Frank Corcoran

Holding steady. Dodge and flit from one tree-shadow to the next in The Delight-filled Garden. Keep thinking cooled. – ” All is well” is no bad statement – could change , of course, from one hot moment to the next roaring nineties and more. So what´s the rock in the flow of silly sensations ? O Rock of Ages ! O Mercury-column Climbing ! O friendly shadows and gentle venticello which makes sunlight and dappled shade and thermonuclear solar bomb all bearable, indeed bright. O pasha´s green-cool glass. Keeping thoughts crystal green, the tones waiting, dormant temporarily.

QUASI UNA STORIA 2013 March 17 to May 17 . I could see the 13
strings on my stage – double bass and two celli on the extreme right.
Choirs,sections, colours, soli and tutti, too. ” Storify ” its bits and
pieces; is that introduction just right ? A violin solo ?

2012 was CELLO CONCERTO year – mighty 4 movements – the Slow Movement
has my new singing; the third mov., a Scherzo may be the most brutal I´ve ever
attempted , achieved – great horn interjections in unisoni or only two-voiced
bucina-terror with the percussion. My rhythmic pattern of 5,4,3,4,5
beats in the bar is assymetrically right to control, mesh this violence.
Great cello – up to its dizziest heights

Of course the birth in sound of the Violin Concerto ( of 2011 ) and
the International IFCM First Prize for the choral EIGHT HAIKUS
triggered good internal monologue for the future. What future ? That Manila ( October 5 2013 ) Premiere will lift me and them . FIVE TENORLIEDER still waits. performance – lovely
tessitura and use of my ownb good texts.

Same for 4 PIECES FOR 2 CLARINETS …. courageously thought, shaped.

Same for RHAPSODIC BOWING ; swooning 8 Celli.

You got to be tough to keep going, keep imagining in the vast
loneliness.

NIGHT HAIKUS :

Also this music / Two fierce crows work fast – sharp beaks…. / The cat´s blood congeals.

Now it is evening / They dive down darkly, two beaks /
Flay our young cat´s eyes.

She did not hear them. / Hacking her eyes horribly /
Flying surgeons gouged.

Now gentle evening.
Birds slash, tear, slice our kitten.
Kinetic life dead.

A haiku has no / Plural . Bite that hot pencil. / Here mine is
born thus .

My mind is empty. / All electric clouds also / Please give me a
match….

July heat roaring / Hang on to your molten brain / Still !
Ciccadas, still !

An onion is a / Perfect image of my ” self” / Peel the layers
off

This last haiku now : Tomorrow´s temperatures Can´t ruin tonight

Let us separate the men from the boys, risk-taking, courageous ( – Yes, in my newest New Leap – for 13 Strings, – ” I am sick with worry !” ) excellence from the safe, cowardly, the second-rate take-it-easy. Hand me down !
I reach for the composers´ stars. Extend the boundaries of poor Debussy´s ” musically thinkable ! ”
In each new musical salto mortale….
Only that can interest me.
Th trivial remains trivial.

It´s the race, desperate or more calm, to remember, to record my receding past; to etch something on the grey tombstone before it´s gone; fix at least something from shaky memor, my memories . Slap it down.( We have been at this a long time now.) But also to attempt a description of the conception, gestation, licking into final shape of an important work I composed in, say, 1977. How rein in mythopoetic ” I remember” ? Which initial gesture, texture, synaesthetic bundle of sensations accompanying an initial rhythm, motif or cell? How? As the spool winds backwards ?
If my recent music is busy remembering earlier composed works ( whether it suits me or not, it is ! ) , music about music, and if my earliest composed music was ( – okay, mostly unconsciously ) “remembering” things past, surely my work on memory this very today is a highly compound re-working of ( all ? some ? ) my lived and thought sense-data ( tasted, smelled, ingorged, expectorated, etc. ). Devilishly tricky, you´d imagine.

CROATIAN RADIO THREE . October 30 2013

Frank Corcoran PIANO TRIO ( Zagreb Biennale 2013 )

How , in God, will I ? – Bundle and forge to my smithie will

my eight violins, two violas, my two celli and one bass ?

For 2015 NEW YORK CITY ?

For : FRANK CORCORAN: ” Quasi Una Storia” for 13 strings….

Apparently angels are out; pin-tips are in. Oh it´s often enough I´ve put the cart before the dogs.
Now I brood over, carpenter, strain at stool, knead my 13 strings – 8 violins en masse or tutti or singly , tiny Guarnieri skeins and threads; two each of celli and violas; one doublebass is mighty, tender as the night, explosive.
( I composed QUASI UN CONCERTO thirty years ago ; my IRISCHE MIKROKOSMOI for String Orchestra was a fun-thing for the Irish Chamber Orchestra; then QUASI UNA FUGA, written for the 2007 Shannon Festival , became my salute to monothematicism, to counterpoint and counterpunch… This new QUASI UNA STORY for New York 2015 will be very, very different. )
Brood on.

Sa. 4.05.2013 Filmforum Cologne. 15.00 “SPEAKINGS”

Frank Corcoran QUASI UNA MISSA ( 1999 )