Frank Corcoran

Nov. 15 2011 . 21.30 Irish Time

Irish Television ( TG CEATHAIR ) :

Portrait Frank Corcoran

Recently become himself an archangel, Gozzoli Ben couldn´t email away my tears: ” Caro Corcorano, which black ? Why terror? The vortex? For my and her early death? For good ? For painterly talent? For your tones not quite reaching over our top, amico mio? We are all gone. Si. Into a world of light. Encore. Si, mister. I had it not easy – I remember well my first amateurish goose-quill attempt, the Annunciation Angel Gabriel falling over on his Umbran nose. It took time and tenseless spaghetti and reams of renunciation. I painted over the top. Across the top. Painted quills and wings into eternity.”
Normally a normal sort o´chap, I staunched my tears. As I will now. A shroud is calling. D Major, cheap, frilly-normal, cheerful.

Get this: she DID flutter as in one of your artistic Umbran-Tuscan excursions into The Other Side Of The Black Hole. Nightie singed, how paint great heat? We shall ALL be purified and burned and fly slowly on Benozzo Gozzoli half-wing through the purgatorial vortex in order to separate ourselves in an orderly fashion. From our dross. See “wing merchant”, ” artist on the wing”.
I was very weak now. Theologically toneless. Tuneless. It´s not every night you email a Renaissance Goose-wing Painter. But I did:
” Dear Benozzo ( may I call you Ben? No? ), a dying friend just emailed good me with : But she was disturbed long before your time; you see that, don´t you ? What chain of which suffering? ” – So how did you, Gozz, paint which causality? Who did what ? Your new pal, Phranck”.
Umbran silence from Beyant.

The Boston Phoenix Nov. 11 2005.

The hit of Boston Musica Viva ” Boston Celtics” ( Scottish, British, Irish and Welsh )…. In “MAD SWEENEY” , which was getting its American premiere, Irish composer, Frank Corcoran´s wild-man recitation from Seamus Heaney´s English rendering of the medieval Irish tale about the mad warrior king and knotty sound world reminded me of Peter Maxwell Davies´s 1969 ” Eight Songs for a Mad King”. ( This was “One Song for a Mad King” ) All the playing , under Richard Pittman, was spectacular.

Get back quick behind that microphone ( or there´ll be virtual violence ! ) ! On a green light, go! Ours not to choose: a green-yellow scream is different – fill cheek, go for the all out, a molten red scream, bawling screech, howl, roar, low again, anything really to get us going. On a green, I´ll say it once, twice; no breath across the microphone…. When the time comes, come it will, inject real suffering. So let´s take ten again, please, How now, brown howl ! Column of air, erupts like a studio Stromboli. Take two again. Have a quick listen: short approach curve, apogee, centre crammed with vocal temperature Galileo´s Inquisition boyos ´d envy. Feral grunt, rut sounding, surgical knife´s clean amputatory. Different from David´s harp preludes. Cathedral of pain inside her screech, quartering horses getting good hay for breakfast ( pressed to death in 1587 ). Be not wanting, micro. Inflect her yell too. A dollop of transcendence. Green light.

“The people in the bus go round and round” is a circular enough tune, its delicate tonic and dominant and cadence, tripartite as a Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick.
this children´s song form is its content, Herr Hanslick, its arpeggio up, then down again to its Doh, a child´s dominant echo, and then its octave leap right up to the tonic echo , an ” Abgesang” cadencing phrase.
That´s it.
No, that´s not it. So. What happened to German music-theory after our hugely noble Hugo Leichentritt and our gallant gentleman, Hugo Riemann had tried ? Were both tried and noble knights ?
What happened, I´ll try weeping this, was genetic exhaustion , gone-mad, pseudo Kantian stringency, linguistic tizzy, galloping, lovely incest.

