Frank Corcoran

5.5.2016 WGXC Radio : Frank Corcoran QUASI UNA MISSA

2.2.2017 WGXC Radio : Frank Corcoran VIOLIN CONCERTO, QUASI UNA MISSA, TRAUERFELDER

2.3.2017 WGXC Radio : ” Cello Concerto and QUASI UNA FUGA

27.4.2017 Woodville Theatre, Gravesend, England.
The Italian violinist virtuoso, Luigi De Filippi gives the English premiere of Frank Corcoran’s
SEVEN MINIATURES for Solo Violin.

This lark is larking,
HE scatters quavers , crotchets
His whole bird-life long.

Listen ! Wow ! Blackbird !
It broadcasts its bel canto
Across the wide lough.

Thrush, no ! Blackbird, yes !
Neither has humour, music,
But they imitate .

Between shore and shore
Yawns an immense, great distance
Watch ! – the bird tried it .

Domenica 28 maggio – ore 18.00

Piccolo Teatro Cavour – corso Cavour – BOLSENA

Pratoleva Piano Trio
MUSICISTI MEMBRI DELLA NATIONAL SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA DI IRLANDA
Fergal Caulfield: pianoforte
Adèle Johnson: viola
Martin Johnson: violoncello

L’evento di Bolsena segue la Prima italiana di due opere del Maestro Corcoran presso l’Ambasciata di Irlanda in Roma: “Piano Trio” e “Duetti Irlandesi” basati su Sean n’os, un’antica melodia irlandese.

Yes, art can be defined. but watch the context, the cultural and historical period. Art or arts ? Which art ?
Then see also Horace, the Roman poet.
See also craft ( as in 19th. c. ” Arts and crafts” ) . etc. Clear the decks.
Or are we attempting a definition in this 21 st. c. ?

Where we do the defining is also important. eg. Take Ireland and, say, the contemporary art of composed music.
Why do I insist that in Ireland still today there is hardly a concept, a definition, even the possibility of defining composed musical works , music composed by Irish composers – music as art, indeed as Irish art, as an art on a level with eg. Irish poetry, film, painting etc.
What are the causes of this blindness, this prejudice, this exclusion of this definition ? Are they dogmatic ? Lazy thinking? Could it be lack of experiencing New Irish Music, is that it ? Hmmm. Mull this over.
There have in the past been many definitions of art, of musical composition. ( It´s also worth reflecting a moment on some of the things we still today may define composing music as: sicut fumus, like smoke, ethereal. Yes, it is a temporal art, indeed THE time-art par excellence – time-bending, stretching, sculpting, stitching, overlapping, deluding, defying, conquering. ( – See Rosenstock´s great lines in MIGMARS : ” Buailim bob ar bhás! ” )
Composing is hope, it’s utopian, mythic, teeth-pulling, fighting the good fight. If “cinis aequat omnia”, still a Frank Corcoran composition will yell and shout and erect, trumpet out its own resistance to Montague´s : ” For there is no sea / Except the sea of history / Upon which we all turn / Turn and thrash / And disappear… ”
Music keens, protests, praises a fightin´ transcendence which potentially lives beyond the grave.

Certainly, music can be defined. Art can be defined. Irish contemporary music fights STILL for its place in defining Ireland, Irish art, Irish artists and , well, music .

FRANK CORCORAN

. wie gewünscht erhalten Sie die Auflistung Ihrer Prisma Musik Sendungen in 2014 und 2015:

25.01.2014 I 20:00 – 22:00 Uhr
Kleine Schule des musikalischen Hörens
Frank Corcoran hört das Violinkonzert von Johannes Brahms

21.06.2014 I 20:00 – 22:00 Uhr
Kleine Schule des musikalischen Hörens:
Frank Corcoran hört „Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche“ von Richard Strauss

20.09.2014 I 20:00 – 22:00 Uhr
Kleine Schule des musikalischen Hörens:
Frank Corcoran hört die 9. Sinfonie von Antonín Dvoøák

01.11.2014 I 20:00 – 22:00 Uhr
Schuberts „Winterreise”
Eine Sendung von Frank Corcoran und Gerhard Müller

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04.04.2015 I 20:00 – 22:00 Uhr
Kleine Schule des musikalischen Hörens
Frank Corcoran hört Mozarts Jupiter-Sinfonie

