Frank Corcoran

I like this ( daily ) beast: the inner dialogue between I and me. It hones. Honest. Drips new wine into old wine-skins. Not monologues. Chat with my self and cosmos.
Consider a pre-Christmas moment Corcoran´s Genetic Fallacy: this composer received :
” Many prizes, commissions, distinctions and awards….”
True as far as it goes. It goes not farther- does it make the work better or worse ? No. Neither. More or less crafted, felt, uttered, suffered ? No. More or less Horatian ( “ars est celare symphoniam …. ” etc. ) ? No. A little success helps. Goes a long lonely way. Certainly. Flatters and butters. No success ( Oh Schubert ! Ah Hugo Wolf, ´n Anton Webern an´ all ) makes the gall a bitter bladder. Yet it remains eternally true that the work´s excellence is not, cannot ever be its success with ” the public ” ( – who are they, then ? ) . Its construction´s pithy craft is not a brother to its crafty marketing. Its dark depths and felt heights and dizzy ecstasy have really nothing to do with or to say to its subsequent history of performances or of being sieved by a critics´canon or colunder or crooked sales or high-minded hype. Nothing. Horace would agree instantly with me. The work´s quality is simply quite different from its history; this means that it is not ” good ” while ( or because ) it gets a thousand performances, heists and hurrahs – or, alternatively, because it is ignored for a hundred years- . Art is well-conceived and imagined and incarnated energy, it is strong sounding brass and synergy and symphony, more perennial than the Roman poet´s polished perfection. Poor Mahler´s ” my time will come ” or poor Schoenberg´s ” my music is not bad, merely badly played” may well be true, important. But no Genetic Fallacies, please: a good piece of music is ( hey tautology ! – Nothing wrong with that …. ) a well composed , finished, completed construction of sound and silence. Nothing more or less.