Timothy McCormack: The Hand is an Ear [Kairos]. It’s rare to hear music that makes you think differently about things: about the composer, the genre, music in general. I’ve seen a couple of equally enthusiastic reviews of this album and both start with descriptions of something beyond the music itself that struck the reviewer, which should give you some idea of how people react when they’re confronted by these two pieces. The pieces are your body is a volume, a fifty-minute string quartet played by the JACK Quartet, and the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart, a twenty-minute piece for solo violin played by JACK member Austin Wulliman. For me, I started thinking how they both delivered an emotional impact out of brutalist handling of sound, as I’d previously experienced when hearing his piano piece mine but for its sublimation. Then I went back and listened to mine but for its sublimation again and realised that I’d been hearing something completely different in the way it left its lingering impression on the listener. Turns out I’d been bamboozled, hearing those close-spaced and unresolved piano chords and thinking Feldman. There’s nothing of the kind on the new album, as niceties of pitch have lost all relevance. your body is a volume is an exquisite tour de force in noise, instructing the JACK players through a gruelling regimen of bowing speed, pressures, direction and placement, finger pressure, multiphonics and (at one stage) subharmonics, 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. Obvious reference points I’ve seen cited are Lachenmann (fixation on extended techniques as the primary source of sound) and Scelsi (treatment of sound as a plastic medium); besides Lachenmann, I heard connections with Nono (self-created forms made out of impoverished material), Xenakis (visceral effects from conceptual abstraction) and Harley Gaber’s The Winds Rise In The North (prolonged sounds at once distant and uncomfortably close). So many discrete references can be found that, even if it were a synthesis, the work and its voice is unique. You’ll have noticed by now that I’m throwing ideas together just to convey and 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, except for the idea that the JACK Quartet are heroes for achieving this. In conception and execution, it’s perfectly realised.
So far I haven’t given the hand is an ear / the ear is a heart its due. It is in no way overshadowed by your body is a volume; rather 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. Wulliman plays this piece with a stern, commandeering tenderness – such a thing is evidently possible – with all the alien yet touching sentiments that can instill in the listener. Rigorous in its orientation while more capricious in its method, the piece feels as though it’s been lived through more than composed.
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