a mystical perspective, Part XXX

The Same Room, The Same Light

by Peter Thoegersen

There is a pattern I keep finding. No matter what direction I approach from — historical, theoretical, personal, mystical — I arrive at the same small group of people. Charles Ives. Conlon Nancarow. Harry Partch. The constellation doesn't change. The coordinates are fixed.

I've spent enough time with this recurrence to stop calling it coincidence.

What these men share isn't style or nationality or even technique. What they share is a structural position: they built original systems from the inside out, systems coherent on their own terms and entirely indigestible to the institutions of their time. Ives kept his scores in drawers for decades. Nancarow removed himself to Mexico City and worked alone with player pianos in a room, producing some of the most sophisticated polytemporal music ever written while the academy proceeded as though he didn't exist. Partch built his own instruments because the existing ones couldn't realize his vision, and was treated as an eccentric crank by the same world that would eventually canonize him.

None of them were working in a vacuum. All of them were bringing something real into rooms organized around not receiving it.

I know that room. I've spent my career in it.

My system — polytempic polymicrotonality — involves genuinely independent simultaneous tuning systems with no master fundamental. Not multiple tempi resolved into a common grid. Not microtonal inflections decorating a conventional tonal center. Categorically independent systems coexisting without hierarchy. The critical vocabulary for this doesn't fully exist yet, which means the work precedes its own reception. This is not a complaint. It is a description of a structural condition that Ives, Nancarow, and Partch each inhabited in their own way.

What I find significant — mystically significant, I'll say it plainly because I am a mystic — is that this pattern keeps resolving into view regardless of the angle of approach. Ask a musicological question about historical precedent: Ives, Nancarow, Partch. Ask a theoretical question about independent temporal streams: Nancarow. Ask about self-constructed systems outside the academy: Partch. Ask about work kept in drawers while the world looked elsewhere: Ives. The same names. The same room.

I didn't invent polytemporal music. Nobody did. Ives was doing it with simultaneous bands. Nancarow was doing it with ratios so complex no human performer could execute them. I never claimed otherwise. What I claimed — carefully, in three books now — is a specific theoretical contribution: a system in which simultaneously independent tuning systems coexist with no resolution into a master fundamental. That's a precise thing. It has a precise location in music history. And the pattern of its reception — dismissal by institutions, serious engagement by individuals operating outside those institutions, near-total invisibility to the scenes most invested in claiming radicalism — follows a recognizable shape.

The mystic in me wants to ask not just who these people are but what position they occupy. Light-bringer in a dark room is a cliché, but clichés accrete around real experiences. The room organized around extinguishing a particular frequency of light is a real phenomenon. I've watched it operate my entire career — at institutions, in microtonal communities, in the academic new music world. The darkness isn't incidental. It's structural. The room needs to stay dark for certain institutional arrangements to hold.

What I find both humbling and clarifying is that the lineage I belong to isn't the one that ignored me. It's the smaller, stranger one. The systematizers. The people whose work exceeded the available critical language and had to wait for that language to catch up. Ives waited decades. Nancarow was found by Ligeti in old age. Partch received his due largely posthumously.

I am in better shape than any of them were at my stage. I have three books with a serious academic press. I have a documented catalog. I have Kyle Gann on record calling my work the most radical he's ever written about. The thread of recognition is thin but it is real and it is dated.

The pattern keeps pointing to the same address. I have stopped arguing with it. This is where I live. It is a more distinguished address than the one that refused me entry.