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Notes on the Program
By James M. keller, Program Annotator, The Leni and Peter May chair
STOMP, for Orchestra
John Corigliano
J
ohn Corigliano was born into a musical
family; his father (John Corigliano, Sr.)
served for more than two decades as Concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. As a
young composer, he studied with Otto Luening at Columbia University and Vittorio Giannini at the Manhattan School of Music and
worked for nearly a decade with Leonard
Bernstein on the CBS broadcasts of the New
York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts.
Following an early period during which his
music — as he has described it — was a “tense,
histrionic outgrowth of the ‘clean’ American
sound of Barber, Copland, Harris, and Schuman,” he embraced a posture in which Romantic grandeur can rub elbows with an
unmistakably modernist musical vocabulary.
Corigliano serves on the composition faculty of The Juilliard School and is also Distinguished Professor of Music at Lehman
College, City University of New York. The
Philharmonic performed the New York Premiere of his Conjurer: Concerto for Percussionist and String Orchestra and Brass in
June 2016 during the NY PHIL BIENNIAL.
STOMP is the 12th of his symphonic works to
be programmed by the Orchestra, which has
also offered two of his chamber pieces on its
New York Philharmonic Ensembles series.
Symphony No. 1 (from 1988, a commission
from Meet the Composer and the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra, where he was then serving as composer-in-residence) earned both the
Grawemeyer Award and a Grammy for best
recording of a classical composition. (Another
Grammy went to his String Quartet of 1995.)
Programmed by more than 150 orchestras
around the world, Symphony No. 1, along with
its subsequent choral incarnation, Of Rage and
Remembrance (based on the work’s third
movement), has been acknowledged as one of
the most compelling artistic statements related to the AIDS crisis. With his Symphony
No. 2, an expanded recomposition of his 1995
String Quartet, Corigliano was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2001. His 1991 opera
The Ghosts of Versailles, The Metropolitan
Opera’s first commission in three decades, has
been revived in multiple productions. The
year after its premiere, Corigliano was named
Musical America’s first Composer of the Year
and was elected into the American Academy
and Institute of Arts and Letters.
IN SHORT
Born: February 16, 1938, in New York City
Resides: in New York City and Kent Cliffs,
New York
Work composed: 2010, as a solo violin work;
adapted into orchestral form in 2014 on commission from the Houston Symphony, Andrés
Orozco-Estrada, music director; dedicated
“For Conrad Winslow”
World premiere: in its original form, by
violin contestants in the XIV International
Tchaikovsky Competition in June 2011, in
St. Petersburg, Russia; in its orchestral form,
September 17, 2015, at Jones Hall in Houston,
Texas, by the Houston Symphony, Andrés
Orozco-Estrada, conductor
New York Philharmonic premiere: this
performance, which marks the work’s New
York Premiere
Estimated duration: ca. 7 minutes
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STOMP was originally conceived for unaccompanied violin, written to be performed
by competitors who reached the semifinal
round of the XIV International Tchaikovsky
Competition in 2011 in St. Petersburg. The
composer wrote:
In order to test the performers’ ability to do
new things, I included in this piece special
difficulties that the standard repertoire
they were playing did not pose. For one
thing, I changed the tuning of the violin so
that the lowest open string (G) now
sounded a third lower, on E: I also tuned
the highest string (E) down a half-step, to
E-flat. For the players, this meant they had
to relearn where their fingers had to be
placed to get their pitches. It enabled
me to write a crunchy low E as the bass
note of the violin, which alternated with
the open two top strings sounding A and
E-flat — making possible some pungently
dissonant intervals. If this weren’t enough,
I asked the players to tap or stomp on
certain beats. This was because STOMP
is actually “fiddle music” — country
music, bluegrass, and jazz combined, and
the original players of this music often
stomp to the rhythm (and mistune their
instruments).
When the Houston Symphony asked
Corigliano to write a new work in 2014, other
projects prevented his embarking on a symphonic piece completely from scratch. But he
felt a recasting of STOMP could fill the bill.
He told an interviewer at the time:
I had heard a wonderful transcription of
Bach’s Chaconne (for unaccompanied violin) for full orchestra, so I said this could be
done. … Why not adapt STOMP for solo violin into STOMP for orchestra? … It’s a piece
that’s high-spirited and has a lyrical melody
in the middle, and then it gets back to the
high spirits and really goes wild.
Instrumentation: two flutes (one doubling
piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, xylophone, snare
drum, splash cymbals, wood block, suspended cymbal, tambourine, ratchet, castanets, tom-toms, large bass drum, and
strings; the wind and percussion players also
tap and stomp their feet.
In the Composer’s Words
In adapting STOMP for orchestra, I was beset with problems.
How was I to take a mostly single line instrument like a violin
and fill it out so a whole orchestra could play it?
Very often the melodies of the solo violin implied harmonies, and sometimes the violin played chords with its four
strings. I took both ideas to beef up the texture of the piece,
and did away with the changed tuning (after all, I had violas
to play my low E now!). But I could not give up the tapping
and stomping — so you will hear sections of the orchestra,
and finally the full orchestra, stomping away. I hope they
don’t drown out their playing — but I will find that out when
we play it. … I will end by saying that this should be fun for
everyone, and I hope it is.
— John Corigliano
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