Clocks - Coldplay

Clocks is an enormously-successful song by the British rock band Coldplay.
It was released in 2002 on the band?s second studio album A Rush of Blood to the Head.

The iconic, modal piano theme, contrapuntal melodies and classical structure make it highly suited to
arrangement for solo instruments and ensembles.

This arrangement is ideal for concert works, encores, wedding repertoire and background music. It is technically and musically appropriate for players of an intermediate/advanced standard.

Some bars present players with considerable technical challenges so alternative solutions are offered.

Dan?s arrangements for solo guitar and ensembles for all levels can be heard at www.danjonesguitarist.com.

Links to downloads are also available in all video descriptions.

Thank you for listening and I hope very much that you and your audiences enjoy Clocks as much as I have enjoyed arranging and playing it.

A full recording can be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/user-115466245/clocks

A video will be uploaded here before the end of March 2020.

It is October 31, Halloween, late in the evening. Outside, a slight but chilling wind blows. Inside, the pendulum of the great clock ticks slowly back and forth, back and forth. Somewhere a faucet drips arrhythmically. Suddenly, the clock strikes twelve. And, it all starts. The ghosts, the goblins, the witches and all their familiars?these are the beings that hold sway on The Eerie Night. This Halloween fantasy was inspired by a jingle the composer learned many years before while in primary school. Attributed to Lillian Mohr Fox, the words accompanying the tune described ?witches on broomsticks with cats and bats? and ?spooky . . . noises on Hallowe?en night.? ?The Eerie Night,? composed for brass quintet, emulates the supposed ghostly environment of Halloween with generous (and eerie!) use of the lower brass instruments. Trumpets provide emphasis, punctuation and occasional screeches, while the Horn in F harmonizes with Trombone and, at one point, shrieks like a cat. The haunting and scaring builds and builds until just before the end, when absolute cacophonous bedlam occurs. Gradually, things quiet down. The nightmare is ended, and we?re back to the clock, the wind and the faucet. Completed in 2017, this composition runs about 4 minutes, 40 seconds. The composer, Les Smith, would be very interested in your comments on this piece; contact him at lessmith@ufl.edu or leave a review on the SheetMusicPlus website. For more arrangements by Les, enter "Sweetwater Brass Press" (without the quotation marks) in the SheetMusicPlus search box.

The pdf file contains the original score (in letter format) followed by the somewhat larger copy with dedication by the composer and fingerings by Valentin Bogolubov who premiered the 3 Chromicons.

The sound sample is the live performance.

The Three Chromicons were premiered by pianist Valentin Bogolubov at the Soci�t� de concerts de St-Bruno, Saint-Bruno, Quebec, Canada, on 27 January 2007. Bogolubov's adventurous, technically demanding program, which also featured the works of Alexander Scriabin and Jean Chatillon, was accompanied by video animation of numerous works of art, four of which were created by the composer (among them, the Chromicon No. 3).

Ford explains the significance of these unique scores:

"In both my earliest chromicons, which I had begun to create by the 1980s, and in those I continue to make today, color is the element that links what is seen to what is heard. Unlike composer Alexander Scriabin, who may have been a true synaesthete as the result of a rare neurological condition enabling him actually to hear colors, my approach to color music has been by way of analogy. Although the tones in a musical scale and the colors of a prism both result from specific vibratory frequencies, scales can be replicated in various octaves while there is no comparable transposition observable in the case of the spectrum. However, the analogy between pitch and hue is implicit in the term "chromatic scale" (the Greek chr�ma signifies "color"), and on that basis it is possible to equate the twelve tones of Western music with the hues on a twelvefold color wheel: red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue, blue-violet, violet, and red-violet."

"By placing the pitch names of the chromatic scale in a separate band around the periphery of a such color wheel, much like the numbers on the face of a clock, and by rotating the central color wheel, it is possible for any given pitch to be aligned and associated with any hue. Such an easily constructed device, which I have dubbed the "chromonomicon," is the key necessary to decipher the musical meaning of my chromicons. The chromicon can be thought of as a calligraphic text in which each discrete area of color is a separate letter."

"Although there are literally millions of possible colors, all of them can be categorized as one of the twelve hues shown on the chromonomicon. Instead of being written from left to right or from right to left, the color-letters in a chromicon are arranged concentrically. The shapes of the individual letters, usually painted in watercolor and "illuminated" with metallic paints, colored pencils, and other media, are the result of each artist's creative meditation. The personal meaning of the chromiconic text as a whole emerges during and after this meditation, and may be expressed by a conventional title or accompanying commentary."

"Now, anyone wishing to realize a chromicon is at liberty to follow any path?straight or curvilinear?from the centermost letter to the periphery, constructing a cantus (melody) by notating the musical pitches associated with each contiguous color-letter encountered along the way. The cantus thereafter serves as the structural basis of a new, freely composed work. The individual pitches in the cantus may be moved to any octave, and may be repeated any number of times before proceeding to the next pitch in the sequence. Customarily, once the final tone of the cantus is reached, the entire melody is heard in reverse (retrograde), resulting in a palindrome. That palindrome is itself subject to varied repetition, so that in formal terms, each realization of a chromicon amounts to a 'mirror' theme with variations."

"Chromicon No. 3 travels even further back in collective human memory to the eighteenth century. For all its contemporary melodic and harmonic inflections, the style is pervasively contrapuntal, summoning to mind the polyphonic keyboard textures of Bach and Handel. It eschews the worldly strife and diversions mirrored in the first two chromicons, maintaining a dignified, highly stylized manner throughout, but with its unexpected final cadence on D, there seems to be a fleeting intimation of transcendence."

Video of Chromicon III
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHMw-vzZlGE