‘Musically, the passage of time is about human existence’: Brian Cox on working with IWC and Hans Zimmer

‘What is time?’ asks physicist Brian Cox, who has been debating the question with watch brand IWC. ‘It’s part of the laws of nature, but then it becomes different things in quantum mechanics, and then we don’t know if there is an origin of time because we don’t know if the universe is eternal or not. Ultimately, you need to know what time is. So this kind of gets you into a mess, ultimately. It's a fundamental part of existence, it’s about being human. Sorry, what magazine is this for again?’

While it may be tricky to gloss over the ins and outs of quantum mechanics, what is clear is that the partnership between IWC and Brian Cox is a carefully considered one. The duo joined forces with Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer to create music inspired by IWC’s new Portugieser watch collection and the Portugieser Eternal Calendar watch, which debuted at Watches and Wonders 2024. The orchestral performance took place at the Royal Opera House in London in August this year, during Cox’s live show, Symphonic Horizons.

‘Hans and I had had chats over the years,’ says Cox of where his relationship with Zimmer began. ‘He comes to a lot of the science events; he is particularly interested in astronomy and cosmology. When we got together with this collaboration, we spent most of the time having deep philosophical discussions about the nature of time. What he is so good at, I realised when I heard the music after all our discussions, is that all those ideas are in there.

‘Musically, if you think about what the passage of time means, it's about all of human existence, isn't it? It's about ageing. The thing that we notice most about time, viscerally, is getting older, I think. So, there's this tick in the music. It builds to a crescendo. So it’s quite dramatic and intensifies, and then it just drops back to the tick again. And the way that he's crafted it captures the mystery and almost the tragedy of time. It's a thing that we all ultimately succumb to. And for me, it's in there, in this piece, and it can also circle around as well. So it's got a sense of eternity to it.’

Cox and Zimmer looked to the mechanics of the watch when translating the inexpressible into the sonic. Awesomely precise, the Portugieser Eternal Calendar will not only recognise a leap day every four years – including the rare leap year exception rules – but also encompasses a moon phase that will only diverge from the moon’s orbit, by one day, after 45 million years.

‘​​You build a mechanical computer to do that, which is the challenge of the internal calendar,’ Cox adds. ‘What I love about that ambition is that when you look at this thing, you’re then connected with something that we don't perceive, although we know we're on this huge rock thundering through space, around a star, spinning pretty fast and orbiting pretty fast. And this mechanical computer you build to map the months and the orbits and leap years has to fit in a little box on your wrist. You realise the ambition, the engineering ambition, and then you can ask, why? To me, it's almost like the climbing Everest race, that famous statement – because it's there, because you can.’

'IWC Portugieser: A Tribute to Eternity' by Hans Zimmer is available on Spotify here

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