Humble Hamburg Musings | Frank Corcoran

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KEEP WATCHING THIS SPACE !

Posted on February 23, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

This below was 2015 …. but watch HERE

for 2017 Summer Concerts !

Teatro Mancinelli – Orvieto
Venerdì 31 luglio ore 21

Piccolo Teatro Cavour – Bolsena
Domenica 2 Agosto ore 21.15

IL CONCERTO DI DUBLINO

Solisti della National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland:
Martin Johnson – Violoncello
Adele Johnson – Viola
Fergal Caulfield – Pianoforte
( Musiche di Schubert, Frank Corcoran, Popper e Brahms )

AMONG MY SOUVENIRS 1990

Posted on February 23, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

1990 it was. Yes.
I was a Fellow at the Virginia Centre for Creative Artists
VCCA at lovely Sweet Briar. I remember their generosity, this exploding jungle, the light in the crippling July heat.
The week before I drove across from Milwaukee to the Blue Ridge Mountains ( as I made a car-stop on a hot, hot road, my son, Andreas, leaped across a nest of rattlesnakes beside us and lived to tell the tale… ) , Joe the Cook’s brother had fallen into the water from his flat fishing boat in a dark corner ( dense trees ) of the lake; he’d drowned under, well, mysterious circumstances. – Don’t ask the police anything , was my fellow Fellows’ advice.
Well, every morning Joe welcomed the big black snake – from the big black tree in the Fellows’ Park – for breakfast at the kitchen-door. Every morning it then slowly wallowed back to its
tree to digest it . Aghast, I watched ( – I have kept a photograph of us both ). Later in the even greater heat I’d swim in the impenetrable lake, fearful of all giant, biting tortoises which would plop down suddenly from the trees and making a great noise…
It was advisable to keep a sharp eye out for all the Virginia flora and fauna.
Most of the Fellows were well-known New York painters. A few poets wrote in the great temperatures. My friend, Eddie Clift, great professor of photography, composed high-quality
pictures. I composed high tones.
One evening we put on ( for ourselves ) a concertante version of my gestating opera, “GILGAMESH ” , which was all about death-in-life and life-in-death.
I have never, never forgotten Sweetbriar, VCCA.

NOW WE’VE LEAPED TO 2015, I SEE

Posted on February 21, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

Yes, see :

here a CMC link for the Festschrift.

A new book on Frank Corcoran celebrating his recent 70th birthday has been published

A 2010 FRANK CORCORAN ORCHESTRAL CONCERT

Posted on February 20, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

January 19. 2010. National Concert Hall. 13.00

“Horizons” Concert with the National Symphony Orchestra , Chloe Hinton, soprano, Conductor : Colman Pearce.

Featured composer : Frank Corcoran

12.30 SHARP ( ! ) The Composer Speaks

Frank Corcoran: FOUR PRAYERS for Mezzosoprano and Orchestra . ( World-premiere )

In these four orchestral lieder, the orchestra accompanies the singer; it “sets” and sings and carries and colours the texts and, yes, prays them. ( Music has from the beginning had its role in the Eleusinian mysteries and, much earlier, in Old Babylon and Egypt ) .
Lied One fuses John Scotus Eriugena´s staggering God – text, ” Deus est. Non est. Superest.” – ” God is. God is not. God is beyond ” IS” ” ) with the Irish saying, “Aithníonn súil liath saol liath” ( ” It is a grey eye which sees the world as grey”. ) . Strings and wood-winds sing with the soprano-line; percussion washes it.

Lied Two treats Henry Lyte´s traditional Victorian hymn, ” Abide with me “. ( It was this melody the band played over and over as the great ship “Titanic” sank to its icy Atlantic grave…. ) . What once might have been saccharine has become steel. Its intervals buckle and are chromatically crushed until, at the end, brake-drums and brass are also shrieking the singer´s “Abide!”

Lied Three sets an amazing, anonymous two-liner which I found over the Neo-Classical lintel of a Hamburg 18th. c. villa. I use the German : ” Wir bauen hier so feste / Und sind doch fremde Gäste! Und wo wir sollen ewig sein /
bauen wir so wenig ein!” – in my English it goes : ” We´re building here so free / Our jolly building-spree ! But where we should endure , there we´re so unsure!” with the Pauline: ” We´ve here no lasting city ! We build and build like mad – a pity ! ” which become a breathless, sardonic and bitter vocal Scherzo.

Lied Four composes Meister Eckhart´s ecstatic God – text . With its prelude , interludes and postlude of massed , muted brass it aims for the final rapt ” Ewig, ” ( “Eternal” ) with deep pulsing harp, celesta and crotales.

Frank Corcoran. QUASI UNA FUGA . World-premiere of this revised version ( 2009 ) for full orchestra .

This is in no way a neo-Baroque or neo-Bach one-movement work. It is and it is not a fugue for 56 strings. It is ” quasi” a fugue; the ascending “soggetto” is there, also its accompanying counter-subject . All is counterpoint ; everything is built out of the interval of the second . Fragments and smidiríní of the “theme” ( really a major-minor 12-tone scale, nothing more…. ) are heard in hundreds of bits and pieces until at the end it all morphs into the Early Celtic chant, ” Ibunt Sancti”. Was this the hymn which St. Brendan The Navigator and his twelve merry monks sang before having dinner on the broad back of an Atlantic whale somewhere up there near Greenland, around the year 550 or so …. ?

