your body is a volume [2016-19]

string quartet [50’]

commissioned by the Westdeutschen Rundfunks for the JACK Quartet and the Wittener Tage fur neue Kammermusik

performance history

8/21/2024 - JACK Quartet. TIME:SPANS Festival. DiMenna Center. New York, NY.

11/19/2022 - ensemble mosaik. PGNM Bremen: Biennale Aktuelle Musik. Bremen, Germany

12/14/2021 - JACK Quartet. JACK Arts. Brooklyn, NY

3/23/2018 - Hannah Walter, Olivia Momoya Resch (vl); David Schnee (vla); Moritz Müllenbach (vlc). Gessnerallee. Zurich, Switzerland.

3/22/2018 - Hannah Walter, Olivia Momoya Resch (vl); David Schnee (vla); Moritz Müllenbach (vlc). Gessnerallee. Zurich, Switzerland.

5/5/2017 - JACK Quartet. Wittener Tage fur neue Kammermusik. Witten, Germany.

reactions

“Timothy McCormack‘s your body is a volume seemed at first to be harnessing texture as its modus operandi. In some respects, it was an even more extreme form of texture than Bianchi’s, taking notions of grinding and croaking to their absolute limit, the quartet’s bows moving with eerie sluggishness, as though caught between lethargy and indifference. The work’s duration is entirely occupied with this remarkable stuff to the point where it almost seemed less appropriate to think of it as music as ‘bandwidth’. But as the minutes passed and the quartet moved along their glacially slow trajectory, it came more and more to resemble – i’m not kidding – a chorale. Modulated by the very texture itself, pitches and harmonies, even chords, seemed to be materialising – both the combination of sounds from the four players as well as spontaneously emerging from within each instrument – barely substantial enough to be tangible but perceptible at least, though retaining the possibility that they could be entirely imaginary. For nearly half an hour, like a vinyl record played back at a single revolution per minute, McCormack filled the Johanniskirche with wheezing, laborious strands of this almost-maybe impossible music, which never ceased to be simultaneously baffling and marvellous.”

- Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik 2017 (Part 2) by Simon Cummings on his blog 5:4.

“The sheer strangeness and weight of the sound is so overwhelming that conventional aesthetic categories simply do not apply… The listener, too, finds that the music cannot be held at arm’s length; it demands to be taken in bodily, internalised, absorbed on its own terms. You do not so much listen to your body is a volume as submit to it, and the submission is not comfortable, but it is profoundly rewarding.

your body is a volume is not merely one of the most striking string quartets of recent times, it is a work that asks fundamental questions about what the medium is for and what four stringed instruments in proximity to one another can become. Between them, they confirm McCormack as a composer who matters.”

-Dominic Hartley, MusicWeb International

“your body is a volume is an exquisite tour de force in noise […], treating the musicians as conductors of an unstoppable current, filtering and modulating the spectrum of audible noise. It begins as a prolonged gasp, before suddenly unleashing a thunderous wall of dense, hyperdetailed granular sound; from there on it runs the listener and the players ragged… I’m throwing ideas together just to convey [an] impression of this quartet’s power: it builds a grand, encompassing statement from an entirely new language, made out of the margins of the instruments’ vocabulary. The strings never fully speak yet they convey meaning at a gut level, with coarse eloquence. There’s a tremendous intellect at work behind it, even though one endures it as though it were a force of nature, immune to reason. The music teaches you a lot that you won’t understand right away. In conception and execution, it’s perfectly realised.”

-Ben Harper, Boring Like A Drill

“A mountain of noise, a symphony of the granular. McCormack is a distinctive new voice. The music is an experience more than a sound object.”

-Liam Cagney, Gramophone

“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… Stoically balanced, yet at other moments primal... A cunningly created, artfully crafted set of sounds and movements, it is both evoking and yet passively innate at near enough the same time”

-Anne Carlini, Russell Trunk's Exclusive Magazine

program note

The performer and their instrument form a single body. Attention is drawn to the positioning and proximity of the appendages of this body, as well as their effortful and glacial movements; the body in acute proprioceptive relation to itself. This body does not move through a space - it becomes the space; the body as the site of kinesthetic inscription. We hear the body in its sound, and the sound subsumes us.