Frank Corcoran

Januar 27 2018 HAMBURG BLANKENESE

KONZERT

” BILDER HOEREN – TOENE SEHEN ”

Heinz Gellrich ( Maler) und Frank Corcoran ( Komponist )

Die Synaesthesie hat bei beiden, Malern wie Komponisten, in Europa, wenigstens seit Mussorgsky ´s “Bilder einer Ausstellung”, eine hervorgehobene Bedeutung.

Farben und Töne sind häufig näher beieinander ,als wir erwarten.
Man denkt an Klee und Kandinsky auf der einen Seite und Skriabin und Messiaen auf der anderen.
Titel wie “Der gelbe Klang” (Kandinsky 1909) oder “Couleurs De la Cit’e C’eleste (Messiaen 1949), erzählen ihre eigene Geschichte.

2014 hörte der Hamburger Maler Heinz Gellrich die 2.te Symphonie des irischen Komponisten Frank Corcoran.Während vieler Monate im Jahr 2015 malte er das zentrale Bild, das später zum “Corcoran Tryptichon” erweitert werden sollte.
Er “übersetzte” tiefe, ozeanische Töne und Linien und Rhytmen des ersten Satzes der 2. Symphonie in seine eigene abstrakte Komposition, mit eigener Textur, Dichtigkeit und Bewegung.

In diesem Konzert präsentieren die beiden Künstler ihre zwei Kunstformen mit ihren beiden Werken.

Corinna Meyer-Esche(sopran) und Jennifer Hymer (Klavier) illustrieren musikalisch.

PROGRAMM:

Begruessung

Frank Corcoran : Vokalise fuer Heinz Gellrich

Heinz Gellrich TRYPTICHON Beleuchtung / Frank Corcoran 2. Symphonie Satz 1.

Frank Corcoran FIVE HAIKUS ( Corinna Meyer-Esche , Sopran und Jennifer
Hymer, Pianoforte ) U.A.

Johannes Brahms DEUTSCHE VOLKSLIEDER ” ”

Robinson Panoramic Quartet
Michelle O’Rourke, vocalist
Qristina Brooke, fiddle
Aoife Burke, cello, David Whitla, double bass
Karen Dervan and Robin Panter, violas
Simon O’Connor, piano

Programme includes

Frank Corcoran Piccolo Quartetto Filarmonico (world premiere)

Haydn Divertimento for Cello & Bass
Domenico Dragonetti Duet for Cello & Bass
Frank Bridge Lament for 2 Violas
Simon O’Connor Left Behind – Songs of the 1916 Widows
Qristina Brooke Music for Trad Fiddle, Loops & Voice

Tickets available here.
Venue
Bello Bar
Portobello
Dublin
Ireland
Venue Contact Info
Bello Bar
Frank Corcoran
Frank Corcoran(b. 1944)

Frank Corcoran was born in Tipperary and studied in Dublin, Maynooth, Rome and Berlin (with Boris Blacher). He was the first Irish composer to have his ‘Symphony No.

Yes, art can be defined. but watch the context, the cultural and historical period. Art or arts ? Which art ?

See also Horace, the Roman poet. See also craft ( as in 19th. c. ” Arts and crafts” ) . etc. Clear the decks.

Or are we attempting a definition in this 21 st. c. ?

Where we do the defining is also important. eg. Take Ireland and, say, the contemporary art of composed music.
Why do I insist that in Ireland still today there is hardly a concept, a definition, even the possibility of defining composed musical works – composed by Irish composers – as art, indeed as Irish art, an art on a level with eg. Irish poetry, film, painting etc.
What are the causes of this blindness, this prejudice, this exclusion of this definition ? Are they dogmatic ? Is it lazy thinking? Could it be lack of experiencing New Irish Music, is that it ? Mull this over.

There have in the past been many definitions of art, of musical composition. It´s also worth reflecting a moment on some of the things we still today may define composing music as:
it is sicut fumus, like smoke, ethereal. It is a temporal art, indeed THE time-art par excellence. Time-bending, stretching, sculpting, stitching, overlapping, deluding, defying, conquering. ( See Rosenstock´s ” Buailim bob ar bhás! ” ) Composing is hope, utopian, mythic, fighting the good fight. If “cinis aequat omnia”, still a Frank Corcoran composition will yell and shout and erect its own resistance to Montague´s ” Sea of history / Upon which we all turn / Turn and thrash / And disappear… ” Music keens, protests, praises a fightin´ transcendence which potentially lives beyond the grave.

