Frank Corcoran

Pángur Bán is right: one kitten shinnies up a vine trellis; number two´s playing domino with a pebble on the terrace; three and four clean their predators´shining teeth on a rose-bush. A full harvest moon oversees the fun, feline, play, high jinks, cats´night theatre. Is this a rehearsal for a kitten´s future ? “Play” the right word here, eh ? Play as ec-stasis ? As delight in shaped activity without purpose? Animal ludens? Free or “free” this fun? ( Pángur Bán had no concept of that monk´s writhing or writing, of art, of the art of writing tones and pre-imagining their sounding ) Nor was the same harvest-moon especially interested in Sapph´s ladies´slow dance on the shore.

Our nights here at the September peperino Magic Table are a tad cooler, a jot, a degree of the thermometre at the Pizza Chimney. My drift is my continuous trouble and torment with six tones , F R Cis Es C A . Toxic. ( Apparently these 6 tones, with travail and with slaves´yells extracted from this typist contain my composer´s D.N.A ? )

Her four freely Olympian feline children will this cooler September magic night “comfort” our now firmly ( and only temporarily ) caged
cat. Has to be , sterilize, tomorrow at magic dawn… . I am locked into, seemingly, my rotting 6-note motive, scale, row: F D Cis Es C A ( from, how could it be other ? , ” Frank Corcoran ” . “Rotten” only in its tonal implications, how counterpoint with its inversion and “Krebs” , remain wonderfully ( tonality-wise ) polyvalent ? Will certainly solve tommorrow magic dawn. My caged cat won´t. She lacks, Mrs. Aristotle, concepts, therefore tones. Hmmm.

Yesterday´s ( my ) ” Yeatsian” to ” Keatsian” was a cheap e-shot; justified, if at all, by this maestro´s , well enough, laudable attempt to paint My Garden´s colour-passage from, say, this last Monday to moon-lit / anti-Sapphic this night. Killer mother cat, ” lovely”, sharpens her four daughters´ killing, pouncing paws on a/their thankless lizard which she then offers us as breakfast toast. Darwin chilled. Only this morning can I even attempt ( the lowest garden storey has that Septimber venticello ) first orchestral sketches of my future Orchesterkind , ” QUASI UNA FANTASIA ” , in fact, in scrolled fact a paean. What ?
Great paeaning brass will paean-like celebrate my e-being, my scribe-I-love-thee, my trust in
WHICH symphonic, – strings/ woodwind/ percussion et full, full, FULL. Very full. ” Full”.

Tuck in your shirt-tails, flapping free in the great heat since May month. A few degrees cooler is no bad things; it enables me to think tones again, slap down a motif, a chord, even a rhythmic idea. Thel ake keeps its warmth, an immense mass of volcanic water ( arsenic ? sulpher ? ).
So all in all, there´s new movement. You sleep better, visualize a theme. ” Pre-composition” , I suppose. Water lapping Yeatsian; the countryside Keatsian. Fair enough for September nectarines and kiwis and peaches and “fragolini” grapes. Yummie!
If music is also metaphor, is September music in any sense the harvest home?

It´s a good five kilometres out to Isola Martana; the
keel of Paolo Pescatore´s boat held firm. I did notice the ninety metres depth of water under singing us. ( – Alas, poor Tomoa! Which oaf had tightened the Gothic piano-string around whose throat ? ) So Amalasuntha, proud princess, descended those stone steps in that tufa tunnel ? Down to that limpid water ?

Words will sweat this day, melt like butter in this heat. Good for planting lettuce. Rilke-Keatsian time all parched and breathless till the little breeze, il venticello, sidles up. How think tones in this breathlessness ? Well, Pythagoras did it in great Sicilian temperatures, Skalkottas, poor Xenakis, Basil the Monk and others. It is that will to tone we want. To tone down nature´s noises and ciccadas and birds and sheep and cows and the sweating horse; let the willed tones up, out and down on five lines and four spaces. The will to make, to whistle and sing yourself free. Hot ceol. A warm piece. Melting beauty.

The stronger two kittens play with a heavy pebble; stone terrace kitty-hockey, over and back, no hot holes barred…. Warm Monday.

November 25 2011.
Royal Irish Academy of Music Dublin.
RTÉ Premiere of commissioned Frank Corcoran´s : CLARINET QUINTET
( Vanbrugh Quartet and Fintan Sutton, clarinets )

Today will be up to forty degrees, so it´s swimming fully dressed.
But now it´s rosy-fingering; my dawn comes filtering through and true, not yet real pink blue, all Franco´s seventy five cows lowing at their bovine Matins. ” Far call”, THE WAKE is right. Clarion. This soundscape for world and dawning. ( Cows smell the coming heat. Start the still sleeping tractor quick.) This shimmering Lazio Tuesday is being born.

Actually it´s ” SEAN NUA” , ” OLD AND NEW”, “ever old and ever new” these clarinet colours in Mozart´s Clarinet Quintet ( I´ll be on again about his crafty assymetries in this 1789 work, late autumn, was it ? ).
My RTE commission, Frank Corcoran´s Clarinet Quintet, nears its premiere, this November 2011 in Dublin. Assymetries ? SEAN NUA ? What colours ? Tone? Leaps and sighs ? Four glowing strings plus clarinet ( I remember Mozart´s mighty leap of over two octaves? ) ? Yet in no way Neo-Mozartian. Um Gottes willen ! Mamma mia! My three movements have to find their own narrative, tell their own story of a few recurring tones. With musical logic. Hearable. Hearably new and yet connected. A string quartet plus a clarinet.