Eric Whitacre

John Corigliano was my composition teacher at Juilliard, and he was easily the best composition teacher I’ve ever had – a true mentor. On top of that, he wrote Mr. Tambourine Man, an unbelievably beautiful and poignant work for soprano and orchestra that won my wife a Grammy. He is one of the most popular and influential composers alive today, and has won just about every award there is to win: three Grammys; a Pulitzer; a Bafta; the Grawemeyer; and an Oscar.

I recently discovered that a google search for “John Corigliano” turned up 126,000 unique hits. That is awesome. What is not awesome is that his gorgeous new website, www.johncorigliano.com, came up 10th on the list. I need everyone’s help to fix this.

In order to get his website to the top of the google search, we all need to build a link to John’s site. But first, please, please click here. (This takes you to www.johncorigliano.com), where you’ll be able to explore his site and his music and his life. And, click here for the google search and then find www.johncorigliano.com and click on it. Best of all, if you have your own website or blog, set up a permanent link to John’s site. The googlebots respond to the number of links when ranking their search returns, so the more links from the more places, the better.

My great friends Steven Bryant, Jonathan Newman, and John Mackey were all students of John’s at Juilliard while I was there, and they are all doing the same thing on their sites. We’re so completely devoted to John, and want to do anything we can to help honor this once-in-a-generation artist who did so much to change all of our lives. Please help us!