polymicrotonal weirdness with max msp, 2018

PolymicroEtude7

In both movements of this quartet, each instrument gets assigned a repeating rhythmic pattern—sequences of notes and rests of equal length (say, all eighth notes). 

The first violin plays a pattern of 11 beats (6 notes, 5 rests), the second violin a 7-beat pattern (4 notes, 3 rests), the viola 6 (3+3), and the cello 5 (3+2). These patterns cycle independently.

One full cycle  takes 2310 beats—the least common multiple of 11, 7, 6, and 5.

But—crucially—beat durations vary.

Indeed, the duration of a beat depends on its density—meaning how many instruments are sounding at that moment (0 through 4). Each density appears a fixed number of times within the full cycle, independent of pattern contents assuming the constraints above. 

The twist: beat durations get adjusted so that each density—whether a silence, solo, duo, trio, or a full quartet—occupies exactly one-fifth of the total time of the movement. Rare textures are stretched, common ones compressed.

Thus the interaction of the parts effects an emergent large-scale rhythm.

Out of millions of possible combinations of patterns, one movement employs the set that yields the most unpredictable overall rhythm (in a precisely defined mathematical sense). The other, the most predictable.

As for pitch: each instrument traces a fragment of the cycle of fifths—in near standard tuning. The quartet plays 17TET, so with the octave divided into 17 equal steps, which makes a "perfect" fifth span 10 steps. Each instrument repeatedly travels through this cycle fragment, alternating between octaves. Individually, the lines sound diatonic; together, they form unfamiliar and highly dissonant verticalities—often stranger than even the most dissonant music in 12-tone systems.

Despite this microtonality, no specialized technique is required. If each player tunes their instrument to a slightly different “A,” then standard fingerings suffice—as long as they resist the instinct to tune to one another.

Waves, Winds, Mind - Mvt. II

The promised orchestration of the piano I recently posted.  

9/11 in 19TET for chamber orchestra

Didier Aschour is a pioneer specialist performer of microtonal guitar music.  His custom guitar allows for rapid exchange of fingerboards, and he has worked with a luthier to build a collection of fingerboards that cover a vast range of tuning systems.  

This piece exists in two versions.   

While the two versions share a common score, they differ with respect to the arrangement of the fingerboard frets (the "warp") and the tuning of the strings (the "weft").   Didier commissioned two special fingerboards for the piece.


In each version, between the tunings of frets and the strings, one constitutes a fragment of the overtone series and the other a fragment of the undertone series.   The resulting interaction provides a very rich selection of pitches: within a limited span, arbitrary numerators and arbitrary denominators arise--thinking here of the available pitches by their ratios to the guitar's lowest open string.  

"Just intonation" always means composing with intervals formed from small integer ratios, thus with some subset of the rational numbers.   The tuning here, you might call it Cartesian, means to project the structure of the rational numbers writ large, so without imposing any subjective selection process.

Performed live, the piece would have Didier sliding a glass "bottleneck"  for the warp and strumming for the weft.  Or course that timbrel conceit is lost in these MIDI realizations.  But hopefully one day I'll have a recording of an instrumental performance for sharing.  This will have to do for now.



   




Warp Weft (I), for microtonal guitar (1998), for Didier Aschour

Didier Aschour is a pioneer specialist performer of microtonal guitar music.  His custom guitar allows for rapid exchange of fingerboards, and he has worked with a luthier to build a collection of fingerboards that cover a vast range of tuning systems.  

This piece exists in two versions.   

While the two versions share a common score, they differ with respect to the arrangement of the fingerboard frets (the "warp") and the tuning of the strings (the "weft").   Didier commissioned two special fingerboards for the piece.


In each version, between the tunings of frets and the strings, one constitutes a fragment of the overtone series and the other a fragment of the undertone series.   The resulting interaction provides a very rich selection of pitches: within a limited span, arbitrary numerators and arbitrary denominators arise--thinking here of the available pitches by their ratios to the guitar's lowest open string.  

"Just intonation" always means composing with intervals formed from small integer ratios, thus with some subset of the rational numbers.   The tuning here, you might call it Cartesian, means to project the structure of the rational numbers writ large, so without imposing any subjective selection process.

Performed live, the piece would have Didier sliding a glass "bottleneck"  for the warp and strumming for the weft.  Or course that timbrel conceit is lost in these MIDI realizations.  But hopefully one day I'll have a recording of an instrumental performance for sharing.  This will have to do for now.


Warp Weft (II), for microtonal guitar (1998), for Didier Aschour

The Thing With Feathers, for flute, oboe and clarinet

This is a companion piece to The Thing With Feathers

on the strangest Sea  - for violin, viola, cello, celesta, harp and marimba

This piece is simply a love song to a tone row that enjoys a unique mathematical property. Let me put that in some context.

When people think of "mathematical music," three names tend to come up: Milton Babbitt, Iannis Xenakis, and Tom Johnson. For the point I want to make, let me concentrate on Babbitt and Johnson.

With his musical career well underway, Tom fell in love with mathematics writ large, despite having no formal training in the subject. He relied on professional mathematicians (myself included) to tell him about significant ideas, and he was a genius at finding ways to project mathematical concepts through music in the most natural possible ways.

In the preface to the score of Networks, Tom writes: “Composers should not tell their music what to do.” (This reflects Tom’s willingness to call himself a “minimalist,” even as the most famous minimalists rejected the label.)

