Life is about rhythm. Natural rhythm as nature comes to life around us through the seasons. Biological rhythm as our consciousness moves at its own pace, in a pattern of waking and sleeping, while the Earth turns.

At the same time, clocks tirelessly beat out the hours of the day and night. In the past, lookouts stood watch from the top of clocks or other high architectural structures to warn people of fires and danger. Today, in a continuation of the lookout’s role, Lausanne’s watchman cries out the time, while the tradition of the Hejnal, a trumpet melody played each hour from the top of Saint Mary’s Basilica in Krakow, Poland, still carries on.

Music is also about rhythm and its language is the vocabulary of the clock and time, with beats, bars and intervals.

The clock, music and the watchman on his perch are the inspiration behind Hoper from Stéphane Hardy, which offers a succession of odes to passing time – solo pieces improvised on a Breton musical instrument called the bombard while perched on the steep rooftops of the city or the horizontal green lines of the countryside.

In Breton, Hoper means crier. In English, it of course means someone who hopes. Hoper takes to the rooftops, filling the city with sound, playing out quasi-modal improvisations, becoming, for just a few hours, an incarnated beacon of sound, a reassuring lookout for our troubled times.

On this first day of spring, Hoper will be looking out over Rennes, from sunrise to sunset.