Frank Corcoran

Irish Composer

Home » Articles posted by Frank Corcoran (Page 3)

A RURAL TEXT OF SOME TIME AGO… .

MO CHEOL = MO SCEÁL FÉIN / MY LITTLE LIFE / MO SHAOL FÉIN

Frank Corcoran. ( 4.2.2014 Hamburg )

I often reason it out thus: like music, I am a temporal creature , I see seventy years of my life as a kind of performances, – performance here being analogous to that of theatre, tthat of certain kinds of conceptual art .
My lived seventy years seem from yet another angle , my „ notes written on water „ , also akin to sand-art perhaps , like the snow sculptures of the certain North Greenlanders ( – am I making this up? Certainly…. Why not ? ) My life as a
„sicut fumus „ kind-of-thing arts .
As many an other rural Irish child of the time I , too, must have been sensitive to the sounds of North Tipperary nature. ( I´ll
do the re-telling of mother´s 100 pigs and my 2. Symphony later. )
I certainly was blown away by Yeats´s „ For the wet winds are blowing / High up on Cloothnabare „ ; – my child´s cochlea already knew this . ) . Our Borris saw-mill whined danger, of course, and there was the rhythmic skurting of cows´ whitish milk into the scoured milk-bucket. My childhood was full of immense, loud goings on with sheep and cows and banbhs and sows in our farm-yards.
It is not my intention here to manufacture various Seamus Heaneyesqueries between the early composed music and our farm sound-scape .
Certainly there was that ; but there was more. eg. I sang in our little school , I clapped my hands, I slapped my body around, I produced tones on tin-whistle and box-accordeon.
One private thing I was proud of: I surely did patent Corcoran´s Hands And Feet Composition Plan – I used my right or left fingers ( while pedalling down the country boreens ) to register just newly learned melody-tones; then I had the principle three toes of the left or right foot for the few basic chords I had just learned ; so it was – fingers melody, left or right foot harmony.
And every Tuesday was Fair Day; on Borrisokane´s Main Street our country roarer, Paddy Reddan, ´d roar out all his „come all yez „ ; mostly pentatonic.

Early enough I wanted to write songs, set poets, compose vocal music ( – a Quintet for accordeon and strings of my sixties in Rome was a disaster – I couldn´t get the form of the three movements ; my experience of sound was pitiful , nor had I any knowledge of musical densities ) ;
quite simply, text was always a powerful help . ( To compose one minute of music is hard, but to compose five is much harder )
I loved solo and choral singing, my own breath
and the choir´s plastic lines and chords, dark, light, densities, slender or thickly matted , high dives and depths, dark/ bright colours , Protean shapes.

DÁN AIMHIRGÍN of 1971 ( – I must have been the first Irish composer ever to use this Early Irish poem, a pantheistic God-litany; quite thrilling its climax ) calls for eight second altos improvising on the low C with the words „ Am „ „ gaoth „, „ gaoth i muir“, ( „ I am the wind on the sea“ , – Celtic God Aimhirgin´s self-definition in Iron Age Ireland ; His final „Am Brí Dána „ / „ I Am This Meaning“ – analogous to the Genesis „ Eheye Asher Eheye „ ) , then another eight altos murmuring these magic syllables on the D, eight second sopranoes on the E and then all first sopranoes on F Sharp. A vibrating, humming whole-tone chord. Then , as the high tenors enter on the G above these thirty two women´s voices with the „ Gaoth“ , my choral effect is magical .
A simple, fresh choral idea. But excellent.
Then the 1994 MEDIEVAL IRISH EPIGRAMMES which set short Japanese Haiku-like miniatures from our Irish
Middle Ages , eg. Take : „All are keen to sleep with blond Aideen . All Aideen herself will own / Is that she will not sleep alone…. „ .
Thirty years later , other terse-like texts were to spark off NINE WAYS OF LOOKING AT AN IRISH POEM BY GABRIEL ROSENSTOCK . Listen !
„ As tobar duaigh spéire / Líonann crainn / A ngoib“ .

