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John Corigliano

Symphony No. 3
and
Perspective on the Symbiosis
of Film and Music

Alexander Goodhart

I. Introduction

How many Western composers, born in the second half of the twentieth century,
were not exposed to the music of American film in their youth? Hint: none. For how
many of these aspiring artists was the music of cinema their first encounter with
orchestral writing? Today, hundredsif not thousandsof young composers are
pursuing degrees in Composition for Visual Media; this is a testament to the powerful
relationship between film and contemporary composers. And while those desiring to
make a living off of their craft may find it impossible to not dabble, at the least, in the
film industry, the distinctive role of an autonomous artistic aesthetic is absent from most
commercial composition projects. This moves many young musicians, such as myself, to
study the discipline under classical virtues, which can be so academically distinct from
film music (as is the case at the Esther Boyer College of Music) that we very well may be
excommunicating a central component of our intrinsic musical rhetoric.
Without a significant academic elision between historically classical music
theory and the cultural impact of music for film, the 21st century composers voice is
at stake of being lost. Through the end of the last and into our new century, a birds-eye
perspective of contemporary classical music looks something like an international
potluck crammed into one disorganized dish; and, while the consolidation of emerging
theoretical principals will only be at its clearest in retrospect, it would do our community
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due justice to reexamine the influential forces at play in our works.
Luckily, as the postmodern era progresses, many careers of elder composers can
be seen flittering between the conservatory and commercial styles. A suite from John
Williams score to Close Encounters of the Third Kind has been programmed for the
Philadelphia Orchestras 2014-15 season; Henryk Goreckia composer made famous
to the layman while failure to the aficionado by his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs
received an April 2014 premiere of his posthumously completed Symphony No. 4; and
John Corigliano, known most widely for his score to the 1997 film The Red Violin,
received his first Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 2 in 2001. Corigliano is an
exemplary role model for the new generations of composers, having successfully
straddled a career ranging from classical composition, film scoring, conservatory and
university pedagogy, and even assistant producer with the New York Philharmonic. It is
a versatility of professional musicianship that has propelled him to success, and that
same versatility is a unifying factor among his musical works.
In reckoning the influence of film music on the modern composer, theorists have
been at odds for decades over the cross-pollination of aesthetic, meaning, and
compositional procedures between film and music. This argument is thoroughly
explored in a 2010 article by Scott Paulin, Cinematic Music: Analogies, Fallacies, and
the Case of Debussy. As his title suggests, the author is cautionary towards drawing
lines between the genres. Yet, the brilliant and successful music of Corigliano can
demonstrate that these lines are well drawn, crossed, and so permeating as to be
invisible. The composers music exhibits strong theoretical unification, uniqueness in
sound and form, and a fresh approach to interaction between performers and
audiences alike. This paper will present a survey of and theoretical approach to the first
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three movements to his Symphony No. 3 (Circus Maximus), and also serve as an
intermediary in the ongoing discussion of media specificity and the symbiotic
relationship of film and music.
II. Symphony No. 3

As Paulin demonstrates in Cinematic Music, theoretical perspectives reliant on
the canon of American film to classical scores give rise to integral issues of media
specificity and linguistic meaning. However important these examinations are, there is
clear evidence in the case Corigliano that the aesthetics and functions of music for
concert hall and visual media are comparable and fit for complimentary analytical study.
In their marriage, conservatory and commercial compositional strategies provide
a more advantageous arsenal of perspectives with which to approach Symphony No. 3.
The piece is enormous in scope and considerable in length: it encompasses eight
movements over 35-minutes; and employs an oversized ensemble of winds, brass, harp,
percussion with piano (on stage) woodwinds, brass, percussion, and double bass
(surrounding the audience) a miniature marching band (moving through audience)
and a 12-gauge shotgun.
This tour de force is not merely a novelty show for Corigliano, but a foundation
on which to set a remarkably unique musical language. Coriglianos notational methods
are not even close to the avant-garde scores of his conservatory-focused colleagues;
the reasonably conservative score does rely on non-metronomic repetition in the first
movement, a method with great influence on its acoustic result and explored deeply in
his preceding symphony. Graphic notation is sparingly used in accompaniment of
unfamiliar extended techniques such as a siren/doppler sound in clarinets and wolf
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howl in horns. Truly, Corigliano succeeds in crafting music that is cohesive in its newly
tailored rhetoric. How, then, is the music structuredand can it function meaningfully
within the classical idiom?
The symphonys subtitle, Circus Maximus, is taken from an ancient Roman
stadium of the same namethe empires first and largest arena, which was host to the
most aggressively passionate games and celebrations of Western civilization: festive
religious ceremonies, theatrical recitals, chariot races, and gladiator contests. Through
this electrifying realm the piece is presented in eight movements:
I. Introitus
II. Screen / Siren
III. Channel surfing
IV. Night Music I
V. Night Music II
VI. Circus Maximus
VII. Prayer
VIII. Coda: Veritas

