frank corcoran
::frank the pen
home works discography excerpts reviews news links contact
In einer eMail vom 09.04.2006 16:33:59 Westeuropãische Normalzeit schreibt FBCorcoran:
Tiocfaidh ár lá, yes, do try to hang on to this always, but especially in the fight for The Faith against all tonight’s Benedictine blandishments. They, I was there, tunnelled upwards from Norcia’s grand Lower Chapel, painting their genitalless Gesù at the third curve of the tufa in (their) eighth century. All is not lost. Lab - ora!
So therefore: Light = Dante’s ‘‘Prime Mover’’ (-Beckett’s, too, as it so happened).
It gleams. My violin, bass-clarinet and cello must paint that ‘‘gleeeeeee’’ in full flight and its full-mouth stop.
Genuflecting as profoundly as a Luciferian will ever now, can ever click the knee-muscle’s innate need to worship. - Now hang on! - WHY? Why worship? WHICH super-knee’s what’s behind much Dantesque dishonesty, trickery, archery? Precisely Whose knee? You may laugh. It is forbidden.
What cuts off its gleaming? After, after all, one instant? We supposed it’s His Prime Mover, - okay? Now watch, ye Benedictines! - Either: 1. its ‘‘gleaming’’ (still gleaming .... ?) is cut off after it has gleamed a full instant, remember; - but by WHOM, pray?
- or: 2. Supposing the light supposes it is worth only supposing that it gleameth for a mere nothing, a nano -nothing , God’s mosquito-inspiring ‘‘instant’’? This our light therefore decides to cease now its gleaming, mother? Whist would you stop all your gleamin’? - A kind of Old Hebrew - Irish, you guess: ‘‘I gleam that which I shall gleam?’’
(Frank Corcoran’s QUASI UN BASSO for Solo Bass is performed on May 17
2006 in Magyar Radio/Radio Bartók’s Bela Bartók Centenary Concert in
Budapest)
In einer eMail vom 05.04.2006 09:45:02 Westeuropãische Normalzeit schreibt FBCorcoran:
Is cumadóir ceoil mé. I am an Irish composer. The pre-industrial, rural Ireland of my childhood in the fifties was, in a way, not unlike the small, agricultural Hungary of Bartók’s youth and maturity. Dublin and Budapest were, for all their artistic short-comings, vitally important cultural metropoles. (- For Hungarian and Irish music-lovers they still are.) Small nations both, their surrounding neighbours often seemed culturally omnivorous, omnipotent posing a real threat that the identity and self-respect of both little emerging States would be gobbled up by an all greedy neighbour.
Bartók ploughed the lonely furrow. Bartók said "NO!" to cultural tyranny. Bartók took his stance. Moral. Artistic. Not that he wanted to marry folk- and art-music; you can’t. But as a folk-collector and as a 20th c. composer, forging and finding his individual composer’s voice, he refused to let lazy indifference stifle musical diversity or musical courage. Courage - that’s it. He discovered the unknown, hidden jewels of folk-art. He composed his own mighty musical structures. Behind both of these, yes, heroic stances was Bartók's refusal to give in.
My own little Ireland in my 20th c. has gone an in many ways similar path. With very mixed results. My Irish language dies daily a thousand deaths. Ireland, too, had a Renaissance, an explosion of Irish traditional music which however by its very over-kill and over-exposure in the media is endangered. As a composer in Ireland, an Irish composer, I had to plough my lonely furrow. In my native Tipperary I had to overcome a still mightily hostile indifference to the oldest layers of Irish singing and instrumental art. In my own youthful struggle to compose and construct tonal structures at once private and public, the enemy number one was Dublin’s very clearly post-colonial dependence on a second-rate, hand-me-down, London-based music-pedagogy. Even bits of Bartók were misused in our musical curricula, his work contextlessly, lovelessly paraded without any real understanding of where Bartók was coming from, but shamelessly paraded as ‘‘our’’ apologia for contemporary music, as ‘‘our’’ bulwark against, say, the horrors of the Second Viennese School. And my little Ireland , politically a ‘‘free ’’Republic, had in its early days of liberation psychologically and politically not succeeded in providing a climate of musical understanding and the respect for musical creativity necessary to have, in its critical years, an Irish Bartók, Bartók na h - Éireann.
My ‘‘Quasi Un Basso’’ for solo bass is my diptych for, as Bartók uses it, a mighty orchestra in a solo instrument. (I am thinking of those - now sadly ubiquitous but then so fresh, so shocking Bartók pizz.s from his basses in the orchestral works like his ‘‘Divertimento’’ for String Orchestra, the extraordinary long legato lines near the end of his ‘‘Music For String Orchestra, Percussion and Celesta’’, the daring and brilliance of his orchestral imagination.) Mine are two fragmented pictures from my vanished Ireland.
Art-music today faces the most viciously anti-art global market known to man. We have no place where wares are bartered. But YOU CANNOT BARTER BARTÓK! - Nor indeed any music of lasting value. It is questionable whether the folk-musics of either Hungary or Ireland will survive the market’s kiss of death. It is doubly questionable whether Hungarian and Irish composers will survive our global village which today is swollen with the greatest ocean of sonic rubbish known to man. Have we composers a place to be heard? Where’s the silence? From which music is born and heard?(See my Beyond Beckett 2006 Beckett Centenial Commission for the National
Gallery’s Centennial Concert, April 23, 2006, 12.30 to 17.30)
In einer eMail vom 03.04.2006 16:35:38 Westeuropãische Normalzeit schreibt FBCorcoran:
Tiocfaidh ár lá, yes, do hang on to this, especially in the Fight For The Faith against all of tonight’s Benedictine blandishments. They tunnelled, I was there, upwards from Norcia’s Lower Chapel, painting a genitalless Gesù at the third turn of the tufa screw in their curved eighth century. Lab. Ora. All not lost.
Light = Dante’s ‘‘Prime Mover’’? Beckett’s?
It gleams, violin and bassclarinet and cello paint ‘‘gleeeee’’ in its full flight, its gob then stopped with my ‘‘mmmmms’’.
A Lucifer genuflecting, suppose with me, clicks a knee’s innate need to
worship, but, hould:
What then did cut off the Light’s gleaming? After its nano-second? After
its decent (- but please, define. Two hundred words.) ‘‘I gleam,
therefore I am and I definitely do have value’’?
It doesn’t matter now.
Will it? Happen to me in my sun-crazed head’s babbling fluids? - As I am bending to whet which servant-girl’s heel-dinge? Or what impaled serpe, perfectly harmless, milkless, no laughing lunge, will topple my guilt at the drop of Corbianco milk? My robust belief that I’ll knit up the rent sleeve of down-Milky-Lazio-Way streaming Cristo?
That’ll be Act Three. Let’m come. And they will; I bought hearth and heart-history with Corbianco cows’ stalls’ shadows (- never a suicide in the best of families) in last winter, comfy by late April, would explore ould eye-balls by the first week o’July. Act Two was consolidated by buying worms, their wood. No dinge in sight then. Late love can mature before their impalement, before my sixty cows’ whinge comes to shove the proprietario, well.
They calve gletchers. Great delight in just what my? We impaled St. Augustine, we done a Dan Flyin’ Tipperary Breen Ould IRA rub-out (- not enough . It doth behove) on: Middle Italian Rabbis and South-North Kill-joy and The Unwashed Armpits Of Dopey Depression.
Sail high; flail; hail my highest and freshly purchased medlars. Ho-ho.