"The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past"
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Calling the French Revolution the "ultimate modernist statement" is a composer talking less about guillotines than about aesthetics: the seductive fantasy that you can erase inheritance and start art (and society) at bar one. Corigliano frames modernism not as a style but as an attitude with a violent premise: "Destroy everything". The blunt imperatives mimic the manifestos that powered 20th-century avant-gardes - Futurism, certain strains of serialism, the midcentury cult of the new - where tradition isn’t a toolbox, it’s a contaminant.
The line "Don't build on the past" does double duty. It's a critique of revolutionary politics and of artistic gatekeeping that treats lineage as illegitimate. Corigliano’s subtext is skepticism: modernism’s promise of purity often requires amnesia, and amnesia is rarely neutral. "There is no past" is the tell. It’s not a factual claim; it’s the psychological trick revolutions play to justify total rupture. If the past is declared nonexistent, then anything can be remade without apology - but also without accountability.
Context matters: Corigliano came of age when "progress" in composition was frequently policed, when tonal writing could be dismissed as reactionary and novelty could pass as virtue. His own career, often described as pluralist, sits in tension with dogmatic modernism. The quote lands as a warning from inside the art world: when destruction becomes your identity, you stop hearing what you’re inheriting - and you risk mistaking wreckage for liberation.
The line "Don't build on the past" does double duty. It's a critique of revolutionary politics and of artistic gatekeeping that treats lineage as illegitimate. Corigliano’s subtext is skepticism: modernism’s promise of purity often requires amnesia, and amnesia is rarely neutral. "There is no past" is the tell. It’s not a factual claim; it’s the psychological trick revolutions play to justify total rupture. If the past is declared nonexistent, then anything can be remade without apology - but also without accountability.
Context matters: Corigliano came of age when "progress" in composition was frequently policed, when tonal writing could be dismissed as reactionary and novelty could pass as virtue. His own career, often described as pluralist, sits in tension with dogmatic modernism. The quote lands as a warning from inside the art world: when destruction becomes your identity, you stop hearing what you’re inheriting - and you risk mistaking wreckage for liberation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reinvention |
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