What Hath the Clock Wrought?

Why don’t longshoremen or sailors or assembly-line workers sing as they work?

Blame it on the clock. Lewis Mumford wrote in the 1950s, “To keep time was once a peculiar attribute of music: it gave industrial value to the workshop song or the tattoo or the chantey of the sailors tugging at a rope.” With the mechanical clock, music’s value in industry evaporated. Coordinated effort isn’t measured by notes and beats but by ticks.

Mumford adds that the clock “presides over the day from the hour of rising to the hour of rest,” and inspired other innovations: “When one thinks of the day as an abstract span of time, one does not go to bed with the chickens on a winter’s night: one invents wicks, chimneys, lamps, gaslights, electric lamps, so as to use all the hours belonging to the day.”

Clocks spatialize time: “Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, it could even be expanded by the invention of labor-saving instruments.”

It encouraged nostalgia. Romans looked fondly back at the Greek past, but “dissociating time from organic sequences, it became easier for the men of the Renaissance to indulge the fantasy of reviving the classical past or of reliving the splendors of antique Roman civilization.”

It all goes back, Mumford thinks, to Benedictines who needed to keep track of liturgical hours.