Duetti for Cello and Piano on Irish Melodies

It is in the Annals of the Four Masters that the entry for the year 1498 records the death of a distant ancestor, Floirint Ó Corcorain a saoi cruitire (master harper). How many of these eight melodies were already in his repertoire? I wrote the 8 miniatures for cello and piano in 2015 and 2016. These traditional sean nós (old style) melodies have been haunting me since my rural childhood in Tipperary. I had long been appalled by the settings of old Irish melodies attempted by Beethoven, Haydn, Britten , Harty and too many other well-meaning composers: their often saccharine harmonies, their rhythmic iron corsets or indeed the foursquare form too often adopted.

In these eight settings I have had to respect the fundamentally monodic nature of each song, taking great care of its modal intentions and linear ornamentations and its architectural form, normally an arched A B B A structure. Their rhythm is normally that of the Old Spanish sarabande, a heavy three in the bar. How the sarabande came so strongly to impregnate the Irish harpers and the music they played since the 16th century is anybody’s guess. In my settings of these traditional Irish airs, the cello has to sing its plaintive song while the piano remains orchestral with its myriad colours, phrases, echoes and motifs. These settings of eight great traditional Irish melodies, indeed almost chants, are of course also historical miniatures of my vanished Ireland.

Im Aonar Seal (Once as I was alone)
A tune where the erotic is fused with a political dream. In this vision of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, the great Kerry poet of a dying Irish language in the mid 1750s, appears Venus – an allegory for Ireland – and promises political liberation for the poor enfeebled country. Again the four melodic phrases, the arched form, the confident ascent and plaintive descent strive to articulate a country’s struggles for freedom from colonialism.

Seán Ó Duibhir An Ghleanna (John O’Dwyer of the Glen)
I learned this at six years of age in my rural Borrisokane school. It is a Jacobite lament by John O’Dwyer from Aherlow who, with the downfall of the Catholic King James at the hands of the Protestant William of Orange, lost his home, his lands, his everything. This sense of an unrecoverable past greater that his own personal loss is lyrically evoked:
On my rising in the golden morning with its resurgent sun I heard the sounds of the hunting horn, the distant guns and an old peasant woman lamenting the loss of her geese.

Príosún Chluain Meala (The Prison of Clonmel)
Clonmel is the county town and largest settlement of County Tipperary. Dating its expansion to medieval times, the town is noted for its resistance to the Cromwellian army which sacked both Drogheda and Wexford. Priosún Chluain Meala dates from the revolution year 1798, although the air is certainly much older. Again, the words of its lament with their Mahlerian/Des Knabenwunderhorn quality are very fine. This young prisoner will be hanged next Friday:
My Kerry friends, pray for me, your voices are soft to my ear. I did not think that I would never return to ye. Our three heads they’ll place upon spikes to make a grand spectacle. The snows of the night and all harsh weather will bleach us…”

A Úna Bháin I&II (Fair Una)
There are at least two versions of this great Co. Roscommon love song. Tomás Mac Coisdealbha was drowned night-swimming across lovely Lough Key to visit fair Una McDermott: ‘…you were a candelabra on the festive table for a queen.’ Still today on Trinity Island you can visit the two intertwined trees growing from their two graves. In the first version, piano harmonics echo the cello’s wild high line. In the second version, it is the cello’s primitive pizzicati on the open strings which punctuate the piano’s vain attempt to imitate the ululations of a Connemara traditional singer, the legendary Joe Heaney, heard in my distant childhood in the 1950s.

A Mháirín de Barra is love-song based on a myxolydian mode, essentially the diatonic scale with its roots in medieval forms. In the song the singer curses his lover, Mary Barry, who has come between him and God.

Róisín Dubh (Dark Roisin)
Ever since the film music of Irish composer, Seán Ó Riada, achieved iconic status in the 1960s, fiery Róisín Dubh used by him in Míse Eire has become for many the Song of Revolution, indeed almost an Irish Finlandia. Its huge melodic ascent and incandescent leaps strain to express the folk-poet’s vision: ‘The ships are on the ocean deep. There will be wine from the royal Pope for my Dark Rosaleen,’ a symbol of a little nation’s political rising.

