Working now on Dvorak’s CELLO CONCERTO – a mighty work ; it ( – plus Lutoslawsky’s ) lurks behind my own Concerto ( Premiere March 13 2015 with the N S O / Kenneth Montgomery / Soloist: Martin Johnson ) . Its ” big ” ATTITUDE ( of the orchestra and the solo instrument ) ; its aura ( Yes,Czech – though I have no thought of working neo-Slavic or neo-Celtic tricks into mine…. ) and its power. Courage . The big slam. Lutoslawsky’s work also towers, a giant act of instrumental courage , the composer’s belief that tones matter, that his music as sounding architecture must soar and shout against cosmic indifference; against societal, medial indifference.
“You’re On Earth – There’s NO Cure For That ! “
To the EDITOR / Irish Times . 11.11.2014
Dear Editor,
I weep for the Irish Times and the Royal Irish Academy’s post-colonialist ” panel of experts ” and their pale Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks.
” M’or Mo N’aire ” indeed for their
post-colonialist ignorance of contemporary Irish art-music . Over twenty years ago now the Irish Times portraited me as an Irish composer abroad who had no chance of being understood at home ( – it meant being understood by our Irish intellectuals, leaders, arts administrators and panels of ” experts” ) as an Irish artist working in sound , tone, silence; seeing an Irish symphony, sonata, chorus, opera, concerto, as on an exact par with an Irish book, painting, sculpture, play, poem, building. Certainly I weep.
post-colonialist ignorance of contemporary Irish art-music . Over twenty years ago now the Irish Times portraited me as an Irish composer abroad who had no chance of being understood at home ( – it meant being understood by our Irish intellectuals, leaders, arts administrators and panels of ” experts” ) as an Irish artist working in sound , tone, silence; seeing an Irish symphony, sonata, chorus, opera, concerto, as on an exact par with an Irish book, painting, sculpture, play, poem, building. Certainly I weep.
For your “experts” with their 100 Irish Artworks nothing has changed . An Irish ” cumad’oir ceoil” has no place in their 100 post-colonial artworks. – Yet how could she ? In 1981 my “SYMPHONIES OF SYMPHONIES OF WIND” was premiered in Mozart’s Vienna with the O.R.F.S..O under Lothar Zagrosek. Silence at home. ( Why ? Well, the Irish
“post- colonial” canon of what are and are not Irish arts doesn’t perceive Irish composed music as a part of Irish intellectual tradition. ) My ” JOYCEPEAK MUSIK ” won the German Studio Akustische Prize in 1996. – Yawn at home.. Yes. Post-colonial. My electro-acoustic “SWEENEY’S VISION ” won the 1999 Bourges Festival Premier Prix. West German Radio commissioned my ” QUASI UNA MISSA” which then won the 2002 Swedish EMS Prize.
A post-colonial narration of Ireland and Irish musical composition indeed ? Last year my choral “EIGHT HAIKUS” won the International Federation for Choral Music First Prize Outright . ( Here I am not blowing my trumpet but my musical nails )
Your revered panel’s post-colonial blinkers are blind to composed music on the Irish island . Abroad there is a healthy
recognition of four generations of Irish composers . I weep now for your woeful bias, the disgrace of your lazy, unexamined definition of Irish arts.
Yours etc.
Frank Corcoran , Irish Composer, Member of Aosdana.
On Talking About My Music or Writing The Programme-Note .
Talk about ” Quasi – Talking ” about my own work ; and writhing about my own works. Difficult.
Why ? – Because you sense :
1. I am not getting it. The full self-analysis ; nor even the musical composition, its true genesis and how its substance is born and takes off in full flight, well-wrought, well-rounded off .
2. Self-deceit is never distant , self-diddlement. Tales heard from another . A story “bentrovato” if not quite how it really was, perhaps ?
3. When is writing writhing ? Riding blissfully over truth – what truth ?
ON THE AIR WAVES AIRY ; FAIRY , TOO
5 March 2015 , H.R.2 Hessischer Rundfunk 2. Kultur
21.30 – 22.30 ” Cluster ” Komponistenportraet
FRANK CORCORAN
COLD, NIPPY DEATH FOR WEBBED DUCKS FEET IF ….
It is no joke and yet for me it wasa rare pleasure to have spent this grayish-Bergedorf day ( we are still pre-Winter Solstice, remember, ) correcting the orchestral parts for my new CELLO CONCERTO ( premiere March 13. 2015 in in Dublin . ) . Tricky the bass clarinet’s quirls , all the double bassoon darkly farting , my transposing instruments. It’s not yet two years since – in our sun-filled back-room, I composed it in furious, patient, unrepeatable ecstasy.
