It's Just an Illusion

It’s Just an Illusion is a six-minute piece for solo violin written in 2018 and premiered by Christine Cornwell in the United Kingdom on 11 May 2018, with a second performance in Amsterdam the following year.

The violinist sings. At several points in the score the player is asked to hold a tone and, without vibrato, sing exactly the same pitch — so that the listener hears one sound and cannot tell which of the two bodies it is coming from. That is the illusion of the title, and the piece is built to produce it and then take it apart: the voice and the string start together, drift by a quarter-tone, beat against each other, come back; the bow is lifted and the voice is left alone, or the voice stops and the string keeps going as though nothing had happened. Around these moments the writing is fast and slightly unstable — a steady quaver pulse that keeps losing a beat, figures that begin in one key and end in its neighbour.

It is a piece about how little it takes to believe two things are one.