Timothy McCormack
...stretched across its axes

...stretched across its axes   (2024)    44:35

Marco Fusi, viola

 

 

Interview with Timothy McCormack and Marco Fusi

These extracts are from an excellent  long interview with Timothy and Marco that Tim Rutherford Johnson posted on his Substack in March 2026. You can read the whole interview here

Tim RJ: … stretched across its axes is a collaboration of sorts between the two of you …

Timothy McC: We’ve been talking about it for years; there’s been over a decade of buildup towards it. We always knew that it was in the future. So every time we were in the same place at the same time, we would check in on our interests and string research things and ideas for sounds – and then get dumplings!

And then, I don’t remember exactly why … It wasn’t the normal constantly deferred project; it was understood between us that there’s no rush, and when it wants to happen, we’ll just know, there will be something in the air – and that’s exactly what it was. I don’t remember exactly what the initiating thing was, but I remember it just felt mutually like now is the time.

So then there was a bit of a different charge in the air when we would see each other. There was a moment when we happened both to be in New York, and we had a much more, I don’t know, like pointed workshop. I think after a decade of this thing stewing in our brains, a lot of the material, or at least a lot of the fundamental technical ideas, were experimented with and set. And then after that, it was fairly clear what the piece was.

Marco F: Most of what Ti has said resonates with me and my memories – meeting, talking about this. What is very acute in my memory is how much we have grown from the first meeting to when we actually were on stage bowing together, because I remember talking about this for the first time when Ti was still at Harvard – it could have been more like fifteen than ten years. And the thing growing organically and us being in touch. And then I proposed to play with some colleagues this piece for violin, Paetzold contrabass recorder and cardboard, and we performed it somewhere remote in Sweden …

TMcC: … the Kalv Festival ...

MF: … so there was a constant connection and rekindling of thoughts....  And then when we met in New York, I also felt that was the moment when things came together. And they came together in a way that was, on the one hand, very reassuringly, successfully traditional in the sense that Ti and I played, or rather embodied, our roles. I was the performer touching the instrument, exploring and trying to find sounds, and Ti was there trying to capture these ideas, to structure them, to think how the little grains of sand that I was producing could be melted into glass.

At the same time, the beauty of these sorts of collaborations, in which, I would say, boundaries or rather rules and competencies are clear, is that you can really see when the two ways of thinking click together.

I remember moments where some sun was sparkling out of the instrument, when we were both like, ‘Oh my god, yes, this is it, we’re going to use this’. There is a specific moment around thirty minutes into the piece where a sound is generated by over-pressure of the bow, but also fingering up the string. That technique produces both a low grunt, like a hammering, like a growling sound, but also a high frequency, a high resonance and a high partial that is produced by the contact point of the bow on that specific point of the string. And I remember when we discovered that sound … we just needed to identify two or three sounds, and then a few months later, Ti came back with a quotation from Stravinsky, played with that specific technique. So it was quite interesting to see how that little sparkle exploded in the piece....

 

 

TRJ: I know, Ti, that you work with, or think about bodies, and particularly bodies of specific performers. For as long as I’ve known your music – which is nearly twenty years – that’s always been part of the way you work. Presumably there’s some of that in the way that you’ve been thinking about Marco as the performer of this piece. Can you tell me where you are in that journey?

TMcC: Every piece that I write – especially a solo piece, but not just those – is sluicing two things together and is a confluence of these two things. One of which is: I have relationships with instruments, whether I play them or not. The first time that you write for an instrument, you learn a lot about not only the instrument but also your relationship with it. And what about a certain instrument exposes or clarifies or allows to emerge something within my own work. So every piece is a continuing sort of research/poetic project.

This is just to say that there is this string world that I’ve been mining for a long time. And of course, the deeper you excavate into a certain place, the more you realise is there. This piece really furthers the poetic, formal spaces that my work with strings for the past ten years has proposed.

But then also a big part of that equation is the person that I’m writing for and what they allow: the knowledge and insight into their instrument, and the relationship they have with their instrument that they grant me access to. With Marco especially, he is a performer and a musician and a person who is very acutely sensitive not only to their instrument … You know, Marco is so analytic about his relationship with the instrument. We would be working and we would make a sound, and immediately, of course, I need to know: what are the physical conditions of this sound? And Marco is just immediately able to switch into this self-analysis, like, ‘Okay, what I did was this and it was this pressure, and if I move my finger in this way, it does …’. Which is exactly how my brain works.

When I want to use a sound, there’s a blockage between me and the possibility of using it, no matter how much I’m interested in it, if I don’t know exactly what is going on in the creation of that sound. I tend to try to analyse the production of that sound and determine what parameters – bow speed, bow position, finger pressure, bow pressure, all that stuff – what of that needs to remain constant? If you modulate one of those parameters, does one of those parameters break the sound, make it into something else when modulated? Or is the sound resilient through modulations of a certain physical parameter. In which case, I know that that’s the parameter that I can use to shape and create morphology with a certain sound.

That’s how my brain works, but on a sort of ‘removed composer’ side. And I got the sense that that’s how Marco’s brain and body work with the instrument as well – very analytical but also very poetic... And so I just felt like we understood each other in that capacity. And knowing through working with Marco that he has such an immediate retreat into this critical-analytical relationship with his instrument … But also haptic; whenever these moments would arise in collaboration, it was never like, we put down the instrument, we talk about it; he was always thinking through his body in contact with the instrument. So I knew that with this piece, I could write really, really nuanced...

You can read the whole interview on Tim Rutherford Johnson's Substack here

“…stretched across its axes,” operates within the micro-realm for three-quarters of an hour. Violist Marco Fusi draws the bow across the strings so slowly that the usually continuous tone—as if in slow motion—disintegrates into discrete pulses. As if under a scanning microscope, one hears the rosin-coated horsehair repeatedly dragging the string along a fraction of an inch before allowing it to snap back to its starting position. Depending on the specific string, contact point, pressure, and bowing speed, this periodic rattling—resonating through every fiber of the viola—sets the finest nuances and shifting overtones into vibration.”
Rainer Nonnenmann, Unausweichliche Zeitgenossenschaft in Neue Musikzeitung

Timothy McCormack writes:  "…stretched across its axes is interested in the tethers within a body, and the hemispheres across a body. It plots itself along the network of interconnected tendons, sinews, and ligaments that bind and convulse and constrict each other’s action. The viola is the body: press here to exact tension there; tighten there to sharpen vibration here. Touch the body, it responds. Listen to its song: a hidden, withdrawn counterpoint of tactility and sensation."   

Music recorded, mixed and mastered by Sam Dunscombe

Cover Artwork 'Forms of Co-existence' by Sebastien Robinson, with thanks

Photograph of Marco Fusi by Veera Vehkasalo