Now that it's over, it seems fair to say the University of Utah got its money's worth from John Corigliano's visit two weeks ago.
Not only did the hot-as-blazes composer make himself available for lectures and master classes - he also became a highly visible, and audible, member of the community, putting in appearances at concerts where his music was to be performed, including one of nothing but at the U. itself.For me the highlight of that Jan. 13 program was tenor Robert Breault's artful illumination of the "Poem in October," its finger squarely on the pulse of both the Dylan Thomas verses and Corigliano's setting of them, followed by Robert Stephenson's forceful projection of the Aria from the Oboe Concerto.
However, the composer also took pains to compliment the non-faculty performers, some of whom he had coached in advance. And, at his lecture the following day, he shared with them, and anyone else who cared to attend, some of the ins and outs of putting these pieces together.
That was particularly helpful in the case of the Clarinet Concerto, from 1977, a piece I thought I knew well from recordings. But no two-channel tape can capture the surround-sound intricacies of the concluding Antiphonal Toccata, energetically charted (with the help of chalkboard diagrams) by Corigliano himself.
"This is a piece for live concert performance," he emphasized, reiterating his conviction that that is where the future of music continues to lie. But, he acknowledged, it is not always easy to convince young people of that, which is why he often incorporates a strong visual component in his music.
He also admitted, in the question-and-answer session that followed, that not every composer has made that effort.
"If you want to reach audiences," he said, "I think you have to try to get them involved in your work . . . so they can get all the things you want them to." By contrast, Corigliano recalled the composer - himself a recent visitor to the U. - who maintained in print that "it was the audience's responsibility to study, prime themselves and understand music and understand the piece and the various permutations of it when they go into the concert hall. . . . And my answer to that was, then you really have to pay them to go to the concert."
That would seem a basic truth in a discipline whose greatest strength, as I see it, rests in its ability to transcend linguistic and/or intellectual barriers and speak directly to the human heart.
That doesn't mean all music has to be emotional, or even tonal. But in order to touch anyone outside the academic community that for so much of this century has laid down the rules, it must somehow tap into the universal consciousness. And in my experience, that can be done in ways as diverse as Japanese koto music, the songs of Cole Porter or Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire."
But, posited one questioner, isn't melody easier? "No," answered Corigliano, iterating another basic truth. "Melodies are the hardest of all. Simplicity is the hardest of all." Which I hope sank in, coming as it did from a composer who is not afraid of complexity, or of challenging his audience.
But then he isn't the first to say it. Nor, I suspect, was Mahler, whose music is if anything even more personal than Corigliano's. (We are still plumbing the involvements and emotional entanglements of the later symphonies.) "To be interesting is easy," he is supposed to have said. "What is hard is to be beautiful."