Frank Corcoran

There’s an enticing new-music culture in Ireland, and though much of its product is rarely heard in English concert venues (or Welsh or Scottish, one suspects), these releases from Black Box will play their part in fostering a closer awareness of the subject. While Frank Corcoran and John Buckley represent the middle generation, being born in 1944 and 1951 respectively, Gráinne Mulvey and Deirdre Gribbin are of younger stock, of 1966 and 67 vintage, so the range is evenly balanced both in age and gender. Through the medium of chamber music each composer focuses on an aspect of poetic understanding that avoids, with Corcoran’s exception, the issue of a distinctly national idiom. Corcoran writes music for the Book of Kells, and for Heaney’s translation of the Middle Irish text Mad Sweeney. His ‘macro counterpoint’ and bright and stormy sounds evoking the truth of the Irish dream landscape….

Born and raised in Southern Wisconsin, Lori graduated from Beloit College in 1986, with a double major in vocal performance and conducting, and countless hours spent on-air in the campus radio station.

Her college hobby became a more permanent part of her life at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, due to a wrong turn in seeking a professor’s office. Stumbling into the studios of WUWM-FM, and a notice of a vacant position covering a late night jazz program, she did what any underfunded graduate student would do and applied for the job. Lori would go on to host various jazz and classical programs, when she was not singing with the Milwaukee Symphony Chorus and Chamber Singers, or conducting ensembles of her own.

Lori moved her on-air home to “Milwaukee’s Classical Choice”, WFMR-FM, in 1988, first as overnight programmer, then as afternoon announcer/production manager. In addition to studio and live broadcasts, she was producer of “Legacy”, composer Frank Corcoran’s lecture series on the development of classical music in the twentieth century, and a weekly program of interviews and music for the Milwaukee Ballet. Where she had

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

Dutch Radio – Concertzender

17. January . 17.00

Composer-portrait FRANK CORCORAN

A number of new works by Frank Corcoran will be performed in September and October 2013

The Still-Life with Guitar trio will premiere Corcoran’s work for flute, viola and guitar Seven Cubist Miniatures for Cardiff at the National Museum of Cardiff on 15 September. The ensemble, featuring Emma Coulthard on flute, Philip Heyman on viola and Michael McCartney on guitar, is dedicated to performing new or rarely heard music featuring the guitar and performs.

In October, the award-winning University of the Philippines Madrigal Singers will premiere Corcoran’s work 8 Haikus. The piece, written to texts by the composer himself, was selected as the winner out of 637 entries of the International Federation for Choral Music’s Second International Competition for Choral Composition. The performance will take place in Manila on 5 and 6 October.
Share this:

FacebookTwitter

Related

Upcoming performances of music by Frank CorcoranIn “Composer News”

New Music Digest 9 – 16 SeptemberIn “New Music Digest”

Frank Corcoran geb. 1944 in Tipperary Irland. Studierte in Dublin (alte Sprachen, Philosophie), Rom (Theologie , Gregorianik und Renaissance-Musik) und Berlin (Meisterschüler von Boris Blacher). 1971-79 Music Inspector beim Irischen Erziehungsministerium. 1980 Stipendiat des Berliner Künstlerprogramms . 1981 Gastprofessor an der HdK Berlin. 1982 Professor in Stuttgart, seit 1983 an der Hamburger Musikhochschule. 1989-90 Fulbright-Professor in den USA und Gastdozent in CalArts, Harvard, Wisconsin, Boston, New York und Indiana. Seit 1983 ist Frank Corcoran Mitglied der Irischen AdK.

Im Elektronischen Studio der T U BERLIN produzierte:

Balthasars Traum 1980
Sweeney’s Vision 1997 ( 1999 Bourges Festival . Erster Preis )
Sweeney’s letztes Gedicht, Sweeney’s Farewell 1997/98
Tradurre – Tradire 2004

Im Elektronischen Studio des WDR KOELN produziert:

Quasi Una Missa 1999 ( 2002 Schwedischer EMS Preis )

In Hamburg produziert:

JoyceMusik 1995 ( Studio Akustische Kunst Preis Preis )

I was there. 1980 was the worst. Gray West Berlin.

Certainly I set to tones, great Herbert’s …. I did dare to, that incomporable Zbigniew Herbert poem, DER KIESELSTEIN / THE PEBBLE . We supped, we dined.
He had suffered. His few Polish vowels tittered, shivered. I drank to ” Cad a dheanfaimid feasta gan adhmad ? ”
I shivered.

