Frank Corcoran:
Frank Corcoran was born in Tipperary in 1944. He studied in Dublin, Rome and Berlin and he returned to Berlin 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 Fullbright guest-professor in the USA 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, electronic and choral 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.
Symphonies 2, 3 & 4:
Corcoran on his Second Symphony:
I began my Second Symphony in Berlin in 1981. I wanted to compose vast sound-masses, bright or dark, with plenty of space between them. I composed expanding silences. I intended the two movements to mirror each other. In the first, all is non metrical, spaced; in the second, the same musical stuff is measured in real bars. The big battery of percussion divides, underlies, comments on, asserts or questions my opening string music, smeared chorales and fudged wind passages. I composed an archaic, elemental world. In the second movement, those tightly weaving string canons and wind hymns use the same tones and intervals. Metered and non metered passages are split in the age old struggle of Chaos and Order. At the end of my symphony there is a real gain in order, in composed control of the material. The final music of the bases grows out of sound and fury.
Corcoran on his Third Symphony:
The genesis of my Third Symphony was in 1994. My formal problem here was how to construct a single long movement out of my then favourite notes C sharp, D, E flat, G, A flat and their neighbouring notes. Why those notes? I do not know. Perhaps it was the sheer amount of harmonic ambiguity such a collection offers, depending on which note is on top, in the middle or on the bottom.
Corcoran on his Fourth Symphony:
The story of Orpheus is that of many composers. My Fourth Symphony too. Certainly, the birth of music was associated with ritual killing (not that sound was a substitute for violence, a tonal scapegoat). Here is my dolmen in sound, violence controlled on the leash. Again those six notes from my Third Symphony continued to haunt me. I began working in 1996. It was a hard year, the year of C sharp and D. Those high oboes at the opening are Orphean. There is a story in this single movement work, but it is a tone story of piled up energies, vast virtual space. It is both Cagean and Aristotelian. You hear the arch-forms; ears understand the logic of my story. It is a logic of chaos.
[Notes by Frank Corcoran]
