuorinen was the same age as I was.

Marc A. Scorca: And doesn't that make a great teacher, where the teacher supports you to make you the best you can be in the style that speaks to you personally? I think that's fantastic.

John Corigliano: (It's) what I try to do with teaching at Juilliard: to find out what the young composer wants, and let them achieve it, and help them get their goals, no matter what they are. If they're different from yours, it doesn't matter.

Marc A. Scorca: In one of the interviews with you that I read, your father also was not a great fan of the modern music of the day, and that was one of the reasons that he was discouraging of you as a composer, because he just didn't like the new music that was being composed at the time.

John Corigliano: No, he didn't. And the audience didn't like it. Some of the critics liked it; that was the only people who liked it. And the performers didn't like it, because it didn't give them things to really play and phrase and make musical gestures out of it. It was much more holistic and angular. So, my father, on the other hand, warned me that I was too lyrical when a Poem in October was done by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in 1970. He heard a recording of it and he said, "Johnny, you're gonna have to get more dissonant and angular". And I said, "I'm not gonna do that, Dad".

Marc A. Scorca: How interesting. One of your first very successful pieces was for violin. And, of course a bit of an homage to your father. It was an instrument you knew in your ears, so so well, but you didn't play the violin, and yet an early important piece is for violin. How do you compose for an instrument that you actually don't play?

John Corigliano: But you have to. You have to be able to compose for all instruments. The strings are particularly tricky, because they have so many things they can do - the possibilities of producing tones in different ways are enormous in any of the strings, and the violin I loved, and I heard my father practicing concertos, and I heard all the various ponticellos, pizzicatos and senza vibratos - all the unusual sounds that the violin was then called to make. And I just adapted my brain as to the fact that I thought this was beautiful and this was beautiful. And then if there were a difficult chord, which involved four strings, I would take it to a violinist, and say, "Can you play this?" In fact, I still do that. I have a violinist friend, and when I'm writing something for violin, I will send a sort of photograph and email my friend the passage and say, "Can you just play this on the violin for me?" And he calls me up on the phone and plays the passage on the violin and says, "You know, if you alter that note from F sharp to a G, it will be really easy, but it's very difficult right now.

Marc A. Scorca: How fascinating.

John Corigliano: Still do it.

Marc A. Scorca: Do you do the same thing with singers?

John Corigliano: I don't really try out avant-garde vocal techniques; I don't use those too much. In The Lord of Cries. We had an insane person, and I wrote gestures - luckily we had a wonderful singer, David Portillo. And he took coaching with somebody about how to do moanings and groanings and sighings, and all the things that were called for besides singing the pitches. But generally, I write (the) same way anyone else does - pitches and rhythms for a singer to sing, and I know the abilities of singers, and I write for those abilities. Sometimes I stretch 'em a lot, but I still write for them.

Marc A. Scorca: The Ghosts of Versailles was such a landmark opera, the first premiere at The Metropolitan Opera in decades, and I'm pleased to say that I was there, loving every minute of it. So for that opera, Lord of Cries, did you compose for singers you knew, so that you understood that so and so has an easy high C, or so and so has a beautiful middle F, or did you just compose beautiful music, and the singers were able to perform it? How did that work?

John Corigliano: Well, in The Ghosts of Versailles, I had actually envisioned Renata Scotto as being Marie Antoinette. I thought she was, and still in my mind is, the greatest opera singer I've ever heard. What she can do with gesture and voice, no one else can do. And James McCracken was gonna be Bégearss and he's a huge man. And a tiny guy, Graham Clark actually ended up doing it. Graham Clark was tiny with a huge voice. And Renata Scotto was gonna be my Marie Antoinette. In the new opera, The Lord of Cries, the only person I really wrote specifically for was Anthony Roth Costanzo, because we wanted an androgynous person to be Dionysus, and Anthony being a countertenor is that wonderful bridge between the male and the female that produces a sound quite unlike anything else. And I did listen to his work and chat with him about it a little. I wrote the piece tailored for him. The others I wrote as a baritone, or a tenor and so forth. But for Anthony, I really specifically wrote for his voice.

Marc A. Scorca: How interesting, because in say, Ghosts of Versailles, Marie Antoinette (that you'd thought about with Renata Scotto) was so beautifully performed by Teresa Stratas and then by Renée (Fleming), so it works for different voices, even though you had a different one in mind.

John Corigliano: Sure.

