Frank Corcoran

The S-Bahn´s crónán in the wet January air as sleep knits up all unravelled pieces of fibre. This day will face the problems of yesterday, I suppose; so what´s so different in the tones of Friday? Between now and my next midnight, which images? Sounds and zounds?

Will my 2012 bring more thinking power to this Humble Hamburg Musing ? And to thinking about tones ? Thinking about thinking ? Hmmm. I wonder. Wait and hear. eg. listen to this sackbuts´music:
“Cogitatum ergo cogitationes” ( = ” Because there are thoughts, therefore there have to be thinkers” . ) . Now how is this whopping tautology in any way an improvement on good old “Cogito ergo sum” ? ( “I think therefore I exist” ) ? – Well, it´s not. While appearing merely to put in the plural “thought” and ” thinker” , its hopeless lack of an “I” makes it unurgent, turgid. Sackbuts, bray on, please.

I´d say, oh worse. – Much worse our Irish composers´plight now.
Webern and Schoenberg and Berg had it tough in post-war artMusik-creating Vienna. Okay, shall I weep ? ..
Caoin tú féin, a chumadóir bhocht ! – ” Irish art ” ? ! ?
My Irish composer´s seventies were , yes, tough. Why? – Because, unfortunately, ” I ” did not exist in ” Irish ” ” art ” .

There are only the two melodic lines, leaping and crisscrossing, chasing each other´s snake-tails, Book of Kells trellis-work in these 4 very short chapters of my
FOUR PIECES FOR TWO CLARINETS.
All the extremities, depths and heights, chalumeau colour, pianissimo breath, howling, high shrieks.
PIECE 1. A-Clarinet follows B-Clarinet canonically up nearly three octaves. Even a fortepiano trill is a dramatic moment before highest stridency wins.
PIECE 2. fast breathlessness of the enormous phrase taking off , this time the rocket ascends over three octaves. Flatterzunge takes over in the second half.
PIECE 3 a quiet, miniature song for both wind-instruments.
Poised, exquisite gestures.
PIECE 4. My salute to ” B.A.C.H.” , certainly, bent and shaped in many different shapes.

Unleash irony, folks of our now calving, birthing 2012.
So let´s just look at the chord for a 2012 moment – here I pre-date Pythagoras and his higly Greek ” The Birth Of Music Out Of A Wheel´s Tyre Pressure”.
Be happy with that.
Let all our New Year Kids rocket, and racket; – well then, we did?
Now dirge for 2012, – Oh Pythagoras, Oh SHITEGOTT- Janus, who will
sing death ´n life ´n suffering for all good Buddhis plus just this, too, – for the forever higher, for the richer, for the mythically
troubled.

– We don´t even have our language!

Now the first dirty wave of rockets ( anti-war, yes, I´ll grant you )
has slashed this Hamburg milky sky, high above my high , Ariel high
loft high stashed window.
Why is this Hamburg New Year Myth so dirty? Why are their young , young
longings, so mythic and so beautiful, so inauthentic? Are they?

Stony ( penile – ye knew – ) TERROR – God Janus brought holy
sleeplessness.

Too angelic choirs tend to bore us …. Is that why so much harp music can sound so trivial ? Tired?
“IN THE DEEP HEART´S CORE” emerges over, out of, over against that low F sharp. Not too much chordal stuff, short motivic. Those notes G A flat B flat C sharp D occasionally bring in an A to sharpen things. High and lowest registers contrast very finely. A new element, a little melodic unison wisp in octaves. The melodic last section has been grown into. Like this our Old Year, 2011, it, too, vanishes into, if not angelic, ethereal heights. Sicut fumus. Holy smoke.

Among my very few New Year Resolutions will be my scrivener´s intention to write briefly on the work of the last, say, ten years, me scribe going backwards over the musical works I actually wrote this now vanishing year, then I´ll glide over those of 2010 and so on, explore their possible origins, forms, intentions and inventions, stunts. I´ll write in 2012 further for myself primarily. In the beginning was the urge, later came the, ahem, splurge.

Certainly we´ll scrub the ascending steel stairs; prepare the New Year.
I come back to that high-mindedly triumphant Robert Spaemann Theorem: ” Keine Tatsache wird jemals wieder falsch”. I fear for Prof. Spaemann ( – in Robert Spaemann´s ” GOTTESBEWEIS” ) that it is a tautology, not a theorem – in “Tatsache” is already contained the idea of ” keine …. jemals falsch”. To bray this trumpet music is more defiance than dontological, more orthodontic than orthodox. Leave it like that ? Okay….

12.11.2011 BAVARIAN RADIO “IRISCHE MUSIKNACHT” :

The Music of Frank Corcoran

“Keine Tatsache wird jemals wieder falsch”. ( which is roughly, ” what´s done is done and cannot be undone” or some such – hard though to match those gritty eleven syllables of the original. ) Do I smell a tautology ? Nearly, if not quite. Only if “Tatsache” ( ” the done deed” ) itself contains the idea of un-undoness; which it doesn´t quite; though it nearly does. For the idea of undoing the done doesn´t appear at your first look self-contradictory. Second look, yes. Impossible, yes. Hmmm , perhaps also self-contradictory, – in which case the great ” keine Tatsache wird jemals wieder falsch” is more in the nature of festival music for trumpets, a solemn announcement of the obvious ? How obvious?