Frank Corcoran

I´d asked for a fine shower of left hand pizzicati . Delicately silvery. Difficult. We rehearsed the new string quartet near Rodin´s bronze haunch in the central hall of the Hugh Lane Gallery. How much bow-hair for the ” col legnos” ? I was glad to be back in rainy Dull Bin ( - I quote a colleague; he shall remain nameless, his quip writ on sullen dock-waters ) from Burg Ham, seeing Jack Yeats and T.P.Flannegan and those Barry Cooke pictures again. The invernal, special luminosity of the afternoon prompted this: why was it that, heard in such an ambience, such a special art-gallery, my new quartet reinforced the fullness of time which all astonished ears will hear , the work´s reeking temporality , an ensemble´s narration of the stringy sections as they unreeled like a long fishing-line in the Georgian room ?
It´s derived from the opening clot, the tangled skein of four voices, a knot of strings, cat-gut, I was gravely telling my agogic audience next morning at The Composer Talks, He Shoots From The Hip , Belvedere Apollo Animates His Hearers. They nodded approval. Let us be moved by the cat´s suffering. The sum of its parts equals the whole screeching, sawing, amputating thing. A quartet of strings seeks a quiet ending after whose travail ? I did not trot out - once again - my Composer´s Breakfast Argument, how words move, music moves, but only in time. Rilke and Rodin and T.S.Eliot rustled a little. My four musicians started together. They knitted and joined and fitted and soldered, creating great arched lines, flageolet chorales, little solos and bits of tutti, gridded and non metric music. It became one drawn-out musical thought-process . What, O Hugh Lane Gallery Trinity, if there´s actually nothing behind the must- green Director´s Door ? What had I, composing the quartet, been thinking of ? Consider: A musical enough farmer successfully sold five pigs at the Borrisokane market. Pig number one he delivered to the buyer, then he drove home to bring the second pig into town; this he also delivered to the dealer ; likewise pig number three and then his remaining fourth and fifth . It was the five trips and the separate pig-deliveries which finally compelled the buyer to ask if this way of selling five animals wasn´t a terrible waste of time. ” Time”, our philosopher-farmer´s immortal answering twist to St. Augustine´s theme :” But , shure, what is time to a pig ? ” Zbigniew Herbert ( he was in great poverty at the end, the Polish poet returned to die “at home” ) would have laughed his philosophic guts out. No mean musician himself, his REPORT FROM PARADISE, the closing lines, would have fitted in at the Hugh Lane Gallery:
” As it is now every Saturday at noon / Sirens sweetly bellow / And from the factories go the Heavenly proletariat / Awkwardly. Under their arms they / Carry their wings like violins.”

So how does each new phase of life follow from the previous one? Logically, or through a sudden discontinuity? Do I draw strength from a false belief that I am changing and growing, when in fact I´m stubbornly staying the same? In the hall Rilke was silent as the grave. Eliot in the Gallery buried himself embarrassedly, a cluttered montage. Rodin´s bronze haunches stood in bronze stillness.
Yes, everything in that string-quartet was derived somehow from My Gesture One´s sounding material. The whole thing was writhing in rawls of left-hand pizzes and wood-taps and lyric phrases of high, beautiful pathos and prayer and sigh and yell. There is , as a point of fact, in this composition no Marsyas to be flayed alive ( he was a wind-man, a mind-blower, a doomed aulos-player of Sweet Grecian Blues ) , it´s all cat-gut sheen. The players could down- and up-bow third- and sixth-stoppings in the middle of my synchronized mess, lyric droppings , melodic curlicues, heart-stops and stunning stunts way up on the E-string, dark Rembrandteries on a low viola, a cello caoine.
I didn´t dare trot out My Unanswered Question: was the premiered work a reflection of , or derivement from, or reaction to , or expression of and metaphor for this composer´s breakfast ? For eg. leaves out of the chapters of my life ? Actually , I didn´t think so. What then, so ? For my belief in form ? For words´and tones´ tautological motion in time ? Smart thinkers lump mathematics, chess and music together because they do create their own auto-referential worlds and rules and discourse and solutions to sublimity, economy, daring, wordless courage . Will we here have to add to this short list the ” art” of fishing and cooking and driving while drinking vintage red and , maybe,composing a dream´s end or a story about five pigs and a farmer or an explanation why somebody would go at all to the Marsyas / Apollo trouble of writing a new string-quartet ?
Will we ? Chess, okay. Mathematics , too, is a closed shop. Music, however, gets in under layers of skin-cancer , affects breath and heart-beat and growing old in that rainy, wintry Hugh Lane Gallery of visual and musical arts, wringing withers , touching woe and ecstasy and, at least so it felt, timelessness. Odd. I was sweating. I was in the musical now. Yet it was definitely unreeling. A sequence of quartetish happenings. A skein unravelling at great speed. Rilke and Eliot hid further. Only Rodin´s haunches, fine bronze poured, remained. What was time and being to a pig ? Could Jack Yeats have painted that ? Had shining Apollo any answer ?
Zbigniew Herbert again: ” Marsyas / Howls ! / Before the howl reaches his tall ears / Apollo reposes in the shadow / Of that howl…. ” I see see them four now, my Quartet for the End of Time. St. Augustine plays a big cello line. Jack Yeats is washing a painted viola; the philosophical farmer plays the second violin and his fifth, sold, siderificated pig leads.

