Graham’s Orrery
2011
Graham’s Orrery was conceived as a short response to the musical and extra-musical content of Robert Saxton’s A Yardstick to the Stars. Saxton’s piece is concerned with planetary orbits, and I began by thinking about the machine used to demonstrate differing rates of orbit. This machine is called an ‘orrery’, invented by English clockmaker George Graham (although an earlier version was said to be constructed by ancient Greek philosopher Posidonius, around the time the Greeks first started racing yardsticks to the stars…). As the planets rotate at different times, some come full circle fairly often, others only very occasionally, but all at fairly regular intervals with little or no relation to one another. I like the chaotic effect of multiple differing regular patterns overlaid to create an irregular aggregate, so for this piece I envisaged small musical motifs, repeating at regular but uncoordinated periods, like planets viewed from a single spot on the sun.
The motifs are taken from the opening of A Yardstick to the Stars, which has been fragmented into tiny parts that orbit at different rates. Only once during the piece do they briefly align to reveal the Saxton quotation – the rest of the time they drift past each other, sublimely unconcerned by their relation to each other. This brief alignment (in reality the starting point of the composition process) suggests that we have been uniquely fortunate to happen upon a crucial moment in a mechanical process that could go on for millennia without ever repeating the quotation.
Instrumentation: Piano solo
Duration: c. 3′
Workshopped: 1 October 2011 by Andrew Wilson-Dickson, Primavera Crossing Borders day, Canton Uniting Church, Cardiff