Symphony No. 2
John Corigliano
About this work:
(Published by G. Schirmer)
Having proclaimed as a young composer that I would "never write a symphony," I look with some surprise at the premiere of my second.
My thought then was that there were so many great symphonies in the repertoire that I could satisfy only my ego by writing yet another. Only the death of countless friends from AIDS prompted me to write in our largest orchestral form. Mahler once described writing a symphony as creating a world. My Symphony No. 1 was about world-scale tragedy and, I felt, needed a comparably epic form.
This second symphony has a different genesis. The Boston Symphony contacted my publisher with a request that I write a second symphony to honor the l00th anniversary of their justly famous Symphony Hall. At first I declined, stating my earlier reservations about writing in this form, and offered another kind of orchestral piece, but they were quite insistent.
I started thinking about what I could do that would feel truly symphonic, and my thoughts turned to the String Quartet I composed for the farewell tour of the Cleveland Quartet in 1996.
Two things about the quartet-as-symphony intrigued me. Firstly, the Quartet, like Symphony No. 1, drew from very intense human feelings. The symphony dealt with inadvertent loss: death. The quartet, written as it was as the valedictory piece for the disbanding Cleveland Quartet, dealt with chosen loss: farewell.
Secondly, I knew even as I was composing it that the string writing had acquired a very orchestral quality. Just as Beethoven's Grossa Fuga stretches quartet playing past its limits, so does my quartet stretch the players' range, dynamics, emotional energy and technique. And, interestingly, the Beethoven is often played by orchestral strings in the concert hall.
Once I decided that the quartet was indeed ripe for orchestral expansion, I wrestled with how that should best be accomplished. Rescoring it for full orchestra -- or even strings and percussion -- would certainly expand the piece's timbrel palette. But wouldn't that in fact diminish the intensity of the work, even as its dynamic range widened? Part of the intensity of strings derives from their relatively limited (say, compared to brass) dynamic range. Fortissimos must be achieved by intensity, not volume. If even the Grossa Fuga were redone for full orchestra, tension would yield to bombast. So my final choice was to leave the work in the strings, rewriting it when necessary and adding to it when the opportunity arose. And, to come full circle, this also satisfied my reservations about writing another symphony in a repertoire of masterpieces: the string symphony is another animal entirely, and there aren't many of them.
It was not a simple task. My quartet is in five movements, three of which are notated in spatial notation. This means that the players do not count beats, but play more freely rhythmically, coordinating at various points but totally independent in others.
Obviously four lines of quartet can do this wonderfully well. Freed from beat, the players can do individual fluctuations relying on their musicianship and the eye-to-eye coordination that a solo quartet can maintain to align at just the right moment.
This is the sort of a thing that a great quartet can do magically, but with fifty strings playing instead of four (and a two-or-three day preparation period instead of the extended rehearsals chamber music demands) three of the quartet's five movements would be quite chaotic if it were not re-thought and completely re-written.
On the other hand, the number of violins, violas and violoncelli in the string orchestra (as well as the addition of contrabassi) made it possible to augment chordal passages by dividing the sections and thus achieve new and thicker harmonies. Virtuoso passage work could be simplified for playability by dividing the runs between members of the orchestral sections. And the textures benefitted as well. For example, in certain sections of the Quartet (such as the center section of the third movement's night music) the four players strained somewhat to give the illusion of many answering voices. Now I could use a vast orchestral complement of strings soloistically to echo each others' calls.
The result of this is a work that deals with the string orchestra as a whole body of sound unique in itself, and this transforms the string quartet to symphony and the string section to string orchestra.
Architecturally, the 35-minute work is in five movements that bear a superficial resemblance to the arch-form principles of Bartok's fourth quartet (movements I and V are related and movements II and IV are related, with III as a central "night music"), but in fact all five movements of the symphony are also united by similar motives and thematic content. Specifically, the symphony is based upon a motto composed of even repetitions of a single tone, and a sequence of disjunct minor thirds. There are also four pitch centers recurring throughout the work: C, C-sharp, G and G-sharp.
- John Corigliano (used by permission)
For further information, please contact:
G. Schirmer Promotion Department
257 Park Ave South, 20th floor
New York, NY 10010
Phone: 212 254-2100
Fax: 212 254-2013
E-mail: schirmer@schirmer.com
Year composed: 2000
Duration: 00:40:00
Ensemble type: Orchestra:String Orchestra
Instrumentation: 1 Strings (General)
Instrumentation notes: string orchestra (6.5.4.4.2 players minimum)