Marc A. Scorca: So funny. So, 1963: a really successful piece for violin, and within 10 years, you're working in film. And I'm really curious to know how you got into writing scores for films.

John Corigliano: Well, it happened in a very unusual way. The director, Ken Russell, was a huge music fan. And he made many movies as director on musical subjects. He did a Strauss movie. He did a Delius movie. He did The Music Lovers of Tchaikovsky movie with Richard Chamberlain. He did Lisztomania and all sorts.... And he loves classical music, and knows the orchestral classical music repertoire much better than I do. I mean, Myaskovsky's Ninth Symphony - he will know, that kind of thing. It so happened that my Clarinet Concerto, which premiered in 1977, was being played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta, and he went to the concert because he's a concert goer, and he loves to hear Zarathustra of Strauss in the second half. And he thought, he told me, "Oh, I just have to get rid of this boring, contemporary clarinet concerto, or whatever it is by this person I don't know, and then we'll get to my Strauss that I love". And what happened was he heard it, and he loved it so much that he called me in New York and said, "I want you to write the music for Altered States. Can you fly out here?" And of course, I flew first class and had a limo taking me - it was very, very, very Hollywood - to meet him. And he wanted me to write very wild music for Altered States. The first music he knew were things like Bartók's Miraculous Mandarin or The Rite of Spring of Stravinsky. And he put temporary tracks of those in. But he said, "I really want something wild". And I was gonna go for much wilder writing of sonorics that are quite contemporary now. And I had to go to the producer and say, "Ken wants this, but I wanna go even further". And I explained what it was, and he said, "I'll back you up on that". 'Cause the director is be-all in films. I mean, if you do a film, you are really writing for the director - hopefully for yourself too. But the main thing is the director likes it, uses it. He doesn't like it; he tosses it out. He wants to use one part of what you wrote and put another symphony in the other space. He just does it. The director is supreme. But luckily, Ken and I got along and he loved the music.

Marc A. Scorca: What a great story. The result of a premiere in Los Angeles, LA Phil in 1977. That's just fantastic. We're gonna come back to some of the differences between working symphonically, for film and for opera. I'll come back to that in a second. But in terms of you as an artist, I wanted to talk for a second about your residency at the Chicago Symphony, 'cause you were composer-in-residence there. You were the first composer-in-residence there. That's right. And there aren't many composers-in-residence in opera, but it is something that exists in Symphony. What is the value to you as an artist of being in-residence at a Symphony?

John Corigliano: Well, I could be a lot of help for the things that are not the main official concerts, because the music director picks the main concerts and chooses. And I often offer, say, "Would you listen to this piece or that piece? Maybe you'd be interested in programming this piece?" And that's all to the good. But the other things you can do - the Chicago Symphony has a youth orchestra called the Civic Orchestra, and the Civic Orchestra play a contemporary piece by a younger composer, every concert. You can have a chamber music series of members of the Chicago Symphony and run it as a chamber series, and audiences will come, and you can play smaller works, but contemporary works that way. So there are a lot of ways that the composer-in-residence can fill out the spectrum of not just the symphony concert, but all the other things that are happening. And I used to do that a lot. I had a wonderful experience with young composers who were 12 and 13. What happened was: I went to a school in South Chicago with a bunch of kids and with a pianist. And we said to the kids, "Make up a melody. You can sing it, you can play it on a piano if you want. You can whistle it. Just make up a melody. And we got all these kids to make up these melodies. Now we're talking about eight year olds (who) wrote all those melodies down. We then came back and got these 12 or 13-year-old kids and said, "Here are some melodies. You wanna write a piece incorporating these melodies?" And so he gave it to three different young composers. And then I coached them in the orchestration. (Made sure it) was all good for the Chicago Symphony, and they played it at a young people's concert. And the little kids were in the audience, and the 12 and 13 year olds came on stage to take bows. And the audience was so receptive, because these were kids writing. They're much more interested in that, than any Mozart you can play. And they loved it. And we did that for television. We put it on a TV show. Those are the things that you can do that are really special. Make the concert world fuller and richer. The main stage is definitely the music director's decisions, but you have a lot of other things you can do.

Marc A. Scorca: So then symphony and opera. And with opera, you have a story. You have characters. They are, in a way, a kind of points of reference that are given to you. In concert music, there isn't a story, there aren't characters. How do you approach the creation of concert music that gives you no pointers? And how is that different from opera, where the story and the characters give you pointers?