While the movements titles do little to describe their programmatic relationship
with the subtitle, the music instantly translates the sensory experiences of the ancient
coliseum into palpable narrations and illustrations expressed through both linear and
surreal perspectives.
The colossal events invoked by the symphony were, in their time, predicated by
the pompa circensis, a parade of the circus participantscomplete with horsemen,
chorus, and statues of the gods. This affair was especially pompous at The Circus
Maximus, as described by Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his work Roman
Antiquities. Coriglianos introductory movement is strikingly evocative of the ritual; the
first gesture is a piling of declamatory ostinati in the snare drums, trumpets, and
woodwinds. When the full ensemble enters, it energizes the music with magnanimous
depth and movement: piccolo and clarinets in their highest register shriek wildly against
the brutally rigid brass. The spectacle is as exhilarating as it is horrifying.
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As a piece of pure music, the collective sound seems confounding, with no
traceable connection to the Western canon. One might feel compelled to disregard
Coriglianos sonic onslaught as an artifice designed merely to provoke emotional
response (a dangerous choice, as Goreckis Third shows us). However, when the
program of Circus Maximus is taken into account, the music takes on a whole new life
and meaning. The antiphonal trumpet ostinati are bugles blowing from the corners of
the stadium; the loud tremolandi of flexatones are the thrashings of slaves and animals
chained to the ground, and that exhilarating fear evoked is not just a meaningless trick:
it is a modern interpretation of the colliding passions of celebration and bloodlust.
In this way, Coriglianos music is made more meaningful by a visual
interpretation: for without artists impressions of Roman stadiumssuch as those in the
2
nd
century illustrated play Hecyra or the 2000 film Gladiatorthere would be much less
of a conception of the Circus Maximus on which to set music. That is not where the
composers work ends, however. While a film soundtrack may seek only to effectively
underscore the action of a scene (playing the part of an amplifier, rather than a separate
actor), Corigliano is engaging with his theatrical subject: making with it a unique
impression that is musically codified. While the first movement explores the sensory
faade of the Circus Maximus, the music goes on to explore its subjects much more
deeply.
In stark contrast to the introduction, the second movement Screen/Siren is
thinly orchestrated, quiet, and meandering. A duet of alto saxophones introduce the
music, which has a harmonic quality akin to Samuel Barbers Summer Music and
melodic gestures reminiscent of Ravels Daphnis et Chloe. In this pastoral terrain, the
music is sumptuous and dreamy, taking the listener into a distance: away from the
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frenzy of Circus Maximus. The soft timbre of the saxophones set apart from each other
by a tritone creates a cool and misty atmospherethe thin orchestration providing
depth through intimacy. This movement is not about the games themselves, but one of
their individual players: a gladiator, perhaps, alone in the moonlight on the eve of a
match that could be his last. To engross the listener in this cerebral realm, Corigliano
calls only on players in the audience-surrounding ensemble. The duet grows into a
quartet of saxophones, who lament the brutality with unresolved dissonance. Above the
quartet, a solo clarinet echoes the savage crowds: their fortissimo trills reduced to
quietly descending melodic line. In mimicry of the silent and unfeeling earth, the
pizzicato of a solo contrabass responds to the saxophones cries with the occasional
single-note answer.
Without preparation, the dream is interrupted with the blare of a whistle and
lurid staccato chromatic ascents in the horns. The rush of ascending motion invokes the
visceral commotion of a stampede, perhaps of stadium patrons brutishly filling into the
Roman coliseum. As quickly as this violence appeared, it is replaced by the lugubrious
dream that preceded. This extrapolation through unprepared juxtaposition continues
through the third movement, Channel Surfing. The disparate sections that open this
movement are delineated through the diagram on the next page.




