Daily Inspiration Quote by John Corigliano

A working composer praising film composers isn’t polite small talk; it’s a small act of boundary-breaking. John Corigliano comes out of the concert hall world where “serious” music has often guarded its prestige by treating Hollywood as a commercial cousin: useful, lucrative, and faintly suspect. Saying “tremendous respect” presses against that old hierarchy. It’s an endorsement with edge, because it implies that the dismissiveness he’s pushing back on is still in the room.

The phrasing does a lot. “Tremendous” isn’t nuanced; it’s muscular. Corigliano isn’t offering a carefully hedged acknowledgment of craft. He’s staking out admiration for a job that demands virtuosity under constraints most symphonic composers never face: brutal deadlines, collaborative politics, the need to hit emotional targets without turning the music into wallpaper, the requirement to be both distinctive and subordinate to picture. Film composers write at the intersection of art and service, and the service is public, immediate, and judged by millions, not a small coterie of critics and institutions.

Context matters because Corigliano knows both ecosystems. Even without leaning on his own film work, he’s part of a generation that watched composers like Herrmann, Williams, Goldsmith, and later Shore and Zimmer reshape mainstream musical literacy. The subtext is almost a dare to his peers: if you think film scoring is lesser, you may be misunderstanding what difficulty looks like in modern composition - and who’s actually keeping orchestral sound alive in popular culture.