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Sound and vision 12
How did you make the idea a reality?
It was an outdoor installation constructed from theatrical apparatuses, fabric netting and a lighting and audio system. The structure was the site for public performances – and you’d go there to hear the performance. We used orbs as beacons that set the time for the project with lights and sounds timed exactly (and randomly) to create unexpected, serendipitous music. In fishing communities, you had bells and lights that ‘timed’ the town – when people would go out to sea and back. It also referenced that.
You’ve got a project at the Bluecoat in Liverpool that has a planetary feel…
In 2019, I produced The Orrery for the London Contemporary Music Festival. I’m taking the energy from this into a gallery installation. An ‘orrery’ is a mechanical model of the solar system. They have their own personality – they whir, shake and move around. One thing goes fast: another goes slow – they’re idiosyncratic.
The 2019 Orrery entwined performers and audience in a huge apparatus with a giant moon in the middle, testing the choreographic and cartographic possibilities of the choral machine. With support from Arts Council England, I’m working with the Bluecoat to see how we can use this approach to make gallery exhibitions.
Moving away from your work, what’s the difference between sound and music?
Music is the organisation of sound: the choreography and sounds going in and out of sync. That includes the silences, too. The composer Felix Mendelssohn said, “Music is in the silences.” It has an end and a beginning, whereas noise always goes on.
Finally, would you consider yourself a musician or artist?
I’m not throwing away the visual – it’s essential to what I do. I don’t produce music: it’s about the different senses playing with each other!
OUR FINEST HOUR BEL CANTO
ONLY A HANDFUL OF WATCHMAKERS HAVE MASTERED WHAT MIGHT BE THE MOST CHALLENGING COMPLICATION OF THEM ALL – AN AUDIBLE INDICATION OF TIME. SO GUESS WHAT CHRISTOPHER WARD HAS GONE AND DONE?
WORDS: Matt Bielby
eet the C1 Bel Canto, argua-M bly Christopher Ward’s finest horological hour. It marks the debut of a brand new in-house calibre, FS01. It feels utterly alive, marking each hour with its cheerful, reassuring internal chime. And it sees CW assert its horological ambitions like never before.
Although Christopher Ward is best known for its sports watches, the company has a parallel history too, one that constantly pushes the creative envelope. It’s this strand that produced in-house movement Calibre SH21, and was responsible for the legendary JJ calibres, unique modules piggybacking on existing movements.
As the name suggests, all were designed by Johannes Jahnke, CW’s first master watchmaker. But FS01 is the first of a new series, named after current technical director Frank Stelzer, and is the most ambitious yet. In all horological history, little has tested the watchmaker like creating sound, so it’s no wonder Bel Canto took three years of tortuous development.
Bel Canto is what’s called an hour chime, or – more romantically – a Sonnerie au Passage complication, which translates as ‘passage of time’. Sound has a long history in timekeeping, with entire communities revolving around the chime of a town clock. But though a pleasant sound is easy to create in a huge tower, on the scale of a mechanical watch it becomes very difficult indeed.
“Bel Canto is an extrapolation of the C60 Concept, in that we're taking the highest quality hand-finished components and putting them within reach of many,” says Jörg Bader Junior, head of product at CW’s Biel atelier. “But in terms of technological challenge, it’s taken us into uncharted territory. You can buy books on how a tourbillon works, but there’s nothing on watch chimes – and the high-end brands that make them are incredibly secretive. We had to figure everything out for ourselves.”
With each JJ calibre, the desire wasn’t just to produce a complication, but to do it in a fresh, efficient way. Ten years ago, JJ01 was designed to offer the most accurate jumping-hour function possible and, by spreading the load over an entire hour, Johannes managed it. His success became one of the starting points for FS01. Another, however, is more unexpected.
It’s a little known fact that Christopher Ward creates watches for MeisterSinger, the German specialist in single-hand timepieces. A few years ago Frank made a new model for them, the Bell Hora, a Sonnerie au Passage. So, could something similar be done for Christopher Ward?
“The Bell Hora was a stepping stone,” says CEO and co-founder Mike France. “But with Bel Canto we wanted to bring the striking mechanism to the front, so the wearer could watch it in action. The question became: could we make a chiming watch both look and sound beautiful at the same time?”
While the closed-face MeisterSinger was created in the functional German style, Bel Canto would be a show-off. The movement would operate in a way that made sense to the viewer, which meant pulling the important elements forward, while emphasising pleasing shapes throughout.
THE DIAL CONSISTS OF INTRIGUINGLY STACKED LAYERS, RISING FROM THE PLATINE THROUGH THE BRIDGES TO THE TIME-TELLING SUBDIAL
“Finding a way to split out the components so they felt balanced across the entire face, was complicated,” says CW watch designer Will Brackfield. “Each time we moved one piece, it had a knock-on effect on the others. The platine – the blue module plate behind the important elements – would have a gorgeous sunray finish, so we needed to find a way to hide minor components behind that too.”
Frank began with a Sellita SW200-1 automatic base movement paired with JJ01, which charges incrementally over an hour to then make a single movement. But his modifications would eventually involve the creation of 50 new components, and become a race against time once an onsale date of autumn 2022 was confirmed.
“One of the great challenges was striking the right balance between note and loudness,” says head of product design, Adrian Buchmann. “To make an averagely pleasant sound is easy, but a beautiful one is hard. The gong – in this case, a giant spring – needs to be perfect: the material, length, shape and finish all just so. And it’s the same for the hammer, and the case; change any of these and you change the sound. We soon learned that the case would have to be made of Grade 5 titanium, a material we’d never used before, with lots of empty space and resonance points. It’s a very dense metal – and creates a sound cage with the best possible vibrations.”
So, what exactly does a Christopher
Ward chiming watch sound like? Here there are some differences of opinion. “Elegant,” says Mike. “Luxurious,” suggests Will. “A long, high-pitched note,” says Adrian.
No one can quite define it – it is more like a xylophone, or a hotel bell? – but all agree that it’s delightful. Technically, it turns out to be a D, also known as Re (“a drop of golden sun”) on the fixed do solfège system, familiar from The Sound Of Music.
“One thing everyone comments on is how the bridge structure towards the bottom looks like a bird,” Mike says. “The red ‘beak’ is actually the on-off mechanism, controlled by a pusher at 4 o’clock, and moves to indicate whether the chime is on or off, while the hammer is its tail. Bel Canto means ‘beautiful singing’, so there’s whimsical humour going on which seems very Christopher Ward.”
