Frank Corcoran

I have found writing a ” word – music” radio-programme is also composition. I use time . I weave words and music.
( Yes, the opening matters greatly; also how I end )
There is a rhythm to my setting of musical examples; juxtaposition can be powerful, a passage with only text ( – itself perhaps using one or several voices ).
Then there’s the “information ” versus ” tone ” tension which I must also compose – none of your old Music Appreciation gush.
– What exactly do I wish to convey ? About the music under aural analysis ( the radio-listener has only two ears ) ?
Comparison of motifs and phrases which I first must disect, their bisection and variations and expansions or being whittled down ?
The art of making a radio-programme ” about” and with music . The thinking ear.

14 02.04.95 John Field und seine Zeit
41/42 17.10.99 Charles Ives-Porträt zum 125. Geburtstag
12 22.03.03 „Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh“ – Stille in Musik
29 19.07.03 Great Britain läßt bitten (Länderschwerpunkt SHMF)
47 22.11.03 Franz Schubert zum 175. Todestag
06 07.02.04 Eine Winterreise
20 15.05.04 Charles Ives zum 50. Todestag
24 18.06.05 Irland – die Insel der Barden
02 13.01.07 Hörschule: Franz Schubert Sinfonie C-dur D 944
52 29.12.07 Frank Corcoran hört die Sinfonie g-moll
19 10.05.08 Frank Corcoran hört die 4. Sinfonie von Johannes Brahms
46 15.11.08 Frank Corcoran hört Beethovens 7. Sinfonie
23 06.06.09 Frank Corcoran hört Haydns Oxford-Symphonie
39. 26.09.09 Frank Corcoran hört Schuberts Sinfonie C-dur D 944
02 16.01.10 Frank Corcoran hört das Klavierkonzert c-moll von Mozart
11 20.03.10 Frank Corcoran hört die „Eroica“ von Ludwig van Beethoven
03 22.01.11 Frank Corcoran hört die 3. Sinfonie von Brahms
19 14.05.11 Frank Corcoran hört die 1. Sinfonie von Mahler –
26 02.07.11 Frank Corcoran hört die Sinfonie C-dur D 944von Franz Schubert (Whlg.)
50 17.12.11 Frank Corcoran hört die 2. Sinfonie von Gustav Mahler
15 14.04.12 Frank Corcoran hört Mozarts Klarinettenquintett
18 05.05.12 Frank Corcoran hört Mahlers Vierte
06 09.02.13 Frank Corcoran hört die 2. Sinfonie von Johannes Brahms
04 25.01.14 Frank Corcoran hört das Violinkonzert von J. Brahms
25 21.06.14 Frank Corcoran hört Till Eulenspiegel von Richard Strauss
38 20.09.14 Frank Corcoran hört die 9. Sinfonie von Antonin Dvo?ák
44 01.11.14 Frank Corcoran hört Schuberts Winterreise (Whlg)
14 04.04.15 Frank Corcoran hört Mozarts Jupiter-Sinfonie
03 23.01.16 Frank Corcoran hört das Cellokonzert von Antonin Dvo?ák

Since 2. 4. 1995 it appears that I made TWENTY NINE programmes ( hefty ! ) for NDR-KULTUR “Prisma Musik”. Big and

meaty two hour programmes, neither “professorial ” nor trivial. Important. Strongly argued, researched, bevelled.

There had been others in them dark eighties. There were others, also for other radio-stations in the nineties and

indeed later.

Good, hard work. Some original musical thought, a jewelled phrase, a genial musical connection or a sudden

apparition…. Great musical

minds thinking each her musical ” logic”. Young Wittgenstein would have approved, certainly.

I will publish the NDR lot – A List.

Watch this space, pixels and breath held.

Seven theses on Joyce and Irish music
Friday, February 5, 2016 – 3:00am

Irish composer FRANK CORCORAN delivered these seven theses at the James Joyce Centre in Dublin as part of his seventieth birthday celebratory concert.

1. Pythagoras was the greater composer – il miglior fabbro.

2. Yet James Joyce was in many respects the greatest Irish composer.

3. Joyce chiselled and turned and fashioned his syllables and word-units and titles and bits of songs, as would a composing Irish artist. He thus achieved his emotional-semantic character-associations and the fragments of memories which he needed in composing those great sonorous passages in his own sound-world.

4. If he had so wished , he could have reached highest places in his singing, playing and composing of (at least) Lieder. He chose not to.

5. As I mentioned in my 2005 Trieste James Joyce Summer School lecture, Nora’s father, Tom Barnacle, was known in Galway by his nick-name ‘Gobar i Goney’ – Irish: Ag obair i gconaí = ‘always busy’ – here is Joyce’s opening to Gabriel Conroy’s far-off West of Ireland ‘native Doric’, the music of sean nós song. At the same time we have Steven Dedalus’ Lestrygonian entry, “Music is maths for ladies….”. And then in the Trieste Notebook , Stephen Dedalus prefers the “vigour of the mind” needed in composing literature to any thought of composing music.

