Frank Corcoran

Sat 17 Sep 2016 – 19:30
Kevin Barry Room, National Concert Hall

Concorde.

Programme:

Gerard Victory: Runic Variations

Philip Martin: Garments of the Night

James Wilson: Three Play Things

Deirdre McKay: through still pollen

Eric Sweeney: Strings in the Earth and Air

Jane O’Leary: Poem from a Three Year Old

Rhona Clarke: Purple Dust

Frank Corcoran: The Quare Hawk

Composing the Island:
Five Decades of Music for Guitar
An overview of music for the classical guitar since 1969
Saturday 24th September, 7.30pm
John Feeley
Composing the Island: Five Decades of Music for Guitar
Start Date24-09-2016 19:30

Room: Kevin Barry Recital Room
Prices: €10 (Concessions: €5)

John Feeley, guitar

Andrew Shiels The Voyage of Maeldún: The Island of the Black Mourners – The Island of the Little Cat
Mary Kelly Adagio – Moderato from Shard (1982 rev. 1988)
Frank Corcoran Prologo from Three Pieces (1990)

http://newisland.ie/product/the-invisible-art-century-music-ireland-1916-2016/

The Invisible Art: A Century of Music in Ireland 1916-2016
newisland.ie
New Island is delighted to announce the forthcoming publication of The Invisible Art – A Century of Music in Ireland, 1916–2016 this coming September 2016.

Subject: Arena playback

Don Francisco,
In case you didn’t know you can listen back to your interview, or send on the link to whoever you wish,
here

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/arena/programmes/2015/1207/751906-arena-monday-7-december-2015/

Cross Currents Radio Series on RTÉ lyric fm
Fri 2 Sep 2016

Cross Currents is a landmark music documentary series, narrated by award-winning actor Barry McGovern, exploring contemporary Irish composers and their work. The series begins on RTÉ lyric fm on 9 September at 7:00pm and continues at the same time on 16 and 23 September.

The last 50 years have seen Irish composition flourish as young Irish composers look to Europe and beyond to re-imagine an Irish identity in music, paralleling many of the societal and economic shifts in post-de Valera Ireland. The series is a blend of substantive interviews with the music and musical influences of the composers involved and draws on archives, illustrative soundscapes and a rich mix of music reflecting the full canon of composition in Ireland over the past 40 years.
Actor Barry McGovern narrates the series which is an Athena Media production for RTE Lyric fm made with the funding support of the BAI and the TV licence fee in partnership with the Contemporary Music Centre. Series Producer, Helen Shaw. Producer and Recordist, Jonathan Grimes.

The series consists of three episodes and features interviews with composers Gerald Barry, Seóirse Bodley, John Buckley, Linda Buckley, Frank Corcoran, Raymond Deane, Donnacha Dennehy, Roger Doyle, Dave Flynn, Amanda Feery, Michael Gallon, John Kinsella, Garrett Sholdice, and Jennifer Walshe.

Listen to a promotional trailer on the series:

A number of audio shorts produced as podcasts for the series are also available to listen to here.

For more on the series, visit crosscurrents.ie
Cross Currents Radio Series: Audio Shorts

Playing around with my firewall is all very well.
Yet, how avoid triviality ? Quadriviality ? Early banality and the noble art of self-imitation?
Why ironic or muted trumpets to announce a noble message ? Or are such categories banned for the future ? For whose future ? Is there a “second”theme ? Original, whew ? Under this hot, whistling hot sun ?
Too hot to playact , to typeset.

Yes, go back over diary entries this time last 2015 or 2014. Were those Keatsian days so roasting ?
Perhaps yes, I do be disremembering.
Now it’s reach and overreach the Heaney Number , health being splendid, the PIANO TRIO
NR. 2 ( with Viola ) and all the hay harvested.
Yes, I survived blistering heat , the temptation to let all go, to destroy finely wrought work, to cry : ” What’s the point?”
Soon we’ll have all the cello works in the composer’s bag , recorded for the new CD.
What’s new in the offing ? Strings or wind ? How fish for a performance , a recognition or a smile ?
Winter will come and the Fight for the Musical Faith, the composer’s indomitable will to plough icy fields. Be
prepared for all faint new autumnal stirrings , small or big. Be aware. Beware!