Certainly I will compose a Cello Concerto. How? Certainly great Dvorak towers. Logical, Lutoslawsky´s Concerto is Music Drama of the highest order. When then? This blessed night?!How then? (–Well, eg. for a start, mine is not the tonal option of Dvorak´s lovely and virtuoso washed sheen, his parallel sixths at high orchestral velocity , his aching sequences, cadential constructs and Slavic sighs and beautiful B Minor – yoked functional harmony.
Obvious.No?
I´ll also wish to prepare my very personal version of my personally” drama” (“Agony” is a fine word still), my very own: Solo Versus Orchestra, Great Titan Against Great Many Them, ahem, yes, my ploy´s quite different from the Polish Master´s masterly tension graph. How?
Corcoran must (once again) invent his wheel, must sketch his musical syntax for his 2012 – 2013 Cello Concerto. Major principles of musical psychology holding on in the macro-wave , let´s say, so in the micro-wave how´ll he construct his initial “A then B then C” , that beautiful bane of all great composers´ humble musical alphabets after the Final Atonal Revolution? ( – we mean: its latest date was about 1913 – ish, a possible earliest date around Gesualdo, Wagner, such shades ; – but more on this in a near future, my Humble Hamburg Musing, – I have no doubt at all on this, ahem, score. ).We mean by this, surely, that the poor man must choose even his basic motivic moves , all cello leps, mighty orchestral thin or thick massing, eg. he has to chose, say,” C, A, Z, B,” etc. plus the well-known, -sung, – heard and –used motivic operations, blah, on this little start. Follow? Nein? Okay: I´ll keep to a scale, seven sturdy notes ( – they often stood me stead” sa bhearna bhaoil”). Neither minor nor major but, yes, Corcoran. With these seven tones, build me then my three great movements, my mighty soloist-plus-orchestra clash by night struggle, my heard accompaniment of My Dark Cello´s Great Song, Lush Dream Sounding. My tones will suffer, sing, die. high, my post-Dvorak-and-Lutoslawsky

Certainly I had to study Berg , Beethoven and Max Bruch and them all; how to make my new Concerto sing and soar, how thin out the accompanying orchestra ( eg. I use no tuba, little enough brass, sparing percussion ) to let the violin get lift-off at the opening of my Movement 1.
The Slow Movement then wrote itself, the solo line singing its three ( sad ? – Are they sad ? ) verses before the Cadenza and final wisps of string.
In the fast semiquavers of the last 3. Movement, I composed the lightness of being. So it´s: Fast / Slow / Fast approximately, this well-tried formula of this exciting violin concerto genre. The writing is deliberately pared down. eg. it´s metred, gridded music all through , no complex polyrhythms or controlled aleatory, here clear melodic line and accompaniment .
My work is taut, lean, lyrical, leppin´, a true concerto that looks back and looks forward.It learns from Mozart in the last movement´s fast passage-work. There´s something, – of course there is, of Mendelssohn, Brahms and all the rest in the opening movement´s orchestral tutti pitted against the weak-strong strength of the solo line.
The Slow Movement is certainly a ” Lied Ohne Worte”, pure amhrán. It has to be.
So what´s my whole ( shortish , packed, compact ) orchestral work ? – Un poco “music about music” ? Maybe. As in several recent works ( eg. my 2011 CLARINET QUINTET or the 2008 ” 9 ASPECTS OF AN IRISH POEM” for Large Choir and Solo Violin ) my building-blocks are a simple 7 – note row : G A flat C sharp D E flat F sharp and A. That´s it. With these seven tones I construct a mighty sounding edifice, in these three movements a concerto ( in full flight) of fiddling fun and violinistic seriousness and art´s sorrow and fast, furious, last orchestral thoughts. “Quasi Un Concerto “? – No, the real thing, but a concerto of our time, my seven tones re-living ( at least a century of violin concerti without being in the least neo-tonal or neo-this and that. I´ll call it also: ” The One And The Many” ; “Four Strings Against The Rest”; or we should subtitle its three supple, subtle movements perhaps: ” Announce The Event” , ” Sighing Song” and “Lightness Is All”.

