John Corigliano Quotes

United States, Composer
February 16, 1938

John Paul Corigliano is 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.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

John Corigliano
- Past
- Revolution
Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

John Corigliano
- Beginning

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

John Corigliano
- Great
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 England.

John Corigliano
- Good
- American
- Respect
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.

John Corigliano
- Good
- Beginning
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.

John Corigliano
- Thinking
- Style
- Choices
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.

John Corigliano
- People
- Different
- Done
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.

John Corigliano
- People
- Music
- Culture

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges.

John Corigliano
- Different
I think art can reflect tragedy.

John Corigliano
- Art
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.

John Corigliano
- Up
I have tremendous respect for film composers.

John Corigliano
- Respect
Art is not only about angst.

John Corigliano
- Art
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.

John Corigliano
- Thinking
- Challenge