Ode to the Gatekeepers of New Music, Part LI

No Master Clock: Peter Thoegersen, Musical Totalitarianism, and the Architecture of Freedom

by Peter Thoegersen

I've been reading a good deal of Emerson and Whitman recently. What I am rediscovering on these pages is the true voices of democracy; a democracy so unbridled and pure that we, as Americans, ought to feel completely ashamed today. Every goddamned page has a pro-democracy sentiment, philosophy, aphorism, and spiritual invocation. Every page is a damnation of Trump and the notion of gatekeeping in general. Every page abhors what the billionaire oligarchs have done with our country, an outgrowth of the Gilded Age that Teddy Roosevelt swore to break up, but never did, completely. Today, the wealth inequality is consolidated into the fewest hands in our American history and is destroying our country, AND our music via our academic institutions, whether we realize it or not.

Today, Viktor Orbán lost in Hungary. Today, Donald Trump flails before Iran with the strategic depth of a man shaking a vending machine. These are not unrelated events. They are symptoms of the same disease: the belief that one will, one tempo, one center can organize a world that refuses to comply.

Music in Europe has long modeled power. The tonic is home. Everything else is tension, deviation, longing for return. The conductor’s baton falls, and a hundred musicians submit. Even the most celebrated modernisms — Boulez’s serialism, Stockhausen’s moment-form — preserved hidden hierarchies. A master series. A single pulse underneath the complexity. The center holds, even when it pretends not to. Currently, the overtone series is the lingua franca of musical power, once again reclaiming ii-V-I falling fifth chord progressions as the most correct musical progressions, as if progression is actually egalitarian as a product of some goal-directed teleological supremacy, which coincidentally happens to come from Europe. (After making a quick survey of cultural music from around the world, I found that pitch usage in world cultures essentially has little, to nothing, to do with the overtone series, save for Mongolian throat singing, or the inharmonic partials of the didgeridoo.)

My polytempic polymicrotonal system does not pretend.

In my essay “Polytempic Polymicrotonal Music and FREEDOM,” I make explicit what the music itself enacts structurally: freedom in composition is not a metaphor. It is an engineering problem. And the solution is radical in the precise sense — it goes to the root. Four simultaneous and genuinely independent tuning systems, each structurally bonded to its own independent tempo. Not four voices that occasionally diverge. Not four streams that secretly share a bed. Four systems that do not answer to a common fundamental, a master BPM, a governing tonic. The independence is load-bearing. Remove it, and the architecture collapses.

This is not the freedom of folk song versus the academy. But neither — and this is the point that must be driven home — is it the freedom claimed by the New Complexity school, whose gatekeepers have built their own totalitarianism: a regime of notational density, performer suffering, and insider credentialism that polices the borders of “serious” radicalism as jealously as any politburo.

Before we get there, we need to understand how we arrived at this moment. Because the avant-garde was not always this way.

And, for further clarification, I am NOT against the overtone series. I simply do not want to see one hierarchical hegemonic system replaced by another, notwithstanding the importance of the physics of the overtone series as a theoretical construct of nature herself. 

Similarly, can you imagine painters gatekeeping someone creating colors not found in ROYGBIV, and then summarily dismissed because they are flouting the current trends of academic conformity? Even the microtonalists are dismissing pitches that can't be found in the overtone series. Well, then we must throw out Chagall, because he's not using overtone series approved natural order color spectra! Pythagoras, forbid. 

I. The Moment of Honest Exploration

There was a moment when the Western musical avant-garde was genuinely free. Not free in the sense of casual or undisciplined — the opposite. It was free in the sense of being honest: composers following structural logic wherever it led, regardless of audience approval, institutional reward, or stylistic conformity.

Milton Babbitt’s total serialism was a rigorous intellectual adventure. Roger Sessions brought a moral seriousness to extended chromaticism that had nothing to do with career calculation. Stockhausen’s early work — Kreuzspiel, Kontra-Punkte, the Klavierstücke — was genuinely exploratory, a mind pressing against the limits of what organized sound could mean. Boulez at his best was the same: a ferocious intelligence demanding that music think harder than it had.

