Escapement (2019)
Duration: 9:00
Instrumentation: Violin and Metronome
Commissioned by: Flora Wong
Selected: Official Australian Submission for ISCM World New Music Days 2024.
Premiered by: Flora Wong and Pheobe Bognar at Bang on a Can Festival, Mass MoCA, 25 July 2019
Additional Performances: Flora Wong and Jodie Rottle at BiB’n’Brace Collective, October 27, 2019; Claire Litwinowicz (violin), Ethan Strickland (metronome) at Bang on a Can Festival, Mass MoCA, July 14 2023
Released: on Flora Wong - Geburtstag, through Corella Recordings, June 10 2022.
Press
“Escapement … performed by Flora Wong (violin) and Jodie Rottle (mechanical metronome), captures the ears immediately and refuses to let go. Composer Chris Perren nimbly weaves violin gestures rhythms between ever fluctuating metronome beats in a way that is mesmerising and demands your focus as a listener.”
Program Notes
The entrancing power of a simply steady pulse is to me one of music’s great mysteries. While the metronome is considered by most a tool rather than an instrument, in sonifying the otherwise silently abstract bars and beats, it cannot help but become a player in the music. Its persistent pulse transforms the accompanying material, giving percussive energy and a solid counterpoint to syncopation and polyrhythm. Unlike bars on the score, it is not silent, and it makes the music different. Even when the practice is over, the metronome’s echoes remain in the rhythm of the performance. Its presence within the ecology of musical practice runs deep, despite our ability to render it invisible and inaudible through the act of creative perception.
Escapement embraces the metronome’s inevitable musical intervention by elevating its position from tool to instrument. The violin dances and weaves in and around the metronome, exploring various relationships with its steady beat. At times, the violin simply takes advantage of its freedom from supplying the rhythmic frame; at others its conspires to create a competing pulse, pushing the metronome reluctantly into the musical spotlight as it emerges into its own counter-rhythm against the beat.