Polytempo

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The term polytempo or polytempic is used to describe music in which two or more tempi occur simultaneously. [1]

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In the Western world, the practice of polytempic music has its roots in the music theory of Henry Cowell, [2] and the early practices of Charles Ives. Later on, composer Elliott Carter, in the fifties, began polymetric experiments in his string quartets that inevitably amounted to polytempic behavior by nature of several competing lines at different surface speeds. At around the same time, composer Henry Brant expanded on Ives's The Unanswered Question to create a spatial music in which entire ensembles, separated by vast distances, play in distinct simultaneous tempi.

Some types of African drumming exhibit this phenomenon.[ citation needed ]

Today's composers are employing polytempi as a compositional strategy to create total and complete independence of line in polyphonic music. Composers such as Conlon Nancarrow, David A. Jaffe, Evgeni Kostitsyn, Kyle Gann, Kenneth Jonsson, John Arrigo-Nelson, Brian Ferneyhough, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Frank Zappa, and Peter Thoegersen have used various methods in achieving polytempic effects in their music.

Polytempic music also harkens to the rhythmic practices of some Renaissance and medieval composers (see hemiola).

Multitemporal music

Multitemporal music is composed using sound streams that have different internal tempi or pulse speed, for example one part at 115 bpm and at 105 bpm at the same time. Multitemporal music was first heard in US-Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow's work, discovered by Hungarian György Ligeti,[ further explanation needed ] who undertook the task of bringing Nancarrow's music to the fore.

To overcome the limits posed by a human performer in playing a multitemporal score Nancarrow used two modified player-pianos, punching the rolls by hand. One of the few recordings of this composer's work is found in Wergo's "Studies for Player Piano" series. The idea was then proposed by Iannis Xenakis in the early seventies and more recently by Italian born composer Valerio Camporini Faggioni [3] using synthetic and software devices.

A similar technique, with the tempi similar to each other is rhythm phasing – a technique introduced by Steve Reich and used especially in minimalist and post-minimalist music.

See also

Related Research Articles

A time signature is a convention in Western music notation that specifies how many note values of a particular type are contained in each measure (bar). The time signature indicates the meter of a musical movement at the bar level.

In musical terminology, tempo, also known as beats per minute, is the speed or pace of a given composition. In classical music, tempo is typically indicated with an instruction at the start of a piece and is usually measured in beats per minute (BPM). In modern classical compositions, a "metronome mark" in beats per minute may supplement or replace the normal tempo marking, while in modern genres like electronic dance music, tempo will typically simply be stated in BPM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Ives</span> American modernist composer (1874–1954)

Charles Edward Ives was an American actuary, businessman, and modernist composer. Ives was amongst the earliest American internationally renowned composers to achieve recognition on a global scale. His music was largely ignored during his early career, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Later in life, the quality of his music was publicly recognized through the efforts of contemporaries like Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison, and he came to be regarded as an "American original". He was also among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements, and quarter tones. His experimentation foreshadowed many musical innovations that were later more widely adopted during the 20th century. Hence, he is often regarded as the leading American composer of art music of the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Cowell</span> American composer (1897–1965)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metronome</span> Device that produces a sound at a regular interval

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Samuel Conlon Nancarrow was an American-Mexican composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. Nancarrow is best remembered for his Studies for Player Piano, being one of the first composers to use auto-playing musical instruments, realizing their potential to play far beyond human performance ability. He lived most of his life in relative isolation and did not become widely known until the 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polyrhythm</span> Simultaneous use of two or more conflicting rhythms

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modernism (music)</span> Changes in musical form during the early 20th Century

In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position.

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<i>Chungas Revenge</i> Album by Frank Zappa

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wallingford Riegger</span> American music composer

Wallingford Constantine Riegger was an American modernist composer and pianist, best known for his orchestral and modern dance music. He was born in Albany, Georgia, but spent most of his career in New York City, helping elevate the status of other American composers such as Charles Ives and Henry Cowell. Riegger is noted for being one of the first American composers to use a form of serialism and the twelve-tone technique.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">String piano</span>

String piano is a term coined by American composer-theorist Henry Cowell (1897–1965) to collectively describe pianistic extended techniques in which sound is produced by direct manipulation of the strings, instead of or in addition to striking the piano's keys. Pioneered by Cowell in the 1920s, such techniques are now often called upon in the works of avant-garde classical music composers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rhythmicon</span>

The Rhythmicon—also known as the Polyrhythmophone—was an electro-mechanical musical instrument designed and built by Leon Theremin for composer Henry Cowell, intended to reveal connections between rhythms, pitches and the harmonic series. It used a series of perforated spinning disks, similar to a Nipkow disk, to interrupt the flow of light between bulbs and phototoreceptors aligned with the disk perforations. The interrupted signals created oscillations which were perceived as rhythms or tones depending on the speed of the disks. Although it generated both pitches and rhythms, it has often been described as the world's first drum machine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phase music</span> Compositional technique

Phase music is a form of music that uses phasing as a primary compositional process. It is an approach to musical composition that is often associated with minimal music, as it shares similar characteristics, but some commentators prefer to treat phase music as a separate category. Phasing is a compositional technique in which the same part is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempi. Thus, the two instruments gradually shift out of unison, creating first a slight echo as one instrument plays a little behind the other, then a doubling effect with each note heard twice, then a complex ringing effect, and eventually coming back through doubling and echo into unison.

<i>Studies for Player Piano</i> (Nancarrow)

The Studies for Player Piano is a series of 49 études for player piano by American composer Conlon Nancarrow. Often exploring complex rhythmic variations beyond the ability of a human pianist, these compositions are some of the best-known and celebrated compositions by Nancarrow, even though they are generally not considered a set of compositions, but rather individual compositions that were given the same title and status. The dates of composition are unknown, but approximate ranges have been given according to best evidence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black MIDI</span> Experimental music genre

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References

  1. Collections of articles; Greschak, John
  2. Henry Cowell, With contributions by David Nicholls, New Musical Resources, [ page needed ], Cambridge University Press, 1996 (original text by Henry Cowell published in 1930), ISBN   978-0-521-49974-3
  3. Valerio Camporini F., Multitemporal Designs, (Line)