Beating Adorno Part II, Part XLVIIB

 

Beating Adorno at His Own Game (Without Trying), Part II

Peter Thoegersen

Introduction

There is a particular irony embedded in the reception history of new music. The composers most celebrated for radicalism — those associated with Darmstadt and, later, the New Complexity — grounded their work in a philosophical framework that presents itself as universal while quietly defending a highly specific cultural premise. That framework is the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and it has shaped the definition of “serious” composition for over seventy years.

I did not set out to oppose it. I was not working within it. I was following the internal demands of my own music.

What follows is not a critique from within the tradition, but the emergence of a system that renders its central assumption unnecessary — and a self-critical examination of whether that system fully delivers on its own premises.

What Adorno Actually Demands

Stripped of its dialectical language, Adorno’s demand is clear: a serious work must fully engage the complexity of its historical material. It must resist simplification, refuse reconciliation, and maintain the autonomy of its internal logic against external pressures — commercial, perceptual, or social. Difficulty is not decoration; it is the form taken by truth under conditions that resist it (Adorno, 1949/2006, 1970/1997).

This demand has real consequences. It produced real music. The work of Brian Ferneyhough exemplifies this at the highest level: scores that exceed performative realization, whose expressive force emerges precisely from that excess (Ferneyhough, 1995). The rigor is genuine. The resistance is genuine.

But the framework within which this rigor operates contains an unexamined premise.

The Hidden Assumption: Unity

Even at its most complex, the tradition Adorno shaped assumes that a composition is a single object: one internally differentiated totality. However fractured, however resistant, however irreconcilable its surface, it remains grounded in a shared substrate — a common pitch space, a unified temporal field, a single compositional intelligence organizing the whole.

Adorno’s “non-reconciliation” takes place within unity. Contradictions are internal to a total structure. The work resists closure, but it remains one thing (Adorno, 1970/1997).

This assumption is so fundamental that it has gone largely unchallenged. It defines the horizon of what counts as musical thought within the tradition.

It is also the point at which that tradition reaches its limit.

What New Complexity Actually Does

The composers of the New Complexity push Adorno’s demand to its extreme — but only within that assumption. Ferneyhough’s music maximizes density, notational precision, and performative resistance inside a single system. Complexity is intensified, but the underlying ontology remains intact: one space, one time, one work (Ferneyhough, 1995).

This is not a failure. It is a logical culmination. But it is a culmination that cannot exceed its own premise.

Polytempic Polymicrotonality: A Different Ontology

Polytempic polymicrotonality does not increase complexity within a unified system. It removes the unity of the system itself.

The compositional field consists of four simultaneous, independent structures. Each is defined by its own tuning system, its own tempo, and its own melodic identity — what I have termed polymelody. These are not voices within a shared framework; they are distinct musical worlds, each internally coherent and structurally autonomous (Thoegersen, 2022, 2024).

The vertical result of their interaction cannot be reduced to any one of them. These sonorities — what I identify as simultaneities — do not belong to a common pitch space. They are emergent objects, produced by coincidence rather than derivation. They belong to no system. They are what happens when genuinely independent worlds briefly occupy the same moment.

There is no master grid. No shared tuning. No unified temporality. No single perspective from which the totality can be grasped or reconciled.

This is not a fractured unity.

It is an ontological plurality.

Beyond Adorno

Adorno’s framework can describe works in which contradiction unfolds within a unified field. It cannot fully account for a system in which no such field exists.

Polytempic polymicrotonality satisfies every demand Adorno makes: structural rigor, autonomy, resistance to consumption, and irreducibility to convention (Adorno, 1949/2006). But it does so without relying on the assumption that makes those demands legible within his philosophy — the assumption of unity.

This is not an extension of Adorno’s project. It exposes its limit.

Where Adorno insists on non-reconciliation within totality, this system eliminates the condition of totality itself. There is no higher-level synthesis to resist. No whole within which contradictions can be dialectically contained.

Musical reality is not one thing in tension with itself.

It is many things, coexisting without the possibility of reduction.

The Historical Material, Reconsidered

This shift has consequences for what counts as “historical material.” Adorno’s lineage — like those of Wagner, Schoenberg, and Boulez — is fundamentally Austro-German, extended through a European modernist frame (Boulez, 1968/1991). Even when expanded, as in Xenakis, it remains filtered through that conceptual structure.

Polytempic polymicrotonality engages a different history — not as an act of inclusion, but as a recognition of what pitch and rhythm have always been across cultures. Greek genera, Arabic maqam, Chinese tuning systems, and American vernacular rhythmic independence are not external influences. They are evidence (Thoegersen, 2022).

They demonstrate that the assumption of a single, universal pitch space is historically contingent. Western equal temperament is not the norm — it is the exception that became institutionalized.

The coexistence of multiple tuning systems is not a radical innovation. It is a return to a broader musical reality that the European consensus temporarily narrowed.

To engage the “full complexity of the material,” as Adorno demands, requires acknowledging this plurality.

Origin Without Polemic

None of this began as an argument.