NOVELETTE for Full Orchestra . Witold Lutoslawski ( 1978 -79 )

Fifteen times the mighty opening chord yells, announcing the five short movements of this orchestral narrative. The Polish master calls them simply ” Announcement, First Event, Second Event, Third Event” and the accumulative ” Conclusion”. His orchestral palette is , as always full of the most beautiful and refined instrumental colours.

( Composer´s Notes )

WAS THIS DUBLIN JOYCE EVENT IN 2015 ?

Posted on February 20, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

Performance begins at 8pm.

Frank Corcoran, James Joyce and the Poetics of Myth: A Celebration of Frank Corcoran at 70

The James Joyce Centre, Benjamin Dwyer and the Association of Irish Composers are proud to present this very special concert celebrating the life and work of Irish composer Frank Corcoran. Featuring a keynote address by Benjamin Dwyer, a number of performances by world-class musicians and even a few world premières for good measure, this is […]

Posted on February 20, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

ALTO RHAPSODIES for Orchestra and Contralto….

1. Alto Rhapsody / High, pure, soar, sear, white, high, fly / My orchestra snores !

2. For the womb the seed sighs / Turn and thrash and disappear / The high silence drowned .

3. ( as ” PRIOSUN CLUAIN MEALA” ) Just one year ago / I strutted to Ardpatrick / To lace my bonnet. / / Next Friday they will / Shove my head upon a pike / Snowing on my soul.

4. Suppose God is light ? / My eye tries to see itself / Soft horns! Clarinets !

5. Whisper ” Tramonto ” / Tiptoe through my dark window / Well is this, then, death ?

WHT’S IN A TITLE ?

Posted on February 19, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

Composer
Frank Corcoran (1944-); IRL
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ABOUT/BIO
WORKS
ALBUMS
ESSENTIALS

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Recordings: 4 tracks
Various Works

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Various Works 4 tracks
Symphony No.3 1 track
Symphony No.2 2 tracks
Symphony No.4 1 track

CAOINE BY FRANK CORCORAN BY CHAMBER CHOIR IRELAND

Posted on February 19, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

https://soundcloud.com/chamber-choir-ireland/caoine-by-frank-corcoran

Stream Caoine by Frank Corcoran by Chamber Choir Ireland from desktop or your mobile device

Posted on February 19, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

Corcoran
20 January 2012 – 1:21pm
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Composer(s):
Corcoran
Works:
Mad Sweeney; Music for the Book of Kells; Wind Quintet; Sweeney’s Vision
Performer:
Frank Corcoran (speaker); Das Neue Werk NDR Ensemble, Percussion Modern/Dieter Cichewiecz, Stuttgart Wind Quintet/Willy Freivogel
Label:
Black Box
Catalogue Number:
BBM 1026
Performance:
starstarstarstarstar
Sound:
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There’s an enticing new-music culture in Ireland, and though much of its product is rarely heard in English concert venues (or Welsh or Scottish, one suspects), these releases from Black Box will play their part in fostering a closer awareness of the subject. While Frank Corcoran and John Buckley represent the middle generation, being born in 1944 and 1951 respectively, Gráinne Mulvey and Deirdre Gribbin are of younger stock, of 1966 and 67 vintage, so the range is evenly balanced both in age and gender. Through the medium of chamber music each composer focuses on an aspect of poetic understanding that avoids, with Corcoran’s exception, the issue of a distinctly national idiom. Corcoran writes music for the Book of Kells, and for Heaney’s translation of the Middle Irish text Mad Sweeney. His ‘macro counterpoint’ and bright and stormy sounds evoking the truth of the Irish dream landscape sound less well in performance than in his description.

PUBLISH OR PERISH

Posted on February 19, 2017 By Frank Corcoran

Frank Corcoran

‘The loss of culture in Ireland is why I am interested in mythopoetic remembrance and imagination.’

Born 1944 in Borrisokane, Tipperary, Frank Corcoran studied philosophy, music, ancient languages and theology at the National University of Ireland Maynooth, University College Dublin and the Pontifical Lateran University, Rome. Further studies in composition were undertaken with Boris Blacher in Berlin. In 1980, he took up a composer fellowship the Berliner Künstlerprogramm. In the 1980s, he taught in Berlin, Stuttgart and Hamburg, where he was Professor of Composition and Theory at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater. He was a Fulbright Visiting Professor and a Fulbright Scholar in the U.S. in 1989 and 1990, and has been a guest lecturer at, among others, CalArts, Harvard University, the University of Wisconsin (Madison), University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), Princeton University and New York University. Corcoran’s output includes orchestral, choral, chamber and electroacoutic music. His Joycepeak – Musik won the Studio Akustische Kunst 1995, Sweeney’s Vision won the Bourges Festival Premier Prix in 1999, and Quasi Una Missa won the 2002 Swedish E.M.S. Prize. Two Unholy Haikus took first prize at the Cork International Choral Festival in 2012 and his Eight Haikus was awarded first prize at the International Foundation for Choral Music in 2013. Corcoran’s music has been performed by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Crash Ensemble (Dublin), the Cantus Chamber Orchestra (Zagreb), Wireworks Ensemble (Hamburg), the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and Antipodes (Switzerland), among many other ensembles and orchestras. He is a founding member of Aosdána and lives in Hamburg and Italy.

Photograph Tony Carragher. Frank Corcoran at his home in Pratoleva, Viterbo, Italy, 15 July 2013.