Name: Robot3: the R2D2 Robot Argument and Tentative Agreement by pthoege
Duration: 2 min 7 s
Description: Two R2 units have a fierce argument with stasis and agreement. 2024.

All the sonic stuff notwithstanding, I hear a tonal grand plan.   With all the distortion my ears aren't up to taking this for dictation, but there's some kind of tritone relationship between the beginning and the ending.  Harmony and timbre come from the same place, even if they operate on different timescales, and I hear a continuum - no easy way to separate effects into harmony and timbral.  PD?

ooh, they are reaching consensus, its beautiful

Viola Sonata (1974), performed by Nigel Keay

With 12 pitch classes one has 144 2-note sequences or just 132 upon insisting on 2 distinct notes.  

Dividing these 132 sequences randomly into 3 "buckets" of about 44 sequences each one can seek out, for each bucket, all the 12-tone cycles that each bucket affords: so each adjacent pair of notes in each cycle must constitute a 2-note sequence in the affiliated bucket.

Now repeating this recipe millions of times, I eventually discover three instances where each bucket affords, in total, exactly 30 conforming cycles each.

Musically speaking, all the cycles associated to a particular bucket, seeing as how they got cobbled out of the same 2-note sequences, they all turn out to share a common feeling.   Moving from one bucket to the next that feeling changes.  Indeed I feel a distinct but subtle shift, akin, something to something like a key change or modulation and this occurs despite how composing with 12-tone cycles promotes consistent pitch saturation, and thus the classic "atonal" sound you will hear.

But honestly, even having composed the piece myself, and thus knowing in advance where to expect these quasi key changes, only after repeated hearings did I suddenly find these shifts, these reconfiguations, obvious.  

With three 30-30-30's, I had one to use to govern the pitch classes, but also one for durations, and one for orchestration.

Think of this as very unconventional 12-tone-music: the rows never get transposed or inverted or retrograded, but rather variety arises from employing multiple rows that happen, by design, to share common "DNA."  Rather than burying this "row technique" under some sort of subjective rhetoric, as traditional 12-tone composers feel they must, I organize all these materials for transparency, hoping for listeners to follow the goings on.  One usually views "complexity" and "minimalism" as opposite poles, but both attitudes inform every moment of this piece.

Fritillary, for small orchestra

Kondor: Piano Concerto 1st Mmt

Kondor: Piano Concerto 3d Mmt

Kondor: Piano Concerto 2d Mmt

Two R2 units have a fierce argument with stasis and agreement. 2024.

Robot3: the R2D2 Robot Argument and Tentative Agreement

Dedicated to Christopher Maher, who urged me to take a serious interest in Cuban timba, the band Klimax in particular, a type of music far removed from my usual listening habits, to say the least

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said “Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.”

Composer that I am, I am also a mathematician and that is exactly what happened.

Harvesting Timba

Given four distinct pitches (not pitch classes!), you will have available 24 distinct orders to perform them in.   Even without any ear training, most any listener can easily distinguish, say, 
highest - next_to_lowest - lowest - next_to_highest  
from
lowest - next_to_lowest - next_to_highest - highest.
This makes for the basis of a highly audible, psycho-acoustically available variant of serialism.

As such, the present piece is based on a sort of abstract 24 tone cyclic row, abstract because, the row lacks the usual information concerning precise pitch content.  Instead the row structure specifies only, for each note, whether it sits lower or higher relative to the three notes before it and after it in the cycle.  

The existence of such a row that exhausts exactly the 24 contour possibilities is a mathematically non-trivial fact.

Less than two minutes at full tempo, the piece might service as a virtuosic concert encore.





The distinction between these 24 order 

A Study in Contour,  for viola (1975)

méson kaí ákron

Lately I'm making pieces for a synthetic percussion orchestra with a virtually infinite number of instruments.

This is a proof of concept piece.

Perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhurthrumathunaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun

The most basic rhythmic transformation consists in subdividing a single unit of time into two equal halves.  Repeating this operation produces an infinitude of patterns of which this piece might be considered a partial catalog.  The tempo is chosen so that the beginning sounds like some sort of virtuoso drumming (but these are my own computer generated sounds, and no sampling was involved), yet gradually, as the patterns grow more complex, execution would require superhuman ability and the result verges on the biological.  The catalog has its own emergent shape, so there is rhythmic interest too on larger time scales.

Halve and Whole

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)

Robot3: the R2D2 Robot Argument and Tentative Agreement

pthoege

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