Frank Corcoran

To the  EDITOR / Irish Times  .         11.11.2014

Talk about ” Quasi – Talking ” about my own work  ; and writhing about my own works. Difficult.

Why ?  –   Because you sense :

1. I am not getting it. The full self-analysis ; nor even the musical composition, its true genesis and how its substance is born and takes off in full flight, well-wrought,  well-rounded off .

2. Self-deceit is never distant , self-diddlement. Tales heard from another . A story “bentrovato” if not quite how it really was, perhaps ?

3. When is writing writhing ?  Riding blissfully over truth  – what truth ?

5  March  2015  ,  H.R.2             Hessischer Rundfunk 2.   Kultur

21.30  –  22.30    ”  Cluster ”       Komponistenportraet

FRANK  CORCORAN

It is no joke and yet for me it wasa rare pleasure to have spent this grayish-Bergedorf day ( we are still pre-Winter Solstice, remember,  ) correcting the orchestral parts for my new  CELLO CONCERTO  (   premiere March 13.  2015 in  in Dublin . )  . Tricky the bass clarinet’s quirls , all the double bassoon darkly farting , my  transposing instruments.  It’s not yet two years since – in our sun-filled  back-room, I composed it in furious, patient, unrepeatable ecstasy.

The symphonic opening does, well, open a high argument , a solo cello pitted against an  orchestral Moloch.  Take the ” motto-theme ”  on its three high trumpets: Dvorak and Lutoslawsky behind, before me, I will sing the mad, sad years behind This Big Song;  the  Slow Movement’s shifting lines and colours and familial shadows and background-foreground shapes are less my aping of splendid 19th. c. forebears, more my composing singing lines for a  soloist and his shadowers.  The third movement is the most violent music I ever had to compose. Massed brass , one- or two-voiced attacks on a cellist’s  beautiful nightmare ( and with his self-punishing marathons up to lonely, dizzy heights on the A string . A pounding rhythmic formula , this manic five / four / three / three assymetrical corset at my crazed , breathless tempo.

The final  movement rescues orchestral shambles , this ever-present Corcoran’s Seven-Tone Scale (  G – A flat – C sharp – D – E flat – F sharp – A )  , our trumpets  or horn motto- theme, Dvorak’s hymn, all the rest.

My  Cello Concerto as autobiography? – hardly . As tonal architecture plus thematic play plus shadow plus sunlight plus reinforced concrete plus ” quasi una visione ” ?  Quite. Quasi. Certainly.

Yes, we are in a post-colonial situation. No, we must not close our Sligo ears to the string-quartet or the upright piano. As I was eight , it was hard to retain the melodies of our Borrisokane Bagpipe Band. In the 2000 Festival I have twinned my own with other Irish international works. Look at the musical sandwiches I’ve made.  My music matters.

Sligo WAS a centre of megalithic culture, of the “TAIN” ‘s beginnings. My 2000 Festival here mates  my musical thought with a tradition going back to that South Turkish gazelle-hunter’s village.

It begins with God’s Stutter. Hear the music those pierced swan-bones sang in Catal Huyuk. . B’i ag clos. Jump over your post-colonial shadow in Sligo. Elsewhere .  Noli temere.

SLIGO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL 2000   Director :  Frank Corcoran

Model Arts And Niland Gallery SLIGO.  24 – 26 November  2000,

” SeaNua ”    Old / New  Music incl. Frank Corcoran’s:

Music for the Book Of Kells ( 5 Percussion and Piano )

Buile Suibhne / Mad Sweeney  ( Speaker and Ch. Orchestra )

Lines and Configurations      ( Marimba and Bass Clarinet )

Wind Quintet   ( Dedalus Wind-quintet )

Trauerfelder /   Goirt an Bhroin  ( 4 Percussionists )

=   Teadcheol, Cnagcheol agus B’ealcheol, Builecheol. My tones matter in Sligo, Yeatsstadt.

“We Irish are uneasy when we have to face the retention of 8 bars “.

“My music matters. Sean agus Nua. ”

“One John Field doesn’t make a summer of Irish composers.”  ( Frank Corcoran  )

Today at my cardiologist’s I heard the whoosh and sluicing of my blood being pumped. Apparently this will go on until – one fine day – it won’t ever any more. Why is this a tiresome and trite fact. It isn’t. Not at all. Yet if I don’t find it important, well….   Not that I am the kind of composer who wants to record it  as sound-material and then make a tape-piece of it , “The Heart’s A-Wonder” kind of billage. Spillage of my  pumped blood is only interesting if I could form it, bend this raw material into musical, i.e. temporal – sonic shape. Only then. Blood is thicker than water and a Blood Sonata is thicker than water-music. Really now.

I will indee. This space in the New Year. Announcing:

Hessischer Rundfunk Frank Corcoran Portrait,  Spring 2015.

Also the publication 0f Festschrift for Frank Corcoran’s Seventieth

Apparently scribbling is all. Write about the work ( performing it is obviously one better…  ) and its psychogenesis and its nemesis and all. To pretend I understand where it is coming from, a sigh in the piccolos or a chorale for muted horns , an all-present four tone motif in the “Jupiter” Symphony, such lip. Be not above the occasional Haiku. No, I know I can’t explain everything ( anything ? )  but there is a pleasure in the attempting, too. Quod scripsi has the habit of remaining.

About the Third String Quartet I expatiated:  ”  Mine is a kind of musical stream-of-consciousness, referring and feinting and discharging all the elements of Fast / Slow/ Violent / Lyrical/ Dense/ Thin/ Stringiness of Filigran.  “

Watch this space also for the new Cello Concerto. I will writhe in good time for the March 2015  Dublin Premiere  ( March 13. National Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Montgomery / Soloist: Martin Johnson. 2014. ca. 30′. )

I will also write for the Spring 2015 launch of my choral Eight Haikus ( 2013 First Prize I.F.C.M. ) .