Why I Made It: “only when the clock stops…”
By Charlie Zhong '25
In the fall of 2023, I approached Mr. Hodgkins, our Director of Music, about writing a piece for the Commonwealth Chorale.
Usually, when I write a piece, the music comes first and the title comes later. But this was different. The only thing I ever knew for certain was the title. It comes from a phrase I overheard at a concert hall in Cambridge: “only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
Wondering if it was nothing but a clever philosophical conjecture made by an intellectual concertgoer, I looked up the phrase. I was wrong; it came from William Faulkner’s 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury.
So I decided to read it. It was one of those books where I didn’t understand a single thing. You could have asked me “what happened?” two days into reading it, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. But I did notice one thing: Faulkner’s narrator repeats himself—a lot. Identical pieces of description, word for word, syntax for syntax, would come back again and again, phrases like “Caddy smelled like trees in the rain” or “I could hear the bright, smooth shapes” or “I’m not going to mind you” or “I wasn’t crying, but I couldn’t stop.” From those repeated phrases, I began my work on “only when the clock stops...”
One of my great mentors, the composer Lei Liang, has said that a composition contains three parts: the idea, the musical material, and the execution of the material (i.e., “technique”). In reading Faulkner’s book, I found the material for this piece: those repeated phrases of Faulkner’s. What was left was an overarching idea to tie the piece together conceptually, and the notes and rhythm to turn these materials into music. Quite naturally, time became the obvious candidate for the conceptual idea.
I don't [sic] suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You dont [sic] have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.”
— Quentin Compson in William Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury
Time is a central theme of The Sound and the Fury and escaping from time, in particular. Benjy, the narrator of the first chapter, contemplates the relationship between the past, present, and future; he hopes to escape time by avoiding the present and only thinking about the past, looping his thoughts over and over again in his memories. On the other hand, Quentin, the second narrator, contemplates the slowing down or speeding up of time. Constantly aware of the “minute clicking of little wheels” that happens every second, Quentin attempts to destroy time, whether through destroying his watch or a grandfather clock, or by ignoring the cathedral bells across the river.
My piece examines Benjy’s and Quentin’s attempts to escape time in musical terms. French composer Gérard Grisey’s 1987 article “Tempus ex Machina” describes three aspects of musical time: the “skeleton” of time, the “flesh” of time, and the “skin” of time. The “skeleton” represents a quantitative approach to time: the seconds or beats per minute, or the hertz. Meanwhile, the “flesh” and “skin” are qualitative: a driving drum beat that makes time “flow” or a predictable chord progression that makes time stagnate.
Grisey’s article formed the basis for my exploration of musical time in this piece. In the same way Benjy dramatically repeats his phrases to dial back to the past, cells of rhythmic and melodic content repeat themselves in the piece, almost obsessively, in an attempt to “freeze” biological time. As for Quentin, it is the musical time that gradually speeds up; the violins begin the second movement by playing an unpitched pulse at sixty beats per minute, like the second hand of a clock. As Quentin becomes increasingly paranoid about the clock as an object, that unpitched pulse gradually becomes pitched, adding another layer of time (frequencies), then harmony (multiple frequencies), and finally an accelerando to end the piece.
I am beyond grateful to Mr. Hodgkins for giving me this opportunity to write for our very own Chorale, who performed this piece wonderfully during our 2024 Spring Concert!
This article originally appeared in the winter 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.