January 21. 23.15 Lyric Fm broadcast : IRISH MIKROKOSMOI for String Orchestra ( 1996 ) . These are six short ” Scenes From My Receding Past”.

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.

DUBLIN CITY GALLERY THE HUGH LANE

SUNDAYS @ NOON CONCERT SERIES

ADMISSION FREE

Sunday January 13th 2008

Callino Quartet

Frank Corcoran String Quartet No. 3 (2007) première

Gyorgy Kurtag Officium Breve In Memoriam Andreæ Szervánszky Op. 28

L. van Beethoven Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 74, “The Harp:”

Pre-concert talk 11.30am:
Frank Corcoran will speak about his new string quartet.

The Callino Quartet is an internationally successful string quartet formed in 1999. They regularly broadcast on Lyric FM and BBC Radio 3 and have also appeared several times on RTE television. They have toured in Norway and Holland several times and also appeared at festivals in Lithuania, Italy, Czech Republic, and have also performed several times in Canada.The Callino Quartet was awarded a Special Prize at the 2002 Paulo Borciani String Quartet Competition for their performance of Haydn and since then has enjoyed collaborations with such diverse artists as the Vanbrugh, Vogler and Belcea String Quartets, double-bassist Edgar Meyer, pianist Barry Douglas, the Paris-Bastille Wind Octet and jazz guitarist John Abercrombie.The Quartet has commissioned and premiered new works by Ian Wilson, Raymond Deane and Finnish composer Kimmo Hakola and worked closely with Edgar Meyer, Peteris Vasks and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh on their works for string quartet. Recent and forthcoming performances include appearances at the Cheltenham, Sligo New Music and Clandeboye Festivals, concert tours of Scotland as winners of the Tunnell Trust Award, concerts in Ireland and the U.K. and a Wigmore Hall debut performance. Earlier this year they released their first commercial CD of works by Irish composer Ian Wilson to great critical acclaim. The Callino Quartet’s own annual festival takes place over the Easter Weekend in Co. Cork, Ireland. http://www.callinoquartet.com/

For further information contact
Gavin O’Sullivan
ph: +353-87-2456971
email: gmusic@indigo.ie
address: DUBLIN CITY GALLERY HUGH LANE, PARNELL SQ., DUBLIN 1, IRELAND. Website: www.hughlane.ie

The Sundays @ Noon Concert Series is funded by Dublin City Council and grant aided by The Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon.

