singing clock

Whilst this is not ostensibly a rural story, albeit a stark separation between rural and urban issues can tip us into the trap of special rural pleading anyway, its a lovely story which will be a real experience for rural travellers to our 2nd City post HS2. It tells us:

A £2m singing clock is to be installed at the site of a planned high-speed railway station in Birmingham, with the new public artwork considered the most ambitious commission in the city’s history.

The Turner Prize-winning artist Susan Philipsz was on Tuesday named winner of the Birmingham Big Art Project contest to place a major work at the centre of a city centre regeneration project.

Philipsz will create Station Clock, which will feature more than 1,000 voices that will be heard in differing combinations on the hour, every hour. She said she was “very proud and honoured” to have won the commission for what will be her biggest permanent work to date.

“I’m very happy, I can finally tell people now because I had been sworn to secrecy. I can’t wait to get started on it,” said Philipsz.

She was inspired by a circular diagram of the chromatic scale, which is pinned up in her Berlin studio. “I’m not a musician, I didn’t study music and often I work with deconstructing compositions so it is good to have the scale up on the wall for me to refer to,” she said.

Philipz’s Birmingham work will be a clock with the digits one to 12 replaced by the 12 tones of the musical scales, from A to G sharp. “At times it will sound harmonious, at other times not,” she said.