The symphonic opening does, well, open a high argument , a solo cello pitted against an orchestral Moloch. Take the ” motto-theme ” on its three high trumpets: Dvorak and Lutoslawsky behind, before me, I will sing the mad, sad years behind This Big Song; the Slow Movement’s shifting lines and colours and familial shadows and background-foreground shapes are less my aping of splendid 19th. c. forebears, more my composing singing lines for a soloist and his shadowers. The third movement is the most violent music I ever had to compose. Massed brass , one- or two-voiced attacks on a cellist’s beautiful nightmare ( and with his self-punishing marathons up to lonely, dizzy heights on the A string . A pounding rhythmic formula , this manic five / four / three / three assymetrical corset at my crazed , breathless tempo.
The final movement rescues orchestral shambles , this ever-present Corcoran’s Seven-Tone Scale ( G – A flat – C sharp – D – E flat – F sharp – A ) , our trumpets or horn motto- theme, Dvorak’s hymn, all the rest.
My Cello Concerto as autobiography? – hardly . As tonal architecture plus thematic play plus shadow plus sunlight plus reinforced concrete plus ” quasi una visione ” ? Quite. Quasi. Certainly.
SLIGO NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL 2000 Frank Corcoran
Yes, we are in a post-colonial situation. No, we must not close our Sligo ears to the string-quartet or the upright piano. As I was eight , it was hard to retain the melodies of our Borrisokane Bagpipe Band. In the 2000 Festival I have twinned my own with other Irish international works. Look at the musical sandwiches I’ve made. My music matters.
Sligo WAS a centre of megalithic culture, of the “TAIN” ‘s beginnings. My 2000 Festival here mates my musical thought with a tradition going back to that South Turkish gazelle-hunter’s village.
It begins with God’s Stutter. Hear the music those pierced swan-bones sang in Catal Huyuk. . B’i ag clos. Jump over your post-colonial shadow in Sligo. Elsewhere . Noli temere.
SLIGO NEW MUSIC FESTIVAL – FRANK CORCORAN
SLIGO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC FESTIVAL 2000 Director : Frank Corcoran
Model Arts And Niland Gallery SLIGO. 24 – 26 November 2000,
” SeaNua ” Old / New Music incl. Frank Corcoran’s:
Music for the Book Of Kells ( 5 Percussion and Piano )
Buile Suibhne / Mad Sweeney ( Speaker and Ch. Orchestra )
Lines and Configurations ( Marimba and Bass Clarinet )
Wind Quintet ( Dedalus Wind-quintet )
Trauerfelder / Goirt an Bhroin ( 4 Percussionists )
= Teadcheol, Cnagcheol agus B’ealcheol, Builecheol. My tones matter in Sligo, Yeatsstadt.
“We Irish are uneasy when we have to face the retention of 8 bars “.
“My music matters. Sean agus Nua. ”
“One John Field doesn’t make a summer of Irish composers.” ( Frank Corcoran )
I LISTENED TO MY HEART’S “MUSIC” TODAY
Today at my cardiologist’s I heard the whoosh and sluicing of my blood being pumped. Apparently this will go on until – one fine day – it won’t ever any more. Why is this a tiresome and trite fact. It isn’t. Not at all. Yet if I don’t find it important, well…. Not that I am the kind of composer who wants to record it as sound-material and then make a tape-piece of it , “The Heart’s A-Wonder” kind of billage. Spillage of my pumped blood is only interesting if I could form it, bend this raw material into musical, i.e. temporal – sonic shape. Only then. Blood is thicker than water and a Blood Sonata is thicker than water-music. Really now.
NEW MUSIC WATCH
I will indee. This space in the New Year. Announcing:
Hessischer Rundfunk Frank Corcoran Portrait, Spring 2015.
Also the publication 0f Festschrift for Frank Corcoran’s Seventieth
END OF NOVEMBER JOTTINGS
Apparently scribbling is all. Write about the work ( performing it is obviously one better… ) and its psychogenesis and its nemesis and all. To pretend I understand where it is coming from, a sigh in the piccolos or a chorale for muted horns , an all-present four tone motif in the “Jupiter” Symphony, such lip. Be not above the occasional Haiku. No, I know I can’t explain everything ( anything ? ) but there is a pleasure in the attempting, too. Quod scripsi has the habit of remaining.
About the Third String Quartet I expatiated: ” Mine is a kind of musical stream-of-consciousness, referring and feinting and discharging all the elements of Fast / Slow/ Violent / Lyrical/ Dense/ Thin/ Stringiness of Filigran. “