IN THE DEEP HEART’S CORE ( May 31 Dublin AIC CONCERT, Anne-Marie O’Farrel, Harp )
My short Harp Solo pits the instrument’s low strings against its ethereal high ones. The opening fortissimo music generates the whole thing , including the final high thoughts of this miniature art-work . In writing for this great an-orchestra-all-in-one-instrument my duty as a composer must be to avoid the merely ornamental, the beautiful ( but too often cheesey ) clichees of 19th. c. harp compositions, the merely lovely sheen of their glissandis and their ultimately boring middle range. ( Stravinsky rehabilitated the instrument with his pale low tones in that little Tombeau for Fuerst Fuerstenberg. ) No tired rhetoric but stern compression. The title of course also recalls the harp’s Irish past, coming from W.B.Yeats’s 1890 minor masterpiece , ” The Lake-Isle Of Inishfree” ,
in which the young exile hears in London the “low sounds lapping by the shore” of his Co. Sligo idyll, Lough Gill.
Yes. he hears it ” in the deep heart’s core”. I,too, hear it.
FRANK CORCORAN