Even before arriving at York, Orton displayed an interest in the potential of the timepiece not only as a symbolic device - significant of the terrifying monotony of contemporary life - but as a structuring element in the musical exploration of more complex, non-linear durations. In August 1966, reading Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, Orton noted in his diary the significance of the clock to Spengler’s teleological ‘dread symbol of the flow of time’ and attempted, briefly, to unpack the compositional possibilities enabled by the underpinning flux. Here, Orton ruminated on a compositional exploration of the ‘psychological appreciation of time [...] very different’ to clock temporality, in which, ‘massed events crowded into a small period of time contrasted with long periods of [...] “‘boredoms’”. This interest in the exploration of polymorphous musical duration was initially expressed in the varying timbral densities, augmentations and ‘echo-polyphonies’ of Orton’s unfinished work for eleven players, Jeux Souterraines (c.1966).

It was, however, a repeated encounter with the local environment that acted as a spur to a more explicit compositional dramatisation of this temporal dislocation. Each day, on his journey to the University ‘[a]ong the B1222 road from York to Howden’, Orton passed a sign bearing the name ‘Clock Farm’ on a ‘rustic wooden clock face’: ‘[t]he familiarity of seeing the name every day gradually evoked in me the fantasy of a farm of clocks’, ultimately resulting in what the composer designated as the ‘aural result of that whimsy: to take a walk through a farm where, instead of enclosed animals, are caged clocks…. How would they behave?’

Clock Farm (1973), wrote Peter Manning, ‘is a fascinating exploitation of the regular patterns of ticking clocks subjected to simple treatments’. Here, judicious filtering, tape-speed manipulation and the careful application of reverb are applied in collage ‘to produce interactive patterns’. The ‘inevitable use of a clock alarm’, notes Manning, ‘elevates a cliché’ to an acceptable coda; ‘[t]he ending of the piece’, writes Orton, ‘awakes me from the daydream’.

The piece was first performed with an accompanying three-projector slideshow featuring ‘montages of the many faces of clocks in advertising land’ in a run of concerts at York Arts Centre in January 1974, accompanying Trevor Wishart and Mick Banks’ Marxist parable about the life and death of a wooden sideboard cabinet, Son et Lumiére Domestic (1973). Orton’s Aysgarth Falls was also intended for performance, but remained unfinished.

Clock Farm was programmed later in 1974 as part of John Paynter’s New Music in Action residential course for music educators at the University of York, and revisited in the summer of 1979, when it was featured as part of a short tour of the North of England and the Midlands arranged by Wishart during a Hinrichsen Fellowship at York.