Frank Corcoran

“The people in the bus go round and round” is a circular enough tune, its delicate tonic and dominant and cadence, tripartite as a Tripartite Life of Saint Patrick.
this children´s song form is its content, Herr Hanslick, its arpeggio up, then down again to its Doh, a child´s dominant echo, and then its octave leap right up to the tonic echo , an ” Abgesang” cadencing phrase.
That´s it.
No, that´s not it. So. What happened to German music-theory after our hugely noble Hugo Leichentritt and our gallant gentleman, Hugo Riemann had tried ? Were both tried and noble knights ?
What happened, I´ll try weeping this, was genetic exhaustion , gone-mad, pseudo Kantian stringency, linguistic tizzy, galloping, lovely incest.

Consider this sentence: ” Damit ist festgestellt, daß Herr Corcoran mit eindeutiger Mehrheit des Gremium und der Professoren auf Platz 1 der Liste kommt. ”
Humph. Now. Consider: could it really be that “Liste” = ” List” . Is it? – Is that it? Consider. And yet. And again yet: ” Beware the viper´s tongue; ” I did beware. I bewared, it was still sunny enough 1982, Prof. Dok Krützfi´s declared aim in his dirty ball-game was certainly to reduce his ( Hamburg; we are lying in his love-bed now in Milchstrasse ) and her ( in still, ah so distant Lübeck )
” fucking distance ” ( No ! I am not making this up, I quote …. ) from her fine bed ( in fine Lübeck ) to his ( fine ) ” Liebes” bed in ( fine ) Harvester Weg. How to reduce their ( love-mating ) distance from ( her female smelling ) Lübeck to ( his male smelling ; speriamo , si ) Harvestehuder Weg ?
Manipulate the votes. He tried. The Gremium stirred, my Selection Board tittered, shivered, it rallied, it voted me up from awe-filled Stuttgart.
” Nunmehr die Liste in der Reihenfolge….” ” Geheime Abstimmung “. ” zu beschließen. ” ” Diese Abstimmung erbracht folgendes Ergebnis…. ”

I like this ( daily ) beast: the inner dialogue between I and me. It hones. Honest. Drips new wine into old wine-skins. Not monologues. Chat with my self and cosmos.
Consider a pre-Christmas moment Corcoran´s Genetic Fallacy: this composer received :
” Many prizes, commissions, distinctions and awards….”
True as far as it goes. It goes not farther- does it make the work better or worse ? No. Neither. More or less crafted, felt, uttered, suffered ? No. More or less Horatian ( “ars est celare symphoniam …. ” etc. ) ? No. A little success helps. Goes a long lonely way. Certainly. Flatters and butters. No success ( Oh Schubert ! Ah Hugo Wolf, ´n Anton Webern an´ all ) makes the gall a bitter bladder. Yet it remains eternally true that the work´s excellence is not, cannot ever be its success with ” the public ” ( – who are they, then ? ) . Its construction´s pithy craft is not a brother to its crafty marketing. Its dark depths and felt heights and dizzy ecstasy have really nothing to do with or to say to its subsequent history of performances or of being sieved by a critics´canon or colunder or crooked sales or high-minded hype. Nothing. Horace would agree instantly with me. The work´s quality is simply quite different from its history; this means that it is not ” good ” while ( or because ) it gets a thousand performances, heists and hurrahs – or, alternatively, because it is ignored for a hundred years- . Art is well-conceived and imagined and incarnated energy, it is strong sounding brass and synergy and symphony, more perennial than the Roman poet´s polished perfection. Poor Mahler´s ” my time will come ” or poor Schoenberg´s ” my music is not bad, merely badly played” may well be true, important. But no Genetic Fallacies, please: a good piece of music is ( hey tautology ! – Nothing wrong with that …. ) a well composed , finished, completed construction of sound and silence. Nothing more or less.

I see, – no, I hear – that my Third Symphony is now up ( or “up” ) on Youtube. A mighty sound, mighty drums, mighty brass. Yes, 1994 was a good year for mighty artillery and fine filigree and sound writing, cool composition of the third kind, really. Long time ago now, though. Have we kept it up ? Have we?

Frank Corcoran: FIVE HAIKUS 2011
( = Lieder for Tenor and Piano )

Five dogs or seven
Snarl in the cold evening air
Barking: “Kill the Spring!”

Who goes here? Summer!
My pen glides on white paper
Soft horns, clarinets

Bits of sticky sleep
My eye tries to see itself
Morning birds chitter

Suppose God is light
A mountain´s shadow purple?
“Ciúnas, a h-anaim!”

Whisper “that sunset
Tiptoes through this, my window….”
Well, is this then death?

North German Radio . N.D.R.Kultur :

17. December 2011. 23.30 broadcast
Frank Corcoran´s new CLARINET QUINTET with the Vanbrugh String Quartet and Fintan Sutton, Clarinets.

FINIS

Remember, surfer, thou are dust, it is the blight. ( Is that it ? ) Draw round. Since I´ve been sick in this head for so long I don´t see really, actually an overamount of inducement now. No. ( Yes. She delivered this, film over eyes, no inverted commas )
Then there was the day they caught the long telephoning with nobody at the other end. Terror is a little furry animal. Trap the scream, grist for your musical art. As from a vast distant, the eyes. Cold. ” Someone come up and lift me.” I´d locked up the meat-carver. Let this chalice never pass. Stand by me now, O great self-love. Bridges burned, down the long road….
Her scream roared, ranted, her rocking ululation, that catatonic wail a chthonic keen. Caoine. Art comes from plumbing. Twenty seven years . Molten lava, lads, bottle her good …. ( I had to employ a food-taster. – Had to. ) Well, the eyes´ cold filmed fear had to snap. Actually. The terminal sprawl as her electrolytes just snapped like that. Furry, foetid, fetid finis.

FINISH THIS:

Draw around.If I catch ye again trying to commit me. ( How´d I ever get off the Titanic bridge ? ) Nowadays I tend to sleep with home-spun noose. Sure now?

It was in fifty four, early morning already very hot, our parent´s harnessed horses frisky to go, still quite still hay-knife in its mowing-machine oiled, sheathed, cleanly cut two rabbit´s legs, then that unfortunate nesting instinct of our corncrakes. Far in the future lay her scream, dormant in my June: how the, her eyes were filmed over. That June
month fused the bread-knife, the clean legs, a child´s bliss, my hay smell now in these virtual lines. If you believe this, you´ll believe anything, no little sir. Wash her strait-jacket; hang out to dry in the summer sun. Stop your inner scream or you´ll get a great slap ! Right here and now ! Mind this urn.

Dear, dear Frank Corcoran ,

Well, it was a famous victory, the musicians fab in my world-premieres ( CLARINET QUINTET and A DARK SONG ), phrasing and tempi and shaping and driving and sarkly singing and dancing and birthing in Dublin. I was delighted. The composer calves.

Meet The Composer! Frank Corcoran, November 25
This is a unique opportunity to learn more about the art of composing as Frank is also interviewed by the equally eminent Kevin O’Connell as part of a special composition mini-festival in association with the Royal Irish Academy of Music.

Join the Quartet, Frank and Fintan in the Katherine Brennan Hall at 2.30-3.30pm for an open rehearsal of both works – Clarinet Quintet and A Dark Song – a real rarity scored for solo bass clarinet. Both works will be workshopped and given their world premiere performances at 4.30-6pm and Kevin’s interview with Frank is not to be missed!

This special event will be recorded for RTÉ lyric fm Nova programme and filmed for TG4’s arts series Imeall. Admission FREE