Timothy McCormack (b. 1984)
mine but for its sublimation (2021)
Jack Yarbrough (piano)
rec. Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, USA
Another Timbre at239 [64]
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. More precisely, as a listener I felt as if I’d been fully part of the transformative experience that the partnership of composer and performer had accomplished. 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.
The composer, Timothy McCormack, currently Assistant Professor of Composition at University of California San Diego, already had an impressive list of compositions and a significant discography before turning to the piano. Although that list included substantial solo pieces for other instruments, McCormack recounts that the piano had been avoided until the discovery of a ‘strange chord’ whose ‘intervention’ became more and more compelling and difficult to ignore. In the end it proved the eventual catalyst for mine but for its sublimation, a work which started as what the composer thought was going to be a ‘small side-project’ but which ended up being a year’s full on compositional effort. The pianist Jack Yarbrough was the intended performer from an early stage. Yarbrough was studying at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee at the same time McCormack was teaching there and writing the piece, and it sounds as if his qualities as a player very much helped McCormack define the form of the piece and its characteristics.
The ‘sublimation’ of the work’s title refers both to the timbral changes in sound which occur in the piece and the formal transitions which take place, and where those leave performer and listener. I suppose that’s a less hyperbolic way of looking at what I was trying to describe above. Simply, I felt I had ended up in a different place mentally after listening.
McCormack says the piece is about ‘resonance, register and touch’. I’d like to add ‘repetition’ to those qualities too. I think McCormack would say that repetition is a method to effect the formal changes which occur, but it’s an unignorable, brilliantly used device which permeates the work. It’s also the first thing that the listener is aware of as the piece starts, with two clusters dominated by a C sharp and a D sharp a ninth higher, alternating like bells slightly out of sync, or a mildly irregular heartbeat. The rhythmic disconnect comes and goes and with it moments of apparent, quickly forgotten urgency. Other touches in the early part of the piece add to the slightly disquieting effect, not least the occasional, low, mysterious rumbling chord. As the initial pattern become more fragmented it’s accompanied by increasingly percussive forays into the piano’s higher register and what feels like a drum beat coming from the instrument’s body. As this happens, the focus of pitch shifts to a repeated G sharp before a long series of gruff and increasingly violent chords. But then McCormack introduces, stupendously, the first of what will be a set of remarkable forays into resonance. This is achieved technically for the most part by the use of an EBow, a device most commonly used with the electric guitar, which allows strings to vibrate indefinitely without being touched. Its first occurrence in this piece instantly brought to my mind Rothko colour fields for some reason. In any event, the use of resonance for the rest of the work, the effect of initial timbres and their gradual decay coupled with Yarbrough’s very subtle touch and colouration is remarkable. McCormack reintroduces the C sharp – D sharp alternation now in a different register and, combined with the resonance, for a magical moment it sounds as if the piano contains actual bells, before a different rising three note sequence comes into focus, still with a C sharp and D sharp at its top and starting with a B. This is a prelude to what feels like the spiritual heart of the piece where the D sharp we are used to hearing is enharmonically transitioned into what feels like E flat major. It’s a really startling moment, warm and consolatory, even if in the overall structure of the piece it’s fleeting. That warmth is sustained though, first by a single E flat played against a resonating tonic string and then later in the piece after the return of the opening cell and a suddenly percussive passage, with an enthralling resonance created with a low G as its base. The way the sound then rises through the piano and the aural landscape is stunning. As the piece comes to a close, we’re aware of the C sharp/D sharp repetition coming back into focus but here the accompanying resonance has a distinctly mechanical feel to it, like the hum of an electrical device on standby which gradually becomes louder and more unsettling. It’s not unlike some of the extraordinary timbres Messiaen creates in his organ works.
I said at the start that I felt overwhelmed at the end of the music. More accurately I was referring to the experience of being dazzled alongside the elation, because I couldn’t quite take in and parse everything I’d heard. I’m at peace with this I realise. I don’t need a full understanding of why McCormack’s music has such a profound effect, I’m just glad that it does, and my appreciation has only deepened on repeated listening.
I hope I have been able to give a flavour of why I think this is an essential disc. I should say that my rudimentary analysis above has been done without the benefit of the score, which is not yet published, so if I have misheard anything then I can only apologise to composer and performer. Speaking of the latter, I don’t have words to give Jack Yarbrough the recognition he deserves for his performance. Virtuosic, profoundly sensitive, seminal don’t do it justice, but they will have to do. Ryan Streber for Another Timbre has done a remarkable job in capturing the sound. Not easy, given the range of effects conjured and the fact that for the most part the music is incredibly quiet, but the recording is exemplary. There are no detailed booklet notes but there’s an excellent interview about the piece with McCormack by Simon Reynell on the Another Timbre website which I wholeheartedly recommend.
Dominic Hartley
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