Certainly, music can be defined. Art can be defined.

Irish contemporary music fights for its place in defining Ireland, Irish art, Irish artists.

FRANK CORCORAN

2014

” The light gleams… ”

Frank Corcoran ALWAYS has something to say – either in words or music! His mind is sharp, witty, makes connections forward and backward in time; he makes you stop and think.
Always uniquely individual, challenging and puzzling, his music reflects his Irishness, his distance from Ireland, and an uncomfortable relationship with the constraints of that society.

When I arrived in Ireland in the early 1970’s, there were very few Irish composers. Frank was one of the first that I met in Dublin. He was then working as an Inspector for the Department of Education; the contrast between his creative inner world and the requirements of his job was stark.

Soon after that, I formed a contemporary music ensemble. CONCORDE performed Frank’s ” Five Songs of Gabriel Rosenstock ” ( ” Cúig Amhráin de Chuid Gabriel Rosenstock” ) for soprano voice, violin, cello and piano at Sender Freies Berlin in 1981 – the first of many performances abroad in the subsequent 30-plus years of Concorde’s existence. Performing a work in the Irish language in Germany was a memorable experience – but for Frank, language is his sustenance and it seemed a natural thing to mix Irish, English and German – 3 languages and cultures which are essential to his being.

In 2006, Concorde invited Frank to respond to a commission which would honour the work of Samuel Beckett on his centenary. Frank’s piece – again featuring soprano voice, this time with bass clarinet, violin and cello – used five words by Beckett: ” The light gleams an instant…. ”

As always, the music was vivid, stark, piercing.

I wish Frank well on his 70th birthday and I will commemorate it in Dublin with a performance of ” A Dark Song” (2011) in a concert at the RHA Gallery.
Frank’s song has always been dark, but there is a twinkle in the eye as well. Life has been harsh to him, but the sheer joy of finding expression through music has been a happy companion to him for most of those 70 years. Happy Birthday, Frank – Yes, keep singing!

Jane O’Leary (Dr.)
Director, Concorde ensemble
Galway, Ireland
February 21, 2014

A FEW LATE OCTOBER HAIKUS

Shannon bank haystacks
Stirring in the memory
Sweet pain and sweet hay

See all these haystacks
When the river floods, flooded.
Who can stop our pain ?

Shannon island calls:
” Where is God ? Who’re his daughters ? ”
Re-fill your pipe.

Deep Shannon river
Wanting to pull, to drown me.
It makes our chess-board.

( On water, on land
My eye tries to see itself )
Good night, ladies all ….

Subject: cocaí féir/ haystacks

haystack after haystack …

the sweet pain

of memory

coca féir i ndiaidh a chéile
pian mhilis
na cuimhne

Ron Rosenstock & Gabriel Rosenstock

Lesetipp: Hommage an Frank Corcoran

ALLE PRESSEMITTEILUNGEN

22 Oktober 2015

Zum 70. Geburtstag des irisch-deutschen Komponisten hat der Herausgeber Hans-Dieter Grünefeld eine Festschrift verfasst.

„At Seventy“ ist als Hommage an das reiche Schaffen seines langjährigen Freundes konzipiert und für Musikliebhaber in englischer Sprache im Selbstverlag aufgelegt. Für seine Komposition Joycepeak Music wurde der in Hamburg lebende Frank Corcoran vom WDR ausgezeichnet. Mit dem Untertitel „Old And New – An Irish Composer Invents Himself” blicken in der Buchausgabe mehrere Autoren und auch der Komponist selbst auf sein musikalisch ereignisreiches Leben zurück. Wunderschöne Gemälde, die bei jährlichen Aufenthalten in Italien entstanden, zieren die Umschlagseiten des Bandes.

