The Double Theft: Adorno, New Complexity, and the Jazz Musicians Nobody Credited

There is a contradiction at the heart of the New Complexity movement so glaring that it should have ended careers. It hasn't, because the people who benefit from it control the conversation. This essay is an attempt to change that.

The New Complexity — Ferneyhough, Barrett, Dench, the UK network that decides who exists and who doesn't — presents itself as the apex of Western musical thought. Rigorous. Uncompromising. Intellectually serious in ways lesser musics cannot be. Its theoretical self-image draws heavily on Theodor Adorno, whose withering dismissal of jazz as a regressive, pseudo-individualist commodity form remains foundational to the European new music worldview. Jazz, for Adorno, was not serious music. It was administered rebellion — the appearance of freedom within a system designed to prevent it.

And yet.

The extended technique vocabulary that defines New Complexity on the instrumental level — multiphonics, overblowing, singing while playing, microtonal inflection, teeth on reed, soft tonguing — was developed, systematized, and performed by jazz musicians before it appeared in a single bar of notated new music. Not approximately. Not arguably. Prior. Let us be specific. (horns and upright bass are not even included in these examples, as these techniques are primarily for winds)

Multiphonics. Rahsaan Roland Kirk was producing multiphonics on saxophone in the early 1960s — documented on recordings including Mingus: Oh Yeah! (1961) and developed systematically across his subsequent catalog. These were not acoustic accidents stumbled upon in practice. Kirk understood what he was doing. He controlled it. He deployed it musically, expressively, at will. Bruno Bartolozzi's New Sounds for Woodwind, the canonical text that introduced multiphonics to the notated new music world, appeared in 1967. Kirk is not mentioned. The chronology is not ambiguous.

Singing while playing. Again, Kirk. His flute work — documented exhaustively on I Talk with the Spirits (1964) and throughout his recordings — made simultaneous singing and playing a complete artistic vocabulary, not a curiosity. The timbral layering of voice and instrument that New Complexity notation would later specify with elaborate precision was already a living, recorded, performed practice. Yusef Lateef, another figure conspicuously absent from the new music literature, was similarly exploring the voice-instrument boundary in this period.

Overblowing. Albert Ayler. Late Coltrane. The physicality of the instrument pushed beyond its designed parameters into raw harmonic noise, which was not a laboratory discovery of European new music. It was the sonic signature of free jazz, recorded and available, constituting an entire movement by the mid-1960s. The overblown saxophone in Barrett and the reed-writing composers of this tradition arrives after Ayler, not before.

Microtonal inflection. This case may be the most historically expansive of all. Blue notes — the flattened thirds, fifths, and sevenths that are the tonal foundation of the entire African American musical tradition — represent microtonal practice so deeply embedded that it predates jazz itself. Ornette Coleman extended this into a systematic approach: his false fingering and variable breath pressure allowed him to shift the overtone complexes of individual pitches to match their expressive context, producing microtonal inflection as compositional structure, not ornament. Coleman was doing this in the late 1950s. Spectralism and New Complexity's microtonality arrive later, armed with notation, and the century of microtonal practice that preceded them goes unacknowledged.

Teeth on reed, soft tonguing, articulation variants. These were performance knowledge, passed aurally through the jazz and blues traditions, long before they appeared in extended technique catalogues as notated discoveries. The taxonomy of articulation that fills the performance notes of New Complexity scores was already a living body of knowledge in Black musical practice. It was not written down. Therefore, institutionally, it did not exist.

Taken individually, each of these could be argued as parallel development, independent discovery, or the same acoustic possibilities revealing themselves to different explorers at the same moment. Taken together — every technique, the same direction of travel, the same absence of acknowledgment — the parallel discovery argument collapses. This is a pattern. Patterns have explanations.

To understand how this appropriation was possible without guilt — how it could happen structurally, invisibly, with clean institutional conscience — you need to understand what notation means in the European new music world. Notation is not merely a practical tool for conveying information to performers. It is the mechanism of legitimation. It is how musical knowledge becomes real.

Bartolozzi's New Sounds for Woodwind is the clearest example. The book is presented as a systematic investigation of previously unexplored timbral possibilities on woodwind instruments. It catalogs multiphonics, microtonal fingerings, timbral variants, and unconventional articulations with the thoroughness of a scientific survey. And in the world of notated new music, that is precisely what it functioned as: a discovery document. The act of writing the techniques down, of encoding them in Western notation, of publishing them through institutional channels — this is what made them exist as knowledge.