John Corigliano: Well, it's much harder, concert music, because you have a blank page and the commission says 'Write a 20 minutes long piece", and there's this blank page, and you don't know what to do. And you could do anything. Anything would be legitimate, as long as you made it into something. So creating out of nothing, completely nothing, is the concert composer's problem. In opera, you're dealing with people, live theatrical gestures, drama and poetry. It is quite a bit easier to do that because number one, you collaborate with the librettist and the two of you get together and make a libretto that you can set, and then you set the libretto, and then it comes in and the director takes over. And very often they try it out and say, "No, I think we should change that, and cut this, and we need another minute and a half here". And the composer is sharing the responsibility of the piece with the librettist and the director. When you go to film, it's all the director. In film, you write the piece. They show you (the movie)...we have a minute and 27 seconds here, and we wanna climax here. And you watch the film and you compose to film. So again, it's easier because you have a real limit of seconds and events that you have to do. And someone's gonna talk here, so you have to drop the music down, etc. And all of that is to please the director. If the director doesn't like it, they don't use it. There are many, many cases where entire scores were written, copied and performed by an orchestra and thrown out. Stanley Kubrick, the guy who wrote 2001, he's the big culprit. He commissioned a full score for 2001 by a composer. And it was written, it was copied by copyists. It was put on music stands and played by live musicians and recorded, and he threw the whole thing out. When he did The Shining, Wendy Carlos was the composer, and she wrote the whole score. And then what happened is, he only used the title music and threw everything out and used the recording that he had put there already. So, it is a very, very different matter of writing for film or commercial use like that. You have to please this director and make your case, or it's thrown out.

Marc A. Scorca: I have a quote here and I just wanna read it. It's from an interview you did in the publication, Industry Central. And you say, "In film composing, you're not in full control of it, the way you are in concert music. So the risk of compromise, or dilution of idea or structure is great. In film, it's the director's vision, even of the music which prevails, whereas in concert composing, it's your own vision. Opera is somewhat in the middle. It's interesting for me, having created an opera for The Metropolitan Opera, The Ghost of Versailles, I found that the work experience in opera partakes about equally of film and concert work, because of the theatrical as well as musical nature of an opera, all the cutting and changes that would never happen in a concert piece happen in opera, as they do in film. What's key is, whose vision is it? In absolute music, it's the composers alone; in the theater, it's the composers and others, and in film it's the directors". So you see it as a bit of a continuum?

John Corigliano: Yes, I do. I think it's very clear. And symphony composers cannot take that kind of compromise that you have to do. Schoenberg went to the film studios. He wanted to write music for a film. And he said, "I'll need nine months to do it, and I'm gonna do it. I want approval on this, and approval on that". And of course, nothing happened. Ravel was approached to write film music, and he said, "I need six months". And they said, "You have three weeks". And he said, "No, I can't do that". Making the compromise from abstract music where you are in total control, and the only job of the performers is to realize your vision. And giving that up and doing something in a timeframe that is not logical to you, or in a manner that's not logical to you...some symphony composers cannot do that. They have to be able to adapt. It's volatile. It changes.

Marc A. Scorca: How interesting. You said in an interview that you have an 'architectural method of composing'. What do you mean by that?

John Corigliano: Well, when you extend music that has no words, (that is abstract music), and you wanna write something that last 20 or 30 minutes long, you have to have a structure to build it on. Now, what happened was, in the classical period, thanks to Haydn and others, they developed these forms that balance the two important balances of all art and all life, which is the yin and yang, (which) informed the idea of repetition and familiarity with the new and adventurous. And all the forms built in the classical period represent that balance between familiar and unusual. This is a human need. It's not a musical need. And so sonata form is a giant ternary form. Rondos are an idea; a digression; back to the idea; a digression; back to the idea; now another digression. Variations is an idea; variation on the idea; variation on the idea. They're all about repetition and variety. If you wanna make your own forms up, you have to be aware of that, and make your own forms. And I tend to do that based upon the concert I'm writing for. When I wrote a percussion concerto, I had big problems to solve on how the percussion would be really heard as a soloist, because when you have a soloist playing all sorts of instruments, it gets confusing. It just sounds like an orchestra piece with a lot of percussion. So I ended up devising three movements based on the three basic percussion sounds. The first one is things hit on wood; the second, things on metal, and the third things on skin. That way, the percussionists travel from one station to another to another. And in each of those, I also made sure that in the metal section that I was able to write a long lyrical melody for the percussionist - something that I don't hear in percussion concertos. They are playing tom-toms and the cellos are playing the melody. So all of the architectural thing was figuring out how I'm gonna build this structure, that makes sense as a real soloistic venture, and also has lyricism and melody in it, that the soloist displays, because, playing the woodblock, you don't play a melody. Even a xylophone or a marimba, it's hard to play a melody 'cause they're so short, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, like that. But luckily the vibraphone...and I had it bowed with a bow and hit at the same time - plays, and it sustains notes and we can build a melody out of it. And that's how I started writing the piece, writing that particular section, which is in the middle of the second movement. So architecturally, the piece now has a structure that can be heard, and you can really tell the soloist is the soloist, and it really has lyrical ideas. And in all the movements, I used in the melody, the interval of a fifth a lot. So I was able to go in, when I wrote the first movement and last movement, and make that interval very important in the structure.

