you actually are evaporating [2011-14]
violin & cello [24’]
recordings
Portrait Disc on KAIROS. Performed by Christopher Otto & Kevin McFarland. Purchase/download here. Listen on Spotify & Apple Music.
Listen to a live recording by Chris Otto & Kevin McFarland here.
further reading
Urgent Attention: A profile of composer Timothy McCormack - VAN Magazine, Jeffrey Arlo Brown [March, 2024]
KARST by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, written to accompany my portrait CD on KAIROS [June, 2020]
outside of time | inside the sound [dissertation colloquium presented for the degree of PhD at Harvard University, May 6, 2019]
performance history
4/1/2014 - JACK Quartet. Portrait Concert. The Stone. New York, NY
11/24/2013 - Christopher Otto & Kevin McFarland. Wesleyan University. Middletown, CT
10/13/2012 - Argento Ensemble. Harvard University. Cambridge, MA
4/7/2012 - Callithumpian Consort. Harvard University. Cambridge, MA
program note
“The more that you can let go of your control, and give it over to a kind of transparency in the body, a feeling of disappearance, the more you will be able to grasp differentiated form... It is as if you are trying to divest your body of movement, as opposed to thinking that you’re producing movement. Like leaving your body in space, instead of pushing forward into and invading space. It’s dissolution, letting yourself evaporate. Movement is a factor of the fact that you actually are evaporating.”
-William Forsythe [in Kinetic Isometries]
you actually are evaporating is the direct result of my study and practice in the field of dance. The piece is not as much about the movement which is accessed once the body allows itself to become transparent as it is about the very act of becoming transparent. It is the searching for and gradual opening up to this transparency. It is the dissipating, divesting, evaporating body. Evaporation is the opposite of dematerialization: it is the opening up of one’s own materiality to the profusion of extracorporeal, sui generis material. It is both the becoming-body of the body and the bodily remainder left behind in the wake of its own effacement. It is the matter contained within the evaporated body; an ecology of openings.