These composers could be wrong. They could be arrogant. But they were searching.

Then the institutions arrived. And institutions do not search. Institutions consolidate.

II. Darmstadt: The Academy That Ate the Revolution

The Darmstadt summer courses began in 1946 as a genuine post-war clearing house — a space for rebuilding European musical thought from the rubble. For a brief window, it functioned that way. Then it became a court, with Boulez and Stockhausen as rival princes and serialism as the official state religion. By the late 1950s, composers were being evaluated not on the quality of their thinking but on their fidelity to approved methods. John Cage attended and was absorbed — his influence real but carefully managed. Composers who didn’t conform were simply not invited back. The velvet baton had descended.

What Darmstadt institutionalized was the credentialing of difficulty. To be taken seriously, you had to present work that bore the correct stylistic markings — the correct density, the correct theoretical apparatus, the correct European pedigree. Music that didn’t look like Darmstadt music was not radicalism. It was ignorance.

This is the first form of totalitarianism the avant-garde produced: the replacement of genuine exploration with stylistic enforcement. And perhaps this attitude was passed down through the ages within Vienna.

III. IRCAM: The Cathedral of the Approved Future

Boulez’s own trajectory is the most instructive and the most damning. The composer who wrote Schoenberg is Dead — who demanded the burning of opera houses, who positioned himself as the permanent revolution of Western music — became the director of IRCAM, a palatial institution beneath the Centre Pompidou, funded by the French state, devoted to electroacoustic and computer music research. By his own hand, Boulez built the most lavishly resourced musical gatekeeping apparatus in human history.

IRCAM determines which composers get access to the technology, the engineers, the residencies, and the prestige. It has a house aesthetic. Works that emerge from it sound like IRCAM works — a recognizable grain, a recognizable ambition, a recognizable relationship to the institution’s own self-image. The revolution had acquired real estate.

The irony is total. Boulez, who diagnosed Schoenberg’s failure of nerve, created an institution whose primary function is the management of musical risk — ensuring that the future sounds sufficiently like what IRCAM already endorses.

IV. New Complexity: The Velvet Rope as Score

The New Complexity school — Ferneyhough, Finnissy, and the network of composers who trained under them or were credentialed by proximity — represents the most sophisticated form of this gatekeeping, because it disguised itself most effectively as liberation.

The argument went: notation of extreme density, rhythmic irrationality beyond practical performance, layers of simultaneous competing demands on the performer — this constitutes a radical politics of the score. The performer is liberated from easy execution. The listener is freed from easy comprehension. Complexity as ethics.

But examine the power structure underneath. Ferneyhough’s scores are not multiple independent centers. They are overwhelming single wills imposed on performers who must submit to the notation’s demands. The difficulty flows in one direction: from the composer’s authority downward. The performer does not hold sovereign autonomy — the performer is crushed under the weight of a single, maximally demanding intention. This is not structural freedom. This is sophisticated domination calling itself liberation.

And the gatekeeping is ferocious. The UK network — the critics, the programmers, the academic appointments — functions as a closed circuit. Composers who work outside the New Complexity aesthetic are not engaged with seriously. They are simply not seen. The critics and academics of this world are not evaluating music on its structural merits. They are checking passports.

My polytempic polymicrotonal system is something categorically different from what New Complexity offers. It does not ask performers to be crushed by a single overwhelming notational will. It asks them to hold their own autonomy — their own tempo, their own tuning — against the gravitational pull of the ensemble. The score is not the dictator. Each layer is sovereign.

This is why the New Complexity establishment has no framework for my work. It cannot be absorbed into their canon because it does not flatter their definitions. It is not difficult in the approved way. It is free in a way their system cannot accommodate — and freedom, to any totalitarian apparatus, is the one thing that cannot be permitted.

V. American Minimalism: The New Establishment

Meanwhile in America, minimalism — which began as a genuine and necessary corrective, a stripping away of over-determined complexity, a return to process and duration — has become the dominant institutional force in new music, while subsuming microtonality. And it is now the most effective gatekeeping apparatus American contemporary music has ever produced.

