Urgent Attention

Hear that? It’s the sound of a composer’s music changing. Timothy McCormack’s “you actually are evaporating” for violin and cello begins with a rapid flicker of timbres. Microtonal double stops, coarse strokes deep in the strings, laconic glissandi, the occasional single note, flit past. Ear and brain reach for the pattern. This is beautiful music that may remind you of music by others. 

About six minutes into the piece, the texture coalesces into waves of sound. At the crest of these waves, the violin and cello reach their most metallic sul ponticello, with the bow very close to the bridge. Strange overtones spray into the air. Listening to this music is like looking at the ocean and noticing that the foam from the breakers is neon yellow.

McCormack, 39, composed and revised “you actually are evaporating” between 2011 and 2014. “You literally hear my music change over the course of that piece,” they told me. “I don’t think I was aware of it logically, but intuitively, something was clearly working itself out. And this piece was bearing witness to that, because it begins with this highly gestural idiom, and by the end of the piece…” 

McCormack paused. “It strips more and more movement away, until we’re left with these planar, barely spoken sounds.”  

You could locate the exact moment of metamorphosis at a few different places in “you actually are evaporating”: after those exquisite waves, or later, when the violin makes the work’s last truly violent interruption. By the time we reach the climax, with its texture reminiscent of needle on (invincible) balloon, we have obviously passed from one world to another. Nothing darts; instead, the sounds linger, devoted to their enigmatic imperatives.

Violinist Ashot Sarkissjan, a member of the Arditti Quartet, heard a performance of the piece in 2014. Listening to it “felt both akin to zooming into a fractal and to what staring into a black hole must be like,” he told me. “The time had stopped (yet never frozen), while the most hypnotic, magical, bottomless void of sheer beauty continuously opened up layer after layer, compelling you to follow deeper and deeper into the very nature of sound and time itself.”

Because “you actually are evaporating” had such a long gestation, it became, McCormack said, “a diary of its own making,” a record of changes aesthetic and personal. One such change the piece records is that, in November 2010, McCormack was diagnosed with HIV.  

Before then, McCormack had kept their biography and musical work separate on principle. “I really was actually not interested and kind of actively resistant to thinking about the music that I write and the life that I live as being connected,” they said. “I was really into whatever high modernist notions of [the] autonomous work of art, and my work was just about the medium, the sound, the instrument.” After the diagnosis, McCormack spent time “sitting with the fact” of having HIV. Gradually, the knowledge of their altered body began to alter the way they created music. “I’m a composer, I use music to think through things,” they said. “So of course the two things could become related.” 

In “panic around death,” a 2015 work for vocalizing performer, objects, electronics, and light, McCormack trained starkly reduced musical means on the theme of existential dread. It was both their first piece for voice and their first composition “where I was consciously writing music about a thing in my life,” McCormack told me. The title’s bluntness speaks to this personal connection. Many of us are eased into the awareness of our own mortality by creaking knees and glances unreturned; despite vast improvements in HIV medications, McCormack, who was 26 when they were diagnosed, faced a steeper reckoning. The disease noticeably changed their physical state: their lymph nodes swelled to twice their normal size, and McCormack’s already deep voice dropped an octave. The disease “gave me a very difference sense of what I am in here,” they said. “It took a little while for me to invite my own sense of body and internal connection within the body into my music, but… once I allowed that connection to be—I don’t want to say consciously made—but invited into my practice, it really changed it.” Their pieces became slower and starker, with a greater emphasis on the preciousness of concentration and more time for the listener’s ears to grope their way around the sounds. 

McCormack’s new approach is clearly audible in “panic around death,” which opens with a primal groan: less violent but more desperate than a scream. The vocalist releases these groans out into a bed of noisy electronics, first very infrequently, then more often. But the density of musical events in the piece remains low enough that when, before the 14th minute, you hear a scattering of very short, very fragile tones, they become the center of your hyper-focus. 

Even throughout the climax of “panic around death,” where the vocal interjections melisma into sounds of screeching, friction-laden resistance, a wash of detailed noise is omnipresent. Such textures are common in McCormack’s music; they see these sounds as places to luxuriate in. “I guess one could create a context in which noise is abrasive and confrontational,” they said, “but I see it as actually being much more of a warm safe nest.” 

In “nestbuilder” for solo voice with glass objects and assistants (2022–23), another naked call—this time two major seconds—rises out from another sensitively constructed bed of noise. In a profile, vocalist (and VAN contributor) ty bouque described the piece as “a hermetic web of softly spooling threads that ends in a haze of shimmering glass”; for McCormack, the music creates “a space saturated with sound and noise so as to pad it, soften it, envelop it from within.” That applies to “panic around death” too, where the noise acts maybe less as the architecture of the nest than the feathers within it, the soft barrier between body and disease and home and world that makes all of it a little bearable. 

