Frank Corcoran

It is not easy. Gets worse all the time.Take how I am currently finishing my Piccolo Quartetto Filarmonico ( using doublebass, cello, viola and violin ), trying to find – with the infinite patience of a good dentist with root-treatment – my “Grossform” , this one-movement’s overall form and the relations between the parts and each other and with the whole . One tiny wrong move and the delicate balance is gone….  the non-coordinated bits and the barred bits, smeared 4-voiced passages played as fast as possible against metric music, my work opening out or narrowing in on a focal tone (  –  yet, never neo-tonal ) or two. That is still my problem , to hear what I see on the hot summery manuscript paper, Don’t let up. No self or self-imitation ( cheap ) allowed.

IN  THE  DEEP HEART’S  CORE     ( May 31 Dublin  AIC CONCERT, Anne-Marie O’Farrel, Harp  )

My short Harp Solo pits the instrument’s low strings against its ethereal high ones. The opening fortissimo music generates  the whole thing , including the final high thoughts of this miniature art-work . In writing for this great an-orchestra-all-in-one-instrument my duty as a composer must be to avoid the merely ornamental, the beautiful ( but too often cheesey )  clichees of 19th. c. harp compositions, the merely lovely sheen of their glissandis and their ultimately boring middle range. ( Stravinsky rehabilitated the instrument with his pale low tones in that  little Tombeau for Fuerst Fuerstenberg.  ) No tired rhetoric  but stern compression. The title of course also recalls the harp’s Irish past, coming from W.B.Yeats’s 1890 minor masterpiece , ” The Lake-Isle Of Inishfree” ,
in which the young exile hears in London  the “low sounds lapping by the shore” of his Co. Sligo idyll, Lough Gill.
Yes. he hears it ” in the deep heart’s core”. I,too, hear it.

FRANK  CORCORAN

I am pleased.

Festschrift Frank Corcoran will appear soon. Very. Memory lane and archiving against time, forgetting, deadly indifference. Nobody wants to die.

In completing the new Piccolo Quartetto Filarmonico ( – uses also a double bass ) I pit high against low, the metred against the polymetred, the spattered against the tightly controlled. Good disparate stuff has to be – as always- united and heard to generate the different parts until it is all “used up ” .

I was into this of course nearly forty years ago. Tough struggle. Bore fruit in my 1977 PIANO TRIO and WIND QUINTET.

I am pleased.

His beautiful, bony fingers articulate, his four plus four bars make eight Irish traditional bars. The drone bass – or its cleverly placed absence , these build the heard form for Tony Macmahon’s  right-hand pleading , his hymning, high linear gasps and plaintive, plain( Co. Clare )  chanting , the old Irish harpers’ pre-Schubertian airs, monumental architectural a la A A B B , a strong ascent, trembling trellis-work above, their lovely descent. Frank Corcoran’s Second Law Of Slow Airs’ Thermodynamics.

For years I – as an Irish composer –  I’ve heard breathlessly  Tony’s melodic tracery; – all its delicate, ornamented phrasing. Or take his humility ,  a few buttons to sing the  bass line .  Rock-like.Rock-

Tony MacMahon’s  “Sean O Duibhir An Ghleanna” is a masterpiece of Naive Art – its native singing , his box wind-music  from my  beaten race. I myself have tried to approach its symmetry.  Many times.

Track Four then , ” The Wounded Hussar ” , is something quite other – minor becomes  major . Tony MacMahon’s Picardy Third wings . Bony work great !

The Dutch Radio Concertzender broadcasts  Frank Corcoran’s new  CELLO

CONCERTO  (  RTE Lyric recording of  March 13  Dublin  National Symphony

Orchestra  /  Kenneth Montgomery / Martin Johnston , Soloist  )  on:

Sunday April 19 2015  between 17.00  and  18.00  .

So what will it bring , this new Pratoleva year ?

Schott will publish my choral EIGHT HAIKUS which won the 2013 International Forum For Choral Music  Premier Prix.

Other choral works will sound, the human breath.

( But of course the human body and breath is also fully there in a Corcoran orchestral or chamber work, strain , aim, polish, energy, shaped musical strength aching to be born, sound as thought and conceived and incarnate. )

Festschrift Frank Corcoran will appear.

Another year near hill-top Celleno and clear April sunny skies. The nights are cold still. New energy stirring.

I finished the six Irish Duets for Cello and Piano, short settings of some of the loveliest  Irish Slow Airs “ar an sean n’os ”  known to me  :  Im Aonar Seal, Na Conneries, Sean O Duibhir An Ghleanna, A Mhairin De Barra, A Una Bhain  1.  and  2. These six are among the finest we have; in each  great expressive power is unleashed in  fine architectural trellis-work. Four lines in each , A B B A  , beautifully balanced. The perfection of a Schubert Lied. Voila !

These settings are neither neo-romantic nor kitsch nor minimalistic nor neo-Bart’ok but rather vintage Corcoran. Each captures the significant motif of the “amhran” in question . The piano is a wash of orchestral colour, of course . The cello surges. I keep the wildness, ornamentation;  melodic ” multa in parvis”. Not a note too much. Not a sigh, an ascent – descent, an apoggiatura without high voltage.

April 4 2015.  NDR  KULTUR  “Prisma  Musik”    20.05  –  22.00

Frank Corcoran’s radio analysis of two focal Mozart symphonies , Nr. 29

in A Major and the “Jupiter”.

22.05  Frank Corcoran’s  4.  Symphony  (   1997  Irish N.S.O., Conducted by Colman Pearce )

Cur Deus homo ? Cur homo soffert ? Cur creator egoismus ? Cur Deus Sadista ? Cur lacrimae German Wings ?  Cur vetus carmen ? Cur ?