Opa's Uhren

About

Opa's Uhren, (German for “Grandfather’s Clocks’) is a pseudo tone-clock piece, inspired partly because of the semantic link between a piece about ‘clocks’ and a facet of compositional approach known as tone ‘clock’ theory. The landscape I'm evoking here is my grandfather's house - I have a lot of good, nostalgic memories associated with his house, crawling up his floating staircase as a toddler, seeing all the woodworked knick-knacks and trinkets he had made himself covering almost every surface. He liked to collect things, and his biggest collection was his collection of clocks - amazing German-made grandfather clocks, cuckoo clocks, alarm clocks - in each room there were probably between 10-12 clocks. He had literally hundreds - and all of them were slightly out of time with each other, so at midnight and noon, every day, for about five minutes, there was just a cacophony as every single clock he had chimed at a different time.

Opa’s Uhren attempts to capture this nostalgic feeling, a settled atmosphere, punctuated by the brilliant chiming of the many clocks.