John Corigliano
John Corigliano
John Coriglianois an American composer of classical music. His scores, now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, five Grammy Awards, Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and an Oscar. He is a distinguished professor of music at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and on the composition faculty at the Juilliard School...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionComposer
Date of Birth16 February 1938
CountryUnited States of America
I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.
I don't think that the Pulitzer should be given the way it is. I think the competition should be anonymous. I think completely different people would win it if the names were taken off because a lot of it is done on relationships and names.
What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make.
I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.
The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.
I have tremendous respect for film composers.
I think art can reflect tragedy.
Art is not only about angst.
I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.
The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.
You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.
Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.
Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.
If you take a violin, you can make it sound 50 different ways. Not just pizzicato and played by the bow, but ponticello, and harmonics, and tremolos. If you take an oboe and play it, there's about one way you can make it sound: like an oboe.