MEDIEVAL IRISH EPIGRAMMES for Choir – Frank Corcoran
1972 I was just back in Ireland from composition studies with Boris Blacher in Berlin. It was bliss to be alive.
I was re-discovering my own country, its traditional music , its language, dances, archaeology , – the entire mythic map
lurking not far below that thin veneer of Englishing that had taken place since the Famine ( I am thinking especially of those woeful distortions of family- and place-names, the daily evaporation of Gaeilge, my own polysemic identity and the slow death of a Celtic FÍS we´d had for better or worse and in some shape or form for so many centuries before that for Irish Ireland killing nineteenth c. )
I wanted to test my composer´s mettle , my Irish mettle. Frank O´Connor´s translations ( ” Kings , Lords and Commons” ) of especially those Early Celtic lyrics provided a window into Iron Age Ireland .
The Nine Medieval ( – but, of course, they´re ages older than that ) Irish Epigrammes which I set for the RTE Singers under wonderful Hans W. Rosen have all the freshness of Basho´s Japanese Haikus. I composed an arch-form similar to , say, those bee-hive stone monastic huts of Sceilg Mór. The range of expression of these my nine lyric miniatures is enormous, including “The Blackbird Of Lough Neagh”,
the wholly erotic ” Aideen ” ” Fionn´s Generosity ” aiming forward to the final ( ” Poet´s Farewell ” ) our lyrical leave-taking from an aristocratic island-culture which had remained largely intact for so many centuries down to the arrival of the Vikings and the Normans .
My choral music “sets”, paints, comments, carries, chants or sings these little literary masterpieces of high concision and great formal perfection. ( – Years later, my coming across Seamus Heaney´s translation of “SUIBHNE GEALT ” unlocked similar archaic energy , leading to my ” MAD SWEENEY ” for Speaker and Chamber Orchestra of 1995. ) . Tones serve words ; sounds lick , lambaste, utter syllables . The RTE recording with the RTE SINGERS later went to the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. I remember also a very fine rendering by Eric Sweeny with them in, if I don´t disremember, 1978.