When living things gain the ability to extract information from their environment and react to it, they can have a survival advantage.   So did our senses evolved;e.g. an animal might "hear that" a predator approaches and evade it.  

Complex beings process complex stimuli for all manner of information, so the cognitive effort after the raw sensation can take time.   This necessary delay, for human beings at least, means experiencing sense-data-in-itself even while reflecting on the question "What is it?"  For music this gives rise to a duality: even as we surrender to an immersive experience we might parse it and deduce some of its structure (or at least experience the mere presence of structure through its artifacts).  

Perhaps "duality" make this too simple: we can also reflect on the feeling of surrender, we can also reflect on the feeling of deductive experience.  We can "hear that" a sound got made in a certain way, we can hear that a sound is similar to different from some other sound, and we can "hear that" a variety of sounds enjoy some order or pattern.   Music is not just how it sounds, it is at least(!) all that the stratified listening mind does.

To Hear and Hear-That, as a kind hypercanon (a canon on a canon on canon on a canon) depends on "transposition up the steps of the overtone series (as opposed to up or down a fixed interval).  

From another but equivalent viewpoint, the many chords here correspond to solutions of the problem of expressing any given beat number, if possible, as the sum of four distinct fourth powers (a.k.a. biquadrates).   From the choice of that problem, and for mathematical reasons, a kind of rhythmic steady state emerges, a flow that neither thins nor thickens on the average, but nevertheless projects predictable/unpredictable variation (depending on the computational power of the agent who would predict).   In contrast to the rhythmic steady state, as the piece progresses the larger beat numbers require solutions with larger biquadrates, so the timbre of the piece slowly evolves from consonance to some kind of resonant dissonance.

For an ending, both a bit arbitrary but also a bit natural, the piece goes on only as long as 32 harmonics suffice.  



To Hear and Hear-That

Composer, mathematician, visual artist. 
Seeks collaboration with performers and choreographers.

Please don't spam this account!

Music and things that might sound like music by Mat Ward. Noise Art/A  Piano and Bass Duet with Dani Kirby/A 50 plus member Art Ensemble called Then She Reaches The Gun/Deep Research Into Luigi Russolo and his Intonarumori .. thats just the stuff I post regularly : ) Thanks to everyone thats ever stopped by. Music is The Best!

To all concerned: 
I am announcing publication of my new book, NOW AVAILABLE:
https://www.routledge.com/Maqam-Melodies-Pitches-Patterns-and-Developments-of-Music-in-the-Middle-East-and-other-Microtonal-Writings/Thoegersen/p/book/9789815129052
My book, Polytempic Polymicrotonal Music, is available on Amazon. 
https://www.routledge.com/Polytempic-Polymicrotonal-Music-The-Road-Less-Traveled/Thoegersen/p/book/9789814968294

I have a new album out through Magic&Unique Group Records on Spotify and other digital streaming platforms:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5qWHmcvyAemvVn2TJH1bio?si=OD5TmPptQ-ypr8WOI0EZKA&nd=1

https://whitecentipedenoise.com/products/peter-thoegersen-facebook-cantos-cdr-flea
My CD via Flea label has been out since April, 2021, featuring the wonderful Lore Lixenberg singing over my microtonal piano accompaniment
Hope you enjoy it!

https://www.newworldrecords.org/collections/vendors?q=Peter%20Thoegersen

From the liner notes on my CD now available on AMAZON and New World Records:
"The author of these notes has spent his life explaining radical music, and the music on this disc may be the most radical I've ever written about. Peter Thoegersen (b. 1967) is not yet a name known to the music world; not for any lack of connection to other famous musicians, but because he came to composition late, and because his artistic aims are so broad and complex that they have taken years to evolve. His aesthetic is well defined, and he is upfront about having a name for it: "Polytempic Polymicrotonal Music." That means he has musical layers simultaneously moving in different tempos, plus, even more radically, that he has different microtonal scales playing at the same time. Few composers have aimed at such fervent and heterogeneous multidimensionality. And yet, while Thoegersen's music can seem overwhelming at first, running through it is a level of charm and simplicity that belies the initial impression.

In total, these three pieces emphasize a particular side of Thoegersen's output. The image his music creates of ornately mathematical structures filled with intuitively friendly melodies maps on to the personality of the man himself: outspoken and acerbically ruthless in his musical opinions, Thoegersen is also marked by a jolly sense of humor and an inexhaustible love of cats and other animals that make him ultimately less imposing and more personable than he might seem at first. The same can be said for his music. And by going further than anyone else has gone in terms of this particularly American concept of fusing the polytempic with the polymicrotonal - extending and combining the conceptual worlds of Ives, Cowell, Nancarrow, Partch, Carter, even Frank Zappa and many others - he has created a special place for himself within American music."                                                             

-Kyle Gann (from the liner notes)

To Hear and Hear-That

David Victor Feldman