Techniques of Polytempic Polymicrotonal Composition

 More about Meter Poetic Meter , for me, is essentially music. Song. The art of songwriting . Although different, the art of poetic meter has a built-in logic that suits musical construction. Most of the time, songwriters, or composers of Lieder , or Art Songs , simply use the rhythms of the composition itself. Or the words of the poem may dictate the rhythms to the composer in a type of durch-komponiert style of writing, like Wagner or Schubert have done. As a matter of fact, prosody is a poetic analysis, much akin to musical analysis. Yet, there is a compositional system dormant and employable in this analytical system. Much like atonal analysis using set theory , or intervallic cell analysis , these types of techniques can also lend themselves to creation by working backwards. I have frequently composed music backwards, or even started in the middle of a piece.  Figure 1. As said earlier in this blog, poetic forms themselves are just as numerous and organic as musical...

  Continuation of part XIIIa: Trisyllabic and Tetrasyllabic feet for intervallic cells As a continuation of part XIIIa, I will provide more notes and examples of prosody as applied to voice leading , intervallic cells, and a type of loose pitch organization as applicable to any microtonal system used in polymicrotonality . The most important aspect of this technique is the specific use of the ultrachromatic cell , prescribed as the unstressed unit "U." According to which smallest intervallic unit your microtonal system is using, for example, the 92.3 cent microchromatic interval of 13tet , becomes arsis U. (All this is presented in part XIIIa) Thesis "—" then contains the remaining group of intervals still within the microtonal system, but are larger than a microchromatic step. Therefore, the third microtonal scale degree , or larger, will be considered as skips, leaps, and jumps to other pitches. The reader may interpret these other larger intervals in the fr...

 Applying Prosody to a Microtonal System What is Prosody, and what the Heck does it have to do with Microtones?   Although Leonard Meyer created a musical analysis approach using simple prosodic elements from the analysis of poetic syllabic feet, I have always been interested in prosody and its close relationship to song and music in general. This morning, as my cat Maximus attacked my face while I was trying to sleep, I had an idea concerning the use of prosody with regard to microtonal systems.  Fig. 1. Disyllabic permutations as applied to microtonal voice leading and pitch cell organization In prosody, poems are written syllabically in a meter, such as in iambic pentameter .  Most English classical poetry is written in iambic pentameter. Take Milton's Paradise Lost , for instance. This epic poem is entirely written in a foot resembling: ∪ — where "∪" is the unstressed syllable, and "—" is the stressed syllable. There are three categories of syllabic feet: ...