The Arc of Development of My String Quartets through Polytempic Polymicrotonality: Part XVIII (blog 22)

The Developmental Arc of the String Quartet Cycle (1999–2025) 

Peter Thoegersen — 17 String Quartets in Six Phases

Phase 1: Pre-System Origins

String Quartet #1 (1999)

The cycle begins before the system exists. SQ1 is a pre-polytempic, pre-polymicrotonal work — written in standard 12-tone equal temperament with conventional temporal structures. It establishes Peter as a composer working within the inherited language of the late 20th-century avant-garde, already pushing against its boundaries through gestural drama, metric modulation, and a maximalist approach to texture. The limitations he felt here — the sense that basic musical materials were insufficient — would drive everything that followed.

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Phase 2: Construction of the Polytempic Polymicrotonal Framework (#2–6)

String Quartet #2 "Hypercube" (2012)

The DMA thesis. The system announced. Four tuning systems (12-tet, 19-tet, 31-tet, 53-tet), foursimultaneous tempi, approximately nine minutes, written in pencil as a full score. Hypercube is a proof of concept — it demonstrates that four independent temporal and microtonal streams can coexist in a string quartet. The structural pillars are unison convergence points where all four voices briefly align before diverging again. Extended techniques serve the system rather than existing as a catalog of effects. The work is compact, rigorous, and essentially a laboratory experiment: *Can this be done?* The answer is yes.

String Quartet #3 (2013)

The system gains personality. Tighter tuning relationships between instruments, sectional form with humor and character — mock-Latin section titles like "Xeroxius Copycatus Maximus" show a composer who is not only building a system but inhabiting it with wit. Approximately 106 pages. The drumstick percussion section is introduced, where precise tuning is suspended, and string players use sticks on their instruments. One part remains in standard 12-tet, a safety net. The tempi stay within hailing distance of each other. The system is still being negotiated — trusted in some parameters, hedged in others. But the humor that would later migrate to the memoir and poetry is still present in the scores.

String Quartet #4 "Irrational" (2018)

Five years between #3 and #4. In that gap, the system became architectural. Eight tuning systems — two per player (Violin I: 27-tet > 16-tet; Violin II: 31-tet > 19-tet; Viola: 16-tet > 10-tet; Cello: 14-tet > 8-tet), with each instrument internally shifting between its two microtonal worlds. The tempi are mathematically irrational: 163.1, 188.5, 97.1, 84.85 — ratios that never resolve into repeating cycles. 234 pages. Each part is a substantial solo work. The title describes the tempo relationships literally. The complexity didn't increase linearly from #3 — it squared. Four parallel streams became four streams containing internal structural logic, each navigating between two different pitch universes.

String Quartet #5 "The Drum Stick Quartet" (2018)

Reckless abandonment. Clock-time navigation replaces barlines entirely — players track their position by stopwatch, not shared meter. Four completely independent parts, never appearing together on a single page. Radically divergent tempi: Violin I at Largo (dotted quarter = 58), Violin II at Presto (eighth = 180), Viola at Prestissimo (whole note = 62), Cello at Adagio (quarter = 66). Each instrument has dual tuning systems (9/21, 8/20, 7/18, 5/10/17-tet). The drumstick, which first appeared as a gimmick in #3, becomes the central compositional metaphor — the composer literally handing string players the tool that started all of this (four-limb independence on the drum kit) and saying: go. No composite score. No way to see what the other players are doing. Total faith in the system.

String Quartet #6 "Broken Finger" (2018)

The opposite solution to the same problem, written the same year. Full composite score — all four parts on the page, shared barlines, 581 measures. A Global Tempo (Adagio, quarter = 60) with four Local Tempi pulling against it (75, 105, 135, 165). Players can see each other and coordinate through the shared metric grid while inhabiting different speeds. The tuning systems push deeper into microtonal space than anything before: 30-tet (fifth tones), 42-tet (seventh tones), 54-tet (ninth tones), 66-tet (eleventh tones) — built on prime-number logic so the systems never align except at the octave. 175 pages. "Maestoso Polymetrico." No percussion gimmick — the full traditional quartet palette (arco, pizzicato, spiccato, portato) pushed into extreme territory. The ending: all four parts building to ffff in parallel motion, convergence of rhythm and dynamic, total divergence of pitch.

Peter described the tension between #5 and #6 as: "I want a composite score, and I want reckless abandonment." He never resolved this tension. He kept it alive across the entire remaining cycle.

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Phase 3: Harmonic Consolidation

String Quartet #7 "Two-Bow" (2018–2019)

The two-bow technique: each player uses two bows simultaneously, effectively doubling the quartet to eight sounding voices. With four players each producing two independent lines in different tuning systems, the result is 16 simultaneous polymicrotonal voices. This is the system's most extreme multiplication of its own premises — taking the four-voice independence of the quartet and compounding it through a performance technique that creates a chamber orchestra's worth of microtonal counterpoint from four human beings. Harmonic consolidation: not simplification, but a concentrated intensification of the vertical dimension.

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Phase 4: Systematic Destruction (#8–10)

String Quartet #8 "Irrational" (2019)

The second quartet to bear the title "Irrational." Establishes large-scale formal architecture — the system working at full structural scale, building sustained musical arguments across extended durations.

String Quartet #9 "Fractured Consciousness" (2019)

Destruction of conventional form. 258 pages of continuous material — no movements, no sectional divisions, no formal pillars to orient the listener. The title describes both the formal strategy and its psychological effect. If #8 built architecture, #9 demolishes it. The longest single-span structure in the cycle to this point, testing how far the polytempic polymicrotonal system can sustain itself without any inherited formal framework to lean on.

