“The String Quartet is the hardest piece I ever wrote,” says composer John Corigliano.

        It's an amazing confession from this soft-spoken American, who won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in classical music for his Symphony No. 2, an Oscar for his film score to The Red Violin, a Grammy for his Symphony No. 1 and whose 1991 opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, sold out two runs at the Met and one at Chicago's Lyric Opera.

IF YOU GO

• What: Cincinnati Chamber Music Society, Works by John Corigliano; The Corigliano Quartet, Audrey Luna, soprano; Brad Caldwell, piano.   • When: 8 p.m. today   • Where: Corbett Auditorium.   • Tickets: $20; $7 students; CCM students free. 533-0451 or 556-4183.

        He continues about his piece: “Such phenomenal quartets have been written by masters that it's very difficult to start one of your own. You really feel Beethoven on one side of you, and Mozart on the other.”

        Mr. Corigliano will be at the Cincinnati Chamber Music Society today for a performance of his String Quartet No. 1 and his song cycle, Mr. Tambourine Man.

        The quartet, he says, “is like a symphony, but even more serious.” (Ironically, it became his Symphony No. 2 when he orchestrated it for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.)

Muslim prayer inspiration

        He constructed the work in five movements, and found unique inspiration for its central movement. There, players evoke the Muslim call to prayer that he heard on a trip to Morocco. It's an exotic, nocturnal image.

        “At 3 in the morning ... you hear all of the mosques singing at different times. They all start differently — all male voices, very florid sounds — and they're coming from different parts of the town in different keys and different rhythms,” he says. “It's quite extraordinary, the combination of emotional intensity that can build.”

        It is this kind of pastiche — the merging of sounds, imagery and emotions — found in now-familiar works like his “AIDS” Symphony No. 1 that resonate with audiences.

Bob Dylan connection

        He prefers working in “abstract” music, like a quartet, because “it's universal, it's nonspecific,” he says. “That gives it a wonderful quality for the listener, because they can lend their own imagination into the piece.”

        Mr. Tambourine Man was born when Carnegie Hall commissioned Mr. Corigliano to write a song cycle for American soprano Sylvia McNair in 2000.

        For text, he chose seven poems by Bob Dylan, the folk singer whose ballads, such as “Blowin' in the Wind” and “Masters of War,” galvanized a generation grappling with America's last major war, Vietnam.

        He wrote it, never having heard Mr. Dylan's original songs.

        “Almost everyone in the audience knows at least three,” he says. “They're going to hear a completely different version, with no resemblance to the Bob Dylan melody, harmony or anything else.”

        Mr. Corigliano bristles at those who criticize his music for being largely tonal and audience-friendly. But he agonized over whether to compose the score to The Red Violin (his other film scores include Altered States).

        “Music in a film is basically used like sound effects, to support action. It is very much in the background,” he says. “We are very much at the service of realizing a director's wishes.”

        He decided to do it mainly because the main character in the movie is a violin. Since then, the music has reappeared as The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra, a 17-minute piece in a widely hailed recording by Joshua Bell on Sony Classical. The composer is planning to write two more movements, making it into a violin concerto.

        Mr. Corigliano likes to put old wine into new bottles. His newest recording, Phantasmagoria, with cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist Emanuel Ax and Cincinnati pianist James Tocco — features a piece based on themes from The Ghosts of Versailles.

        And he likes to mix it up. Today's composers have myriad influences, he says: “Asian and non-Western influences, for example, with Javanese bells and Chinese opera gongs — tonal and nontonal, the romantic, the (serial) composers, and the minimalists.”

        At 63, he observes that “it's harder and harder for classical music to live in America.” With the demise of music education and two generations that do not revere the arts as their grandparents did, he is “a little bit disenchanted.

        “But that's why I want to write music, try something I've never tried, go into a world I don't know and be fresh and alert and learn something,” he says.

        His next project? “A really crazy musical.”

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