Frank Corcoran

Is this which follows, then, improvised music ? Is it perhaps composed music ?
TITLE : “Among My Souvenirs ” : MY MUSIC: obviously a 3/4 bar, violin plus Viennese piano:
– “Admit to the Book Stacks” Harvard College, March 1992.
– “Certificate Of Attendance” – Fellow at Session 167 of the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies , March 26 1976.
– ” Certificate Of Death” Nr. 1121 / 2002 . ” The Decedent ( ? Yikes! ) was born on 22.5.1947 in Bayreuth…. ”
– “Family Tree: Casey / Corcoran: Hackett . Casey. Kirley. Corcoran. Colgan ( -they would have been Roger´s Mother´s Family)
” Music until now has played little part in Irish Studies in the U.S.”
– Prose-jazz? Poetic or pathetic prose? I composed here my word-tones, yellowing chords and rhythms and musical memories , wispeens of melody. In the best Joycean sense, oh yes ! – Can the banal arise struggling out of the trivial? – Can it? Do I hope to compose new ” entrail -sounds” ? New ” VARIATIONS ON MYSELF!” – Yes, I mean, out of my ounds?
I can. eg.
” TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Franklin S. Miller, Dept. of Music, U.W.M., May 16. 1990 : Professor Corcoran was a Fulbright Scholar from Hamburg…. We have enjoyed having Frank Corcoran on the faculty…. he has my personal best wishes for future success here and in Europe as well. ” – Trivial?
Quadrivial? Kitsch? Yellowing music, tones blown in the wind?

Do I believe in “Creatio ex Nihilo” ? Do I what ?
The composer spins, certainly she spins, new yarn, old yarns, out of what? – Yes, out of
her earlier works, or a ” new path” , or ” tones versus anti-tones ” , out of a just-now-perhaps-picked-up paramusical “idea” ( eg. ” Let´s this evening have a little fun! Let´s use a quantum mechanics formula “. ) , or she may compose out of his composer´s grandmother´s sufferings from the year 1894, you folly me? Or build on a new form principle ( – but WHAT!? ) , out of lithe laptops mating limply across measureless oceans, or again out of a ( nearly Kitsch ) trigger – line like : ” fast falls the even-tide…. ”
Creatio ex nihilo ? What´s this “nihil” , I wonder as I blog, compose, essay or saunter across this, my space? To “compose” it new, we surely all will want that nowadays ( Pace Palestrina and all the Bach family; whist, too, John Cage! ), yours truly humbly dumbly included, yes. Neither irony nor pastiche nor imitation nor parody nor re-gurgitation is endurable for long. -Okay. Difficult to define “Kitsch”, I´ll grant me, and yet I don´t believe that anything goes.
“Wir bauen hier so feste / Und sind doch fremde Gäste! ” ” We´re building here so free / Our jolly building-spree!” ” Und wo wir sollen ewig sein / Bauen wir so wenig ein!” ” Bu, well, where we should endure / There we are so bloody unsure!”

VISKI BOJ THE BATTLE OF VIS 2006

21. July Zagrebacki Kvartet ( Zagreb String Quartet )

Mozart, Frank Corcoran, Beethoven

ENSEMBLE 4 / 11. Page 40.

Komponisten : Frank Corcoran

And : JOURNAL OF NEW MUSIC RESEARCH Vol 12, Issue 1 – 2, 1983
( Pages 351 – 355 ) “Irland und die neue irische Musik heute”.

Sea-snakes don´t really. Eat muscle tissue. “The dead will keep going on and on.” “She burned her coal without heating herself or the poor children. ” “A comely bride is easily dressed”. “Did they make any scuffling noise? ” Actually it was more like butter being strained through the scrim of a mouseskin shroud.” Memory morphs: “Búireamh suite fíor ina féachaint” ( Roughly, ” her eyes carried a film” ) .

Whence swims up courage, dignity, hypothomotic longings? A constant cloud of self-manufactured and manufacturing value, the mythic meaning that exudes from submarine us in the deep water ? What sure surrender or recommended swoon towards which cosmic swindle , my glass only half full ? Every twenty minutes up we go for air, then dive, let off the hook, neither I nor Me nor You ; quick, we have but a a sea-sprayed second, a quick wash.Do I pick up a finny hesitancy? Under the rocks´shadows something´s fishy. ( Fish eats sea-snake. Davy Jones died hard. His five fathoms. )

1981 ,I was – from West Berlin – back in Dublin, the Vienna call came through . Into “our” kitchen. Yes: Good:
The O.R.F. had planed my 1. SYMPHONY ( ” SYMPHONIES” of 23 Wind Instruments )
“We” drove down then from Berlin to Mozart´s Vienna. ( I had heard of Salieri, his pomps ). Lothar Zagrosek, GREAT conductor,

I didn´t want to come to Germany.

Webern called. Me.

It was lonely, lonely 1967 as I made my pilgrimage to Anton ( von ? ) Webern´s house in Austrian Mittersill – before the Stockhausens and all these Fernyhoughs etc. etc. There he got the curfew bullet, cigar ignited. ( No help. Nowhere. Austrian / German / American Webern musicologists, weak, very, analytically weak ) .
I take now Webern´s ( lonely ? – CERTAINLY lonely ! ) Opus 11, No. 3. What does the cello play , why the the piano accompany ? Cello trils pianissimo E flat – F flat , ” punctuating” , ” commenting ” lWebern´s low piano trichord darkly, – and then – as if Webern blew a muted trombone ? – . Second ” heroic” cello statement, again it´s a pp – swell – pp, then four bars of eternally deep frozen ( – We´d better e-mail Dante QUICK ! ) cadence for both end-of-that-faughed-19th. c. – solo-instruments ” prostituted ” Cello / Piano Duo and WHAT , post Gustav Klimt, we hope …. )
Nobody has – in Ireland / in Berlin / in ( Zaccagniniana ) Roma /
in Boston or New York ” explained” to me Webern´s sigh. Why?

You don´t know whence ? Whither? Nor I. Nor why? Sob not my song, Hiawatha, but sigh for slight hope, a sliver of light from behind the glass mirror, hearing ear-hairlets and timpanum agog, straining for Good News. A sliver !
Doubt or sift through many different objective correlatives , but I seem to return again to my “I” amd its lissom, inverted commas. I am all of my habits and willed fantasies and censored intimations of a kind of immortality. I and “I”, my walled-in subject/object. “I” only exist because I think of, will be thinking of me. Think or be thought of. Some drizzly wet day I will not be. Some dry night “I” will begin never again existing. Light is letting down a photon at a time. Light is the burden of nothing, lightens everything; who´s paying the light-bill anyway?

Definitely a collector´s item by now :

Frank Corcoran COLLECTION ONE L.P.
A 33 1/3 R.P.M. SELF HELP 101 STEREO from those now ( infinitely ) distant seventies.
“Frank Corcoran is a real musician. He thinks and talks and acts out music, his own and others`, old and new, he conveys his enthusiasm to his company, whether that be a single friend or a crowded lecture room. His music works for me in visual as well as sound elements…. His uncompromisingly modern music is yet richly textured and rests firmly on fully absorbed classical and baroque traditions…. ” SEAN MULCAHY