released February 28, 2024

TWO WORLDS: QUARTERTONE QUINTETS IN CONVERSATION
I redid my Polytempic microtonal large ensemble piece with double mixed quintets and drumset that all splits into 11 separate tempi/meters during the climax and to also add full quartertone features that have not been included in this piece since its realization in LogicPro 8, in 2007. This redux has added sounds from PianoTeq, in .scl quartertone files, and a reworking of the contrapuntal technique of augmentation/diminution, for further counterpoint within the choirs of the piece. Composed for my Master's Thesis, 2003 and REDONE, JULY, 2018

A Day by the Strand
This is music from String Quartet #3, 2012, applied to four pianos in the same tunings and tempi. More clarity regarding harmony and forward motion and the interaction of the tempos can be heard: 12, 13, 14, 15 tet, and tempi 96, 87, 100, and 80 bpm are the main thrusts of the aesthetic. Small thematic materials are bandied about in this dense, but delicate texture.

Fractured Consciousness
Large meterless tuplets in different sizes create polytempic landscapes with four tunings: 24, 26, 30, and 31 TET combine at blistering speed to shatter your consciousness into pure fragments and shards of nothingness. Composed in 2019.

Hypercube Version III
This is a composite of 12 tracks: 4 strings, 4 pianos, and 4 drumsets all in four different tempos and 4 different tunings. All instruments are playing the original Hypercube score! No added notes.

Biography

Peter Alexander Thoegersen, DMA, (1967)

Born in Los Angeles in 1967, Thoegersen received his Doctorate in Music Composition at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2012, writing his thesis on Polytempic Polymicrotonal Music, which came out as a book in September, 2022, through JennyStanford Publishers and disseminated by Routledge.

Polytempic Polymicrotonal music offers a great expansive potential for the re-emergence and renewed ideas of pitch and rhythm, in contrast to the extended technique noise gestures so prevalent in academic music today. In point of fact, Thoegersen has a series of string quartets strictly in polytempic polymicrotonality, where each voice is in completely different tempos, character, and tuning, and is intended for live human players. Polytempic Polymicrotonality offers the perspective of total subjectivity in music composition and performance, as opposed to a gestalt objective point of view, of classical origins.

Thoegersen began music as a drummer, extrapolating rhythms and exploring polytempo and four way independence, wherein each independent "limb" becomes its own part, or voice, with its own tempo, and ultimately, its own microtonal system--approaching a radical new polyphony not yet practiced in any musical literature.

Thoegersen has three albums of his music out: Three Pieces in Polytempic Polymicrotonality, New World Records, 2019; Facebook: What's On Your Mind?, Flea Records, 2021, and Alien Music, Magic&Unique, 2022.

Thoegersen is proud to confess he has never, ever won an academic award for his music.

Thoegersen currently lives in Urbana, Illinois, with his amazing and wonderful cat Maximus.

Digital art by David Victor Feldman

Peter Thoegersen
peterthoegersen.bandcamp.com