Frank Corcoran

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

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”.

No real illness at the moment, nor hardship nor mental woe ( The mind has mountains, of course. ) .
For 2016 not too many expression-marks or hyphens or trusting or mistrusting. How achieve “serenita’ ” without becoming callous ?
The little chapters for new Piano Trio must in their brevity each burst with expectancy, be each a “state of mind ” ; to connect them
won’t be the problem. My Scale binds them..
Colour galore ; explore the keboard but avoid a tired solution. Courage.
Slip-stream still mirrors “serenit’a ” , all our court Stoics and Epicureans. A tall order.
We sneak with stealth towards December 31….
“He who is not a bollix had better be clever”. Be not quick to anger. Watch the hare set, the hare-lip, the bigger picture . Waste not, want not tones. Accept small talk, small movements, small mercies and small parcels and the evenings getting longer. See through charlatans
Yearnings for a House of Stillness can still tempt, my odd Silence Theorem which claims : 1. All silences are equal, equally silent, equally conducive to composing that New And Last Piano TRIO. 2. Even a Benedictine colouring ( praiseworthy, certainly ) should not interfere with composing or cerebral energy, visionary leps in all the parameters, the solving of order versus chaos, courage, go out into deeper water. Alas, poor trumpet, fear interruptions or choleric outbursts against harmless , social do-goodery.
Sharpen de pen ?

(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?

1. Pythagoras was the great composer – il miglio 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 or the fragments of memories which he needed in composing great sonorous passages in his 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 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 . 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 Irich composers as on a par with Irish poets, painters etc. Perfect.

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/

Frank Corcoran Interview on RTE Radio 1. Dec. 7. 2015

21.1.2016

NDR – KULTUR “Prisma Musik ”

20.05 Frank Corcoran hoert das Cellokonzert von Antonin Dvorak.

22.00 VARIATIONEN ZUM THEMA

Frank Corcoran : Violoncellokonzert

Martin Johnson

National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland

The Holy Season of Flap is almost upon us. How hang on to which Skellig Rock in the December moving tide of lived temporality ? The wash ?
Get back to work. Sculpt. Fashion, chip away at the old block. As daily, daily .Do not let go in the Season. No . ( No
exclamation marks either ! )
Serenity we sing. Tide and time wait not for the carol singer. Lusty humbug threatens with treacly singing and the red wrapping paper industry smiles.
The West’s asleep, all our myths are tired myths. Cease yawning above the deep, the reindeers’ sleep, glee, holy holly. Keep the tones uncontaminated – but how ? Hone the haiku pen, I suppose, a harmless enough ploy.

This Haiku Will Die. But Not Just Yet ….

I pressed, pumped it in.

All Black Holes smirked their : ” So what ?”
I’ll print my Festschrift.

But if God is light ?

Phota daunce through this white hair.

Rinse your two glasses….

Plato got this right ?

Curve plus curve makes circle.

Yes, we tried loving.

These light-waves bend, kiss.

She plus he, the old story….

Five syllables. Terse.

The makers of educational films are not entirely ignorant of the values of money, but essentially they have other ideas in view… But I have an idea — a faith, I suppose it really is — that some of my films — or a single film, or even a single sequence in a film or a shot in a film — will light up a young mind somewhere: — light it up so that nothing — unsympathetic teachers, lack of a decent place to live, or lack of love — can ever plunge it into darkness.”

– John Barnes, 1966

Corcoran Mad Sweeney
Another opportunity to get to know one of the most distinctive voices in Irish contemporary music, Frank Corcoran
Show View record and artist details
Author:
Michael Stewart
Corcoran Mad Sweeney

Mad Sweeney
Music for the Book of Kells
Wind Quintet
Sweeney’s Vision for tape

Buy from Amazon

Hard on the heels of Marco Polo’s issue of symphonies by Frank Corcoran – reviewed above – comes another disc of music by this fascinating composer. Corcoran, who was born in Tipperary in 1944, is a name in contemporary music who has eluded me until the appearance of the disc of the symphonies, and on the evidence of that disc I would certainly rank him as a major discovery of last year. He probably wouldn’t thank me for the comparison, but the best way to characterise his style might be to call him the Maxwell Davies of Ireland. I found the symphonies powerful, original and highly organic in structure. Black Box’s new disc offers us the chance to explore some of his music for smaller ensembles, as well as a remarkably atmospheric piece for tape.
Mad Sweeney for speaker and chamber orchestra is a setting of Seamus Heaney’s translation of an early Irish text about a 7th-century king from northern Ireland who went mad at the battle of Maigh Rath in AD 637, and who thereafter spent the rest of his life living wild as a fugitive and outcast. The Sprechgesang-style speaking part is delivered here in fine dramatic fashion by Corcoran himself, and this is marvellously entwined within the complex musical argument provided by the chamber orchestra. I was continually drawn back to this piece and found much to discover on repeated hearings. Less gripping, I thought, was the percussion piece Music for the Book of Kells which Corcoran describes as ‘a terse musical discourse’ and as ‘not programmatic but rather an abstract structure in its own right’. The trouble with ‘abstract’ percussion music of this kind is that it can have a tendency to dilute a composer’s individuality.
The Wind Quintet is in some ways a rather enigmatic, though nevertheless fascinating and thought-provoking piece that almost demands repeated hearings in order to penetrate its surface. It uses a technique which Corcoran calls ‘macro-counterpoint’ and seems to have a fascination with the opening phrase from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring which is quoted early on and thereafter hinted at throughout. Described by Corcoran as ‘a four-movement, late-20th-century electronic symphony’, Sweeney’s Vision is a subtle and highly effective tape piece, which I would say successfully encapsulates Corcoran’s ideas about ‘mythic sound’ and ‘Irish dream landscape’. Superb performances and excellent recorded sound – Corcoran fans will not bedisappointed.’