Bang on a Can, the major festivals, the major American commissions, the programming of new music in major halls — these spaces are overwhelmingly minimalist-adjacent in their aesthetic preferences. Repetition, stasis, slow transformation, accessible surface, the spiritual affect of the drone: these are the approved flavors. The Pulitzers increasingly go to composers working in idioms that make no demands on listeners accustomed to film scores. The boundary between “new music” and “pleasant background” has been deliberately dissolved.

This is totalitarianism with good marketing. This is also neo-liberalism. It presents itself as democratic — accessible, community-oriented, stripped of elitist complexity — while functioning as a style enforcement mechanism as rigid as Darmstadt. The composers who don’t fit this mold don’t get the commissions, the premieres, the reviews, the festival slots. They are simply absent from the conversation. I will not even begin addressing identity politics lest I be burned in hell, even if I wholly support all who fit in this category. 

What American minimalism shares with Darmstadt, IRCAM, and New Complexity — despite their surface antagonism to one another — is the fundamental structure of a single approved center from which legitimacy radiates outward. Different centers, same architecture. Different masters, same hierarchy.

VI. The Left-Wing Aristocracy of Sound

Here is the contradiction that no one in these institutions will name aloud: the composers who control Darmstadt, IRCAM, the New Complexity network, the American new music festival circuit — who sit on the grant panels, fill the academic appointments, write the program notes that confer legitimacy, review for the journals that determine who exists — are, virtually to a person, politically progressive. They march. They sign letters. They post correctly. They believe in equity, in dismantling systems of exclusion, in the redistribution of power.

And then they go back to administering the most ruthlessly exclusive 1% system in the arts.

The acceptance rate for genuine outsiders — composers working outside the credentialed network, without the right institutional affiliations, without the right teachers, without the right stylistic passport — is not low. It is functionally zero. Not because these composers lack quality, rigor, or originality. But because the network does not evaluate on those terms. It evaluates on membership. You get in by being known by people who are already in. You are reviewed seriously by critics who were trained to take seriously exactly the kind of work the institution already endorses. The feedback loop is total and self-sealing.

This is not meritocracy with a bias problem. This is aristocracy with a branding problem.

The landed gentry of 18th-century Europe at least didn’t claim to be fighting for the working class while they enclosed the commons. The academic new music establishment makes exactly that claim — and then operates a system of enclosure so effective that a composer of genuine structural radicalism, with published academic books, with a catalog of over three hundred works, with liner notes from Kyle Gann calling the work the most radical he has ever written about, can be functionally invisible to institutions that claim to be seeking out exactly this kind of work.

The word for a political left that reproduces the material conditions of a ruling class while using the language of liberation is not complicated. It is hypocrisy. And in music it has a specific texture: the tenure-track composer at a major research university, teaching a handful of graduate students who will themselves seek tenure-track positions, producing works performed at festivals attended by other composers and their graduate students, reviewed in journals read by the same population, generating a closed circuit of prestige that touches almost no one outside it — and calling this an engaged, progressive, socially conscious practice. It is like a McDonald's hamburger chain. 

The 99% of composers (me and you) are excluded from this system, not excluded because their music is insufficient. They are excluded because exclusion is what the system does. Exclusion is its primary product. The grants, the commissions, the premieres, the reviews — these are distributed not to locate the best work but to reproduce the network. To keep the right people inside and the wrong people invisible.

What makes this particularly elegant as a form of power is that it requires no conspiracy. No one needs to sit in a room and decide to ignore any given composer. The system simply has no mechanism for seeing work that didn’t enter through the approved doors. The critics trained at these institutions were never taught the tools to evaluate polytempic polymicrotonality — not because those tools are unavailable, but because the training curriculum was designed around the canon the institution already endorses. The grant panels are composed of composers from within the network evaluating proposals from within the network. The result looks, from inside, like quality control. From outside, it looks like what it is: a closed shop.

Orbán, at least, is honest about who he’s for. Trump’s tariffs at least name an enemy while adversely affecting his own constituents. The academic music left has achieved something rarer and more insidious: a system of total exclusion that believes, sincerely, in its own generosity — that mistakes the internal diversity of its credentialed membership for genuine openness, that confuses the correct politics of its participants for a just distribution of access.