HORACE ODE 1. 13

I greatly admire great Horace – so thus I translate his great Ode :

Ciao, Leucone ! Hey, it’s forbidden ! Just stop asking what kind of a death the gods might have in store for you- or , indeed, for me ; and would you please stop fiddling around with those Babylonian numbers !
Whatever happens, just put up with it .
Whether there’ll be more winters, or mebbe Juppiter has sent us this as the last, with those Tuscan waves walloping the bloody bejaysus outta the opposing rocks !
Get wise !
Strain your wines and in this short period just give up on long hope.
Time, that bastard, is flying as we speak.
Grab today ; just give minimal credence to what’s coming after this.

FRANK CORCORAN Translation 2016

Certainly I will compose a Cello Concerto. How ? Certainly great Dvorak towers. Logical, Lutoslawsky´s Concerto is Music Drama of the highest order. When then ? This blessed night ?!
How then ? ( – Well, eg. for a start, mine is not the tonal option of Dvorak´s lovely and virtuoso washed sheen, his parallel sixths at high orchestral velocity , his aching sequences, cadential constructs and Slavic sighs and beautiful B Minor – yoked functional harmony.
Obvious. No?
I´ll also wish to prepare my very personal version of my personally ” drama” ( “Agony” is a fine word still ), my very own: Solo Versus Orchestra, Great Titan Against Great Many Them, ahem, yes, my ploy´s quite different from the Polish Master´s masterly tension graph. How?
Corcoran must ( once again ) invent his wheel, must sketch his musical syntax for his 2012 – 2013 Cello Concerto. Major principles of musical psychology holding on in the macro-wave , let´s say, so in the micro-wave how´ll he construct his initial “A then B then C” , that beautiful bane of all great composers´ humble musical alphabets after the Final Atonal Revolution? ( – we mean: its latest date was about 1913 – ish, a possible earliest date around Gesualdo, Wagner, such shades ; – but more on this in a near future, my Humble Hamburg Musing, – I have no doubt at all on this, ahem, score. ) . We mean by this, surely, that the poor man must choose even his basic motivic moves , all cello leps, mighty orchestral thin or thick massing, eg. he has to chose , say, ” C, A, Z, B,” etc. plus the well-known , -sung, – heard and -used motivic operations , blah, on this little start.
Follow ? Nein? Okay:
I´ll keep to a scale, seven sturdy notes ( – they often stood me stead ” sa bhearna bhaoil” ).
Neither minor nor major but, yes, Corcoran. With these seven tones, build me then my three great movements, my mighty soloist-plus-orchestra clash by night struggle, my heard accompaniment of My Dark Cello´s Great Song, Lush Dream Sounding. My tones will suffer, sing, die.
high, my post-Dvorak-and-Lutoslawsky

FRANK CORCORAN – VIOLIN CONCERTO

February 9th, 2012 by 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 all the rest in the opening movement´s orchestral tutti pitted against the weak-strong strength of the solo line.
The Slow Movement is certainly a ” Lied Ohne Worte”, pure amhrán. It has to be.
So what´s my whole ( shortish , packed, compact ) 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 ( in full flight) of fiddling fun and violinistic seriousness and art´s sorrow and fast, furious, last orchestral thoughts. “Quasi Un Concerto “? – No, the real thing, but a concerto of our time, my seven tones re-living ( at least a century of violin concerti without being in the least neo-tonal or neo-this and that. I´ll call it also: ” The One And The Many” ; “Four Strings Against The Rest”; or we should subtitle its three supple, subtle movements perhaps: ” Announce The Event” , ” Sighing Song” and “Lightness Is All”.

Not push moving to shove but Great Heat Summer collapsing now, today, into Still Very Hot Autumn, season of mellow, smellow.
Is ripeness all?
Yes, if we include the anima naturaliter ecstatica. Good art needs high ecstasy, the glory of the urge to create, to burst, the quill spilling over, the High Point, a GREAT shout in the Joycean street…. Hooray has to meet Anger,
Wallop should meld into Batedebejaysus orchestrally, a sigh or a smile or a sob to melt your entrails. Keep it Baroque, Bach !
Walnuts ripen. Vegetable marrows and vines and olives…. why not the composer now ?