This is our sheet music and recording of "Clockwork Punctuation: [Andy Warhol's]
a, A Novel as Beat Poetry," in answer to
a call by Derek Beaulieu (Poet Laureate of Calgary and Banff) to set to music his erasure of Warhol's 1968 novel, in which
Beaulieu leaves only the punctuation. We fed the punctuation from page 2 into our one-of-a-kind, persnickety clockwork contraption, assigning the exclamation points to the voice of the cuckoo clock bird and other symbols to different chimes and mechanisms. (
Before the invention of MIDI, programmed music required meticulously timed Grandfather clocks, and every performance ticked at 60 bpm. In the tradition of the original "old school," this clockwork recording features vintage timepieces.) Here's a link to the mp3:
The mp3 is mirrored on Soundcloud:
Thanks to the acclaimed poet Christian Bök (author of the astonishing Eunoia) for calling our recording "a beautiful clockwork sonata."