James Joyce, a great LISTENER, preferred the intellectual rigour of composing words to composing musical structures….

6. In 1917, in Zürich, the James Joyce family had as a neighbour in the Seefelderstrasse 73, the composer Philip Jarnach, who was the secretary of the great Ferrucio Busoni, a major figure in the revolution of musical language in the early decades of the 20th century. (Years later Philip Jarnach became president of the Musikhochschule in Hamburg.)

Did Joyce ever discuss the why and how of this revolution, or the birth of the early atonal masterpieces of the Second Viennese School? He did not. Did he show an interest in the compositional bomb that was Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at its Paris premiere on March 31 1913? Was he at all interested in the Viennese ‘Skandalkonzert’ with the premieres of Alban Berg’s Peter Altenberg Lieder and Webern’s Opus 6 Six Orchestral Pieces in May of the same year? Was he? Had he ever asked himself why John Field was buried in Moscow’s Nevensky Cemetry but not in Leopold Bloom’s Dean’s Grange? Or why Stanford, ‘the Irish Brahms’, ended his days at Cambridge but not in Dublin? Why there was no Dublin Bartok or Sibelius?

7. Joyce had an intimate, urgent, yet deeply split relationship with art music, with any Irish concept of composition as an Irish art. He mirrored his native city’s colonial inheritage in this regard.

He was the perfect forerunner of our post-colonial – or non-reception – reception of Irish contemporary composing as art, up to this day.

As Irish art. Of Irish composers as on a par with Irish poets, Irish painters etc. Perfect.

Frank Corcoran spoke at Dublin’s James Joyce Centre, November 26, 2015.

Frank Corcoran
James Joyce
Other Shorts
Book Review: The Life and Music of James Wilson
10/10/2015 – 1:30pm
Kevin O’Connell on his ‘Early Music’ (2015)
14/07/2015 – 2:30pm
Concert Review: ICC10 Day One and Day Two Lunchtime
20/02/2015 – 10:00pm
Concert review: ICC10: Dublin Laptop Orchestra
25/01/2015 – 11:30am

Yep !

Hope this year to premier ( Bolsena and Orvieto ) the new PIANO TRIO ( with Viola instead of Violin ) and the

Piccolo Quartetto Filarmonico ( with double bass…. ). Dear and sweet to me also the new 8 IRISH DUETS for Cello

and Piano -the real ould stuff, these ancient melodies of my soil – which we will also premier.

We’re getting there …. ( But where is THERE, I wonder ? )

Yep ! I watch this space. ? ‘ Course I do.

No, I don’t know what lies ahead. Nor who is lying.
However, take stock. ( Take everything …. )

Take 2015 ; post CELLO CONCERTO. The little Piccolo Quartetto Filarmonico ( a string quartet with double bass ) and the Piano Trio Nr. 2 ( Viola with cello plus piano ) are both shortish ( the first is only one movement ) . Both
more-or-less barred. Is my writing in both “simple” ? “Late Corcoran ” ?
Not sure at all. A new love of this or that figure, interval, sigh. But the old search for:
form , elegance ( i.e. exhaust the material but then stop ) , aura remains. How achieve these ?
Rounding and rounding up ?
Perhaps.
We’ll know sooner or later. And the 8 little Irish Duets ( Piano and Cello ) are a delight. The projected C.D. also.
Good summary. A good start to this 2016 composer’s year.

Your thermometer
Splintering in roiling heat.
I keep my head cool.

Fierce heat from the sun
These High Alps groan; they’re boiling.
Could we stop marching ?

( tairseach an Fhéin
is ea an uile ní –
fothracha )

No! everything
is a portal for the Self –
How shore these ruins ?

The Poet slips in
Through his own portal. No self.
Nothing. No language.

Immense static light
Beamed down on Ungaretti
Healing the hot self

Unwind the onion
All our healthy, ruined selves
Am I Buddha’s portal ?

( Fróinsias As Pratoleva…. ‘ Sea ! 2012 )

What door to my self ?
Tricky, slippery threshold,
It’s disappearing.

How many ruins
Make up my self’s dream-landscape ?
Our cat has fever.

Ihre Suche nach “frank corcoran irischer komponist” erzielte 2 TrefferSortierung nach Datum / Relevanz

09.05.2014Klangkunst
Tradurre Tradire

Das Wortspiel und Sprichwort “Tradurre – Tradire” will sagen: “Übersetzen bedeutet Verrat, Betrug”. Frank Corcoran setzt sich in seiner Komposition ganz wörtlich mit diesem Grundproblem jeder sprachlichen Übersetzung und Vermittlung auseinander.
09.05.2014Programmvorschau
Programm: Vor- und Rückschau

Betrug”. Frank Corcoran setzt sich in seiner Komposition ganz wörtlich mit diesem Grundproblem jeder sprachlichen Übersetzung und Vermittlung auseinander. Anhand eines kurzen gälischen Gedichts des irischen Poeten Gabriel Rosenstock und dessen englischer

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