deep terrane [2021]

solo bass drum prepared with steel strings [25’]

more information on the DEEP TERRANE project

performance history

3/10/2024 - T McCormack. Boston Conservatory. Seully Hall. Boston, MA

8/17/2021 - T McCormack. LUL Winter Composer Festival. Crashbox. Austin, TX

program note

I find meaningful resonance for my work in geologic metaphors. As my work evolves, I continue to find clarity, language, and disambiguation when I assess it through a geologic rather than musical frame. In recent years, the sounds in my music have fused more and more together, speak over greater swaths of time, and seem to be trying to make audible something that happens inside them, rather than something that happens through or upon them. This sensation of a heavy, extensive, viscous, sunken sonic interiority is something that dictates the very forms of the pieces themselves. What I propose is not the inside of a space; it is the inside of a thing itself: suffused within the bedrock of the earth, within the muscles of a body.

In John McPhee’s book Annals of the Former World, I again gained clarity on my own work through geologic discourse, and was given language through which to articulate this interiority:  “Geologists write ‘terrain’ when they mean topography and ‘terrane’ when they are referring to a piece of country many miles deep [...]. Terrain is topography. Terrane is a large chunk of the earth, in three directions.” 

Again, McPhee: “She was suggesting [...] a sense of total composition - not merely one surface composition visible to the eye but a whole series of preceding compositions which in the later one fragmentarily endure and are incorporated into its substance - with materials of vastly differing age drawn together in a single scene, a composite canvas [...] including everything else that had been a part of the zones of time represented [...] below a mountain broken open by a river half its age.” 

deep terrane takes one strand of material that originated in my percussion trio glost fire, and creates an entire sound world out of it. The piece uses sound itself to plumb deep within that sound, to get a sense of how it moves within itself; how time passess differently within sound than it does on the surface world, so to speak. By attending to this dense, enveloping, droning sound (either through listening or, as is the performer’s perspective, through activating and maintaining it), might we sink ourselves so consummately within it that we gain clarity over some deep, hidden, but meaningful place within ourselves, our own bodies? In both the piece as well as the listener there exists a place outside of time, and inside the sound, and this is the place into which deep terrane invites you.