I suspect Milton would have dismissed Tom’s sentiment as nonsense, holding that telling music what to do is composition perforce.

Milton did have mathematical training, and it expresses itself in his work as the rigor with which he approaches the intrinsically musical problems posed by twelve-tone practice. And unlike Tom, Milton actually fathered some original, albeit modest, mathematical discoveries. Still, his relation to mathematics resembled that of a typical engineer: formal methods helped him do what he wanted—and needed—to do, but his interest didn’t extend much beyond that.

Tom, for his part, had a studied disinterest in twelve-tone music, precisely because its practitioners often buried structural principles under richly “improvised” surfaces that attracted listeners’ attention. The common notion was that the underlying theory—the mathematics—was the exclusive domain of experts.

My piece here is twelve-tone music, but philosophically close to Tom’s minimalist spirit.

Indeed, I recently discovered this twelve-tone row:

0  1  4  8  3  6  5  11  9  7  10  2

It enjoys a remarkable property that makes it essentially unique.

By way of explanation: only about 1.5% of all possible tone rows allow you to combine the row with two rotations of two other forms (of the same row) so that the resulting three rows, when sounded together, produce twelve distinct trichords that exhaust all twelve trichord classes.

That said, most rows that allow this at all allow it in just a single way. But this row allows four ways, yielding four essentially different cycles of trichords.

I have never met two stools that I didn’t want to fall between. There is some simple surface detail here, and I can imagine Tom urging me to eliminate any competing idea. But that said, I am neither “improvising” here nor treating the row as mere “pre-compositional” material.

===================

I have chosen a tempo here for the web.  In performance, the player decides, and I enjoy the piece even at half the speed.

Let Me Make This As Clear As I Can, for solo piano

Another snippet from Caligo Paean - beware of gifts when chasing gods : ) 

Caligo Paean is a 1 hour long sound piece installed on river front property in the town of Franklin, Tasmania as part of the exhibition "When The Fog Clears". It formed part of the Ten Days on The Island Festival March 2025.
The work was installed in several locations across the property including a stack of subs under an old bus, in the main exhibition space and in an abandoned shed some 40 metres from the main area . The speakers were 'tuned' quite differently depending on their location and the sound was not delay corrected with the result of each mini-installation merging with each other in odd sonic ways - kind of calling the listener from one spot to another. The the work features field recordings, percussion, piano, bass guitar and Intonarumori as well as this special one off choir : )

Caligo is the Ancient goddess of Chaos. Born of the fog she controls the darkness, dwells in the void and is as old as the primordial matter that created the universe. This work is a tribute to the goddess as she continues to influence our lives and, in the case of this installation, the site and concept informing the show.

Official press release below for The Fog Clears

Every day, the mists of the Huon Valley perform a seductive dance, gently obscuring and revealing contours of the fertile land and waters. Situated in The Watershed Franklin, When The Fog Clears features six artists from lutruwita / Tasmania exploring the region’s iconic mists through a variety of mediums including installation, sculpture, illustration, sound, and video.

Developed exclusively for Franklin, this exhibit extends from the waterfront itself into the chambers, kilns, and rafters of the shed, inviting visitors to consider fog as an atmosphere that can cloak us in unexpected ways.



Caligo Paean (A gift, a choice)

"Tightness" is a composer's value, a quality of music that more often revealed by score study than by casual listening.  Composers might call a score "tight" if its events and parameters turn out overdetermined, as do the answers to a crossword puzzle.  That means the little details all satisfy multiple constraints and the overall fit-together quality verges on the uncanny.

Here I have combined the serial logic with a minimalist's sense of decorum, to keep the listening experience as close as possible to a deep dive into the score.  Indeed, in the second and third sections the rhythmic invention helps you out if your relative pitch lets you down.

In particular, this piece is a love song to the only three tone rows that enjoy a property similar to but distinct from the row that forms the basis of my recent "Let Me Be As Clear As I Can."  

As with the row in that previous piece, each row, joined with certain rotations of two alternative forms of that same row, produces a succession of all 12 distinct trichord classes — and in each case, one can choose the alternative forms in four essentially distinct ways!  Where these rows differ, the succession of trichords always turns out essentially the same across all four solutions.  

Think of a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces can fit together in very different ways and yet strangely still form the same picture.

The three rows and all the solutions receive three different compositional treatments, each forming one of the sections of this work. 

I consider the work indeterminate in a limited way: other versions might replace any or all of the three rows with one of their 2304 = 48² forms (taking into account multiplications of pitch classes and position numbers, as well as transpositions and rotations), and versions can also shuffle, in six ways, which row receives which compositional treatment.




Music Tighter Than A Gnat's Ass Stretched Over A Rain Barrel

The ingredients:
A length-21 sequence of JI-chords every 13 seconds;
A length-13 sequence of JI-chords every 8 seconds;
A length-8 sequence of JI-chords every 5 seconds.
All these are run through a digital ring modulator.  
This results in constantly changing timbre, and a slowly morphing rhythm
(because 13/21, 8/13 and 5/8 all quite close).

At the start, all the chords share a common root/fundamental, 60 cps.  

The roots gradually drift apart to 60-60.75-61.5 and this causes the overall timbral profile to grow gradually more gnarly.

Needless to say, this track is purely synthetic and so not derived from any sampled sound.

art thou but a didgeridoo of the mind, a false creation?

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)

PolymicroEtude7

pthoege