The genesis and composition of For the Time Being (1972) is the most well documented of Orton’s early electronic works. By 1967, the influence of Cage and the I Ching on the composer’s understanding of the relationship between sound and composition was in the ascendancy: ‘I have become increasingly aware of late’, he wrote in May of that year, ‘of the growing significance, for me, of change. As Tinguely and Whitehead among others say, change is a permanent reality’. This notion, whereby, after Heidegger, ‘the artist must attune himself to that which wants to reveal itself and permit the process to happen through him’ was to guide the processes leading to the composition of For the Time Being. In this piece, Orton strived to articulate form ‘from the material itself, a material intuitively shaped in improvisation’ in order to make a music that relied upon ‘an almost sculptural feeling for texture as the generator of organic form’. Such a process, he explained, ‘implies a faith in the intuitive process, the imperfectness and the uncertainty of which is indicated in the title’, which, he insisted, should also be read as a dedication to a divine ‘Time Being’.

The choice of domestic sound sources was rooted in Orton’s revisiting of recordings made by an early iteration of the Gentle Fire, the experimental and improvising group Orton assembled with Graham Hearn and other students shortly after his arrival at York. Indeed, as early as 1968, Orton wrote of listening to tapes of the group in his kitchen, being ‘galvanised’ by their choices, and immediately beginning to engage with the sonority of the domestic environment at home in Howden. Yet the period of experimentation leading to For the Time Being, which was, ‘for the most part recorded in the kitchen’ began in earnest in the summer of 1971. Initially dissatisfied with the oscillation between ‘two of the Denby pottery saucers that we use at home’ recorded and played back at different speeds on a Revox A77, Orton nonetheless recognised ‘a rather beautiful sound fluctuating in pitch as the hollows between the saucers change their cavity volume’; on scraping a thin-bladed pastry knife up-and-down against an earthenware coffee-pot, he became quickly enamoured with the creation of a ‘general classification of sounds with ‘symmetrical pitch-structures caused by the division into different sounding-lengths of a certain length of material’.

Other resources considered or called-upon during this furtive spell included milk bottles containing different volumes of water; ‘upturned plastic flower-pots, dropped from a height of a few inches’ onto a variety of surfaces, sometimes two or three simultaneously in order ‘to create “chords”’; a concave-shaped saucepan, ‘half-filled with water and some beans, shaken in a circular motion, and listened-to from above’, an oven-rack gong, the ‘teeth of a metal comb, plucked’, and, following a brief sojourn on Eigg in August, ‘whelk-shells, on the rocks’. Initial attempts to generate material were deemed unsuccessful, but Orton finally made recordings suitable for the piece at home in September, using ‘the beautiful Nagra’ portable tape recorder recently acquired by the Music Department.

For the Time Being is the shortest piece here, but it is the most accomplished of Orton’s early electronic works: ultimately a collage of recorded sounds, it shares a sensibility and DNA with the opening of Wishart’s contemporaneous Journey into Space, creating a dense timbral landscape and carrying a drama that belies the simplicity of its means of construction. The developing relationship between electronic and naturally generated sounds in For the Time Being, writes Peter Manning, ‘creates a unified structure within which elements grow and unite in a seemingly timeless sphere’.