Corigliano and Dylan

John Corigliano, by any account one of America’s most prominent composers, has won numerous awards, including an Oscar for his score to The Red Violin and a Pulitzer. He recently won the Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition for his song cycle Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.

Charles Downey at Ionarts comments:

According to his liner note, Corigliano had never heard the Bob Dylan songs whose poems he used as the basis of his new composition, an assertion that stretches credulity with a song like Blowin’ in the Wind. Someone who does not listen to a lot of popular music, in whose number I am certainly to be included, might not have heard several of the Dylan songs, or perhaps had heard Mr. Tambourine Man only as covered by William Shatner, but Blowin’ in the Wind? Your head would have to have been buried under a rock since 1962.

I can’t disagree with Downey on that point. I too have managed to ignore a lot of popular music. For reasons too numerous to explain here, I think it has become much easier to ignore popular music over the past 30 years or so – and much more rewarding, since vast swaths of popular music have become so thoroughly ignorable.

To be fair, Corigliano was born in 1938 and was winning competitions at the Spoleto Festival in 1963, so his attention was already focused elsewhere when Bob Dylan came along. And the classical music world of the 60s and 70s was very adept at shunning things popular.

But Corigliano does not live in a bubble and has some interesting things to say. Professor Carol interviewed him a couple of years ago on his Circus Maximus and why wind bands were becoming such a popular medium for contemporary composers. Circus Maximus was commissioned by the University of Texas Wind Ensemble, and the director of that ensemble, Jerry Junkin, also participates in the interview.