Polymicroatonality, Part XLVI

Polymicroatonality

There is a particular quality of listening that my music asks for — one that has no established name, which is itself part of the problem.

When you hear a piece in polytempic polymicrotonal composition, several things are happening independently and simultaneously. Several tuning systems are running, each structurally bonded to its own tempo, none derived from a shared fundamental, none subordinate to another. The vertical sonorities that emerge from their coincidence are not chord progressions. They are not leading anywhere in the harmonic sense. They do not resolve. The piece begins in the middle of something and ends in the middle of something. There is no cadence because there is no departure that would require a return.

The voice leading, where it occurs, moves at the ultrachromatic level — intervals so fine, drawn from multiple independent tuning systems each with its own microtonal vocabulary, that they do not trigger the intervallic landmarks that tonal or even modal listening depends on. Motion is happening, but not the kind of motion that accumulates into direction.

None of this is atonality in the Schoenbergian sense. Schoenberg had to actively suppress tonal tendencies that kept reasserting themselves within a single twelve-tone system. The atonality in polytempic polymicrotonal composition is not suppression. It is structural. The system has no mechanism for producing a tonal center. There is no master fundamental from which hierarchy could be derived. Centricity, when it appears — and it does appear, here and there, as a local event — is a compositional choice within an atonal field, not evidence of an underlying tonal logic. It is an island, not a map.

This requires a term. Atonal does not cover it, because atonal assumes a single system from which hierarchy has been removed. What is happening here involves multiple simultaneous systems, each independently atonal, none in a hierarchical relationship with the others. The plurality is not incidental. It is constitutive.

The term is polymicroatonality.

And for the local event — the centric anchor that occasionally appears within the field — the term is polymicroatonal centricity. It names something Western atonality has no framework to describe: a pitch center that arises within one or more tuning layers while the others continue non-centrically around it, in their own independent tempi, in their own independent tuning systems, answering to nothing outside themselves.

These are not rhetorical distinctions. They describe structural realities that existing terminology cannot reach.