Techniques of Polytempic Polymicrotonal Composition

  What is Polytempo?   What is tempo? First of all, we must understand what tempo is. So I will explore this topic as deliberately, naively, and as guilelessly as I possibly can, to ask the most basic questions without the pomp, rhetoric, and expectations of my doctorate, telling both me that I damn well know what tempo is, when in fact, do I? Jean-Baptiste Lully thought he knew what tempo was when he accidentally crushed his toe with his staff, pounding the tempo onto the floor while conducting Te Deum . Lully was 'tempoed' to death. There is no more concrete example of tempo than this. Now imagine three more Lullys pounding the floor at different rates of speed with their staffs. This is polytempo, and hopefully not the accidental polydeaths of the three additional Lullys.  Today's version of this would not be so much the conductor, but perhaps a drummer? Or more precisely, the click-track pounds the tempo into the ears of hapless musicians via headphones for them to p...

More on Contrapuntal Tempi...  Polytempo as Static vs. Dynamic and Fluid Tempo has throughout Western musical history been thought of as a single-formed containment system for music, perhaps except the isorhythms of the Middle Ages, which actually had nothing to do with tempo, but marked the beginning of the awareness of the potential of several strands of musical thought working simultaneously, as in color and talea , that could conceivably be a thought-form precursor to polytempo . Additionally, and unrelatedly, many motets were written with differing text languages, also not related directly to polytempo, but actually more to polymicrotonality ; the different languages presented in polytextual works offered different vowels, phones, phonemes, and glottals--imperceptible at the time, but today would actually count as polymicrotonal by closer examination. It is here that I must declare that, for me, polytempic polymicrotonality is really nothing more than an attitude; an aesth...

  The Idea of Fuxian Counterpoint of Tempos In looking over what music I have composed over the years, I have noticed a desire to independently vary the tempi of all constituent parts, not unlike Nancarrow did in his Tempo Canons .  I think that the amount of freedom Nancarrow had in making huge punch-rolls for the player piano , gave him a sense of total control over his materials. Although it must have been enormously painstaking, I am sure that after mastering his approach to this, he had way more freedom to calculate tempic relations to which even our modern-day sequencers and notation programs can not even compare. Not being a computer language programmer, I have to hassle with Finale or Dorico , down to the minutest detail, just to get a bit of cooperation from these programs to compose polytempic music , only to then obtain a halfway decent playback.  Elliott Carter also had huge pre-compositional notes and scores pasted on his walls for the calculation of large...