Frank Corcoran

1971 I came back to Dublin from West Berlin ( Boris Blacher – GREAT ! as it turned out ) . October, was it, that second ROSC international, modern art show. Opened my ears more. Why ?
Its shown artists had extended the boundaries of the visible, imaginable, paintable.
So I had to learn to compose musical structures which also hold together and extend the boundaries of the sound-world.
Rothko had been daring. The Americans. Others.
My 1974 THREE ORCHESTRAL PICTURES ( ” Pictures From My Vanishing Past ” ) did. It also won the Dublin Symphony Orchestra Prize that same year.
I wanted to extend the boundaries also of my choral writing. HERR JESU CHRIST went to the 1977 International
Rostrum Of Composers . It set a German Baroque Paul Fleming Christian text, mellow contraltos and post-Bach Chorales and divided basses, a solo tenor’s terror at Dante’s fires, the lot.
I have written elsewhere of the 1976 PIANO TRIO break-through for me, Corcoran’s macro-counterpoint ( 2014 Zagreb Biennale repeated the Trio – huge Croatian string-players’paws, an enormous and thrilling sound… ).
By 1978 , just two years before I embarked in Berlin on my first symphony , the stunning SYMPHONIES OF SYMPHONIES For Wind, I was ready to compose the WIND QUINTET wit hits there enfolding polyrhythms and- tempi.
Well, I did it. I went with tourism. I flew to Lanzarote and flew back two weeks later…
What did i really ” see ” ? Feel and hear ? Certainly hardly any Lanzaroteans. The Atlantic , yes, its white and brown noise,
perhaps also pink, the Atlantic’s awesome depth and power and wallow and wash and surge and tides and washed rocks and one fishermen’s boat pulling out. -Death at sea made easy. Delicious cernie fish with vulcanic white wine, apparently the lava in its very molecules. Certainly not Europe; but not quite Africa either. You’d need a good composer’s commission and a library , the piano strings all salty. A command of the local patois very helpful .
Will I go again, Christmas 2017? I dunno. I really dunno.
What compose this Bright 2017 after all this ?