The fact that Rahsaan Roland Kirk had been performing multiphonics for six years before the book appeared is, within this framework, beside the point. Kirk's knowledge lived in his body, in his ears, in recordings, in performances at Ronnie Scott's and the Village Gate. It was not notated. It was not institutionally certified. It therefore occupied a different ontological category — not discovered knowledge but mere practice, not composition but performance, not music theory but musicianship. The distinction sounds technical. Its consequences are not.

This is the mechanism by which you can take something without taking it. The institutional framework tells you that what you are doing is original research, systematic investigation, compositional discovery. The prior practice exists in a register that the framework does not recognize as legitimate knowledge. You are not plagiarizing Kirk; you are discovering what Kirk did, because discovery requires the apparatus of Western musical scholarship, and Kirk had no access to that apparatus, and the apparatus had no interest in him.

What makes this particularly acute in the New Complexity context is the movement's foundational commitment to rigor. These are composers and theorists who pride themselves on leaving nothing unexamined. The scores specify everything. The theoretical writings interrogate everything. The analytical literature traces every influence, every lineage, every structural decision. The rigor is genuine and, within its domain, impressive.

The domain simply does not include the question of where the techniques came from.

That exclusion is not accidental. It reflects the boundaries of what the institutional framework considers worth rigorous investigation — and those boundaries map with uncomfortable precision onto the boundaries of what European new music has traditionally considered serious music. Jazz is not in the domain. Therefore, the techniques that came from jazz are not in the domain. Therefore, the question of prior art does not arise. The rigor is real; it operates within a circle drawn to exclude the very tradition it absorbed.

Adorno, again, is the key. His framework — which remains intellectually foundational to this world — does not merely dismiss jazz aesthetically. It provides a theoretical account of why jazz cannot be the source of genuine musical innovation. Jazz, for Adorno, operates within the commodity form. Its apparent freedoms are administered. Its techniques are pseudo-individualist gestures within a system that forecloses real individuality. If you accept this framework, jazz musicians cannot be originators. They can only be symptoms. And you cannot steal from a symptom. You can only, at most, observe it and do something more serious with what you find.

This is not a conspiracy theory. No one sat in a room and decided to appropriate Black musicians' techniques while citing Adorno as cover. The process was far more insidious than that. The framework did the work automatically, invisibly, with the full weight of institutional prestige behind it. The composers absorbed the techniques the way any musician absorbs influence — through listening, through contact with the sonic world around them. The framework then ensured that the absorption would not be named, because naming it would require recognizing jazz musicians as originators, which the framework structurally prevented.

The result is a tradition that built its instrumental language substantially on Black musical practice, theorized its own project with a philosophy that dismissed Black musical practice as aesthetically inferior, and called the whole thing rigorous.

If you think this pattern is historical — safely located in the 1960s and 1970s, no longer operative — consider Marc Yeats's 2021 doctoral thesis at the University of Leeds, the basis for his 2025 book on polytemporal composition. The thesis states explicitly: "With no models to adopt in the literature that unambiguously supported my compositional aims, I developed a new composition and performance approach called timecode-supported polytemporal composition." My 2012 doctoral dissertation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — a document that exists, that is catalogued, that is findable — is not cited.

It is worth being precise about what Yeats's system is and is not. His approach uses stopwatches and mobile phones to loosely synchronize performers playing at independent tempi, producing what he calls "sonic flux" — controlled indeterminacy in which no two performances are identical. It is fundamentally a performance coordination system, and asynchrony is not a problem to be solved but a feature to be embraced. Frankly, hasn't John Luther Adams composed pieces like this, where players are spread out in a field, using stop watches and cell phones for cues?

My system is categorically different. Polytempic polymicrotonality bonds each independent tempo structurally to an independent tuning system. The polytempic and polymicrotonal dimensions are inseparable — that bonding is the compositional invention. There is no indeterminacy. It is fully composed. The systems address different problems and arrive at different solutions.

This makes the "no models" claim not merely an oversight but a mischaracterization of the field. Yeats surveyed polytemporal composition incompletely, declared no prior models, and built his originality claim on that incomplete survey. The work that predates his — and that operates at a level of structural integration his system does not attempt — was simply not there, because the institutional framework that certified his research had no mechanism for finding it.