Consider this sentence: ” Damit ist festgestellt, daß Herr Corcoran mit eindeutiger Mehrheit des Gremium und der Professoren auf Platz 1 der Liste kommt. ”
Humph. Now. Consider: could it really be that “Liste” = ” List” . Is it? – Is that it? Consider. And yet. And again yet: ” Beware the viper´s tongue; ” I did beware. I bewared, it was still sunny enough 1982, Prof. Dok Krützfi´s declared aim in his dirty ball-game was certainly to reduce his ( Hamburg; we are lying in his love-bed now in Milchstrasse ) and her ( in still, ah so distant Lübeck )
” fucking distance ” ( No ! I am not making this up, I quote …. ) from her fine bed ( in fine Lübeck ) to his ( fine ) ” Liebes” bed in ( fine ) Harvester Weg. How to reduce their ( love-mating ) distance from ( her female smelling ) Lübeck to ( his male smelling ; speriamo , si ) Harvestehuder Weg ?
Manipulate the votes. He tried. The Gremium stirred, my Selection Board tittered, shivered, it rallied, it voted me up from awe-filled Stuttgart.
” Nunmehr die Liste in der Reihenfolge….” ” Geheime Abstimmung “. ” zu beschließen. ” ” Diese Abstimmung erbracht folgendes Ergebnis…. ”

I like this ( daily ) beast: the inner dialogue between I and me. It hones. Honest. Drips new wine into old wine-skins. Not monologues. Chat with my self and cosmos.
Consider a pre-Christmas moment Corcoran´s Genetic Fallacy: this composer received :
” Many prizes, commissions, distinctions and awards….”
True as far as it goes. It goes not farther- does it make the work better or worse ? No. Neither. More or less crafted, felt, uttered, suffered ? No. More or less Horatian ( “ars est celare symphoniam …. ” etc. ) ? No. A little success helps. Goes a long lonely way. Certainly. Flatters and butters. No success ( Oh Schubert ! Ah Hugo Wolf, ´n Anton Webern an´ all ) makes the gall a bitter bladder. Yet it remains eternally true that the work´s excellence is not, cannot ever be its success with ” the public ” ( – who are they, then ? ) . Its construction´s pithy craft is not a brother to its crafty marketing. Its dark depths and felt heights and dizzy ecstasy have really nothing to do with or to say to its subsequent history of performances or of being sieved by a critics´canon or colunder or crooked sales or high-minded hype. Nothing. Horace would agree instantly with me. The work´s quality is simply quite different from its history; this means that it is not ” good ” while ( or because ) it gets a thousand performances, heists and hurrahs – or, alternatively, because it is ignored for a hundred years- . Art is well-conceived and imagined and incarnated energy, it is strong sounding brass and synergy and symphony, more perennial than the Roman poet´s polished perfection. Poor Mahler´s ” my time will come ” or poor Schoenberg´s ” my music is not bad, merely badly played” may well be true, important. But no Genetic Fallacies, please: a good piece of music is ( hey tautology ! – Nothing wrong with that …. ) a well composed , finished, completed construction of sound and silence. Nothing more or less.

I see, – no, I hear – that my Third Symphony is now up ( or “up” ) on Youtube. A mighty sound, mighty drums, mighty brass. Yes, 1994 was a good year for mighty artillery and fine filigree and sound writing, cool composition of the third kind, really. Long time ago now, though. Have we kept it up ? Have we?

Frank Corcoran: FIVE HAIKUS 2011
( = Lieder for Tenor and Piano )

Five dogs or seven
Snarl in the cold evening air
Barking: “Kill the Spring!”

Who goes here? Summer!
My pen glides on white paper
Soft horns, clarinets

Bits of sticky sleep
My eye tries to see itself
Morning birds chitter

Suppose God is light
A mountain´s shadow purple?
“Ciúnas, a h-anaim!”

Whisper “that sunset
Tiptoes through this, my window….”
Well, is this then death?

North German Radio . N.D.R.Kultur :

17. December 2011. 23.30 broadcast
Frank Corcoran´s new CLARINET QUINTET with the Vanbrugh String Quartet and Fintan Sutton, Clarinets.