No real illness at the moment, nor hardship nor mental woe ( The mind has mountains, of course. ) .
For 2016 not too many expression-marks or hyphens or trusting or mistrusting. How achieve “serenita’ ” without becoming callous ?
The little chapters for new Piano Trio must in their brevity each burst with expectancy, be each a “state of mind ” ; to connect them
won’t be the problem. My Scale binds them..
Colour galore ; explore the keboard but avoid a tired solution. Courage.
Slip-stream still mirrors “serenit’a ” , all our court Stoics and Epicureans. A tall order.
We sneak with stealth towards December 31….
“He who is not a bollix had better be clever”. Be not quick to anger. Watch the hare set, the hare-lip, the bigger picture . Waste not, want not tones. Accept small talk, small movements, small mercies and small parcels and the evenings getting longer. See through charlatans
Yearnings for a House of Stillness can still tempt, my odd Silence Theorem which claims : 1. All silences are equal, equally silent, equally conducive to composing that New And Last Piano TRIO. 2. Even a Benedictine colouring ( praiseworthy, certainly ) should not interfere with composing or cerebral energy, visionary leps in all the parameters, the solving of order versus chaos, courage, go out into deeper water. Alas, poor trumpet, fear interruptions or choleric outbursts against harmless , social do-goodery.
Sharpen de pen ?

(Frank Corcoran’s QUASI UN BASSO for Solo Bass is performed on May 17 2006 in Magyar Radio/Radio Bartók’s Bela Bartók Centenary Concert in Budapest)

In einer eMail vom 05.04.2006 09:45:02 Westeuropãische Normalzeit schreibt FBCorcoran:

Is cumadóir ceoil mé. I am an Irish composer. The pre-industrial, rural
Ireland of my childhood in the fifties was, in a way, not unlike the small,
agricultural Hungary of Bartók’s
youth and maturity. Dublin and Budapest were, for all their artistic
short-comings, vitally important cultural metropoles. (- For Hungarian and Irish
music-lovers they still are.) Small nations both, their surrounding
neighbours often seemed culturally omnivorous, omnipotent posing a real threat
that the identity and self-respect of both little emerging States would be
gobbled up by an all greedy neighbour.

Bartók ploughed the lonely furrow. Bartók said “NO!” to cultural
tyranny. Bartók took his stance. Moral. Artistic. Not that he wanted to marry
folk- and art-music; you can’t. But as a folk-collector and as a 20th c.
composer, forging and finding his individual composer’s voice, he refused to
let lazy indifference stifle musical diversity or musical courage. Courage –
that’s it. He discovered the unknown, hidden jewels of folk-art. He
composed his own mighty musical structures. Behind both of these, yes, heroic
stances was Bartók’s refusal to give in.

My own little Ireland in my 20th c. has gone an in many ways similar path.
With very mixed results. My Irish language dies daily a thousand deaths.
Ireland, too, had a Renaissance, an explosion of Irish traditional music which
however by its very over-kill and over-exposure in the media is endangered.
As a composer in Ireland, an Irish composer, I had to plough my lonely
furrow. In my native Tipperary I had to overcome a still mightily hostile
indifference to the oldest layers of Irish singing and instrumental art. In my own
youthful struggle to compose and construct tonal structures at once private
and public, the enemy number one was Dublin’s very clearly post-colonial
dependence on a second-rate, hand-me-down, London-based music-pedagogy. Even
bits of Bartók were misused in our musical curricula, his work contextlessly, lovelessly paraded without any real understanding of where Bartók was
coming from, but shamelessly paraded as ‘‘our’’ apologia for contemporary music, as ‘‘our’’ bulwark against, say, the horrors of the Second Viennese School. And my little Ireland , politically a ‘‘free ’’Republic, had in its early days of liberation psychologically and politically not succeeded in providing
a climate of musical understanding and the respect for musical creativity
necessary to have, in its critical years, an Irish Bartók, Bartók na h –
Éireann.

My ‘‘Quasi Un Basso’’ for solo bass is my diptych for, as Bartók uses it, a mighty orchestra in a solo instrument. (I am thinking of those – now sadly ubiquitous but then so fresh, so shocking Bartók pizz.s from his basses in
the orchestral works like his ‘‘Divertimento’’ for String Orchestra, the
extraordinary long legato lines near the end of his ‘‘Music For String Orchestra, Percussion and Celesta’’, the daring and brilliance of his orchestral imagination.) Mine are two fragmented pictures from my vanished Ireland.

Art-music today faces the most viciously anti-art global market known to
man. We have no place where wares are bartered. But YOU CANNOT BARTER BARTÓK!
– Nor indeed any music of lasting value. It is questionable whether the
folk-musics of either Hungary or Ireland will survive the market’s kiss of
death. It is doubly questionable whether Hungarian and Irish composers will
survive our global village which today is swollen with the greatest ocean of
sonic rubbish known to man. Have we composers a place to be heard?
Where’s the silence? From which music is born and heard?