The foundational 3:4:5:7 structure emerged from embodied practice — from four-limb rhythmic independence — rather than from theory. I arrived at it independently, through the problem of achieving genuine simultaneous independence across four limbs. The structure emerged from the body before any theoretical framework was brought to bear on it (Thoegersen, 2022). The relationship between rhythmic ratios and pitch structures had been theorized previously by Cowell (1930/1996), but the bonding of independent tuning systems to independent tempi was not derived from that work. It arose as a structural consequence of the compositional problem itself.

The system did not set out to oppose Adorno. It developed on different premises. That it exceeds the Adornian framework is not a goal achieved, but a consequence revealed.

A Self-Critical Moment: The 21 BPM Question

In preparing a diagram to illustrate the four independent systems — four timelines, each at its own tempo and tuning, with simultaneities marked at their points of coincidence — a problem appeared. The four tempi assigned for illustrative purposes were 63, 84, 105, and 126 beats per minute. A glance at these numbers reveals something uncomfortable: each is exactly 21 BPM greater than the last. The differences are perfectly equidistant. 

This raises an immediate question: if the four tempi are arithmetically related — if they can all be derived from a common difference of 21 — does this compromise the polytempic claim? Does the arithmetic relationship between tempi imply a shared generative logic, and does a shared generative logic imply exactly the kind of master grid the system is supposed to refuse?

It is a fair challenge. And it deserves a precise answer rather than a dismissal.

The polytempic argument does not rest on the numerical independence of the tempi from each other. It rests on the structural bonding of each tempo to its own tuning system as an internal property of that system. Four tempi that happen to share an arithmetic relationship are still producing four genuinely independent simultaneous worlds, provided each is bonded to a distinct tuning identity through its own internal logic rather than derived from a common generative source governing both pitch and time.

This is the crucial distinction — and it is the distinction that separates polytempic polymicrotonality from Stockhausen’s Gruppen (1955–57), the most commonly cited precedent. In Gruppen, the three independent tempi are derived from the same serial matrix as the pitches (Stockhausen, 1957/1963). Pitch and tempo emerge from a single generative source. The apparent independence of the three orchestras is an effect produced by a single compositional intelligence. That is not what is happening here in my music.

In polytempic polymicrotonality, the BPM individuation process arrives at specific tempo values through the internal requirements of each system’s tuning identity — not through a formula applied uniformly across all four (Thoegersen, 2024). If the values arrived at happen to stand in a simple arithmetic relationship, that is incidental rather than structural. The independence is ontological, not numerical.

The analogy is straightforward. Four people can be genuinely independent agents even if they happen to be born twenty-one years apart. The arithmetic regularity of their birth years does not make them the same person, subject them to a common governing intelligence, or reduce their individual lives to derivations of a single formula. What makes them independent is that each has their own internal life, their own logic, and their own trajectory.

Nevertheless, I was wrong to use those particular values. Not because arithmetically related tempi negate the polytempic argument — they do not — but because a diagram meant to illustrate ontological independence should not accidentally suggest the opposite through its choice of numbers. The visual grammar of a diagram carries arguments of its own, independent of what the caption says. Equidistant tempi look like a series, and a series implies a generator.

The correction is simple: I can use tempi from actual works, or choose values that carry no visible arithmetic relationship. The principle survives the self-examination. The diagram needed revision. 

Conclusion

The most decisive challenges to a theoretical system do not come from critique within its terms, but from work that renders those terms insufficient.

Polytempic polymicrotonality does not argue against Adorno. It makes visible the boundary of what his philosophy can describe.

In doing so, it fulfills his demand for rigor more completely than the tradition that claimed him — and demonstrates that the demand itself was never as universal as it appeared. Gann (2019) has described this work as “the most radical I have ever written about” — a designation that holds precisely because the system’s radicalism is structural rather than gestural, and global rather than parochial.

That is not a polemic. It is simply what happened.

References

Adorno, T. W. (1997). Aesthetic theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1970)

Adorno, T. W. (2002). On jazz. In R. Leppert (Ed.), Essays on music (S. H. Gillespie, Trans., pp. 470–495). University of California Press. (Original work published 1936)

Adorno, T. W. (2006). Philosophy of new music (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1949)

Boulez, P. (1991). Orientations: Collected writings (M. Cooper, Trans.). Faber and Faber. (Original work published 1968)

Cowell, H. (1996). New musical resources. Cambridge University Press. (Original work published in 1930)

Ferneyhough, B. (1995). Collected writings (J. Boros & R. Toop, Eds.). Routledge.

Gann, K. (2019). [Liner notes]. In P. Thoegersen, Three pieces in polytempic polymicrotonality [CD]. New World Records.

Stockhausen, K. (1963). ...wie die Zeit vergeht... In Texte zur Musik (Vol. 1, pp. 99–139). DuMont. (Original work published 1957)

Thoegersen, P. A. (2022). Polytempic polymicrotonal music: The road less traveled. Jenny Stanford Publishing.

Thoegersen, P. A. (2024). Maqam melodies: Pitches, patterns, and developments of music in the Middle East and other microtonal writings. Jenny Stanford Publishing.

Peter Thoegersen is the originator of polytempic polymicrotonality. His system is documented in two academic treatises published by Jenny Stanford Publishing (2022, 2024), with a third volume recently submitted.