Frank Corcoran

1981 ,I was – from West Berlin – back in Dublin, the Vienna call came through . Into “our” kitchen. Yes: Good:
The O.R.F. had planed my 1. SYMPHONY ( ” SYMPHONIES” of 23 Wind Instruments )
“We” drove down then from Berlin to Mozart´s Vienna. ( I had heard of Salieri, his pomps ). Lothar Zagrosek, GREAT conductor,

I didn´t want to come to Germany.

Webern called. Me.

It was lonely, lonely 1967 as I made my pilgrimage to Anton ( von ? ) Webern´s house in Austrian Mittersill – before the Stockhausens and all these Fernyhoughs etc. etc. There he got the curfew bullet, cigar ignited. ( No help. Nowhere. Austrian / German / American Webern musicologists, weak, very, analytically weak ) .
I take now Webern´s ( lonely ? – CERTAINLY lonely ! ) Opus 11, No. 3. What does the cello play , why the the piano accompany ? Cello trils pianissimo E flat – F flat , ” punctuating” , ” commenting ” lWebern´s low piano trichord darkly, – and then – as if Webern blew a muted trombone ? – . Second ” heroic” cello statement, again it´s a pp – swell – pp, then four bars of eternally deep frozen ( – We´d better e-mail Dante QUICK ! ) cadence for both end-of-that-faughed-19th. c. – solo-instruments ” prostituted ” Cello / Piano Duo and WHAT , post Gustav Klimt, we hope …. )
Nobody has – in Ireland / in Berlin / in ( Zaccagniniana ) Roma /
in Boston or New York ” explained” to me Webern´s sigh. Why?

You don´t know whence ? Whither? Nor I. Nor why? Sob not my song, Hiawatha, but sigh for slight hope, a sliver of light from behind the glass mirror, hearing ear-hairlets and timpanum agog, straining for Good News. A sliver !
Doubt or sift through many different objective correlatives , but I seem to return again to my “I” amd its lissom, inverted commas. I am all of my habits and willed fantasies and censored intimations of a kind of immortality. I and “I”, my walled-in subject/object. “I” only exist because I think of, will be thinking of me. Think or be thought of. Some drizzly wet day I will not be. Some dry night “I” will begin never again existing. Light is letting down a photon at a time. Light is the burden of nothing, lightens everything; who´s paying the light-bill anyway?

Definitely a collector´s item by now :

Frank Corcoran COLLECTION ONE L.P.
A 33 1/3 R.P.M. SELF HELP 101 STEREO from those now ( infinitely ) distant seventies.
“Frank Corcoran is a real musician. He thinks and talks and acts out music, his own and others`, old and new, he conveys his enthusiasm to his company, whether that be a single friend or a crowded lecture room. His music works for me in visual as well as sound elements…. His uncompromisingly modern music is yet richly textured and rests firmly on fully absorbed classical and baroque traditions…. ” SEAN MULCAHY

The S-Bahn´s crónán in the wet January air as sleep knits up all unravelled pieces of fibre. This day will face the problems of yesterday, I suppose; so what´s so different in the tones of Friday? Between now and my next midnight, which images? Sounds and zounds?

Will my 2012 bring more thinking power to this Humble Hamburg Musing ? And to thinking about tones ? Thinking about thinking ? Hmmm. I wonder. Wait and hear. eg. listen to this sackbuts´music:
“Cogitatum ergo cogitationes” ( = ” Because there are thoughts, therefore there have to be thinkers” . ) . Now how is this whopping tautology in any way an improvement on good old “Cogito ergo sum” ? ( “I think therefore I exist” ) ? – Well, it´s not. While appearing merely to put in the plural “thought” and ” thinker” , its hopeless lack of an “I” makes it unurgent, turgid. Sackbuts, bray on, please.

I´d say, oh worse. – Much worse our Irish composers´plight now.
Webern and Schoenberg and Berg had it tough in post-war artMusik-creating Vienna. Okay, shall I weep ? ..
Caoin tú féin, a chumadóir bhocht ! – ” Irish art ” ? ! ?
My Irish composer´s seventies were , yes, tough. Why? – Because, unfortunately, ” I ” did not exist in ” Irish ” ” art ” .

There are only the two melodic lines, leaping and crisscrossing, chasing each other´s snake-tails, Book of Kells trellis-work in these 4 very short chapters of my
FOUR PIECES FOR TWO CLARINETS.
All the extremities, depths and heights, chalumeau colour, pianissimo breath, howling, high shrieks.
PIECE 1. A-Clarinet follows B-Clarinet canonically up nearly three octaves. Even a fortepiano trill is a dramatic moment before highest stridency wins.
PIECE 2. fast breathlessness of the enormous phrase taking off , this time the rocket ascends over three octaves. Flatterzunge takes over in the second half.
PIECE 3 a quiet, miniature song for both wind-instruments.
Poised, exquisite gestures.
PIECE 4. My salute to ” B.A.C.H.” , certainly, bent and shaped in many different shapes.

Unleash irony, folks of our now calving, birthing 2012.
So let´s just look at the chord for a 2012 moment – here I pre-date Pythagoras and his higly Greek ” The Birth Of Music Out Of A Wheel´s Tyre Pressure”.
Be happy with that.
Let all our New Year Kids rocket, and racket; – well then, we did?
Now dirge for 2012, – Oh Pythagoras, Oh SHITEGOTT- Janus, who will
sing death ´n life ´n suffering for all good Buddhis plus just this, too, – for the forever higher, for the richer, for the mythically
troubled.

– We don´t even have our language!

Now the first dirty wave of rockets ( anti-war, yes, I´ll grant you )
has slashed this Hamburg milky sky, high above my high , Ariel high
loft high stashed window.
Why is this Hamburg New Year Myth so dirty? Why are their young , young
longings, so mythic and so beautiful, so inauthentic? Are they?

Stony ( penile – ye knew – ) TERROR – God Janus brought holy
sleeplessness.