And here I had a solo violin introduce , separate , commingle with my nine choruses.
Simple, but only after you´ve composed it. How then later would I set a for large polyphonic choir my 2012 EIGHT HAIKUS ( this time the Haikus were my own ) ?
How was I to handle texts like the Frank Corcoran haiku :
„ Deep purple twilight / In the bay lie three islands / Asleep like children „ ?

So vocal music you can hang onto the peg of the text, of the words.
But what about instrumental music, then ?
My 1974 THREE PIECES FOR ORCHESTRA ( „Scenes from My Receding Past „ ) I had the chance to re-programme years later in an Dublin orchestral concert of 2000 along with my SECOND SYMPHONY ; well , I was delighted – after over twenty five years, still fresh sounds, it was still acts of youthful courage in painting symphonic . Yes. It´s stretch your colour imagination; let the expanding forms create, explode .
Of course the musical ideas come from all over the place. The PIANO TRIO of 1977 was my break-through with macro-counterpoint ; it too dares new colours and its not quite arch-form
singing and sputtering and blazing and searing and singeing whatever it was that I had wanted to singe . A short time later I got this macro-counterpoint , the wind polyphony which I wanted into the WIND QUINTET.
That´s it. ( About the four symphonies, I´ll writhe much later. )
It
became clear to me that music was a metaphor, of course, for transience –
so expression and self-expression, fine, but how do you get rid of the „ I „ in the sound – forgeing ?

The computer-painted works were different again . My 1980 BALTHAZAR´S DREAM ( – why didn´t I then call it „ BALTHAZAR´S SCREAM „ ? ) , generated by the terror of Borges´s minor masterpiece , „The Gospel According to St. Mark „ – I spliced together at the Electronic Studios of
the West Berlin Technical University.
And that Guantanamo scream bursts out again twenty years later – in my digital TRADURRE TRADIRE
of 2002 for Deutschlandfunk.
Its electronic predecessors, both WDR commissions, SWEENEY´S VISION in 1997 and QUASI UNA MISSA in 1999 went on to win , respectively, the Bourges Festival Premier Prix in 1999 and the Swedish E.M.S. Prize in 2002 . Was that important for this composer ?
Of course !
Mol an óige. Encourage and praise good work . It was desperately needed in them for me bad, bad nineties.
It is the isolation. It is courage. Put the head down, progress and shove. Slap it down. Write. ( Brahms to his only ever composition student: „ You must write, write, Every day! Don´t worry about its quality ; write it all down. But stop worrying about the weak stuff – the stove will look after that…. „
Create. Burst. – All words I´d use in struggling to write about my life-long working with sound. A sound man .
It took me thirty years to see that I´d often used as a ( – unconscious, of course ) musical motive in many of my works the melodic motif
C D and E ( or Doh / Re / Mi / ) . Why ? Because they are the initial „ Requiem“ tones
in the Gregorian Mass for the Dead.
Says it all, does it ? Music as metaphors , as distress and help signals, your call into the tomb. Music as Orpheus myth. – All of this , of course, after we ´ve accepted music first as play, music as tone- carpentry , as sounding architecture.

Lutoslawski died on Monday 7. February 1994 , over twenty years ago. What courage – what exemplary musical and human courage was there in his life as a composer . You´ve got to be tough nowadays .
Myriad temptations beckon; among the most vicious are: The Genetic Fallacy ( „ Her compositions derive from her life…. „ – though , mind you, they also do…. ) or „ A Musical Work´s Worth = Its Performance“ ( Thus eg. „ My music is good because it´s played…. „, then with its charming little corollary: „ My music´s played, therefore it´s good. „ . Well, is it good? Why? ).
With the recent Concerto for Violin and then the Concerto for Violoncello, maybe I´ve sneaked around the full circle ( -my cycle of fifths ? ) and the newer instrumental works want to sing even more.
I´d like to write a Clarinet Concerto, to have a shot at an Alto Rhapsody. I´d compose a Fourth String Quartet . If .
Music to ravish. The pure line AND the pure drop, the vertical AND horizontal, sounding densities PLUS the reeling , sonorous line ( – which itself might be built out of various sub-lines ) .
It´s easier to talk than to compose .
Getting harder, too, to avoid self-quotation .
What´s left to be original about ?
Perhaps plenty. I won´t know till I do it.
At the Zagreb Biennale 2013 they did my ancient PIANO TRIO, that young Zagreb Piano Trio, huge, warm sounds from all the three players. My original scaffolding held firm, strong, because I´d built it well in 1977.
Scream and song. Surge or soar. How to get the ecstasy into the mix and wash, I continuously wonder ?
In order to make the structure secure, steady, ready .
Composing is better than decomposing, they say ; it seems to defie the second law of thermodynamics.
No bad thing this ?