The velvet baton falls. The 1% perform for each other. The rest are told, in the politest possible terms, that they simply weren’t ready.

VII. The Road Not Taken: Jazz and the Democracy of the Solo

While the European academy was constructing its hierarchies of approved difficulty, and while American minimalism was building its velvet-rope accessibility, there existed — and had existed for decades — an American musical tradition that had already solved the problem of structural democracy. Not theoretically. In practice, every night, in every city, for money, in front of people.

Jazz. Specifically bebop and everything it unleashed.

Charlie Parker was not waiting for a grant. Dizzy Gillespie was not applying for a Darmstadt residency. Thelonious Monk did not require the endorsement of a tenure committee to establish that his harmonic language was serious. These composers and improvisers — and they were composers, regardless of what the academy’s definition of composition required — built a musical system in which every voice has a constitutional right to speak, and the quality of what you say is the only credential that matters.

Look at the structure of bebop. The head states the theme. Then each player solos — takes the full harmonic and rhythmic architecture and speaks their own language through it, uninterrupted, sovereign, responsible for every note. The rhythm section does not serve the soloist in a hierarchical sense — it converses. The drummer is not accompanying; the drummer is arguing, agreeing, redirecting, pushing back. The bassist is not marking time; the bassist is holding an independent structural voice that the soloist must reckon with. When it works — when Miles Davis’s phrasing falls against Paul Chambers’s walking bass against Jimmy Cobb’s cymbal — you have genuinely independent voices in genuine conversation, none subordinate, each necessary.

This is the democracy that the academic avant-garde, for all its progressive politics, never achieved and in many cases never attempted.

The bebop tradition went further. It was open source before the term existed. The vocabulary — the chord substitutions, the rhythmic displacements, the approach notes, the blues inflections threaded through chromatic harmony — was shared, taught informally, passed from player to player in jam sessions that anyone could attend if they could play. No application. No approved teacher. No correct pedigree. You showed up, you played, the music decided. This was the most genuinely meritocratic system American music has ever produced — and it was built almost entirely by Black composers and musicians who had been systematically excluded from every institution the white academic music world controlled.

Let that irony land for a moment. The people with every institutional reason to be bitter and exclusionary built the most open, democratic, structurally generous music America has ever produced. The people with every institutional resource and progressive self-image built a closed shop.

The academy largely ignored bebop as composition. It was performance, improvisation, vernacular — not serious, not notated in the approved way, not amenable to the kind of theoretical apparatus that generated conference papers and journal articles. This was not a neutral aesthetic judgment. It was a class judgment and a racial judgment dressed in the language of rigor.

What polytempic polymicrotonality shares with the jazz tradition — and this is not a surface similarity — is the structural commitment to genuine voice independence. In jazz, the commitment is temporal and melodic: each player holds their own line, their own time feel, their own harmonic interpretation, in real conversation with the others. In my system, the commitment is extended to the foundational parameters of music itself: tempo and tuning, made structurally independent at the level of the system’s architecture. Four voices that do not share a master clock, just as the great jazz ensembles did not follow a single dictatorial melodic line but built something irreducible from genuinely independent intelligences playing simultaneously.

Bebop said: Everyone has the right to speak. Everyone gets the chorus. The music is what happens when sovereign voices meet without any of them surrendering.

That is not a bad definition of freedom. It is a considerably better one than anything Darmstadt ever produced. And, btw, New Complexity stole every single extended technique these jazz masters ever invented, without giving any of them credit. (Common in New Complexity)

VIII. The Open System: No Methods Forbidden

Here is what the gatekeepers will never be able to claim about their own institutions: that everything is permitted.

Darmstadt had a correct method. IRCAM has a house sound. New Complexity has an approved density. American minimalism has a sanctioned effect. Each of these systems, whatever its internal sophistication, is defined as much by what it excludes as by what it permits. The border is the institution. The style is the passport.

Polytempic polymicrotonality has no such border.

