Future Pulitzer Prize-winner John Corigliano burst onto the film music scene in 1980 with Ken Russell’s trippy film, ALTERED STATES. Based on Paddy Chayefsky’s novel, William Hurt stars as a college professor researching different states of consciousness through mind-altering drugs, which cause disturbing physical changes that indicate evolutionary regression. As whacked out as any of Russell’s other films, [...]

In December 2007, I came across a copy of John Corigliano‘s score for REVOLUTION. The 1985 film starring Al Pacino and Nastassja Kinski during the Revolutionary War was one of the most notorious flops in film history. But I had never seen the movie nor heard a note of Corigliano’s score. What I heard was [...]

The relationship between Hollywood and the concert hall has always been strained at best. But for me, film music and classical music have always existed peacefully side by side. As a clarinet performance major in college, I loved studying clarinet works by such Hollywood legends as Alex North and Miklos Rozsa because of their film [...]

“You could hear the city a mile off…New York goin’ crazy.” But New York wasn’t the only city going crazy when Revolution opened in limited release on Christmas Day, 1985.

Composer John Corigliano is set to score his first film in a decade since winning the Academy Award for The Red Violin. As first reported on Upcoming Film Scores, Corigliano is set to score Martin Campbell’s thriller Edge of Darkness, starring Mel Gibson as a detective who uncovers a government collusion when he investigates the [...]