Frank Corcoran

Very early up and at it. ( – Nobody e-wrote ; so do I exist at all? )
We´ve nearly made it out of that trough of December, so REJOICE!
New sap will rise.

Time´s arrow noses into my future. I´d better write this down. As soon as I finish I will have finished writing this down. ” Future becomes Futurum Exactum. ” That is all.
No need ( well, hell, wrong: obviously Spaemann does need! ) to posit a glorious Ontological Argument, though it´s nifty, neat to be risking : ” I am, therefore You will be!” or, its reversing inversion: ” I will be, therefore You are!” ( I´ll be silent, of course, about ” I shall be Who shall be!” Never know where I´d finish down that slope )
Look, supposing that my new ” VARIATIONS ON MYSELF” for Chamber Orchestra is played in Limerick Cathedral ( – oh, it will be? Yes! ), well then, a nano-second or so after that “event”, it will have been played in Limerick Cathedral. And my second last sentence will have come true, will be true, is even now ( raindrops spatter ) true.
Is that all ? No tensing up. Apparently language today´s not up to a whole lot. It would appear that all kinds of future sentences are in trouble this Christmas, I´m really asserting that ? – Galloping, goofy ontology with the goose on the shining table, that it ?

Keep this to yourself. We´ll issue our joint statement: history is bunk…. there´s simply too many ( never cleared up ) causes hanging around.
They began again, he puffing strongly, cropped, late 18th c., still a bit shaky after his recent hanging by British yeomen. ( No joke, he´d died without a whimper. ) Now worried about the future, if no longer his future ; yes, the descendants two short centuries later. How distinguish, he was muttering badly now , between utterer, uttered and uttering? But now suppose the thing had gone the other way, the shoe on the other foot ? Suppose they´d not hanged him by hemp? The eyes filmed over, all his poor possessions in the wheel-barrow? The scream unvoiced , unutterable and appalling and unspeakable and unscreamable? To be hanged by hempen rope. Till your dudeen bursts?

VIOLIN CONCERTO Frank Corcoran

Certainly I had to study Berg , Beethoven and Max Bruch and them all; how to make my new Concerto sing and soar, how thin out the accompanying orchestra ( eg. I use no tuba, little enough brass, sparing percussion ) to let the violin get lift-off at the opening of my Movement 1.
The Slow Movement then wrote itself, the solo line singing its three ( sad ? – Are they sad ? ) verses before the Cadenza and final wisps of string.
In the fast semiquavers of the last 3. Movement, I composed the lightness of being. So it´s: Fast / Slow / Fast approximately, this well-tried formula of this exciting violin concerto genre. The writing is deliberately pared down. eg. it´s metred, gridded music all through , no complex polyrhythms or controlled aleatory, here clear melodic line and accompaniment .
My work is taut, lean, lyrical, leppin´, a true concerto that looks back and looks forward.It learns from Mozart in the last movement´s fast passage-work. There´s something, of course there is, of Mendelssohn, Brahms and the rest in the opening movement´s orchestral tutti pitted against the strength of the solo line.
The Slow Movement is certainly a ” Lied Ohne Worte”, pure amhrán. It has to be.
So my whole short orchestral work ? – Un poco “music about music” ? Maybe. As in several recent works ( eg. my 2011 CLARINET QUINTET or the 2008 ” 9 ASPECTS OF AN IRISH POEM” for Large Choir and Solo Violin ) my building-blocks are a simple 7 – note row : G A flat C sharp D E flat F sharp and A. That´s it. With these seven tones I construct a mighty sounding edifice, in these three movements a concerto of fiddling fun and violinistic seriousness and sorrow and fast, furious last orchestral thoughts. “Quasi Un Concerto “? No, the real thing, but of our time, my tones re-living at least a century of violin concerti without being in the least neo-tonal or neo-this and that. Call it also: ” The One And The Many” ; “Four Strings Against The Rest”; or subtitle its three subtle movements perhaps: ” Announce The Event” , ” Sighing Song” and “Lightness Is All”.

O Lord of the Futurum Exactum ! Great Guarantor of all our
true assertions! Timeless Tensor of our tenses! Because You will know my present , all my present sentences, and only because You know ( You will know? ) one day ( which day ? ) that this my e-typed ” A is B” ( or indeed any true assertion of mine,” I am XYZ” ) will once have been true is it true….
The morning mind boggles; these typing fingers bleed and stiffen. There must be something deeply wrong here ( – and not only with the Spaemann Syllogism – see yesterday´s blog – which by the way will also have been true, is still true today, was true yesterday…. ) ; also with Spaemann´s God, with Spaemann´s futurum exactum, Spaemann´s “absolutes Bewusstsein”. The mind spins. How shall I today avoid that dratted Futurum Exactum? I´m sure I don´t know. Hmmm. Better spend the day in kindly silences, utterless.
The morning sleet boggles.

