Name: Drums and Piano Duet in Polymeter by pthoege
Duration: 13 min 40 s
Description: this track represents a shift in drumming to a more lyrical and expressive type of playing, rather than just playing beats as a function of time. The piano is split into two opposing meters, as well, allowing three separate meters/tempos at once in places. This music also reflects classical, jazz, and fusion in an integrated fashion.

this track represents a shift in drumming to a more lyrical and expressive type of playing, rather than just playing beats as a function of time. The piano is split into two opposing meters, as well, allowing three separate meters/tempos at once in places. This music also reflects classical, jazz, and fusion in an integrated fashion.

Drums and Piano Duet in Polymeter

String Quartet Nr 9 Rev (01.07.23)

Some friends felt that my cover image for the piano and organ version wasn't a visual analog of the piece.  So here's a klangfarben version hopefully as colorful as the graphic (the new graphic is just a color morph of the old one - they're both visual representations of the score).

Rational Exuberance, twelve instrument version

Standard Adventure. Movement No 3

There are 362,797,056 ways to partition a three octave span into three aggregates.  Once you do so, reading each aggregate from low to high, you get three 12-tone rows.  If you further require that those rows feature at least 7 distinct interval classes, the 362,797,056 possibilities reduce to just 46.  One of those 46 possibilities plays the role here of a passacaglia-like chord progression.  

There are 144 ways to have three triads sit within the aggregate without any overlap.  Remarkably, one can cycle through those possibilities so that each step turns up just one new triad.  Such a cycle provides the figuration for the variations. 

The overall effect produces a counterpoint between two opposing notions of harmonic rhythm, one based on the cycle of aggregates, and one based on the the featured triads.

A Friendly Accord between Aggregates and Triads, for guitar

trommel faining

Deep dark drones oscillate among each other...

Onyx Star Nr 1

More sonic dark explorations (based on a recent improvisation of mine) with the end result rather sounding like a slow movement of a concerto for piano and electronics.

Binary Onyx Stars

In the heart of the night emanate foreboding gleeps, blorbs and fragments of a forgotten broadcast; all of which compliment my piano improvisation.

Black Nocturne Nr 1

Composed in honor of Tom Johnson's 60th birthday and premiered in Paris and Amsterdam by ENSEMBLE DÉCADANSE at a two-part festival in celebration thereof.  

Music based on a finite-state automaton devised by the composer;  Tom Johnson himself was pursuing musical applications of finite-state automata around that time.

T'homage (1999) for flute, violin and harp (for Tom Johnson on his 60th birthday)

In an article I published decades ago in Xenharmonikon, I proposed strategies for composing computer based microtonal music with no fiat scale.  Composed notes thus get their intonation on the fly based on music context rather than as members of a fixed but expanded gamut.

My Fugue and Postlude puts those theoretical principles into practice.   The form makes a twisted reference to Baroque music, a(nother) time when musical values intertwined closely with the theoretical expansion of music language. 

Fugue And Postlude

To all concerned: 
I am announcing publication of my new book August 7th:
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)

Drums and Piano Duet in Polymeter

pthoege

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