HOT HOT THOUGHTS IN HOT HOT DOG DAYS….

Do not weaken or waver.

Keep going. Hear the musical forms.

Write them for a potential audience.
But first write for me.
For inner hearing. For the serenity of meaning . Value.

Perhaps there never ever was even a modest wave of support , understanding or acceptance here for New Music in our post-war 20 c. ? Perhaps all I had was those brave
moral heroes of the Second Viennese School before the Nazi thirties ? ( – Schoenberg’s hasty departure, Berg’s early death and Webern ‘s total lonely
loon in his Austrian Alps ?

Since then you had (im)modest little footlings of composers in Munich and Berlin , WDR’s blandishments in the sixties and seventies ( I am bracketing out Poland and Paris here, also Ligeti’s Luck ) ?

Certainly here in Ham and Burg the woeful few Hogskool Concerts in my eighties and nineties were not to be trusted … But one was thankful for a few thrown crusts. And I remember well the well-meaning Schulmusik publications, books on New Music In The Schools etc., mostly pap .
Perhaps.

And no kind of understanding percolating down to your intellectual, public or private ; no acceptance of the lonely heroes, no kind of parallel at all with , say, the
accepted development of pictorial arts or literary productions or avant-garde theatre .

The world-ocean of musical bilge and cowardly media contributed , certainly. No journalist prepared to call popular shit as sonic shit.

Seldom analytic light cast on the marketing codology or finance-empire of punks and pricks and rocks and cunts and pricks and raps , whether American or helots.

A bit bleak .

GREAT ! HARD RAIN SOLOISTS PREMIERE IN BELFAST 2018 ” 9 LOOKS AT PIERROT =

9 LOOKS AT ” PIERROT ”

for Fls/Clar.s / Pianoforte / Vln./ V.Cello.

Here the classical Schoenberg instrumental ensemble is used to paint NINE short pictures of the traditional ” Pierrot ” figure .

Here are 9

“Charakterstuecke ” on this important theme.

1. Short idea : all the 5 instruments.

2. Miniature – only 4 Bars ! Piccolo and Bass Clar. – We change the colouring.

3. Another colour-facette – only 8 Bars long ! – the 4 instr.s plus a FEW Piano tones !

4. “Lustingando ” – dance-like Pierrot.

5. Presto and fortissimo – all is breathlessness.

6. A Webernesque 7 bars. Repeated. Pianissimo.

7 Piccolo and BassClar. – we change Pierrot’s character once again.

9. Here is the longest . All the heard ideas are developed. – Quintuplet and septuplet figures growing .

The piano’s lowest register and the deep instruments paint also the

Catastrophic. At the end, Pierrot’s irrepressible humour – lusingando….

NOW FIND ME IN 2011

The RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet

are celebrating the music of Irish composers Frederick May and Frank Corcoran this autumn.

The ensemble will perform May’s Quartet on 12 November in Dublin, with the same concert featuring in a workshop performance of May’s recently discovered Four Romantic Songs, in collaboration with tenor Peter Kerr and pianist Fergal Caulfield. May’s Quartet will also feature in the Vanbrugh’s 13 November free concert in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, alongside Franz Schubert’s Death and the Maiden.

