QUASI UNA SARABANDA Frank Corcoran
In the mid-nineties I wrote “Mad Sweeney” for Speaker and Chamber Orchestra ( to a text by the Irish Nobel Prize-winner for Literature, Seamus Heaney ) .
This sparked off the series of ” Mad Sweeney” works , including the electronic ” Sweeney´s Vision” ( a W.D.R. commission which won the 1999 Bourges Festival Premier Prix ) , came my “Quasi” works for various forces, including “Quasi Un Canto” ( Zagreb Philharmonic 2005 ), “Quasi Un Caoine ( N.S.O. 2005 ) , “Quasi Una Fuga” for 18 Strings ( Irish Chamber Orchestra 2007 ) , the electro-acoustic “Quasi Una Missa” ( W.D.R. commission; it won the 2002 Swedish E.M.S. Prize ) , ” Quasi Un Concerto” ( Cantus Ensemble 2006 ) etc.
Last year I composed “Quasi Una Sarabanda” for the Swiss Ensemble “Antipodes”. It is the most recent of my “Quasi” works. It is a sarabande, well,quasi a sarabande . I , as an Irish and ” world – composer” , am no innocent . I know too much of what art-music has been composed, at least in our European history.
Mine is a one-movement argument for ( the classical ) octet. It is a hommage to that great and sad dance – form since ( at least ) the sixteenth c. when melancoly Spanish King
Phillip shut himself up in his depressive Escorial Palace. How much great art-music ( and Irish classical Slow Airs of the ” sean nós” tradition … ) used the rhythmic scaffolding of this halting, stumbling slow three-in-the-bar ? Horn, bassoon and clarinet stumble and sway and sing and scream with the five strings.
Does my stark argument lead inexorably to the viola and violin keening in the final moments of my eleven magical minutes ? Premiere with the Octet of the “Antipodes” Ensemble this June 19 – 21 in Berne, Geneva and Basle. First recording by Radio DRS in Berne.
SOME PRATOLEVA HAIKUS :
I saw her cold eyes
I heard great goose-wings beating
Her ugly, webbed feet
Crow is scratching snow
Beak and claw and craw, black, white
Bird-eye murderous
New Year´s Day glitters
Its firt daw-glint is calving
A hoe in the cold shed
The centre, drowned,
Cannot hold, the wild geese know,
Their swirring wings know