It is time to dust down my choral score of ” MEDIEVAL IRISH EPIGRAMMES” which the RTE Singers under Hans Waldemar Rosen premiered in the then Dublin in 1975. ( It was played then at the 1978 International Composers´Rostrum in Paris 1978 )
These nine Haiku-like miniatures are a window on Iron Age Ireland of those first five centuries A.D.
Stirring singing.
String Quartet No.3
THIRD STRING QUARTET Frank Corcoran
After my ” MAD SWEENEY” generated works of the mid-nineteen nineties ( ” BUILE SUIBHNE / MAD SWEENEY” for Speaker and Chamber Orchestra , 1995, Text by Seamus Heaney ) , this is my ” Quasi Un Quartetto”, the last of the ” Quasi” series.
In the sense that today no composer can remain totally innocent. I write in full knowledge of what Beethoven and Kurtag, but also Berg, Lutoslawski and Ligeti have accomplished with this most fluid and polzphonic-polyvalent medium of music. Mine is in one surging , flowing movement, a kind of musical stream-of-consciousness, referring and feinting and discharging all the elements of fast / slow / violent/ lyrical/ dense/ thin / total stringiness of filigrane. As with Beethoven, everything is extracted out of the opening idea, a clotted knot of tones and intervals spewing out thousands of shapes, chords, soli and tutti. The non-sznchronized passages collide with and are controlled by the metrical music. By the end of this dense, dizzying flow of thirteen minutes , the whole musical argument is born. Quasi.
NEWEST RADIO RECORDINGS
Lyric Fm recorded my Piano Trio with the Spanish Arbos Trio at the 2007 Sligo Festival in April 2007.
Lyric Fm will record the Irish Chamber Orchestra world-premiere of my ” Quasi Una Fuga” at
St. Mary´s Cathedral Limerick at the Shannon Festival 2007 this July 13.
See note on world-premiere at Irish Music Centre
See International Music Festival Brochure
SUMMER NEWS IS SUMMERY
The leading Swiss New Music group , Ensemble Antipodes of Basle, has commissioned a new
Corcoran Octet, ” Quasi Una Sarabande” . Premiere November 30 2008 in Basle.
KUNSTMUSIK Köln ( Spring 2005 Issue www.kunstmusik.org ) has Frank Corcoran´s ” It´s A Cold Wind Blows On An Irish Composer”.
IRELAND FESTIVAL WEEKEND
August 23 – 26 Ireland Weekend at Schloß Gaismar, Kassel, will feature the music of Frank Corcoran, inc. “Joycepeak Music “, ” Quasi Una Missa”, ” Sweeney´s Vision” .
AG RINNCE LE CEOL
21. May ( 04 Bealtaine ) . Lyric Fm Radio at 19.00 – 20.00
A rogha ceoil le Frank Corcoran . It includes ” QUASI UNA MISSA”, ” SWEENEY´S VISION” and VARIATIONS ON ” A MHÃIRÃN DE BARRA”.
SOME OF FRANK CORCORAN´S ORCHESTRAL WORKS
These are among my bigger canvases for varying sizes of orchestra. They straddle more than thirty years of inner struggle with this composer´s ear and ounds .
The THREE ORCHESTRAL PIECES are for middle-size orchestra ( I do insist on the sub-title: ” Pictures From MY Exhibition” ) . They are my three expanding time-pictures, ca. 2 minutes, 4 minutes and 6 minutes. I was thirty years old . This work won the 1975 Dublin Symphony Orchestra Composer´s Competition.
Five years later I had left Dublin for Berlin . SYMPHONIES OF SYMPHONIES OF WIND was premiered by the O.R.F.Symphony Orchestra in Vienna 1981. Of course it is “about” more than Stravinsky´s masterpiece for 23 wind-instruments ( – at its premiere in 1918 his grave caoine on the death of Debussy was a flop with the audience , a salutary reminder to still young me as I went about stealing his ” Russian Chord” ) ; my symphony is very much “about” great masses of air , sounding wind, time shaped slowly into an enfolding 24 minutes of musical argument.
What separates QUASI UN LAMENTO , then, from the SYMPHONIES ? Well, twenty five years of a lived life, three other symphonies, many sound-sculptures, instrumental and electro-acoustic. I´d written the MAD SWEENEY series ( – better: collection of works triggered off by my 1996 setting of Seamus Heaney´s English version of ” Buile Suibhne / Mad Sweeney” . By 2005 I was coming to the end of my ” Quasi ” series , pieces of many different sizes and shapes, all of them mindful of towering musical works composed in at least these last 200 years . This ten-minutes essay for a small orchestra including three saxophones and accordeon is as much
my protest as my lament.
At around the same time I composed QUASI UN CANTO for the Zagreb Philharmonic . Here the orchestral forces are vast. My short Prelude, central Argomento and short Postludio present a big picture.
MUSIC FOR THE BOOK OF KELLS
It was an intolerably humid summer-night at Lake Michigan , 1990 in Milwaukee. My drained year as a Fulbright Guest-Professor in the U.S.A. was ending ; two shadows lay over the family, my wife´s insanity and the violent death of my oldest son, Rory, shortly before. The University of Wisconsin Library purchased a facsimile edition of the Book of Kells in Lucerne. It commissioned me to compose a work for this event. My soul´s flood-gates opened then. This one-movement canvas for a vast array of percussion and , at the end,
Irish pianist ( – I was he- ) paints my Early Medieval Ireland, that strange interfacing of Celtic monastic Christianity and pagan tribal forces, war , peace, prayer, cattle-stealers and saints and druids and kings…. Quiet opening bells and gongs give way to deep drums, later timpani and brake-drums, an great ocean of sound-associations .
MUSIC FOR THE BOOK OF KELLS (1990)
All that we saw was his shadow under his shield
5 perc pf MS13′
Commissioned by Book of Kells Committee
of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
Premiere: 27 May 1990. University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA.
New Music Ensemble, Frank Corcoran (pf), conductor Pavel Burda.
Recording:
Mad Sweeney. Percussion Modern, Frank Corcoran(pf), conductor Dieter Cichewiecz.
Black Box 1999. BBM1026
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