BLIP

for 18 voices (2024)

BLIP is about different ideas relating to time. Thinking about the Greenwich Time Signal or ‘the pips’ became an excuse to think about time generally and the idea of standardised time, how we impose precision onto something fluid and subjective, or in music how we quantize notes to a grid or share the same feeling of a downbeat.

It’s also about radio, about lots of information happening simultaneously, what Marshall McLuhan called the ‘all- at-onceness’ of digital media. Fragments of St. Augustine’s writings on time are mixed in with adverts, Radio 4 programs, Bible verses, the shipping forecast and overheard conversations. Against all this, I imagined the pips as a kind of lighthouse in the storm, an antidote to the chaos, cutting through the noise with something simple and pure.

Commissioned by BBC Radio 3, for the 100th anniversary of the ‘Pips’ on BBC Radio, and first performed by the BBC Singers in August 2024, conducted by Sophie Jeannin.