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McCormack grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Independence, Ohio. Their parents aren’t musicians, but their mom had received a piano from her own father at a time when money was tight, and she insisted McCormack’s three older siblings take lessons with a mean, older neighbor who bashed their fingers against the keys. McCormack was the only child who wasn’t forced to take piano and the only one to become a professional musician. 

They began playing percussion in the elementary school band program, then piano, flute and, in high school, the bassoon. The last instrument was a strategic choice. By the seventh grade, McCormack had created their first pieces, and a year or two later they decided they wanted to be a composer. McCormack knew they would have to play an instrument to be accepted into most conservatory composition programs, but piano and flute were simply too competitive, so the bassoon it would be.

At the time, McCormack had little familiarity with contemporary classical music and only a vague sense of what becoming a composer actually entailed. As a high school student, they heard a performance at the Cleveland International Piano Competition where a contestant played the sixth movement from Messiaen’s “Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus,” “Par Lui tout a été fait.” Unfamiliar with the composer’s harmonic world, McCormack thought the performer was playing a lot of wrong notes, and felt an acute sense of fremdschämen, or embarrassment on behalf of another person. When the pianist got an immediate standing ovation, McCormack was baffled. “It was one of the most profoundly confusing moments of my life,” they said. “I had spent the last 10 minutes without a question in my head that this person was just messing up. And then, in that moment, I was the one who was wrong.” 

They studied composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where a furious crash course in contemporary music changed their outlook completely. When they arrived, their music was like “a really poor version of Bach crossed with Debussy,” and they hated the few genuinely atonal pieces they’d heard. At Oberlin, the combination of exposure to the wildest sides of the avant-garde with genuine context and explanation showed McCormack that they had something to say in this genre. “The composer that I was the first day of Oberlin and at the end of that first week was completely different,” they said. “And I just never looked back.” Meanwhile, the bassoon’s bizarre ergonomics inspired in them a fascination with the interaction between musical construction and performer. For McCormack, “an instrument is not that instrument until it’s being held and activated by a human body, and inversely, the human body is literally part of that instrument’s mechanism.” 

The image of symbiosis between body and instrument has been essential to McCormack’s music since their “quote-unquote first piece,” the frantic “Disfix” (2008), for bass clarinet, piccolo trumpet, and trombone. The work is a kaleidoscopic exploration of a harsh timbral palette. Its materials are the kinds of sounds usually ironed out by traditional classical music training, created by irregular placement of mouth on reed and varying levels of breath support. McCormack crafts this material expertly, but, like the first part of “You actually are evaporating,” the materials and dramaturgy of “Disfix” may remind you of other contemporary music; the critic (and VAN contributor) Tim Rutherford-Johnson has noted the “wildly energised” sound world and “extravagant physicality” of this music. 

McCormack’s recent work evokes more austere images. And though composers’ metaphors often reveal more about their pre-compositional processes than about what we hear, McCormack’s favored terms—“planar,” “geologic,” “haptic”—actually are illuminating. They compared the experience of hearing a piece of theirs to walking through a forest. “There’s a canopy of trees and it’s fully covered. There’s lots of detail that you can attend to—so material—lots of different textures that you’re attending to on the trees, on the ground, lots of little critters inhabiting the space,” they said. “Trees are way bigger than humans, [but] we can still measure ourselves against a tree, and so our rate of walking through the woods in this situation is very measured. The environment itself allows us to have a particular sensation of our movement through this thing.” 

To continue the metaphor, McCormack builds “clearings” into their pieces. The foliage of a piece thins out, often leaving a single, soft noise remaining, like the gentle rustling in the 14th minute of “KILN I,” for contrabass clarinet, euphonium, and percussion (2014, recomposed 2017). It’s an aural experience that quite accurately reflects encountering a rare ray of sunlight in a shady forest. Before I knew McCormack used the term “clearings,” I noticed these moments in almost all their pieces I listened to, and started writing down when they happened, because they always felt so right. Of all the many things about composition that can’t be taught, maybe the most crucial is the sense of what comes when. 

“Every piece teaches the listener how to listen to it,” McCormack told me, “and every piece also needs a certain amount of experience with itself in order to understand itself. I need to start composing the piece in order to fully understand it.” They continued, “A clearing can’t be arrived at too early, because none of us—myself, that piece, or the listener—would understand what it means if it comes too soon. We haven’t lived through the experience enough to be able to assess its behavior.” 

In addition to this internal divining rod for dramaturgy, McCormack has a startlingly precise ear for blends of pitch and noise, a quality they share with many of the best composers of their generation. (In 1958, Stockhausen observed that “the category of noise is no less differentiated than the category of sound,” an insight that is gradually being absorbed in contemporary music’s bloodstream.) “Tone and noise for me are not opposite things,” McCormack said. “They live within each other, and they hide within each other.” In the fifth minute of “KILN I,” a timbre like sand in molars gives way to something numbed and clean, the gritty detritus removed by the dentist’s suction of the musical process.