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Within the first one and a half minutes of the third movement, the music moves
boldly through eight highly disparate sections. Beginning with alternations between the
stampede and Screen/Siren sections, any remaining musical unity evaporates as
the composer employs idiomatic textures reminiscent of Latin American dances, college
marching bands, and traumatic bird songs that could easily find a home in Messiaens
Symphonie-Turangalla. Throughout these contrasting sections, Corigliano utilizes
equally incongruent notational methods, ranging from multiple simultaneous meters to
wholly unmetrical segments.
As the rate of juxtaposition increases, separate motivic elements of harmony,
orchestration, and melodic gesture splinter away from their original presentation and
are unpredictably littered through subsequent iterations: making for an overwhelming
spectacle of recall and rephrase. The strategy of continuity through juxtaposition, while
jarring, effectively forces the listener to examine the music attentively to determine
some sense of linearity. Upon that examination, the musical elements, delicately
organized by the composer but obscured by aural disorder, are illuminated.
As one may expect, Channel Surfing provides many facets to approach
analytically but none fully encompassing; numerous dissimilarly marked moments
comprise the movement. The momentary outburst of salsa fanfare is one of the most
distinct in terms of both its syntax and gesture; by invoking a musical style that is truly
alien to the musical language presented thus far in the symphony, Corigliano gains an
uncanny device for dialoguing with his own music. The way in which he wields that
dialogue is captivatingly brilliant.
As the movement progresses, the musical dialects of salsa and Coriglianos
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unique vernacular begin to collide. The frenzy towards fusion is announced with a
fleeting call from the saxophone quartet, playing a quickened and rather desperate-
sounding version of their lament from the previous movement. This particular reiteration
is so invigorated by its surrounding texture and new tempo that it seems to proclaim an
official rivalry between the symphonys first/second movements and the celebratory
Latin-American vignettes which have so unwelcomely intruded.
In response, the salsa dancing jettisons into a solo for the surrounding-bands
clarinet and some of its neighboring percussion. Just as the lively rhythm and harmony
seem to be taking hold, the music cuts to the stage where a harmonically anguished
chord rings from the brass.
From here, the conflicting sections entrances and departures begin to dovetail
and grow into each other. Eventually, they are playing simultaneously with each other,
though constantly bolting between the three spatially separate ensembles. The ensuing
dissonance is dense and barely intelligible. As these sections overlap, atonal
chromaticism saturates the harmony. This intensification of gestural and harmonic chaos
leads the ear backwards, towards the opening movement. Just as the ensemble reaches
a point of interminable disorder, the music suddenly becomes nearly monophonic and
focused into the horns: a distinctive texture harkening towards the Introitus. A moment
later, the frightening fanfare from movement one returns, as if to suddenly swallow hole
the enormous musical display that had been evolving throughout the movement.
The opening fanfare dissolves into downwards glissandi, with forlorn echoes of
its theme in the horns bringing the movement to its close. At this point, the symphony
is only one third completed; however, the first three movements are poignantly
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representative of the compositional strategies the composer applies in this work. What
is so obvious about Circus Maximus is its polystylismand, yet, what is so striking is
Coriglianos ability to contextualize opposing styles in a manner that allows them to
function cohesively. The symphony has a beautiful and almost intangible balance of
forces at work, those unique to the composers musical vocabulary and ones derived
from long-extant sources. While the amalgamation of individually and socially-
constructed voices is an established norm of postmodern music, its execution here is so
extreme in terms of both rhetoric and orchestrational force that the piece remains
remarkable and unique.
III. The Symbiosis of Film and Music, Conclusion

Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are, henceforth,
free to be used in musical continuity. Claude Debussy

