In 1969, at the height of American involvement in the Vietnam War, composer Philip Corner wrote a piece entitled ‘An anti-personnel CBU-type cluster bomb unit will be thrown into the audience’. ‘Everybody was concerned at the time with how to make a...

In 1969, at the height of American involvement in the Vietnam War, composer Philip Corner wrote a piece entitled ‘An anti-personnel CBU-type cluster bomb unit will be thrown into the audience’. ‘Everybody was concerned at the time with how to make a political statement,’ he explains to me in Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, on the occasion of a concert in celebration of his 80th birthday at a club called Instants Chavirés. ‘I just got very dissatisfied with it, especially when it became a cliché of pop music. Everybody was doing a protest song. I realized, it’s just aesthetics. This isn’t stopping the war. It’s not doing anything politically. So I got very disgusted with it. And this was the only thing I could think of to do that would have any kind of a socially relevant charge at all.’

The idea of the piece was that, having announced the title in the concert programme, the performance would consist of its sudden cancellation. Except it didn’t work out that way. Another composer involved in the show threatened to withdraw from the event unless Corner’s piece was removed from the programme beforehand. Corner says he asked the composer, ‘What’s your objection to it?’. ‘I would believe that you would do it,’ the other composer replied. ‘I wouldn’t sit in the audience if somebody said that with all these cockamamie people and craziness going on. Who could not think that somebody might actually do that? I’d get out of the place.’ So Corner withdrew the piece. He won’t tell me who the other composer was. But with a wry smile he does promise that a ‘new version’ of the piece will be performed tonight.

Corner was born in the Bronx, in New York, and started playing piano at age 13, for reasons he describes now as ‘a mystery’. Shortly thereafter he ‘somehow got the idea that I wanted to be a composer.’ He attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, and recalls his teachers there as ‘a bunch of narrow-minded, ignorant fuddy-duddies.’ In particular, he mentions one occasion when he was asked to write a rondo for piano and trombone. Halfway through playing the piece to class, the teacher stopped him, insisting, ‘That’s not a rondo!’ Before Corner got a chance to explain how the themes were being developed, the teacher got ‘really hostile. And the other students, they couldn’t care less.’ But as he walked out of class, feeling dejected, one girl stopped him in the corridor to say she thought the piece was wonderful. ‘My whole life’, he tells me, ‘I’ve been playing for that one girl.’

Read the rest of “Western Music is So Impatient”, my interview with Philip Corner, at Frieze.

11/27/13 at 2:52pm
3 notes
  1. picnicongallifrey reblogged this from monsterbobby
  2. monsterbobby posted this