The ensemble will take part in a ‘meet the composer’ session with Hamburg and Italy-based composer Frank Corcoran at the Royal Irish Academy of Music on 25 November, from 1430—1600.
Corcoran’s Clarinet Quintet will be workshopped in collaboration with clarinettist Fintan Sutton, who will also present Corcoran’s A Dark Song for solo bass clarinet.

Both pieces will receive their world premiere after the workshop session. The concert will be followed by a Q&A with the composer, to which admission, like the concert itself, is free.

The Corcoran and May concerts feature amidst a packed autumn concert schedule for the quartet, which will see them perform the May and Schubert quartets alongside Joseph Haydn’s Opus 42 D minor quartet in Cork, Waterford, Letterkenny, Kerry and Killarney. In addition, the Vanbrugh Quartet will perform music by Mozart, Johannes Brahms and Charles Villiers Stanford with guests Barry Douglas and horn-player Cormac Ó hAodáin at the Curtis Auditorium in Cork on 30 September, as part of the launch of the Cork Orchestral Society’s 2011—2012 season, and on 12 October they will present a workshop and a concert at the Kilkenny School of Music.

www.vanbrughquartet.com
Published on 26 September 2011

GRAMOPHONE 1. 3. 2016

Gramophone Tue 1st March 2016

Recent Irish Music

Liam Cagney chooses 10 pieces connected with Ireland’s recent history

This year marks the centenary of the Easter Rising in Ireland, the rebellion that led to the founding of the Irish

State. Commemorations are duly filling the cultural calendar.

My playlist salutes the range and vibrancy of music coming from this small island in recent years.

As you’d expect, Irish composers continue to draw inspiration from Irish literature: Jane O’Leary’s riverrun at

once references James Joyce and the flow of Dublin’s river Liffey; Frank Corcoran, here represented by the

lugubrious opening movement of his Symphony No 3, also closely engages with Joyce; while John Buckley’s The Silver

Apples of the Moon, the Golden Apples of the Sun is inspired by Yeats’s poetry.

19. 10. 2017 SEE BELOW !

Chamber Orchestra Music by Composers from Ireland and the US

Henry Bulow Food Court
Frank Corcoran Variations on Myself
Binette Lipper Ten-Able
Joyce Solomon Morrman The Snow Storm
William Pfaff The Road is All

Max Lifchitz, conductor
The North/South Chamber Orchestra
Tuesday, March 12 at 8 PM
Christ & St Stephen’s Church
120 West 69th St (bet Bway & Columbus), NYC

North/South Consonance, Inc. continues its 33rd consecutive season of free-admission concerts on Tuesday evening March 12. The GRAMMY nominated North/South Chamber Orchestra under the direction of its founder Max Lifchitz will premiere five works especially written for the occasion by composers representing a wide variety of styles and hailing from Ireland and throughout the US. The composers are: Harry Bulow, Frank Corcoran, Binnette Lipper, Joyce Solomon Moorman and William Pfaff.

The concert will start at 8 PM and will take place at the auditorium of Christ & St. Stephen’s Church (120 West 69th St – between Broadway and Columbus) on Manhattan’s West Side. Admission is free — no tickets necessary.

The event will feature the first performance of Variations on Myself by the noted Irish composer Frank Corcoran.
A founding member of Aosdána – Ireland’s state-sponsored academy of creative artists – Corcoran was born in Tipperary in 1944 and completed his musical education in Berlin under the supervision of Boris Blacher. His Two Unholy Haikus won the Sean Ó Riada Award at the 2012 Cork International Choral Festival and the First Prize in the 2013 International Federation of Choral Music. Several of his orchestral and choral works are available on recordings issued by, among others, the NAXOS, Col-Legno, and Caprice labels.
For almost thirty years he taught composition and theory in the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Hamburg, Germany. Corcoran first visited the US in 1989 as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Subsequently, he has been invited to lecture at Indiana University, CalArts, Harvard University, Boston College, New York University and Princeton.