May 27 2017 at 18.00 IRISH EMBASSY , ROME , ” IL CONCERTO DI DUBLINO ”

– ” Sean agus Nua ” – New And Old Irish Music with the Pratoleva Trio including:

Frank Corcoran DUETTI IRLANDESI ( Piano and Cello ) and

Frank Corcoran new PIANO TRIO ( Piano, Viola and Cello )

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Programme repeated May 28 2017 at 18.00 BOLSENA ( Piccolo Teatro Cavour )

” ” June 4. 2017 DUBLIN 12.00 ( Hugh Lane Gallery )

– also LYRIC FM launch of new Frank Corcoran CD ” Rhapsodic Celli “

200 words about my 2000 String Quartet….

After Lutoslawsky’s and Ligeti’s and Bartok’s ( and the other great 20. c. works of string quartet writing )

how could I compose something fresh for these four strings, I asked myself ?

( – It was indeed a long way from Tipperary where I was born in 1944. )

And yet have its musical argument clearly audible ? Musical logic ?

So I had to learn from the young Beethoven – I had to spin everything out of Bar One.

So I prepared my explosive opening idea , four strings playing each

its own angry statement fortissimo, yet not metrically synchronized with the others .

Yes, every gesture born out of Bar One’s knorl .

So this one movement quartet quite simply consists of this 4 – part idea plus its thousand variants, but each version blocked

by the grid of metrically barred music. Every possible gesture and tone-colour and string-attack is

used in all of these appearances of my opening idea .

At rehearsal-letter G_ all is pizzicati . After letter H_ all is c.l.b., and then c.l.t..

At I_ the 4 strings give us a legato version. K_ chorale presents yet another idea of Bar one.

L_ is a sound-prism of madly breathless

polyphony.

At N_ bar one seems to return. – But as a varied reprise .

Q _ , al piu presto, – all very fast

After S_ the left hand pizz has

entered the colour- argument, these delicate, impossible pizzicati.

The second half of this stream of musical consciousness strives towards closure.

Is Z_ its crisis.

V_ and W_ , sempre al piu presto, are as throstled helplessness .

By T1 the four voices have come to rest. The kinetic energy has stopped. Deep frozen now the original opening notes of Bar One.

In my end is my beginning….

Pratoleva Trio premiere a new contemporary Irish chamber music by Frank Corcoran.
Fergal Caulfield, piano
Adèle Johnson, viola
Martin Johnson, ‘cello

Programme includes:
Achille Simonetti Allegro Romantico
Frank Corcoran Duetti Irlandesi: Im Aonar seal, Séan Ó Duibhir An Ghleanna, Mo Roísín Dubh
Alfredo Piatti Caprice No.4
Jane O’Leary as if one
Olivier Messiaen Première communion de la Vierge (No. XI from Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus)
Dermot McDermott A Peace Worth Wiling
Frank Corcoran Trio (world premiere)
Girolamo Frescobaldi Toccata arr Cassado

Venue
Irish Embassy, Rome
Via Giacomo Medici, 1
Rome
Italy
Venue Contact Info
Works
as if one(2016)
Jane O’Leary
Viola and cello
11 min
Frank Corcoran
Frank Corcoran(b. 1944)

Frank Corcoran was born in Tipperary and studied in Dublin, Maynooth, Rome and Berlin (with Boris Blacher). He was the first Irish composer to have his ‘Symphony No.

FRANK CORCORAN
(b 1944 )

Frank Corcoran was born in Tipperary in 1944. He studied in Dublin and Rome, and in Berlin with Boris lacher, returning there in 1980 with a Composer Fellowship. Since 1983 he has served as professor of composition and theory in Hamburg and in 1989-90 was a Fulbright guest-professor in the United States of America, lecturing at CalArts, Harvard, Bloomington, Boston College and elsewhere. His compositions include four symphonies, the first of which was first performed in Vienna in 1981, and several orchestral, chamber, electonic and vocal works. His compositions have been performed widely at home and abroad and he has received many commissions and awards, being represented at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, at Aspekte Salzburg, the Zagreb Biennale and elsewhere.
Role: Classical Composer
Album Title
Catalogue No Work Category
CORCORAN: Symphonies Nos. 2, 3 and 4 Marco Polo
8.225107 Orchestral