Robert Spaemann´s ” GOTTESBEWEIS” – surely he´s the fastest gun in town since 2006 ? Linguistic logic ( – a lazy tautology here , cold blogger ? ) . Observe the rabbit in the hat, sleight of hand :

1. Alle Tatsachenwahrheiten sind ewige Wahrheiten.

2. Jede Gegenwart ist die Vergangenheit einer künftigen Gegenwart.

3. Der ontologische Status dieser ewigen Wahrheiten besteht weder in einer Wirking, noch im Erinnertwerden, sondern im Gewußtwerden.
Es ist somit einem absoluten Bewußtsein, also Gott, gegenwärtig.

Voila! Try denying 1. I can´t. But ” ewig” seems to be claiming more than “Wahrheiten” – a, ahem, tautology ? A whiff of unearned grandeur? I´ll try denying 2. Humph! – again, it won´t budge. But is it more than a teasing out of
“Gegenwart “´s meaning ? Or of the way we invented the future – simple or “exactum” while swinging from the banana-trees, eh? Ahem, no, nein. Now where did Spaemann get Nr. 3. then ? It´s apparent magisteriality ? His Big Clout? He got it out of his black hat, an enormously beautiful whopper of an assumption…. it may well be true if what he wants to prove is true is actually, well, true. Otherwise, not true – because he has smuggled “Gewußtwerden” in by the heels. And therefore also his Nr. 4 : ” es ist somit”…. is not a “somit” but a real quick pistol-draw. ( – And, of course, “Es ist somit… ” IS true IF what our good Prof. Spaemann is hoping to establish IS the case…. )
But is it the case ? Humph. – It may; or then again it may not be , quite independent of his virtuose Gottesbeweis.
Word-trickery? Logic gone awry? Academia´s endemic acrobacy?

The snow will be back. It seems happy to announce nothing, nobody, except
1. the world is ( composed ) of mush, 2. behind ( all ) colour is white-gray, 3. ( all ) music is reducible to this wind whine.
Culture = seeing these our Three Truths, yet going on, head bent ( not bowed ) as we plod around the castled moat. Art puts up a good fight. Is this not something ? The pre-Christmas clenched fist ? It is. Yes. Celebrate this holy time. Behind good cheer we cheer ourselves on, that it ? Yope. Wintry words about nothing, no. Important.
Say it out! Sing up, little man !

Benozzo Gozzoli I came upon not, I´ll be snow-bound, by any mere accident – he painted his wings of his Umbran archangels, of his Umbran annunciated Jewish young girl, his brushed ( also finger-tips? ) Monte Falco parthenogenesis,
certainly. He painted lift off. He did brush with another world, announced the advent of what ? The Advent of WHAT ? He brushed off his brush-strokes each evening, opened the Monte Falco miracle-factory each sunny morning. New day, new angel´s wing. How ?

Are there some among us who cannot draw together these Benozzo Gozzoli e-threads ?
Well, we had male parthenogenesis ( rare enough , admit it, in the Queen´s County ). Go easy on the next gold stitch. ( The Great Scream is being propelled down , not up the chimney vortex) Gozzoli´s golden error can happen. Weave into our sewing passacaglia eleven tones, hypothumotics! ladies, come all to the potty !
Then, I remember it well, we stitched in nothing. God is no thing . Capitals is better. No, our little embroidery job´s not quite finished : weave in the one big auntie, damned good concertina-player – she was unravelled unfairly, out of the Big Design. Short is our needle, your tea-break. Certainly I googled you , Painter Ben . ” O filii et filiae, now the cancer raceth up my Renaissance stiff shoulder”…. I, Benozzo, courted painter of chiefly angels´wings, all sizes, am to get an Umbran welcome; I do bequeath to this, still my world also, my coloured swirls and slashes and oil wisps and half finished Monte Falco angelic rainbows and ye´ll have great fun with. Try to cap that. ” O filii. Now they race through the stiff shoulder. He´d painted the archbishop, the cancerous concertina with the three final chords. Listen: it´s C Minor, B Flat, E Flat. There now, easy, lay down dat brush.

It is / was , silly, at 9.30 Dec. 15. 2011.

Irish Television TG Ceathair Frank Corcoran, as Irish composer ( ” Cumadóir ´Eireannach ” ) .