If You Think Twice, It’s Not All Right

Accepting an Oscar last month for his score to “The Red Violin,” John Corigliano described the difference between his day job as a classical composer and his occasional foray into film work. It’s a lonely life for a serious artist sitting by himself in a studio writing a symphony or concerto, he lamented. And movie-making can be a welcome communal respite.

The acceptance speech may have seemed a little pompous, contrasting the onus of a classical musician’s solitary struggle with the more supportive collaborative atmosphere of film production. But I felt more sympathetic toward Corigliano’s sequestered state when I heard his latest project, the seven songs he has written for Sylvia McNair using Bob Dylan’s early lyrics. These are songs of deprivation.

In the notes to “Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan” the 62-year-old Corigliano writes that he was too self-involved during the ‘60s, too deep in trying to find his own orchestral style, to pay Dylan any mind. Consequently, he was now able to produce fresh music to the lyrics of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Mr. Tambourine Man,” having never really listened to the original tunes. Dylan’s early songs once captured the collective consciousness of a time and then universalized it; as Corigliano songs they’ve become the personal, anguished, haunted expression of one man.

About the same time Corigliano unleashed his Dylan cycle (its Carnegie Hall premiere was in March; its Dorothy Chandler Pavilion performance, two weeks ago), the Disney-produced musical “Aida” opened on Broadway. I don’t imagine that Elton John, who wrote the songs, found the task lonely. He had a partner, lyricist Tim Rice, and “Aida” went through extensive tryouts in Atlanta and Chicago. Like working on a film, the composer of a pop musical enters into an environment of communal creativity.

This “Aida” is the other side of the Dylan coin. Instead of a celebrated classical composer appropriating famous pop lyrics, a pop star has made his version of a famous opera. Like Dylan’s songs, Verdi’s “Aida” captures a vivid spectacle of a time and place (ancient Egypt) and its issues, and then universalizes them by expressing the specific emotions of its characters, making us feel like participants in their drama. Surely John and his colleagues must have at least a passing familiarity with Verdi’s accomplishment. But the new “Aida” is interested in only the story of the opera’s libretto and turns it into a typical Broadway spectacle. John contributes generic pop songs about generic emotions, not music crafted to unique character and theatrical situations. And thus their dramatic artificiality turns them, too, into personal utterances of an individual songwriter--and nothing more.

Corigliano writes of precedents for his songs. Great composers before him have competed in their settings of the same texts by beloved poets such as Goethe. Disney could argue that there is nothing new about the lyric stage reinventing itself with familiar texts or story. In the 18th century, it was common practice for different composers to make operas out of the same librettos. Nor will operas and musicals ever likely tire of Romeo and Juliet or Orpheus and Eurydice or Ulysses or Don Juan.

Yet “Tambourine Man” and “Aida” are not reinterpretations so much as impoverished appropriations. They are less creative borrowings than desperate theft. Dylan’s lyrics are not independent poems but were created along with music. And, for that matter, the libretto of “Aida” was tailor-made for Verdi, the opera being a commission for the opening of the Suez Canal. Neither song texts nor libretto would ever have been of much interest without their particular music.

That, of course, doesn’t make the originals sacrosanct. It doesn’t even mean that Corigliano’s music is bad or insensitive, or that John’s songs don’t capably express emotions or have a certain glitzy individuality. But what these composers have given us is their music and taken away the music that has made the original song and opera what they were. Corigliano’s fussy fustian piano scales sound foreign and inappropriate for “Blowin’ in the Wind,” just as John’s “Written in the Stars”--casual music to Hallmark sentiments belted out by Aida and Radames--is no overwhelming Verdian culmination of an overpowering illicit love. From a seat in the audience, you don’t get a new vision of existing material, you get only a sense of loss.

Going back to the very beginning of Western music, composers have found inspiration and sport using and varying the music of other composers. And as the world has gotten smaller, cross-pollination has been one of music’s most impressive wonders. As my colleague Richard S. Ginell mentioned in a recent review, jazz experimenter Miles Davis learned from classical experimenter Karlheinz Stockhausen. And Minimalist Steve Reich admired Miles. And now DJs remix Reich. This is a fertile, healthy condition.

But Corigliano and John have erected their own walls to keep out Dylan and Verdi. Had they absorbed this music rather than avoided it, the result might have proved fascinating. Ironically, a Corigliano version of Dylan’s songs or a John musical that played with Verdi’s music might well have seemed like something new and different.

And it just so happens that a new CD, “Kronos Caravan,” demonstrates where such absorption, on a grand scale, can lead. For a quarter-century, the intrepid Kronos Quartet has exemplified musical wanderlust and collaboration at its most extreme, absorbing hundreds of composers and traveling the world nonstop, picking up and devouring music from every nook and cranny.

In the process, it has gotten African musicians and gypsies and Eastern European mystics and rock guitarists interested in the arcane world of string quartet writing, and gotten many of us interested in the musics we might not otherwise have encountered. On this astonishing new recording, which is perhaps Kronos’ most thrilling and surprising musical travelogue yet, the quartet and a host of colleagues investigate Pannonia--the ancient Roman province of Central Europe including present-day western Hungary and the northwest Balkan Peninsula, which the Kronos interprets as reaching to Iran, Lebanon and, at least spiritually, to Mt. Diablo and Buenos Aires as well.

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The CD ends with a piece called “Misirlou Twist” by Nicholas Roubanis. The composer was Armenian, and the piece was written in the 1930s. But it sounds an awful lot like surf guitar. And it sounds that way because this “Misirlou Twist” fell into the hands of an East Coast Armenian guitarist named Richard Monsour, who changed his name to Dick Dale and wended his way to the West Coast. And what the Kronos, joined by surf drummer Martyn Jones, reveals in an raucous arrangement is that the whole inspiration for surf guitar turns out to have come from Armenian music.

But what if Monsour/Dale (who may or may not be a Beirut native; he’s made different claims over the years) had kept his head buried in the desert sand? And what if Verdi hadn’t ventured into it to write his Egyptian masterpiece for the opening of the Suez Canal? And what if a folky Dylan had never plugged in his guitar like the surfers did?

The global Kronos consciousness helps us appreciate why Disney’s packaging is too small for a Verdi opera and Corigliano’s musical remodelings are too confining for Dylan’s songs.