9 PRATOLEVA PEARLS for Solo Piano ( 2008 – 2009 )
The nineties saw my various “Mad Sweeney” compositions that were sparked off by my 1996 work for Speaker and Chamber Orchestra , ” Mad Sweeney” which used the Early Irish epic, ” Suibhne Gealt” in an English translation by the Nobel Prize-winner, Seamus Heaney .
After that came my series of “Quasi” works for various genres, including “Quasi Un Canto” for the Zagreb
Philharmonic, “Quasi Una Visione” for Ensemble Modern, also the Irish Radio commissioned ” Quasi Variations on A Mháirín De Barra ” for Solo Viola an several more. I , as a contemporary Irish composer, am
not innocent in my knowledge of how music-history has used the various genres and forms, therefore my
” quasi “, hesitant , in these pieces and their titles.
It is astonishing how difficult it is to write worth-while music today for the solo piano ( i.e. using only the key-board, deliberately excluding the sound-scape within the piano ) after the black-and-white and manifold sound explorations by eg. Bartók and Messiaen and , in our own day, Ligeti. It is very difficult to “sing” something new with those , is it, 85 chromatic tones.
My 9 piano miniatures are like pearls gleaming here in Pratoleva where I spend my Italian summers composing . As in a Webern or Berg miniature ( eg. his Pieces for Clarinet and Piano ) , each has to explore its own short-lived and strainng terse emotional world within its own short, bursting form. Brevity has to be ( musical ) wit, but also soar and lift and development and closure and polished finish.
Frank Corcoran