HARRISON BIRTWISTLE'S CHRONOMETER: AN UPDATE

Abstract

While Harrison Birtwistle’s house in Mere was being sorted out after his passing last year, his son Silas called me: ‘I found some tapes in the basement. Are they important?’ Once I had discovered the images below (see Figures 1a, 1b) in my email I called him back: ‘Yes, they are important.’ For what Silas had stumbled across between damp papers and spiders’ webs were the original master tapes of Harrison Birtwistle’s Chronometer (1971–72), the ‘two asynchronous four-track tapes’ about which one has read in almost every catalogue of Birtwistle’s work. Not only had these tapes been lost since their creation – only surfacing once in the 50-odd years of their existence (more on that below) – the idea had even been aired by Peter Zinovieff, who himself brilliantly realised the tapes and translated Birtwistle’s composition into physical reality, that they had never existed. Yet here they were. Here is what is known for sure about these tapes: