John Corigliano Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Art is not only about angst.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

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.

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.

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

I think art can reflect tragedy.

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.