String Quartet #10 "Irrational" (2019)

The third "Irrational." Separates the ensemble into fully independent parts — a return to the #5 model of total autonomy, but now informed by everything learned in #6 through #9. The destruction phase completes: formal architecture dismantled (#9), ensemble unity dissolved (#10), the system stripped to its most elemental state.

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Phase 5: Reconstruction and the Paradigm Shift to Just Intonation (#11–15)

String Quartet #11 "Seven C's" (2019)

Reduction to essence. Variations on a single pitch class — C — across seven different tuning systems. After the destruction of #8–10, this is ground zero: one note, seven ways of hearing it. The entire polymicrotonal system distilled to its most fundamental question: what happens when the same pitch exists simultaneously in incompatible tuning worlds? Everything that follows rebuilds from this point.

String Quartet #12 "Big Bad Mother Fucker" (2019)

Reconstruction at massive scale. 152 pages, 48–50 minutes. Four voices in 20-tet (66 BPM), 22-tet (72 BPM), quartertones (79 BPM), and 26-tet (86 BPM). This is where the Bartók extension becomes explicit — the compression of harmony into microintervals across polytempo, taking Bartók's chromatic saturation and pushing it through four simultaneous microtonal grids. The title's bravado matches the ambition: after reducing to a single pitch class in #11, the system rebuilds itself into its most expansive equal-temperament work yet.

String Quartet #13 "PolyJust Intonation" (2019)

The paradigm shift. For the first time in the cycle, equal temperament is abandoned entirely. The tuning systems are now Just Intonation based on prime-number limits: 7-limit, 11-limit, 13-limit, and 17-limit. This is not a refinement of the existing system — it is a fundamental change in the philosophy of pitch. Equal temperaments divide the octave into fixed steps; Just Intonation derives intervals from the overtone series through whole-number ratios. The prime numbers that define each instrument's pitch collection also serve as the basis for tuplet ratios, achieving total systematic integration between pitch and time domains. The two parameters are no longer parallel — they are unified.

String Quartet #14 "armageddonouddahere" (2019)

Pushes the Just Intonation paradigm into extreme territory: 19-limit, 23-limit, 29-limit, and 31-limit systems. These are pitch relationships that have essentially never been performed — intervals derived from the 29th and 31st partials of the overtone series, ratios so remote from any familiar tuning that they exist at the outer edge of human pitch discrimination. The title's eschatological wordplay is apt: this is the end of something. The equal temperament world that began with Hypercube is now completely behind him.

String Quartet #15 (2019–2020)

Three movements: (a) "It Is Now," (b) "Disperse. Now," (c) "Not a Fugue." Quarter tones, eighth tones, third tones, and sixth tones — interval-based divisions of the semitone rather than EDO systems or Just Intonation, a third approach to organizing microtonal space. Movement (a) is monody: a single melodic line refracted through four microtonal lenses simultaneously. Unity of line, divergence of intonation. Movement (b) explodes that unity — four independent tempi (180, 190.6, 201, 211.7), sul ponticello throughout, "free use of [your microtone] at your discretion." Performer interpretive freedom enters the system for the first time. Movement (c), "Not a Fugue," uses Baroque fugal procedure — staggered entries of a subject — inside a system that makes Baroque voice-leading impossible. The structural principle persists; its harmonic meaning is destroyed and rebuilt.

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Phase 6: Inhabitation (#16–17)

String Quartet #16 "The World Pandemic, Covid-19" (2020)

The system responds to the world. After sixteen quartets of increasingly radical internal evolution, external reality enters the cycle. The pandemic quartet integrates the mature polytempic polymicrotonal language with subject matter outside the system itself. The composer is no longer building or testing — he is using the system to speak about lived experience.

String Quartet #17 (2024–2025)

The summit. 90 minutes. Three parts. Four simultaneous tempi, four tuning systems. Kyle Gann called it "amazing" with "a kind of minimalist chaos." This is the system at full maturity — not because it is the most complex (the Just Intonation quartets may be more radical in pitch terms, and "Fractured Consciousness" is longer as a continuous span), but because it synthesizes everything. The control/abandonment dialectic of #5 and #6. The harmonic consolidation of #7. The destruction and reconstruction of #8–14. The performer freedom of #15. The expressive directness of #16. All of it is alive simultaneously across 90 minutes. The cycle does not resolve. It inhabits.

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 The Arc

The 17 quartets trace a path from pre-system origins through construction, consolidation, systematic destruction, paradigm-shifting reconstruction, and finally, inhabitation. The key structural insight is that the cycle is not a linear progression toward complexity. It builds (#2–7), destroys what it built (#8–10), reduces to zero (#11), rebuilds on entirely new foundations (#12–14), explores alternative approaches (#15), engages the world (#16), and arrives at a synthesis (#17) that contains all previous phases without privileging any one of them.

No tuning configuration is repeated across the cycle. No formal solution is reused. Each quartet solves different compositional problems, and no two rely on the same answer. The fundamental tension —composite score versus reckless abandonment, architectural control versus faith in the process — is never resolved. It is the engine that keeps the cycle going. The titles track a parallel psychological journey: from the mathematical ("Hypercube," "Irrational") through the visceral ("Big Bad Mother Fucker," "armageddonouddahere") to the confrontational ("Fractured Consciousness") to the historical ("The World Pandemic"). The composer who began by proving a system could work ended by using that system to say something about being alive.