So what´s so awful ? Sort, sort out, sift. I always HATED the smell of that book´s paper. Out ! Here´s a last chance to ask why many socks hoarded and hotel bathroom-soap hoarded, bank-statements from before the Flood stashed in the well-thumbed Koran that props up the bed in which it all happened, why the piano-stool never quite satisfied, how anyone was expected to thread his dish-stacker´s way through the scullery.
Life is ” a continuous house-move” . Moan we have not here a lasting apartment, no : so what´s awful in popping junk and detritus into the mouse-dropping grey-brown boxes, then loading them up on, down off the two trucks, long-forgotten muscles bemoaning their abuse ?
You can´t be thinking you simply walk away from the trousers out of which you´ve stalked? ( Well I did, I´d intend, each awful time, simply to turn the key in the flat - from the outside - walk off and then tip-off the Removal Police anonymously . Take a tin of herrings in cream, eleven years hidden under the uncompleted manuscript of the traveller´s Symphonic Moan for Soprano and Lush Strings.
To be is to be moving. To exist is to move the muck continuously through one´s intimate, comfy chronosphere ? To die, to sleep ? Music, please . Trundle, carriers, a Baroque array of mouse-dropping brown cartons, insulting, ineptly edited, conceived and boring books which boring guests brought as boring birthday -gifts. It´s not that, getting out of this too loud apartment and into that aerial flat of bliss. O Prime Mover, pity the moved ! Move us moving. Move us on. Move on.
Only the snail is sure that it´s moving house it is up to . What I move is the outer wrappings and the armour-plate and epidermic accoutrements, a few sloughed - off layers of lived, chronospherical mystery.
1. Considering Lord Buddha or San Francesco, I´ll have to bring up the songbirds of Tipperary . They do not weep, they never sow nor weave nor clutter.
2. Consider : if possessing the luminously new eyrie is new life, relinquishing the old can soberly be seen as a small rehearsal of its thankfully now no longer occupant´s death.
3. Of such detritus is the house-mover´s past. Who´se beginning to sing : ” Neither a collector nor a consumer be”, O Prime Mover !
4. This complaining squirrel´s taste ran to chipped mugs and hairy cookery books and there were the twelve chamber-pots which father deemed prudent to hoard in the first cold winter of the Second World War. In case we´d run out.
it is tensed temporality we celebrate on this grey morning of these removal-vans and striding furniture-carriers , our dresser walzing back down the stairs. The Reapers. The kitchen-sink dismantlers. The great apes , the Black and White Friars. The schleppers . The levellers. Move it on. Move on. Move.

Conversation: Fund for Irish Studies, Frank Corcoran to lecture on “The Dolmens’ Lament,” Friday, December 14th at 4:30 p.m.
Subject: Fund for Irish Studies, Frank Corcoran to lecture on “The Dolmens’ Lament,” Friday, December 14th at 4:30 p.m.

Please join us for a lecture by Frank Corcoran on “The Dolmens’ Lament”
Friday, December 14th at 4:30 p.m.

Lewis Center for the Arts
James M. Stewart ‘32 Theater, 185 Nassau Street

For more information about Princeton University’s Fund for Irish Studies

Dec. 12 2007

Ireland House, New York : FRANK CORCORAN - AN ” IRISH ” COMPOSER ?

Dec. 29 2007 Norddeutscher Rundfunk 3.

Frank Corcoran´s radiophonic 2 - hours ” Hear - Analysis ” of

Mozart´s G Minor Symphony , Nr. 40.

CHRISTMAS COMES EARLIER EACH AIRY YEAR

Damned to sparagmos and pithishit, synthetic psychology with very little child´s tinsel left over ; that´s one way to pitch our human fate´s faith. The parataxis in some of the less bloody Psalms, of course, hints at golden glory Halleluia , the Plan B, we´ll have to call it.
My contrapuntal skill at surviving must marry a ” blow, bugles, blow” Chorus with a ” Is it that bodybags await us all ! ” Cantata .
Take as my title : “The birth of macrocounterpoint out of merry spirits at this our rapidly nearing Christmas Solstice”, that´s what Ishould be lecturing on, flying out soon from cold Hamburg to cold New York. Watch the tail-wind, whatever I do.
As geese fatten, turkeys will tremble. Each one, all. At all the Good News.
The house-mover cometh, ´tis no Holy Joke , rather more of a ” He flatteneth what he willeth , he filleth small joybooks and large kids´books into smelly cardboard boxes. Nor is he mocked by marching music. ” - I´ll chance an unwieldy title, ” The Unholy Alliance of Psalmic Parataxis.”
The house-movers hie nigh and our table heaped for the Feast .
This blog has in the past been known to equate altars with table-cloths and the knife that killed the golden goose or the Holy Solstice turkey. It now has the gall to question its blog´s festive joy, the aerodynamics of my December flight to North America. Westward ho and the wrapped child´s toy steam-rolle at Christmas .
Is there here the makings of another good Princeton lecture ? - The paratactics of the Psalms before December dark sneaks up on me totally ? ( Remember 2006´s blog , pre X-mas ? ) Music was born out of ritual killing and festive turkey-stuffing . How hymn it ?
If I am composed of time, I am temporal, my personal memory has been growing since first I graced my perambulator. I am who am. I am becoming. Will I be ? A has-been, also. Watch the tail-wind ( all that frosty flight-path back from New York ) above at eleven thousand metres. That golden goose on our Christmas table is, or it certainly was purely temporal .
No more she´ll cackle: ” who will google Mr. Google ? ” Our turkey died for thee and thee. After the house-move is over, after the ball is done, the time for tinsel ´s come. Suspend the sparagmos; desist insisting ” I am but pissishith ” . Or ” pithishith ” either !
There will be time before the tail-wind blows and the music stops hymning its lie . He filleth our festive cards and our carol texts and our turkey leavings into the cardboard house-movers´ boxes. How can parataxis face up to that, ye Psalms?