The mechanism is identical to what erased Kirk. The institutional assumption is identical. The person erased is different; the structure doing the erasing is the same gatekeeping institutional behavior.

New Complexity presents itself as the most rigorous, most thorough, most intellectually accountable tradition in contemporary music. It notates every micro-dynamic. It specifies every timbral shade. It theorizes its own complexity with exhausting thoroughness.

It could not find the rigor to ask where the techniques came from.

That is not an oversight. That is a choice the institution made, and continues to make, and will continue to make until someone names it clearly.

Consider it named.

N.B. Here are some more...

🎷 Woodwinds (Saxophone, Clarinet, Flute)

Jazz precedents (1930s–1970s): Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk

Techniques later formalized in New Complexity:

Multiphonics (complex fingerings producing multiple pitches)
Split tones / overblowing
Microtonality (pitch bending beyond tempered system)
Slap tongue
Circular breathing
Key clicks as rhythmic/percussive material
Growling / vocalized tone
Extreme altissimo register work
Simultaneous singing and playing

👉 In jazz, these were often expressive or timbral choices; in New Complexity they became notational systems and structural materials.

🎺 Brass (Trumpet, Trombone)

Jazz precedents: Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Don Cherry

Techniques:

Half-valve effects (pitch smearing)
Lip glissandi and microtonal inflection
Growling (with vocal cords engaged)
Flutter tonguing
Extreme mutes usage (plunger, Harmon with manipulation)
Air sounds / breath tones
Split tones / multiphonics (especially on trombone)
Extended range (screaming high register playing)

👉 Again, jazz players used these for expression and phrasing, not dense structural layering.

🎹 Piano

Jazz precedents: Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor

Techniques:

Tone clusters (forearms, fists)
Percussive attack as primary sound identity
Inside-piano techniques (strings plucked, muted)
Non-idiomatic fingerings / independence beyond classical norms
Extreme rhythmic stratification (independent layers)

👉 New Complexity absorbed cluster logic and hyper-layered independence, but often stripped the swing-based or bodily rhythmic grounding.

🎸 Guitar

Jazz precedents: Derek Bailey (bridges jazz and experimental scenes)

Techniques:

Non-pitched noise (scraping, behind-the-bridge playing)
Prepared guitar (objects inserted)
Microtonal bending beyond blues inflection
Artificial harmonics in complex contexts
Independent rhythmic layers across strings

👉 These became highly notated in contemporary classical guitar writing.

🥁 Percussion / Drum Set

Jazz precedents: Max Roach, Tony Williams, Sunny Murray

Techniques:

Independence of limbs (polyrhythmic layering)
Metric modulation (before it was theorized formally)
Continuous timbral variation (cymbal color, stick placement)
Non-pulse-based texture playing
Use of the drum set as a color field, not just timekeeping

👉 New Complexity percussion writing often mirrors this but in hyper-quantized notation.

🎻 Strings (Violin, Viola, Cello, Bass)

Jazz precedents: Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman (through ensemble practice)

Techniques:

Extreme glissandi and microtonal slides
Scratch tones / noise-based bowing
Col legno battuto (percussive bowing)
Harmonic instability / multiphonics (especially later bass work)
Rhythmic independence from ensemble grid

👉 These existed in classical avant-garde too, but jazz normalized them as fluid, improvisatory gestures.

🎤 Voice

Jazz precedents: Betty Carter, Leon Thomas

Techniques:

Non-lexical vocalization (beyond traditional scat)
Multiphonic singing (overtone-rich techniques)
Yodel-like register breaks
Pitch bending and microtonality
Rhythmic displacement independent of accompaniment

👉 Contemporary vocal writing in New Complexity often mirrors this but with precise pitch/rhythm grids imposed.

Institutional theft should be made illegal.

But, to be fair:

New Complexity composers systematized and institutionalized extended techniques that jazz musicians had already developed, while the institutions promoting that music often failed to proportionally credit or integrate those jazz lineages.

Peter Thoegersen is a composer and music theorist based in Urbana, Illinois. He holds a DMA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is the originator of polytempic polymicrotonality. He is the author of Polytempic Polymicrotonality: The Music of Peter Thoegersen (Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2022) and The Structural Foundations of Polytempic Polymicrotonal Composition (Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2024), with a third volume under contract.

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Techniques of Polytempic Polymicrotonal Composition