John Corigliano

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

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.

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

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

I think art can reflect tragedy.

Art is not only about angst.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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