Frank Corcoran

irish composer

BE YE SOFT ! BE YE ALERT !

It´s been sent, I expect, to soften me up, yet , strangely, to keep me on the alert. Obvious.
( Ours , too, has been shite ! – Ye must have sent us over those millions of cubic litres of water …. and after the heat-wave of April and May. Bit better today. ) I´ll be flying over you towards Shannon on Thursday. Fancy. Next week is the Grand Soar down to Prato – but there it´ll be – of course – too warm; so we can´t win… moan, moan. Soften me up . Alert me to the Stoics´deep saws , deep , fat wisdom they saw, the human mystery behind the whinge. For example this day gone – and it lived , be honest, lightly enough . Even if I can´t honestly say what my new Third String Quartet is all about. ( – How livd the other two ? Also lightly enough ? )
It soars a bird. A long a last a loon. Well. Might just be a tick too slow here, not NEAR enough savagery there, the end has to be soft but alertish . The Callino ladies´ll do it grand. Wet the baby´s head , move ye forward to the new back field . ” Quasi Una Fuga” came sternly after , I suppose, my ” Quasi Un Lamento” ´s saxophones´ soft , thick moans.
Then there was it: that computered ” Quasi Una Missa”. Yep. I succeeded good , I sink, in linking my guts, my kidney and gall and each epithalamic alpha-wave and my alerted sound-instinct , yep, not a whit softened by the material I´d used : two thousand years of God – fits and Godforbidd´n God- spake and God-starts on our happy Irish island, Eriugena´s Goddish Aachen Latin ( – I´ll bet my real self he didn´t learn that with his Greek at Clonmacnoise ! ) and Stephen Dedalus´s ” – God ! What´s that ? – A shout in the street ! ” etc . I love Irish medieval Mac Con Bríde ” Moladh ! Moladh ! ” , which I could then insert in to the mash of ” Quasi Una Missa” , splendid bullets Isfahanish. My very own private moan for our Rory´s early, awful death just had to quote Bishop Berkeley´s great plea : ” I had a little friend…. God, in His mercy, took him from me…. I had loved him . Too much. ” So . Present Stoics are floored, then silenced, then stoned. The four strings take my very point, then they hurl it over the cross-bar, the fat fans gone loony . A general pause , called for, given gladly by, is it, the viola? ( There is no way you´ll get me ever condoning any cello´s jealousy. ) Where´s the lousy point in my string-quartet´s entirely ineluctable musical discourse ?
Yerra, our summer was shite, too? – Si o no ? – If moodishness and sixty two cows are allowed not to know their place, si. Otherwise we´ll gladly stick to what this is all really about . I mean this : is art = the shit-and-piss of my body´s terminal breaking-apart ? Is that it ? The new Third String Quartet ? Or we visit the Dundalk Institute of Technology at two o´clock sharp , next Nov. 21, David Stalling´s brave EAR Festival , where mad enough ” SWEENEY´S VISION ” will roar through ? Is that it ?

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