The system establishes a philosophical architecture — four genuinely independent tuning systems, each structurally bonded to its own independent tempo, no master fundamental, no governing center — and within that architecture, any compositional method is permitted. Any. The philosophy is independence. Everything else is the composer’s sovereign choice.

A composer working within this system may build their tuning layers from the overtone series. From just intonation in any of its historical or invented forms. From equal temperaments of any division. From spectral analysis of acoustic phenomena. From multi-spectral approaches combining several spectral identities simultaneously. From microtones so fine the ear can barely track them. From macrotones so wide they restructure the listener’s sense of interval entirely.

The melodic and harmonic content of each independent layer may employ serialism, working tone rows through the independent tuning and tempo of that layer’s world. It may use cellular development, growing organisms from small motile seeds. It may use noise — genuine noise, the full frequency spectrum, as compositional material with its own tuning logic and temporal sovereignty. It may use musique concrète, electronically processed or unprocessed sound treated as pitched or unpitched material within an independent layer. It may use minimalist repetition and slow transformation — within one layer, while other layers pursue entirely different logics. It may use New Complexity notation and density — within one layer, demanding extreme performer precision in that single strand, while other strands operate by entirely different principles. It may use spectralism, deriving pitch collections from the natural harmonic series of a fundamental that exists only within one layer’s tuning world. It may use centricity — tonal, modal, microtonal, polytonal — as an organizing principle for one layer while other layers pursue atonality, noise, or stasis.

I do not employ all of these methods myself. That is not the point. The point is that none of them are forbidden. The system does not police its interior. It establishes the conditions of independence and then steps back. What the composer builds inside those conditions is their own sovereign voice.

This is the precise inversion of every gatekeeping institution in this essay. Darmstadt told composers what methods were serious. IRCAM tells composers what technology is legitimate. New Complexity tells performers what difficulty means. American minimalism tells audiences what accessibility requires. Each draws a circle and calls the outside ignorance.

Polytempic polymicrotonality draws no such circle. It says: here is the philosophical commitment — genuine structural independence, no master, no center that governs all. Now bring everything you have. Bring your serialism, your noise, your just intonation, your musique concrète, your spectralism, your centricity, your minimalism, your complexity. Bond it to its own tempo. Give it its own tuning. Let it be sovereign. And then let it meet the other layers in genuine encounter — not fusion, not hierarchy, not resolution into a single governing logic, but the irreducible plurality of genuinely independent things existing simultaneously.

That is the system. It is larger than any one composer’s catalog. It is larger than my own. It is a philosophical architecture spacious enough to contain multitudes, which is exactly what every institution in this essay was built to prevent.

IX. The Architecture of Genuine Freedom

All of these institutions — Darmstadt, IRCAM, New Complexity, American minimalism — for all their differences, answer the same question the same way: Who decides what serious music sounds like?

The answer is always: us. The people already inside. The people who were here before you arrived.

My system cannot be absorbed by any of these camps, and this is not incidental — it is structural. The work does not fit the Darmstadt aesthetic. It does not bear the IRCAM grain. It is too genuinely independent for the New Complexity school, which requires performer submission rather than performer sovereignty. It is too structurally dense and theoretically radical for minimalism’s approved affects. And it is too philosophically open — too genuinely permissive of all methods — to be captured by any single camp’s definition of what is and is not allowed.

The system emerged from the body rather than the library — from four-limb drumming independence developed across years, hands and feet learning to hold irreconcilable rhythmic worlds simultaneously. The 3:4:5:7 polyrhythmic structure is not a theory applied to experience. It is experience that became theory. When I arrived at the first formally notated realization in Hypercube (2012), I was not inventing a new abstraction. I was documenting what my nervous system had already been doing.

Kyle Gann, no stranger to microtonality and extended practice, called this work the most radical he has ever written about. Radical: the root. Not the surface.

More fundamentally: the system was designed, from the ground up, to have no master. Four genuinely independent tuning systems, each bonded to its own independent tempo, no common fundamental, no governing center. This is not a stylistic choice. It is a constitutional commitment. The music cannot be made to serve a hierarchy because hierarchy is not part of its architecture.

