John Corigliano Quotes

15 quotes in 219 categories

• 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,…
• What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• I have tremendous respect for film composers.
• I think art can reflect tragedy.
• Art is not only about angst.
• I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.
• 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.
• I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from…
• 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…

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