Timothy McCormack

Jury member

• Composer

Timothy McCormack 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.

McCormack is the recipient of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Composers’ Prize (2018), and also won the Impuls International Composition Competition (2019). Their work can be heard on the record labels Kairos, Another Timbre, and Huddersfield Contemporary Records. The recording of their piano solo, mine but for its sublimation [Jack Yarbrough; Another Timbre], was described as “a spiritual event” in the New Yorker by Alex Ross, who also selected it as one of the best classical music releases of 2025.

Having received their PhD from Harvard University in 2019, McCormack currently teaches at University of California San Diego (UCSD).