Frank Corcoran

FINTAN O’TOOLE

CULTURE SHOCK : SITTING ON THE bus on the way home from a Dublin Theatre Festival show last week, I suddenly started thinking about what happened to classical music.

Until about a century ago it was a living form, not just at its experimental edges but at its centre. Mainstream concertgoers or operagoers could expect to encounter not just the works of the great tradition, such as pieces by Bach, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, but also, for example, a new symphony by Mahler. They presumably would have expected this situation to continue indefinitely. But it didn’t.

Gradually, the form broke in two: a mainstream that is almost entirely historic and a contemporary avant garde that is of interest only to a minority of hardcore devotees. From time to time a new work will cross the divide, but this is an exceptional occurrence.

Just look at the main programme of forthcoming concerts at the National Concert Hall: Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, Verdi, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, Brahms and so on. The odd work by a living composer, such as Frank Corcoran or James MacMillan, will sneak in, but as a side dish rather than a main meal.

March 12 2013 in New York City :

North South Consonance, conductor Max Lifchitz, will premiere new

Frank Corcoran ” Variations On Myself ”
for Fl/Ob/Clar/Horn/Bassoon and Strings.

Watch this space, space-time.

I did imagine Ireland. In 2011.
See www.imagineireland. etc. for Irish culture in the U.S. I, too, am Irish culture, my musical works .
My music works. In the States in 2011. ( Cad is cultúr ´Eireannach ann ? Cad é cultúr ? “Quaestio mihi factus sum” was St. Augustine´s horror. )

Imagine that …

I do hope to do my ( annual ) radiophonic analysis of a Great Musical Work for the North German Radio , NDR, in Hamburg before Christmas 2012.
It´ll be Brahms Second Symphony . Why will I take that work ?
Well ..
1. I have already covered ( how do you ” cover” a Brahms Symphony is a good question to be asked here ) his Symphonies 1,3 and 4. ” Radiophonic” in the best sense of teasing out for you, dear attentive listener, the HEARD unity of motivs, themes, ecstatic sections, sighs and movements. A great composer composes a unity , his heard symphonic unity. We can hear this composed, welded unity , learn to think with listening ears )

2. There´s a plethora of Wagner works and concerts and portraits and celebrations coming up fast in 2013, I am told. A Brahms Second Symphony is a stalwart antidote, anti-snakebite serum, healthy beliefe in musical discourse in itself and in its intramusical ( no, not extramusical ) valency. No bad thing in this age of bits and bites and bytes and fads and composers´fashions and Gesamtkunst stuff.
Brahms believed in tones, their logical handling , yet also their inner, let´s risk ” Pythagorean” valencies. Tones have magic, even without great props and Bayreuth lasers or crafty, synaesthetic stage-craft. They matter. They reach under the skin of the thinking, listening, dreaming ear.

A more up-to-date Biography of me is, of course, easily findable at :

www.cmc.ie ( under ” Composers” )

It includes a lot of big works in every genre composed since far-off 2006, orchestral, instrumental and vocal Big works. Big in their vision, aim, accomplishment, opening plus closure, new worlds sounding, clashing, achieving or denying “harmony” within themselves, entertaining and disturbing and uplifting and dying and intriguing and tweaking , exploring, mining the psychic gold, creating musical meaning and value and metalanguage and, well, metaphor. Good years at the cutting edge, the coal-face. ( Must shower now )

Is it spell it out here, just one more time ? One more just e-endeavour ?

In our filthy , shifty, modern tide ( the scopological is king – LOOK ! WATCH ! SEE ! The eye and not the seeing, listening ear is king – how we love our dvdeeing, your filming, her looking, his medial and mediatic prying; Thomas, Tom De Peeper is king of this, my present filthy Century of the Eye: …

Thus, where is, well, my place in this 21.st c. Eyeball And Retina And Permanently Excited optic nerves ? – But it´s my EARS ! ( J.S.Bach died of this ; good Mr. Handel ditto ) .
I am ready to writhe here out in a verse my Death-Bed Composer´s Argument. Once again :

once upon a time there was this little ( presently scripting ) lad in Ould Tipperary , surrounded by his loving parents´ me-loving hundred free – moving sows and babies and me-hating boar , – this my First Symphony, actually.
Come De Day when my pre-sentence : ” As he lay dying ” , will have got its, ashy taste,
what doth it behove Dis Composer if he , – if I , have, has not realized his, my, full musical potential, compositional ” potential” , – quite simply : if I have not dared to compose not enough , no, of my ( enormously ) wide range of potential, composed courage, – well then, also , not enough of the perfectly fused ” heard” and ” written” and of the ” having dared” to widen the limits of ( poor ) Debussy´s musically
thinkable universe . Coraggio, Corcorano, Compositore . – I have but my intervals, their hythms and their colours , densities, attacks et al . I wouldn´t be wanting to be stuck in YOUR slippers on YOUR Composer´s Death-bed… Thus:
Write. Courage.

Thursday 25. October 2012 : New Ireland / New Music Salon

( Contemporary Music Dublin )

Martin Johnson, First Cellist of the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, will
premiere ” SNAPSHOT ” for Solo Cello by Frank Corcoran

Huge sorrowful eyes

Misted over , as horses

Discuss damp sorrow

I honour and mourn for Patrick Creagh . He died last week in Tuscany. His eighty two years were full of words, literatures,
poets and poetry, his own and others, his translations of his beloved Leopardi and of so many. A gentleman and a scholar and a grand man, Irish and English roots in his “Brasier-Creagh” of North Cork, Oxford, Radda-in-Chianti. The ´O Cré s were fiddlers and pipers and sheriffs and racy gentry and Old Irish and New. Patrick inherited so much, passed it on, crafted the right word and the well-crpentered phrase and tittle . How honour and mourn for him ? Respect that legacy? How keep my, his respect for language ? For the pared down pen? He shall not go gentle. A tone or three , too, to sing his praise, I would think, a finely jewelled work for Flute and Viola and Guitar , their sighs and tuttis and solos, legato upon staccato, Juan Gris browns and the brighter colours, of course, also. Music has been at this for so long now in our cultural history, crooning or keening our beloved dead. Praise a good man, Patrick! MOLADH!

Does travel broaden my mind ? My musical mind? Or narrow it ? Imbibe, engorge sound-impressions for a short while before the drawbridge rises protectively once more?
Dunno. Is location a Lockian secondary accident , almost irelevant to the substantial,onion-skinned ME ? How shall , who shall adjudicate this? I mostly incline to the ( surely surly? ) opinion that to stay put concentrates the energy. That my flying around airports and traipsing around tourists and walking de feet off in foreign halls, academies, museums or galleries uses limited time, ceteribus paribus, unseriously. “I move therefore I am” is weak enough, a feeble enough proof that I exist, have value, craft anything worth talking or singing about.
Today´s sky is mercifully clouded, not dappled, Italy as North European. But tomorrow !