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A Composer & The Tambourine Man |
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Written by Dan England
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Thursday, 03 April 2008 |
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John Corigliano remembers sitting back in the green room of the New York Philharmonic and listening to his father play the violin for the great orchestra.
Even as young as 5, Corigliano paced the room, nervous as all get out for his father, who served as head lion, or concertmaster, for more than 20 years. As much as he loved music, he knew, even then, that performing on stage in front of all those people was out of the question.
“I was too worried about his performance, I couldn’t even watch him,” Corigliano said in a phone interview. “It wasn’t even my own.”
Now, all these years later, he’s considered one of America’s greatest living composers.
Corigliano’s spent the last year traveling to various orchestras across the country who want to help him celebrate his 70th birthday and honor him for his achievements. He’ll join the Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra for a concert on April 12.
It’s a little ironic: He couldn’t avoid the spotlight, even as a composer. In fact, he hasn’t spent a weekend at home in months, and he admits he’s a little tired.
“I’m happy about it and honored,” Corigliano said, “but I don’t have the mentality for spending all day on planes. I think soloists and concert performers just get used to doing that, but composers are more homebodies.”
A brief look at his career shows why he’s so busy during the year of his milestone. He’s won practically every big music award you can think of, including dozens of doctorates, several Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 2 in 2002, a Grawemeyer for his Symphony No. 1 in 1991 and an Academy Award for his score to Francois Girard’s 1997 film “The Red Violin.”
But one piece that got a lot of attention, since it seemed a little out of character, was the same music the Greeley Philharmonic will perform next Saturday night: “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It is a piece for soprano and orchestra (he originally wrote it for soprano and piano and orchestrated it later) that uses the lyrics of seven famous Bob Dylan songs.
Corigliano wasn’t a fan of Dylan — in fact, he’d never even heard his music — but he took the suggestion of a few friends to take a look at his lyrics after Corigliano was commissioned by Carnegie Hall to create a piece with the words of an American poet. He sent away for a book of Dylan’s lyrics and thought they were beautiful. He enjoyed pop music. He liked the Beatles and musical theater, for instance, but his ear just wasn’t attracted to Dylan’s music.
“The fun thing about this project is people will be familiar with his lyrics but will hear them presented in a completely different way,” Corigliano said. “What they will hear is almost schizophrenic. People can hear how someone interprets the text in a totally different way.”
 A student of his later made him a CD of Dylan’s music, and he listened to it after he completed the project.
“It was startling to me in the way that he saw the lyrics and the way I did,” he said. “The response to those words isn’t logical to me. But it was fabulous to listen to it.”
Corigliano won some of his biggest prizes for his symphonies, even if he once said he’d never write one. He wasn’t afraid of the scope, it’s just that he thought the world needed more pieces for, say, oboe soloists. He changed his mind after struggling through the AIDS crisis, when a lot of his friends died, and he wrote “Symphony No. 1” to memorialize one extremely close friend who was dying from the disease.
“I knew then that period was of the scope needed for a symphony,” he said. “I never would have done that had that not happened.”
He wrote the music to reflect the pain, frustration and anger he felt from a friend dying from a disease, though it wasn’t just lashing out with a bunch of notes, he said.
“It takes a year-and-a-half to write such a piece,” he said. “So you have to nourish the music from those feelings and project it so people understand it.”
He struggled with the ending, but he wrote it first, a peaceful memorial to those lost, music that he hoped contained the message that their lives must be remembered.
“It wasn’t hope, because back then there was no hope,” he said. “It was the idea of remembering our friends and keeping them alive that way.”
Corigliano is encouraged by the number of American composers.
In fact, he believes there are more composers than ever, thanks to the Internet. Back in his day, recording a piece meant hiring musicians and going into a recording studio and using $10,000 microphones and buying editing equipment.
Corigliano loves the technology. He was inspired to start his career from a breakthrough as well, when LPs were invented in 1948. That made it possible for records to capture the longer pieces written by composers, and as a result, writers such as Copeland broke through the Beethoven and Mozart molds.
“There was this explosion of contemporary music, and I was fascinated with that,” he said. “But to think now that some kid can use a hand-held thing and make as good of a sound as that and make his own CD and sell it on the Internet. It’s a glorious time for young composers.”
TO GO
• You can hear Corigliano’s ode to Bob Dylan’s lyrics as a part of the Greeley Philharmonic Orchestra’s fifth concert of the season at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 12 at the Union Colony Civic Center, 701 10th Ave., Greeley.
• The concert also includes Maestro Glen Cortese’s own composition, a tribute to Colorado Springs’ “Garden of the Gods” and the classic “Fanfare for the Common Man” by Aaron Copeland.
Tickets are $10 to $30 and available by calling 356-5000 or going to www.greeleyphilharmonic.com.
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