At Seventy, Selbstverlag Grünefeld, Geverdesstr. 19, 23554 Lübeck, 116 Seiten, 24,95 Euro (+ 5 Euro Versand), hdgruenefeld@t-online.de

Irland Information, Frankfurt, Tel.: 069-66 800 950, www.ireland.com, info.de@tourismireland.com
(25.10.15-ot)

Already it is swinging towards autumnal even if it is only the 18th.of July. Strange.

Sunsets now glorious, a degree colder the early morning. A year on, closed, wrapped up the Clarinet Concerto

and the Piano Trio with Viola/

The 8 Duetti are all ready for recording on October 17,

ditto my now half/ancient

” Rhapsodic Bowing for 8 Celli”

. And Malachy will get around to performing the delightful ” Piccolo Quartetto

Filarmonico ” with doublebass, cello, viola and violin on Nov. 1 2017 in Dublin.

For the stunning ( International Jury’s word…. ) choral ” 8 Haikus ” let us pray /

Painindearsery surrounds me.

And impatience.

Do the chores. Little enough.

The myriad beautiful details of that mighty Cello Concerto are now,

they exist.

SEVEN THESES ON JOYCE AND IRISH MUSIC

( Delivered Nov. 26 2015 at the James Joyce Centre Frank Corcoran At Seventy Concert )

1. Pythagoras was the greater composer – il miglior fabbro.

2. Yet James Joyce was in many respects the greatest Irish composer.

3. Joyce chiselled and turned and fashioned his syllables and word-units and titles and bits of songs
as would a composing Irish artist. He thus achieved his emotional-semantic character-associations and the fragments of memories which he needed in composing those great sonorous passages in his own sound-world.

4. If he had so wished , he could have reached highest places in his singing, playing and composing of ( at least ) Lieder. He chose not to.

5. As I mentioned in my 2005 Trieste James Joyce Summer School lecture, Nora’s father , Tom Barnacle, was known in Galway by his nick-name “Gobar i Goney ” – Irish : ” Ag obair i gconai ” = “always busy “; – here is Joyce’s opening to Gabriel Conroy’s far-off West of Ireland
“native Doric”, the music of sean-nos song. At the same time we have Steven Dedalus’s Lestrygonian entry , ” Music is maths for ladies…. “. And then in the Trieste Notebook , Stephen Dedalus prefers the “ vigour of the mind ” needed in composing literature to any thought of composing music.
James Joyce, a great LISTENER, preferred the intellectual rigour of composing words to composing musical structures….

6. In 1917 in Zuerich the James Joyce family had as neighbour in the Seefelderstrasse 73 the composer, Philip Jarnach, who was the secretary of the great Ferrucio Busoni, a major figure in the revolution of musical language in the early decades of the 20th. century . ( Years later Philip Jarnach became President of the Musikhochschule in Hamburg . )
Did Joyce ever discuss the why and how of this revolution or the birth of the early atonal masterpieces of the Second Viennese School ? He did not . Did he show an interest in the compositional bomb that was Stravinsky’s RITE OF SPRING at its Paris premiere on March 31 1913 ? Was he at all interested in the Viennese “Skandalkonzert” with the premieres of Alban Berg’s “Peter Altenberg Lieder ” and Webern’s Opus 6 Six Orchestral Pieces in May of the same year ? Did he ? Had he ever asked himself why John Field was buried in Moscow’s Nevensky Cemetry but not in Leopold Bloom’s Dean’s Grange? Or why Stanford,” the Irish Brahms “, ended his days at Cambridge but not in Dublin ? Why there was no Dublin Bartok or Sibelius ?

7. Joyce had an intimate, urgent yet deeply split relationship with art-music, with any Irish concept of composition as an Irish art. He mirrored his native city’s colonial inheritage in this regard.
He was the perfect forerunner of our post-colonial – or non-reception- reception of Irish contemporary composing as art- up to this day.
As Irish art. Of Irish composers as on a par with Irish poets, Irish painters etc. Perfect.

Frank Corcoran

‘The loss of the 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.

In advance of Sunday, here’s a preview of the film, ‘The Light Gleams’:

password: lightgleams

I’m sure you’ll all agree that Mark and David have done an excellent job on the film.

I’m very much looking forward to its screening on Sunday .