—————–
Weitergeleitete eMail:
Thema: Fwd: Christmas Hies 4
Datum: 16.11.2007 15:36:53 Westeuropäische Normalzeit
Von: FBCorcoran
An: FBCorcoran

In einer eMail vom 16.11.2007 14:07:24 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt FBCorcoran:
CHRISTMAS COMES EARLIER EACH AIRY YEAR

Damned to sparagmos and pithishit, synthetic psychology with no child´s tinsel left over ; that´s one way to pitch human fate´s faith. The parataxis in some of these less bloody Psalms, of course, hint at golden glory Halleluia , the Plan B, we´ll have to call it.
My contrapuntal skill marries the ” blow, bugles, blow” Chorus with ” Is it , then, that bodybags await us all ! ”
And ” The birth of macrocounterpoint out of the merry spirits of this our rapidly nearing Christmas Solstice”, is that what I´ll lecture on, flying out very soon from cold Hamburg to cold New York ? Watch the tail-wind.
As geese fatten, turkeys tremble on this blessed night. Each one, all. At all the Good News.
The house-mover cometh, no Holy Joker but more of a ” He flatteneth what he will, he filleth small little joybooks into cardboard boxes. He is not mocked by marching music. ” - Is that what I should be lecturing on at Princeton , how music can at all contain Our Snowy Solstice Synthesis ? Or will I chance the unwieldy title, ” The Unholy Alliance of Psalmic Parataxis. Movers move house and the table heaped for the Feast .”
This blog has in the past been known to equate altars with table-cloths plus the knife that killed the golden goose or turkey or whatever . It has had the gall to question my festive joy or my aerodynamics in transatlantic flight, Westward ho, and the wrapped Christmas toy steam-roller. - Is there the makings of another good New York or Princeton lecture here ? - Paratactics before any December dark sneaks up on me ? Music was born out of the festive ritual killing , turkey-stuffing, you agree ? Does my very own macrocounterpoint lie in the very moment that it hymns ? And yet I am time, I am temporal, my personal memory growing and growing since first I ruled a perambulator. I am who am. I become. Will I be ? A has-been, too, my tail-wind ( all my frosty flight-path back from New York ) fading above at eleven thousand metres. My golden goose on the Christmas table is, or it certainly was pure time. A has been now , just like her table-companion, the turkey. No more she´ll cackle: ” But who will google Mr. Google ? ” She died. For thee and thee. Our fine turkey , also. After the house-move is over, after the ball is done. The time for tinsel ´s come. Suspend the sparagmos; desist insisting I am but pissishith. Or pithishith either ! There will be time. Before the tail-wind takes over and the music stops hymning, singing its lie or not. He fillith festive cards and carols and fine turkey leavings into cardboard house-movers´ boxes. How will parataxis face that, ye Psalms?

Yes, I do flutter and I do phight and I struggle and I rattle against these bars, this cage, that oaf, all these our tribulations and trials and our ( Pauline , of course - that unwashed , unwived mendicant preacher was a poet of world-class…. ) cross. The good fight, - perhaps it´s this PLUS AN GLÓIR which is the motor of culture, the real moth´s sizzle ? The mire and the quag and the glory behind or beyond ennui ( that foe which never sleepeth ? ? ) . Without me Deutschlandfunk would have no REAL content to broadcast to the edges of poor Steven Hawkings´ universe, apparently…. Content is very fine ; yet formless it lieth denuded there , unable to phly , phight or phlutter .

” They also serve who only stand and wait ” ( John Milton ) .

Did Milton ever hear of Bash ? Or of O ? No . Nor viceversa . Is this question trivial or quodrivial ? Both.

Why?

Frank Corcoran Interview Video for 2008 Dokumenta Kassel on:

http://www.documenta-dock.net/#p59