the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart [2022]

violin [20’]

written for Austin Wulliman for his 40th birthday

performance history

5/17/2024- Sarah Saviet. Center for New Music. San Francisco, CA

3/10/2024 - Austin Wulliman. Boston Conservatory. Seully Hall. Boston, MA

reactions

“The first half is all suppression and resistance… and full of a palpable, literal tension. Nothing prepares you for what follows. A sudden eruption of plucked strings… tears the work open. What comes after has, for want of a better word, a rhapsodic quality: …a sustained intensity that is no longer the intensity of constraint but of release. Its physical effect on me was euphoric. One of the most shattering moments in McCormack’s output.

the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart does something comparable for the solo violin, finding in a single instrument and a single body an emotional range that its austere surface might seem to preclude. Between them, they confirm McCormack as a composer who matters.”

-Dominic Hartley, MusicWeb International

“It achieves an elevated status by both complementing and transcending the preceding, larger work. Written a few years later, it fills the same sort of miraculous space occupied by Nono’s violin duo “Hay que caminar” soñando, using sparse sounds and silence in a way that feels like you’re hearing the instrument for the first time. Rigorous in its orientation while more capricious in its method, the piece feels as though it’s been lived through more than composed.”

-Ben Harper, Boring Like A Drill

“Across fragile textures and moments of sudden intensity, the music invites listeners into a heightened awareness of presence, vulnerability, and transformation. This album documents a singular compositional voice for whom listening is not passive reception, but a profound, corporeal experience… [The piece] eyes you up from the very beginning, knowing exactly what it wants to do to you, and what emotive sounds are going to work best to hypnotize you into a lulled state of impassioned being.”

-Anne Carlini, Russell Trunk's Exclusive Magazine

program note

This piece is about sensation: sound as a tactile, vibratory, physical, and corporeal sensation. The piece invites the performer to listen through their entire body, to feel the vibration of their instrument upon their fingertips; to feel this vibration in themselves, and attend to it. Vibration as celebration.