QUASI UNA FUGA
Frank Corcoran
These last years I have composed several works for different instrumental combinations with titles such as ” Quasi Un Canto” for Orchestra, ” Quasi Un Concerto” for Chamber Ensemble, etc. The “Quasi” of the different titles refers to the fact that nowadays nobody is fully innocent anymore; this composer knows too much about the various musical traditions of our globe, of human history to be able to feign naivety.
“Quasi Una Fuga” is no neo-Baroque or neo-Bachian composition. ( – Stravinsky´s weakest works were those where he sinned in this respect . I must not repeat this mistake! ). It is my salute to all the thousand fugues I had as a young music-student to compose and it is at the same time my farewell to fugal writing and my bow to the phenomenon of counterpoint itself. It is not a fugue, yet it is unmistakably ” quasi” a fugal one-movement work for string-orchestra.
You clearly hear the subject with a limping accompaniment as it ascends into ethereal heights, its descent, its variants and side-shoots , how my “quasi” exposition develops and variates and becomes lush string-foliage . Everything grows so naturally from the opening ” soggetto” till, near the end , it morphs into the Early Celtic Chant , ” Ibunt Sancti”, which , tradition tells us, was the hymn St. Brendan and his twelve intrepid monks, Atlantic sailors surely extraordinary, sang as they prepared their supper on a broad-backed ( and, one must suppose, unbaptized ) Atlantic whale somewhere up near 6th. century Greenland.
My “Quasi Una Fuga” hymns, yes, total counterpoint, total motivic proliferation and total holistic growth. This is totally stringy music !