Marc A. Scorca: And it helps the audience too then, as I hear you saying, (to) sort of know where they are, with the familiar versus where you take them with variations, the unfamiliar.

John Corigliano: Right. Each piece is different. The clarinet concerto had a different structure. My first symphony had a different structure, but they were all based upon the idea of you build the structure and then you write the piece, because the structure is first, if you write an architectural piece and then you write a piece for 15 or 20 minutes around the symphony, 45 or 50 minutes, you have to know what's happening in the movements before you start page one. And I actually started with the epilogue of the symphony. That was the first thing I wrote in actual music, but I had to plan out all the movements and what they would say and how they would relate to each other.

Marc A. Scorca: Do you bring that architectural approach to opera? Or, is the libretto the architecture?

John Corigliano: The libretto is the architecture. You have to work with the librettist to make an architecture: returns of phrases and ideas, building a contrast, all that. It's all theatrical; it's based on contrast. But the idea of an opera existing as a series of structures. I mean, aria is a structure, duets and quartets and recitative has a different kind of structure. And the reason these things are done, is so that the composer can portray the sound of 'This aria is complete now'. Marie Antoinette's first aria, she sings for nine minutes and it's over, and we go on to something else. That all had to be structured before the music was written. So yes, the libretto is the structure in opera.

Marc A. Scorca: Now your two operas are rather fantastical. We're not talking about: her candle goes out, she drops the key, he touches her hand, and they fall in love. They are far more complicated and fantastical. So what elements does an opera story have to have to really capture your attention as a composer?

John Corigliano: Well, the first two things: it has to have the combination of poetry and drama. Whoever is writing that libretto has to be able to be a poet and a dramatist, at the same time. If someone's just a poet, we get these operas where just things float in and out, and nothing happens, and at the end, you shrug your shoulders. If it's all dramatic, but no poetry, we get these operas where there's no moment where you say, "Ah, melodically, this is really kept capturing me. And it begins here, and it ends here. You don't have that. I think that (the) opera librettist is the most important thing to get straight. If you don't get the librettist straight, you don't have a good opera. You can write it all you want. But that's why I'm so careful. And the two librettists I've worked with are not only experienced, but brilliant. And we talked about, for example, in Ghosts of Versailles, how it would exist on different worlds. Now, as to that, I know that many composers can write everyday situations in the contemporary jargon and set it to operatic notes. I can't. I find it sounds corny, and I know that, like Nixon in China, for example, is set very much in a time where people don't sing that way. I like the so-realistic world, the world of ghosts, the world of Dionysus and the gods. That's where I think music can speak to words and give the meaning. When it's too realistic, "Pass me the mustard". I don't see how anybody sets it, but people do. Just very different tastes. I could never write an opera like that.

Marc A. Scorca: How did you find working with William Hoffman in terms of - did you know him before? Had you guys been talking about doing an opera together?