As basis for his recently completed work, Variations on Myself, Corcoran employs a melodic theme derived from the pitches suggested by the composer’s name: F-D-C#-Eb-C-A.
Melodic and harmonic materials are generated by mutating these pitches while strict metrical writing of the strings contrasts with undulating lines in the wind instruments often moving at their own speed.

1.2.2013 WAS HERE AND IS GONE….

DUTCH RADIO CONCERTZENDER

1.2.2013

Nieuwe cd’s met Nieuwe Muziek.

Vandaag o.a. de Nederlandse radio première van Frank Corcoran’s nieuwe vioolconcert. (nog niet op cd verschenen) en muziek van Kaija Saariaho.

– Frank Corcoran. Violin Concerto.
Alan Smale, viool en het RTÉ Symphony Orchestra olv. Christopher Warren-Green.
(opname ter beschikking gesteld door de componist).

– Kaija Saariaho. Cloud Trio.
Zebra Trio.
. Je sens un deuxième coeur, for violin, cello and piano.
Ondine ODE 1189-2.

Samenstelling:
Gerard Meulenberg

Frank Corcoran

Celebrating Frank Corcoran at 70

Forthcoming concert includes world premieres performed by Alan Smale and Martin Johnson.

A concert celebrating the work of composer Frank Corcoran will take place at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin on Thursday 26 November at 8pm.

Beginning with an introduction by writer Barra Ó Séaghdha, composer Benjamin Dwyer will then deliver a keynote talk on the composer’s work and its connection to Joyce.

The second part of the evening will begin with a short public interview with the composer, followed by the world premiere of his Rhapsodietta Joyceana performed by cellist Martin Johnson.

This will be followed by performances of Variations on A Mháirín de Barra (1995) performed by Adèle Johnson (viola), Seven Theses on Joyce and Music presented by the composer, and Joycespeak Musik (1995) for tape. The concert concludes with the world premiere of Seven Miniatures for violin performed by Alan Smale.

Born in 1944 in Borrisokane, County Tipperary, Frank Corcoran studied philosophy, music, ancient languages and theology in Ireland and Rome and took further studies in composition with composer Boris Blacher in Berlin.

His output includes orchestral, choral, chamber and electro-acoustic music. Corcoran’s Joycespeak Musik won the Studio Akustische Kunst in 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, Crash Ensemble, Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra, Irish Chamber Orchestra and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra among many others, and has been recorded on the Marco Polo, Wergo, Composers Art and Black Box labels.

Recent large-scale works include a Cello Concerto, written for Martin Johnson, and a Violin Concerto, composed for Alan Smale, both premiered with the RTÉ NSO. Corcoran is a member of Aosdána and lives in Hamburg and Italy.

A book dedicated to the composer’s work was recently published. Frank Corcoran – Festschrift at Seventy – Old and New – Sean agus Nua: An Irish Composer Invents Myself is edited by Hans-Dieter Grünefeld and includes contributions from Benjamin Dwyer, Roger Doyle and Jane O’Leary.

The book is available from the Contemporary Music Centre here.

For more on the concert on 26 November, visit http://on.fb.me/1LbtvTs
Published on 12 November 2015

NOW WE’RE BACK IN 2000 !

IRISH TIMES in 2000

Stretching horizons was festival high note .

Thu, Nov 30, 2000, 00:00

Frank Corcoran, director and guest composer of this year’s festival of contemporary music in Sligo,

” SEAN – NUA ” ” OLD – NEW “

AOTHER WONKT VOLCANO SONNET

I’ve come from my ” Salasso” hour today .

The needle searched and found the red, red blood.

But what has this to do , is my dismay,

With pyroclastic, heavy tephra , say ?

Sonnets about volcanoes versus writing

About too much of iron in my veins ?

Vesuvio’s a fiery, red-hot , fightin’

Mountain out to burn my aches and pains.

That needle sucked it out, my ferretin,

My vital , sanguine, life-juice, good and mean.

But yet my thoughts were focused on my death

By Etna’s enormous heat and pent-up power.

The saline fluid sang , but I could cower

Glad my roasting hour had not come yet.