…stretched across its axes deals with the interconnections within a body and the hemispheres that extend across it. It unfolds along the network of connected tendons, fasciae, and ligaments that bind, tremble, and restrict one another. The viola is the body: press here to create tension there; tense here to amplify vibration elsewhere. Touch the body, it responds. Listen to its song: a hidden, seemingly withdrawn counterpoint of tactility and sensation.

(Timothy McCormack)

Timothy McCormack (*1984) writes haptic, viscous music which makes audible the tactile, physical relationship between a performer and their instrument. Sometimes ecstatic, sometimes hermetic, their music threads an intimacy between tone and noise to create strangely affecting sonic ecologies which alter one’s perception of time. They also engage with contemporary queer aesthetics: hæmal ancestries, incurable disease and its histories, mourning, listening, and the erotics of form.

Having won the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Composers’ Prize in 2018, McCormack currently teaches at University of California San Diego (UCSD). They received their PhD from Harvard University. McCormack is the recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prize (2018), and also won the Impuls International Composition Competition (2019). On their desk now is a new work for voice and orchestra, to be premiered in May 2025 by Ty Bouque and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Ilan Volkov, cond.).

Salvatore Sciarrino returns almost fifty years after his famous Sei Capricci per violino to the solo violin, turning his gaze toward a distant, almost mythical past of the instrument. In doing so, he explores the subterranean connection that string instruments have always shared with the human voice. In these Sei nuovi capricci, the violin once again becomes a vocal metaphor, with the bow rediscovering its breaths of inhalation and exhalation. The song unfolds through the strings and with the bow, inhabiting the space, articulating thoughts, revealing inner monologues, and entering into dialogue with itself. Out of courtesy and respect for the listener, the final whispered word is a farewell.

(Marco Fusi)

Salvatore Sciarrino (*1947 in Palermo) began composing as a child. He is largely self-taught as a composer, drawing from his wide-ranging intellectual and artistic interests. With one of the most distinctive and influential styles of recent decades, his catalog spans numerous operas, orchestral works, chamber music, as well as theater and television productions. He taught at the conservatories of Milan, Perugia, and Florence, and also gave courses in Città di Castello and at Boston University. Since 2011, he has been teaching composition at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. Salvatore Sciarrino is a member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, and the Berlin Academy of Arts. He has received numerous awards, including the “Frontiers of Knowledge” award from the BBVA Foundation in 2011 and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2016.

Marco Fusi is a violinist/violist, a researcher in music performance, and a passionate advocate for the music of our time.

Among many collaborations with emerging and established composers, he has premiered works by Jessie Marino, Giacinto Scelsi, Yu Kuwabara, Salvatore Sciarrino and Kristine Tjøgersen, among others. Marco has performed with Pierre Boulez, Elena Schwarz, Lorin Maazel, Susanna Mälkki, Alan Gilbert, and frequently plays with leading contemporary ensembles including Klangforum Wien, MusikFabrik, Meitar Ensemble, Mivos Quartet, Ensemble Linea. He has recorded several solo albums, published by Kairos, Stradivarius, Col Legno, Da Vinci, Geiger Grammofon, New Focus Recordings. Marco also plays viola d’amore, commissioning new pieces and collaborating with composers to promote and expand existing repertoire for the instrument.

After his Masters in Violin and Composition at the Conservatory of Milan, Marco’s received his PhD from the University of Antwerp / docARTES program with a dissertation on the performance practice of Giacinto Scelsi’s works for string instruments.

He is currently Assistant Professor of Artistic Research at HEMU Lausanne and Associate Researcher at the Orpheus Instituut of Gent.