John Corigliano: We knew each other since college, and he'd written us four poems that I set as a song cycle. And he was also a playwright - As Is is the Broadway play he wrote. So he was very theatrical and very poetic. And when we got together to write this, we started with the idea of we're gonna go back to the third play of Beaumarchais, La Mère Coupable, The Guilty Mother. And we're gonna go back to it, and there was no translation in English. And so could he translate and make it into a libretto? And he translated it and said, "I can't make it into a libretto. It's not gonna make it; it's not good". The ending and the whole way wasn't successful. So then we said, 'Can we take the characters", which were very, very rich characters, because you had the whole Almaviva family, and Figaro and Susanna all in the middle of Paris in the middle of the French Revolution. I mean, talk about a dramatic situation. And you have the buffa elements of these characters, and then you have these characters like Bégearss, these villains, who are pretending to be nice, but actually trying to get you off at the guillotine. So then we invented this fictionalized story that the ghost of Marie Antoinette was being courted by the ghost of Beaumarchais, who wrote all the characters in the operas. And she was bored in her life as a ghost; she wanted to live again. And he said, "I will show you that you can live again". And what he did was he brought his characters back. And so Figaro and Almaviva and Susanna and the Count, everybody all came back as 18th century characters. And in The Met production, they had their own little orchestra on the side of the stage. There were two orchestras. This doesn't happen now; now it's being done with one orchestra. But this was way back, with a very voluptuous production. And they (the 18th century characters) sang a kind of classical, but not classical kind of work. And Beaumarchais and Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, sang a different kind of music, because they were ghosts. So we had the interplay of the worlds. I said, "Bill, I want you to give me a place where I can be in the 18th century, but I can go out of the 18th century. I don't wanna be caught in it". I love The Rake's Progress, but I don't wanna be stuck in the 18th century for the whole opera. And that's when he said, "You have ghosts or dreams". And we talked about them both, and we picked ghosts, but it was all based on a musical need. I said, "I wanna be able to go stylistically into another whole world and then then have the little 18th century float here and playing here while this other world's observing it". I said, "How do we do that?" And then he came up, as a librettist, with two ideas. We picked one and we kept going with it.

Marc A. Scorca: And so successfully. Now, with Bill Hoffman, you had someone you had known a long time, but someone you could disagree with, and you could get upset with, because, "Oh, that's not what I'm looking for". In your opera, Lord of Cries, your librettist is your husband. So how does it work to be in a creative debate when you have to make dinner together?

John Corigliano: Well, luckily, I like what he does a lot, and so there was not a lot of conflict. There were one or two places where we disagreed on something, and I wanted something made clearer. But aside from that, Mark (Adamo) is so expert. You see, he built the structure of The Lord of Cries into the libretto. So when later on, the words are repeated of something that happened earlier, I can recapitulate the melody and we can have a form that really makes sense. So we didn't have much of a disagreement. I just wanted the rule of three, of three chances to do something - amplify. And he did; he did that. So, in both cases, they were not contentious at all.

Marc A. Scorca: Now, the rule of three: tell me, what is that?

John Corigliano: Chances, three chances that Dionysus gives Seward. Accept him. Number one, he refuses to accept him - that was the first chance. And he gives him a second chance and by the third chance, it's too late, and he is off to the most tragic of results. He is doomed to beheading the woman he loves.

Marc A. Scorca: I only saw Lord of Cries once, so thank you for that reminder. Compositionally, and you've already described this, but I wanted to read one other little quote from the publication called Strings. And it said, "Corigliano is a unique voice among living composers. He plays homage to the musical past, while pushing beyond the violins', in this instance, conventional boundaries. And his characteristic directness of expression is harmonized with a satisfying musical complexity. Head and heart are given equal due, making for a composition as meticulously crafted, as it is durable". And yes, you do use fugues and chaconne and other traditional musical forms, and yet you write contemporary music. And I guess this speaks to your interest, as you were describing, even in Ghosts of Versailles, of stepping into forms from the past, but not living there.

John Corigliano: Right. Architecture and forms are essential to me to write. And some of the forms of the past are very, very useful, like the chaconne which I've used several times. On the other hand, what you do with that, and the material you get and the sound world you get yourself into can be completely different from anything that didn't exist until yesterday. I mean, the sound worlds I love can have clusters. They can have oscillating notes that just oscillate quarter tones slowly, and all for drama, all for the reason of making a dramatic case for the piece. But the sounds I use are very much the sounds of the modern avant-garde. But I'm not limited by that. That is to say, just because they're using those sounds, I abandoned the structures or the idea of melody, for example, (which has been abandoned for so long now, and unfortunately so), that you have to find a way to make a fresh melody and to set it in a way that's fresh that is not just what everyone else has done. And those are very hard things to do. I work hard on pieces. I mean, it took me 10 years to write Lord of Cries and 12 years for Ghosts.

Marc A. Scorca: It's not a 10-minute overture. Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber are names that come up as important in your life in your early years. Were there other role models or mentors or influences?

