frank corcoran
::biography
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Born in Tipperary in 1944, Frank Corcoran studied at Dublin, Maynooth, Rome and Berlin. He was a music inspector for the Irish government Department of Education from 1971 to 1979, after which he took up a composer fellowship at the Berlin Künstlerprogramm.
In the 1980s, he taught in Berlin, Stuttgart and Hamburg, where he was professor of composition and theory in the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst. He was a visiting professor and Fulbright scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the U.S. in 1989-1990, and was a guest lecturer at CalArts, Harvard University, Boston College, New York University and Indiana University.
His output includes chamber, symphonic, choral and electro-acoustic music, through which he explores particularly Irish issues like language and history. He has worked with text by the poet Seamus Heaney, in the chamber piece Mad Sweeney (1996), and by the Irish-language writer Gabriel Rosenstock.
Recent commissions include Sweeney’s Smithereens (Crash Ensemble for Expo 2000); Sweeney’s Total Rondo (G.P.A. International 2003); Two Orchestrated Bach Fugues (National Concert Hall 2002), from the Cantus Chamber Orchestra, Zagreb, 2003 for the new Quasi Un Concertino; RTÉ commission 2005 Quasi Una Visione for Orchestra (Ensemble Modern premiered at the Living Music Festival, Dublin ); Quasi un Lamento for Chamber Orchestra (N.S.O. Horizons Concert 2005); Quasi Un Pizzicato for Large Ensemble (Wireworks Ensemble Hamburg 2004 ); Quasi Un Canto for Large Orchestra (Zagreb Philharmonic at the 2005 World Music Days, Zagreb); in 2005, Quasi Una Fuga (for IPME ; premiere 26.11.2006, Irish Chamber Orchestra at the National Gallery, Dublin); and in 2006, Beyond Beckett, for Soprano, Violin, Cello and Bassclarinet (for Concorde ; premiere 23.4.2006 at the Beckett Centenary Celebrations, National Gallery, Dublin).
His Joycepeak Music won a prize with the StudioAkustische Kunst, Cologne, in 1995. In 1999, his piece Sweeney’s Vision won first prize at the Bourges International Electro-acoustic Music Competition and his Quasi Una Missa won the 2002 EMS Prize, Stockholm. He is a founding member of Aosdána. He lives in Hamburg.