Name: String Quintet in standard tuning with synth pad by pthoege
Duration: 4 min 25 s
Description: A polycyclic piece with 5 looping cyclic parts not in a neat order, but not polytempic nor polymetric, either. Formerly a string quartet, but with added synth, is essentially a quintet. 2025

standard tuning is still dense with nuance and power

Lovely.  Strikes me as nostalgic...but nostalgic for what?  And mysterious, yet not misterioso.

A polycyclic piece with 5 looping cyclic parts not in a neat order, but not polytempic nor polymetric, either. Formerly a string quartet, but with added synth, is essentially a quintet. 2025

String Quintet in standard tuning with synth pad

In 1974, Robert Morris and Daniel Starr famously enumerated every all-interval twelve-tone row. 

Inspired by their work, and in around 1979 in unpublished works, I generated an analogous catalog of what one might call the all-trichord rows, meaning rows, which together with two of their untransposed rotations, and in "first-species counterpoint," produce a sequence of all twelve distinct trichord classes.  By the standards of the day, this 
involved very substantial computational search.  But lately I have vastly expanded that calculation, now allowing transposition, retrograde and inversion of the rotations. Some of these new rows provide the basis of my recent pieces.   

The catalog of all-trichord rows runs to about 300 more or less, depending upon the accounting for symmetries.  That makes these rows quite rare among all the twelve-tone rows.  This rarity suggests my original compositional conception but unrealized at the time: a museum-like installation where a listener might walk in a large space from sonic exhibit to sonic exhibit, and experience the different ways these rows fit together and do their thing.  

So here are just three typical exhibits, realized now as works for chamber orchestra.  In each, the basic row first gets a plain but lapidary statement, and then the rotated forms fade in, statistically speaking, and eventually the rows likewise fade out in the order in which they entered, leaving finally a statement of the basic row.  By design, this treatment could loop seamlessly as one "display," as per my original conception.

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

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

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

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Drum and bass with blues vocals on the existential difficulty of life.

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Italian opera meets jump up, time to dance!

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As always, Dani and Mat making things up in front of people. Recording is off the desk so a bit better quality than normal zoom offerings - May post some more

Kirby/Ward LIVE @The Container Stage

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)

String Quintet in standard tuning with synth pad

pthoege

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