John Corigliano: Sure. Aaron Copeland, not just by his music, but we knew each other and he was such a spectacularly kind and generous and warm man. I had great feelings of that. And Sam was a great friend to me. I didn't get along that well with Gian Carlo (Menotti). I was Sam's friend, and Gian Carlo got possessive about his friends and Sam's friends. And Bernstein - I worked for 13 years on the Young People's Concerts. So I worked with him a lot, and then when he did my Clarinet Concerto, it was really an extraordinary experience. Anyone in the world who could have pulled that off besides Lenny. He had Monday rehearsals, Tuesday dress, Tuesday night premiere. It was a crazy thing. And there was a piece with antiphonal horns, five horns around the boxes of the audience, two trumpets in the second tier, and two clarinets in the top of the hall, in the back of the audience, left and right. And sounds had moved from one stand to another to give the idea of moving across the stage. And all of these new things, they had to learn Monday and play it Tuesday. It was a crazy schedule, and Lenny said, "I would never have done this, had I seen the difficulty of the piece", but he did it. And he did it magnificently. The recording that is out of Stanley (Drucker) and Lenny, the New York Philharmonic that's out is gotta be the great recording of it, even though there are four other recordings.

Marc A. Scorca: And it is an incredible piece. I'm so sorry I've never heard it in person. You teach. I know you, you teach at Juilliard; you've taught at other fine institutions as well. What can you teach a composer? Because aren't there some intrinsic necessary talents that can't be taught?

John Corigliano: Yes. Some students don't have talent. I tend to pick my students. I don't have to teach at Juilliard. It's not economically what I need to do. So I only teach the students I find have a spark. Now, what that spark is,

Marc A. Scorca: What does spark mean?

John Corigliano: It's really hard to define. It means that when I hear something that a student composed in an audition and so forth, and I hear that composer making me sit up and take notice of what he or she is doing in a very special way. And it is hard to define, as talent is hard to find, but you know, when you hear a piece and a composer has really the talent to make you go, "Oh my God, isn't that wonderful? To just have that feeling. And I take students that are very talented, and they've done very well on the music field. Now, my students are like the top composers in America now.

Marc A. Scorca: And recognizing their talent, accepting them as students, what does a composition teacher teach?

John Corigliano: Well, I liken composition to psychoanalysis. This is what happens. I try to pull the student away from being so close to the piece that he or she can't see it. I'm the same way. I get close to a piece when I write it. I need objectivity. What happens in psychiatry is the psychiatrist tries to give you objectivity. For example, the patient might say, "And then my wife said to me, 'this' and 'that'", and the psychiatrist says, "Yes. At that time, was that the only choice you could have made? The choice you've made before many times. What else could you do at that point to have changed the situation?" And then the patient says, "Well, I could do this, and I could do that. Same thing in music: composers up close to a piece of music, sees that it goes a certain way. And I say, "Yes, that's true, but right here, could it go another way? And if so, what way could it go?" And have the student pull back and say, "I see it could go another way" And let the student determine what that way is, but open the pathway, the idea of thinking of other solutions and not being trapped by what you do all the time. And in psychiatry, that's the same thing. I find it very similar. I don't intrude upon their personal styles. As far as I'm concerned, everybody has their own personal styles right away. I don't try to do that, but what I try to do is offer them objectivity.

Marc A. Scorca: And of course, as one of the most awarded, celebrated, great composers in America today, lots of aspiring composers must seek advice. John, what's at the core of the Corigliano advice to young composers?

John Corigliano: Well, they know more than I do now, 'cause of the computer. And they're all on programs where they can notate, which I don't do. I do it by pencil. They have websites. All these young composers, they make websites. They make their pieces available. They contact other websites, and through social media, they get their pieces out to other people to listen to it. They're actually doing a very good job right now because this is an age of information discussion, of where information passes from one place to another rapidly. I just tell them to keep trying to get live performances of your music and make friends with performers there. At Juilliard, that's pretty easy because my students at Juilliard, they're these fantastic performers all around them. It's harder if you're not associated with the school, but it's still possible. The idea that they are in charge of, at this point, making their music heard, as well as writing it. That they can't just write a piece and expect it to be played, because that's the way things are. Because they aren't. They have to be the person who says, "Listen to this, Mr. Slatkin, and I'm sending you this, and I hope you listen to it". And sometime Leonard Slatkin would listen to it. And there have been occasions where pieces like that were sent, that were then played by these wonderful conductors, like Leonard, who care about young composers and contemporary music. So it's getting out there, but they already are out there, just because of the social media aspect of where we are now. They already have that ability. It's just encouraging them to do more on it.

Marc A. Scorca: Well, John Corigliano, thank you. This has just been a fascinating conversation, and as brilliant and as generous as I knew it would be. I'm so grateful for your time today.