Techniques of Polytempic Polymicrotonal Composition

  Controlled Organization of Microchroma within Polymicrotonal Systems For me, pitch organization is either atonal , tonal , or centric . One can use any approach one wishes in polytempic polymicrotonality . I prefer to be somewhere in between. Although I have not used twelve-tone procedures for my compositions, I have used cells, tetrachords , centric quasi-tonal areas , and even jazz harmony .  Again, I refrain from "laying down" a law or system, and I am only trying to cover an array of topics related to all things poly. I know that Joseph Straus 's book Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory  is NOT everyone's favorite textbook, as it resembles a math class, but it has crystallized some basic atonal concepts for me in my undergrad and graduate years.  I know I rail against the new simplicity of microtonal music adopting minimalism and drones , but there really needs to be an alternative to this. It is good that a simpler approach is pertinent today, as this period...

 More about Meter Poetic Meter , for me, is essentially music. Song. The art of songwriting . Although different, the art of poetic meter has a built-in logic that suits musical construction. Most of the time, songwriters, or composers of Lieder , or Art Songs , simply use the rhythms of the composition itself. Or the words of the poem may dictate the rhythms to the composer in a type of durch-komponiert style of writing, like Wagner or Schubert have done. As a matter of fact, prosody is a poetic analysis, much akin to musical analysis. Yet, there is a compositional system dormant and employable in this analytical system. Much like atonal analysis using set theory , or intervallic cell analysis , these types of techniques can also lend themselves to creation by working backwards. I have frequently composed music backwards, or even started in the middle of a piece.  Figure 1. As said earlier in this blog, poetic forms themselves are just as numerous and organic as musical...

  Continuation of part XIIIa: Trisyllabic and Tetrasyllabic feet for intervallic cells As a continuation of part XIIIa, I will provide more notes and examples of prosody as applied to voice leading , intervallic cells, and a type of loose pitch organization as applicable to any microtonal system used in polymicrotonality . The most important aspect of this technique is the specific use of the ultrachromatic cell , prescribed as the unstressed unit "U." According to which smallest intervallic unit your microtonal system is using, for example, the 92.3 cent microchromatic interval of 13tet , becomes arsis U. (All this is presented in part XIIIa) Thesis "—" then contains the remaining group of intervals still within the microtonal system, but are larger than a microchromatic step. Therefore, the third microtonal scale degree , or larger, will be considered as skips, leaps, and jumps to other pitches. The reader may interpret these other larger intervals in the fr...

History of My Altered Polymicrotonal Staff System   in Pictures. My little notebook holds my treasure trove of poly ideas. Landing in grad school in 2004-7 lit a fire inside me that sought a new approach to composition through my polytempic polymicrotonal approach .  Wiggly staff , may be a silly idea, but I am envisioning an interactive computer notation program that could eventually widen and narrow the staves, such as my fat staves idea, to encompass microtonal tunings vertically without semiotics interrupting the horizontal flow of dense polyrhythmic activity. My little notebook shows the progression of ideas about fattening up, or altering the staff for microtones, without the hassle of semiotics and semaphores cluttering the horizontal scansion of rhythms.  The idea of holographic sheet music occurred to me as a possible solution to microtonal notation problems, and amazingly, I believe I had heard recently, in 2025, that someone was in the process of inventing t...

 Applying Prosody to a Microtonal System What is Prosody, and what the Heck does it have to do with Microtones?   Although Leonard Meyer created a musical analysis approach using simple prosodic elements from the analysis of poetic syllabic feet, I have always been interested in prosody and its close relationship to song and music in general. This morning, as my cat Maximus attacked my face while I was trying to sleep, I had an idea concerning the use of prosody with regard to microtonal systems.  Fig. 1. Disyllabic permutations as applied to microtonal voice leading and pitch cell organization In prosody, poems are written syllabically in a meter, such as in iambic pentameter .  Most English classical poetry is written in iambic pentameter. Take Milton's Paradise Lost , for instance. This epic poem is entirely written in a foot resembling: ∪ — where "∪" is the unstressed syllable, and "—" is the stressed syllable. There are three categories of syllabic feet: ...

  Compression of Harmon y in Polymicrotonality One technique regarding the gradual compression of micro-intervallic structures in the microchromatic line is shown below, in Figure 3, from my String Quartet 12 , Big Bad Mother Fucker From Outer Space, 2019.  Figure 1. Tuning Legend from String Quartet #12 String Quartet 12 is explicitly polymicrotonal , with microtonal systems in full, except for the last one. We start with 20tet at 60 cents, 22tet at 54.5 cents, quartertones at 50 cents, and lastly, 18 of the 26tet gamut , at 46.15 cents. Since a starting pitch needs to be chosen for further divisions of the octave of a pitch class set , and inclusive of all other pitch classes within that octave, and for all microtonal systems within the given octaves of each system, I chose C as "1/1" as indicating the "untouched," pure beginning pitch. In this case, the pitch C is from 12tet and is 261.6 Hz. Any pitch class can be used, including a starting pitch up the over...