Corigliano Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

I think art can reflect tragedy. — John Corigliano

Since they are our right, let us be vigilant to preserve them uninfringed, and free from encroachments. If animosities arise, and we should be obliged to resort to party, let each of us range himself on the side which unfurls the ensigns of public good. Faction will then vanish, which, if not timely suppressed, may overturn the balance, the palladium of liberty, and crush us under its ruins. — Benjamin Franklin

And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field. — Julian Barnes

I will never be one of the happy stupid that were born somewhere. This way of life is excellent for the imagination. It develops your paranoia. You feel paranoid when you don't understand a country, and being paranoiac is excellent for fiction. — Amelie Nothomb

I was fortunate to work with Corigliano for a few years in the mid nineties. Meeting and working with him during those formative years was an important experience. — Michael Hersch

I have mentally overcome situations most of you would be terrified to ever attempt: heights, fire, needles, spiders, snakes, angry monkeys, being shot, being hit by a car, going blind - you name it, I have been in a situation where I have had to mentally overcome my inherent fears to do my job. — Criss Angel

Roughly fifty percent of procedure in a Marine basic-training program is about disconnecting the young American boy from his concept of himself as a unique individual, a lone operator. — James D. Bradley

I have tremendous respect for film composers. — John Corigliano

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

On the ear Drops the light drip of the suspended oar. — Lord Byron

Art is not only about angst. — John Corigliano

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

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

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. — John Corigliano

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

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

I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges. — John Corigliano

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

People have founded vast schemes upon a very few words. — Florence Nightingale

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