How can an analysis account for all of the disunity in John Coriglianos
Symphony No. 3? The works titles and subtitles offer little help to deciphering its
musical message; its movements are all virtually formless, and no harmonic or
contrapuntal approach holds dominion throughout the relentlessly fragmented
movements.
Merely concluding that a lack of unity is what unifies the piece is unjustifiable: it
is both ignorant of the extra-musical activity at work and irrespective of the works
compelling (yet baffling) sense of cohesion. However, understanding that conventional
tactics of analysis would be both exhausting and unfulfilling gives a clue towards
revealing a more valid approach. The foregoing quote of Debussy is a testament to the
fact that what may be perceived as discontinuous is an acceptable musical rhetoric. If
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it is accepted, then, that discontinuity permeates the piece, then what is that pattern
born out of? If John Corigliano is a composer to be respected, it should be that the
meaning of his music is inseparable from its aesthetic.
I would like to assert, in blatant contradiction to Paulins Cinematic Music
discussion, that the role of visual storytelling is paramount to the understanding of
Circus Maximus. Corigliano owes a great deal of his success to music he has
composed for film, and from there it can be surmised that at least some of that work
has become a part of his artistic aesthetic. However, parallels to film and film music do
not serve this analysis to justify musical discontinuity, but rather see past it.
Debussy himself described Richard Strauss music, particularly, Heldenleben, as
cinematic. Paulin points out that Debussy remarks precisely upon the surprise of [the
musics] continuity not as a reference to editing, discontinuity, or shock. While Paulin
is plagued by the manifold meaning of the term, the cinematic analogy serves music
greatly when that music (like Strauss tone poems) are directly referencing a narrative. In
a single scene from a film, the camera may pan both smoothly and suddenly between
different subjects, objects, colors, textures, and so on. Those changes of perspective
are not for the sake of being jarring, but for providing a more depthful perspective. In
the Corigliano Symphony No. 3, the strategy of juxtaposition does work to be jarring
and provocative, which is demonstrative that these seemingly analogous actions have
profoundly different meanings and affects across the mediums of film and music.
Instead, then, of focusing on procedural parallels between the media, attention
should be placed onto the received effects of those methods. In the case of Circus
Maximus, Corigliano uses the sonic imagery of both a spatially separated ensemble
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and rhetorically separate musical devices to successfully engross his audience in its
programmatic story. Intriguingly, his programs subject is ancient, yet its subtitles (like
the musical vocabulary) are contrastingly pre-modern and 20
th
century. The first
movement title, Introitus, is an ancient Italic languageand, appropriately, the music
is primal and unrefined. The third movement title, Channel Surfing, refers to a
modern practice of switching quickly between different broadcast frequencies
(predominantly television)an idea which his schizophrenic music aptly suits. Unlike
contemporary channel surfers, however, Corigliano is seeking to create continuity
through his disjointed episodes. Just as the composer uses Latin-American music to
enter into dialogue with his own musical language, the discontinuous musical style that
dominates the movement is in dialogue with both the contemporary listener and the
musics ancient subject. It is a critique, or at least a frightening representation, of the
hyperactive behavior of consumers, be they Italic or American.
How, now, does filmwith its distinctly visual roleplay into the storytelling at
work in Circus Maximus? As was mentioned in the final paragraph of page 5, the
subject on which Corigliano is setting his music is made more meaningful by visual
interpretations of coliseums, which have been introduced to Western viewers through
various film and television programs. In addition to this, the cinematographic technique
of macro/microcosmic perspectives (the panning over a mountain before switching to a
view of hikers gearing up at their base, for example) is translated musically into the
symphony; Introitus is a staging of the stadium itself, Screen/Siren is a journey
through a single gladiators cerebral experience before or after his battles, Channel
Surfing sets the two previous subjects into motion by bringing the games to life.
While the first three movements provide a sizeable framework on which to
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explore the symphony, the remaining five offer many more perspectives through which
to understand Circus Maximus as aurally visual storytelling. Particularly of interest are
the Night Music movements, which rely heavily on antiphonal discussion between the
separated ensembles.
As of now, theoretical vocabulary is a cumbersome tool for understanding the
symbiosis of music and film. Paulins article demonstrates that, academically, the two
worlds continue to exist separately and have yet to merge in a way that will let the
lessons of film production be a friend to the musical analyst. Academic inquiry should
be made less into what is intrinsically different between the media, which is a
modernist/constructivist endeavor that can rob both parties of identity and meaning,
and more into the similar and dissimilar ways that the two achieve similar and dissimilar
goals. For composers and theorists alike, John Coriglianos Symphony No. 3 offers a
compelling reason to re-evaluate our inspiration from and reliance on visual media as
part of our musical aesthetic and voice.

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