mine but for its sublimation [2021]

piano [60-70’]

written for Jack Yarbrough

“…it has a cumulative power that left me a little dazed the first time I listened… I heard that E-flat chord as a spiritual event. It was as if no such chord had existed before or would exist again.”

-Alex Ross, The New Yorker [June, 2025]

performance history

12/4/2024 - Jack Yarbrough. Conrad Prebys Music Center. UCSD. San Diego, CA

10/16/2023 - Jack Yarbrough. Jordan Hall. New England Conservatory. Boston, MA

9/29/2022 - Jack Yarbrough. Barnes Hall. Cornell University. Ithaca, NY

7/21/2022 - Jack Yarbrough. Florentinersaal. Graz, Austria

4/5/2022 - Jack Yarbrough. LIVESTREAM

4/2/2022 - Jack Yarbrough. Seully Hall. Boston Conservatory. Boston, MA

video

reactions

“…it has a cumulative power that left me a little dazed the first time I listened… I heard that E-flat chord as a spiritual event. It was as if no such chord had existed before or would exist again.” - Alex Ross, The New Yorker

“Timothy McCormack’s single movement composition mine but for its sublimation is the sole focus of one of the most extraordinary discs of solo piano music I have heard in a long time. In what feels like the most undemonstrative way, the writing and playing somehow rivet one’s attention from the start and when release comes just over an hour later, one feels overwhelmed, emotionally, spiritually, musically. […] It’s this sense of sustained engagement with the music, so rare at the level one experiences it here, which makes the encounter so precious. […] My appreciation has only deepened on repeated listening.” -Dominic Hartley, MusicWeb International

“Having achieved this state of otherworldliness, […] It all ends with a slow but brutal finality and I’m still knocked about by the way McCormack and Yarbrough have created a transformative piece out of chin-stroking acoustical considerations while also delivering an emotional thump.” -Boring Like A Drill

“When I first encountered this sixty-four-minute piano solo through a video of Jack Yarbrough giving its premiere at the Boston Conservatory, I knew very quickly that it was something special. Tim’s music has fascinated me for years, but this was something else: the handling of the piano as a machine of resonance and attack (yes, all piano music is that, but this is almost nothing but that), the insights into the interlacing of touch and duration, the sheer inventiveness in escaping self-defined limits. And that is all before the defining twist midway through that the music has been gently steering you towards.

Tim has been on a journey towards clarity since the complexist experiments of his student years, but mine but for its sublimation shows that he has retained every lesson about the significance of detail, the essential interrelationship of sound, instrument and body, and the necessity of boldness. Tim makes crystals (always has), in which the sharp detail of every moment is the point. The care with which this music is made is part of its character; it never rests on anything automatic, or semi-processual, or quasi-improvised […] Returning to [the recording] time and again has been an enduring pleasure of my year.” -Tim Rutherford, Johnson, Purposeful Listening

"This is an especially beautiful piece and recording that rewards, as not so many pieces do, repeated listening.” -Philip Thomas, Tempo: A Quarterly Review of New Music

program note

mine but for its sublimation is about resonance, register, and touch. It is about where we lead ourselves when we trust ourselves. It is experiencing trust as a chain of clearings, a sequence of becomings, openings, centerings. It is about letting go; othering; finding presence through evaporation. Obliteration.