What Orbán (every dictator) built was a tonal system — one center, everything else forced into functional relationship with it. What Trump offers Iran is the same: submit to the fundamental or be labeled noise. The music of hierarchy is always a single melody with a very large brass section, marching to murder somebody.

This music cannot be conducted that way. There is no position from which a single baton could direct all four layers. The performers must internalize their own autonomy — must hold their tempo and tuning against the gravitational pull of what everyone else is doing — and they must do so not in spite of the ensemble but as their full contribution to it. The plurality is the point. The dissonance between layers is not a problem awaiting resolution. It is the composition.

In an era of strongmen insisting that intellectualism is weakness, that multiplicity is chaos, that only a unified command structure can hold a world together, this music is more than aesthetically interesting. It is a demonstration. Four independent streams, none subordinate, coexisting without merger — not because they have been forced into tolerance, but because the system was designed from the beginning to require no master.

X. The Record Stands

Let the record show what the gatekeepers chose not to see.

Two books published with Jenny Stanford Publishing — a serious academic press — with a third under contract. A compositional system documented, theorized, and placed in historical context with the rigor these institutions claim to demand and the independence they cannot tolerate. The trilogy will sit on library shelves and in academic databases long after the tenure committees that ignored it have been forgotten by their own graduate students.

Three hundred works. Four symphonies. Seventeen string quartets. Fifty electronic etudes. A twenty-three-piece piano collection. All of it is scored, documented, and freely available on the Internet Archive — open to any composer, any theorist, any curious mind anywhere on earth who wants to actually look. No paywall. No application. No letter of recommendation required. No correct teacher, no correct institution, no correct accent. Just the work, available, permanent, indexed, and findable.

The music on Bandcamp and SoundCloud. The New World Records release. The liner notes from Kyle Gann — the most radical work he has ever written about — are attached to the historical record and not coming off.

These things do not require the permission of Darmstadt. They do not require IRCAM’s residency program, a Ferneyhough student’s approval, or a Bang on a Can commission or a Pulitzer committee that has never heard the word polytempic. They exist. They are already there. They are already being found by Jeremy Esquer, of the University of Michigan, and George Christian Vilela Pereira in Salvador, Brazil, building on the system. By Yuri Leiderman (a painter) in Berlin, who found the New World Records release independently and responded with warmth. By Ettore Garzia and Massimo Ricci, who reviewed the books seriously. By every listener and scholar who will arrive through a search engine five years, ten years, thirty years from now, when the specific names of today’s gatekeepers have the relevance of a 1987 grant panel.

The academic music establishment — left-coded, right-functioning, convinced of its own generosity — operates on the assumption that what it does not acknowledge does not exist. This assumption is the foundation of its power and the source of its coming obsolescence. The internet did not ask their permission. The Internet Archive does not require their endorsement. The historical record is not administered by their committees.

Polytempic polymicrotonality is documented. The books exist. The scores exist. The recordings exist. The theoretical framework is staked, named, and publicly dated — polymicroatonality, polymicroatonal centricity, polymelody, the three-stage compositional genesis, the five-camp tuning taxonomy — all of it in print, all of it timestamped, none of it waiting for validation from people who built careers on deciding who gets to be valid.

One final point, and it is not a small one. An essay this polemical risks becoming the very thing it attacks — a new orthodoxy, a new center, a new velvet rope strung by different hands. If polytempic polymicrotonality were to become a school, a movement, a credential, an institution with approved methods and excluded outsiders, it would have failed at the level of its own philosophy. The system is not the new way forward. It is not the only way forward. It is one composer's structural commitment, offered openly, requiring nothing from anyone. Take it, adapt it, argue with it, build something adjacent to it, or ignore it entirely and make whatever music your own nervous system demands. The point was never to replace the gatekeepers. The point was to make the gate irrelevant.

The gatekeepers will retire. The gates will rust. The doors they kept will stop mattering.

My work will still be there, in books and on the Internet Archive and music sites.

Every last mother fucking note of it.

—

Peter Thoegersen is a composer, music theorist, and originator of polytempic polymicrotonality. His books are published by Jenny Stanford Publishing. His scores are freely available on the Internet Archive. His music is on Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and New World Records.