The result of this aesthetic work is music that makes time feel like it’s passing slower. As the seconds reverberate, the sounds draw our attention to the relationship between our bodies and this thing outside them. For McCormack, this effect represents the queer, erotic aspect of their music. “There’s a refining or sharping or attunement to sensation,” they said. In their music, they continued, “I access a space of attention and urgency. I give myself an experience that I really don’t have available to me in life in any other place other than through expressions of sexuality. It’s giving myself and maybe others this place of heightened, urgent attention that I really value.” Their “Seated at the Throat” (2023–24) is one of their many works that accomplishes this. It puts the listener deep into the performer’s larynx. Meaning very, very close. 

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In 2021, McCormack wrote a piece called “glost fire” for the Austin, Texas percussion trio line upon line. The work is scored for bass drums of various sizes with different materials attached to them, including a guitar string taped to the drum on one end and held by the performer on the other end. That leaves the performer with one hand free to bow the string. 

After finishing “glost fire,” McCormack wanted to continue to explore the sound produced by the augmented bass drum, so, for the first time since their undergraduate days, they wrote a piece without a collaborator or commission in mind. At first, they said, “I notated it in the most Tim way possible,” with speed and duration of every stroke of the bow on the guitar string precisely defined. (Their scores are complex, full of unfamiliar symbols, and without meter, which demands concentrated listening from the performers.) 

Later that year, McCormack premiered the resulting solo work, “deep terrane.” Rather than a completion, it was the start of another something new. “After I premiered it, I had this distinct sense that this approach to notation and thus to form and organization just wasn’t honest for the material, for this particular instrument,” they said. They found it awkward translating the mutability of the string attached to the drum into instructions that made precise sense on the page. “The fixity of the notation did not acknowledge or provide much room for this reciprocal haptic discourse,” they told me, “that a human body has with this instrument, this object, in order to shape the sound.” 

As when they first received their HIV diagnosis, McCormack needed time to sit with an unfamiliar feeling. They considered how to approach a work where the notation could be flexible, but where “form and intention and creating specific contours of experience over time” would remain at the core of the artistic project. “I don’t want this to be a loosey-goosey improv, or make this vague shape,” they recalled thinking. 

In October 2021, “panic around death” was performed in Berlin, and a member of the contemporary music ensemble Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik who was there approached McCormack about a possible collaboration. They discussed putting on a portrait concert including previous works by McCormack, but also workshopping a brand-new work. It was an ideal venue for the ideas McCormack was working through related to “deep terrane.” “It literally not just put me in a place where I had to try out the things that I’d been thinking towards for a while,” they said, “but let it actually be a thing in the world.” Instead of writing a score, McCormack developed the piece with the ensemble over three days in 2023, working seven to eight hours a day. McCormack gave the musicians broad terms to think about as they played: resonance, vibration, and noise. The ensemble would improvise for a while, then spend an hour or longer talking about what they had just played. 

“These conversations were like, ‘Where did you find the beautiful pebble when you were taking a walk? Where was that nice leaf on the tree? Where were these moments, and how did we get there?’” Sarah Saviet, the violinist who performed the piece, told me. “And articulating to the group, ‘These are moments we really like, these are the moments that really said something to us, and trying to internalize those bits.’ And then we would do another 15 to 20 minute block.”  

Last September, I heard the resulting work, “deep terrane (earth dreams itself, sweating),” at the Berlin experimental music venue KM28. The fragile, concentrated sounds of the piece seemed to magnetize the air. Then the performers went attaca into “nestbuilder,” performed by bouque. In “deep terrane,” I felt like a witness to a private ritual; in “nestbuilder,” the experience was even more intimate, like watching the first human discovering that this strange apparatus of throat, vocal cords, and diaphragm given to us by evolution was capable of magic. 

The title “deep terrane” has come to stand for a project of non-notated compositions. McCormack looks at creating such a piece as a sort of queer community-building with their collaborators. “I appreciate that work and relationship building through music and community building through music,” Saviet said of the “Deep Terrane” process. McCormack “is a facilitator in some ways, very caring,” she added. Their queer community building happens is this concrete way, but also abstractly. As McCormack said, “I don’t mean this pejoratively, I just mean this isn’t something that I am interested in creating—but a lot of queer art is demonstratively queer… that’s not what I’m interested in creating through sound.” Instead, they use music to explore how we “use our bodies to discover and to know something.” 

Being diagnosed with HIV helped McCormack understand how the body discovers, how the ear grasps, how the mind attends. They now would not give the disease up. “It has really clarified what I’m actually after,” they said.

We were talking about clearings, the moments in their pieces where their art is most bare, where their music holds its points of highest and lowest tension. “That already is a fairly queer logic,” McCormack said. “Know that you’re in this place. We don’t know how we got here. But now that we’re here, it feels inevitable.” ¶