Christian Hartman
cellist | percussionist | composer | educator

I’ve had the idea for this piece going back to early high school, when I had just begun exploring contemporary music and percussion ensemble literature. I was particularly inspired by a video of the percussion group NEXUS performing Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood, and I had decided that I wanted to write a piece in a similar vein, also for pieces of wood (each player uses two wooden planks struck with hard mallets).

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Over the years, this piece went through several iterations, all radically different and mostly incomplete. Besides Reich’s work, I was also inspired by the visually inviting score for William Duckworth’s a whispering..., which consists of several small fragments of music which the performers are free to navigate between. Clockwork uses a very similar idea, but I gave each performer a completely different, independent score to take this concept to the next level. Each individual part consists of a “road map” of rhythmic cells, which players are free to navigate in any fashion as long as they move to one within the immediate vicinity of the last.

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For some reason, the title of this piece really stuck since it was first conceived. I don’t know why it initially had this title, but I like to think that all of the rhythmic and metric intricacies in this piece work together like the complex systems of cogs and gears that keep mechanical machines running.