Control, Flexibility, Flux and Complexity: A Timecode-Supported Approach to Polytemporal Orchestral Composition

This project is situated in and takes current orchestral polytemporal praxis as its starting point and context. It seeks to expand independent simultaneous polytemporal activity to every instrumental voice in the orchestra using self-borrowed temporally unrelated heterogeneous materials while preserving the highest possible levels of structural integrity in performance. 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. This thesis explains what timecode-supported polytemporal music is, how it functions, how it is built, and through a portfolio of newly composed and performed pieces, examines to what extent this approach has fulfilled its compositional aims. Although timecode-supported polytemporal orchestral music fully determines structure, rhythm, pitch and expression through notation, it does not use conductors, click-tracks or scores for performance organisation. Instead, players and their materials are decoupled from each other and their actions coordinated by reading part-embedded timecode continually referenced to the rolling timecode found on orchestra-wide loosely synchronised mobile phone stopwatches with players adjusting their tempos as required throughout performance so that both align. This approach to performance introduces player-generated temporal indeterminacy where many players interpreting their respective tempos simultaneously creates cumulative degrees of misalignment between their materials when compared to concomitant material relationships fixed within computer-generated composition models. Temporal indeterminacy along with the uncertainties it generates is an anticipated and welcomed outcome of this methodology. Nevertheless, this project tests the efficacy of player-mediated timecode frameworks to limit those discrepancies and uncertainties by confining them within local detail, so they do not affect global architectural integrity. The degree to which this confinement is successful is gauged through a comparison between live and computer-generated audio recordings. Criteria for success are subjective and built around the impression of similarity between the two where the greater the coincidence, the more successful the performance is perceived to be. This view along with its definitions and rationale are examined and reflected in the project’s methodology and results where despite a range of setbacks including the impacts of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, it has been possible to secure performances that demonstrate and where necessary, extrapolate scaled-up results that show how the outcomes of this research project have met, and in some regards, exceeded my expectations and compositional aims. For composers, such a polytemporal expansion offers new and extended composition and performance opportunities where the use of heterogeneous materials and combinations of any simultaneous tempos become practical in the field of spatial and remote polytemporal performance as well as situated orchestral compositions of any scale or pieces exploring the movement between simultaneously synchronised and asynchronous or loosely synchronised materials where degrees of control over compositional structure and outcomes are important.