CLOCK SMASHER
piano, 4 hands
piano, 4 hands
Clock Smasher was written in 2016 for my friends Sarah Gibson & Thomas Kotcheff, of the HOCKET piano duo. The title was intended to refer to the many polyrhythmic and ostinato passages throughout the piece, which came to remind me of a room full of slightly out-of-sync ticking clocks. Perhaps more significantly, I realized while writing this work that this rhythmic style had perhaps been subconsciously influenced by my memory of the very first HOCKET concert that I attended. In that concert, further back in 2014, I had heard HOCKET perform transcriptions of Conlon Nancarrow's ferociously different player piano etudes, with their nearly impossible polyrhythms, of which HOCKET deceptively appeared to make easy work. The polyrhythms in my Clock Smasher are nowhere near the complexity of Nancarrow's, but I like to think that that early experience of hearing my friends perform this music, at the beginning of their journey as a duo, set my own mind in a particular aesthetic direction when they later asked me for this work.
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