Polytempo Music Booklet by DOTDOTDOTMUSIC

BRIAN BAUMBUSCH POLYTEMPO MUSIC

SAN FRANCISCO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC PLAYERS

POLYTEMPO MUSIC PROGRAM NOTES

GEORGE GRELLA, MARCH 2024

Welcome to the multiverse of sounds. Welcome to the dimensions of listening. The title of composer Brian Baumbusch’s (b. 1987) work is more than a name: it describes the character of the music and also how it works. The title is the concept is the way it sounds. This is music with many tempos running in parallel, meaning many simultaneous timelines. In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory—in its most science-fiction version—every decision is decided in all possible ways, each one splitting the timeline at that point into another universe. Multiple timelines, multiple tempos, Polytempo Music.

What these universes sound like, in Baumbusch’s conception, is nothing theoretical or mathematical, it’s sensual, visceral. Though there is a lot of math calculated behind the scenes by Baumbusch in order to both notate the music and to create a web of click tracks, one for each musician (Baumbusch refers to this web as the “master clock”). This way, when the musicians independently recorded each of their parts, the parts would later align as a whole, each independent fluctuation of tempo hyper-synchronized with the others. What Baumbusch calls “tempo streams” can be seen on his own graphs that depict rising and falling rates of pulses, which in turn dictate the changing density of instrumental sounds.

Right: Manuscript tempo map of the first portion of movement 2, “Clockwise”

This is coordinated music in the old-fashioned sense, with music that has been engraved into a score for a chamber orchestra size ensemble, and it runs in real time, but the individual instruments are playing in different tempos simultaneously within the flow of time.

The recording presented here is an audio-only edition of a work that was initially created as an immersive 3D Virtual Reality interactive application, published by Holography Records. In order to illuminate the musical architecture of Polytempo Music, the original audio-visual VR edition explores a novel concept of presenting sound as an entity in 3D space, moving around and leaving a visual imprint of its journey. This rendering of a 3D representation of moving sound allows us to witness

the once invisible waves of music as they pulsate through virtual space, like a flock of starlings painting patterns in the sky. When woven together, this cacophony of musical strands creates “liquid architecture,” a term used by pioneering animator John Whitney in describing music. How does something like this get thought, much less come to be? In a discussion with musicologist Oscar Smith, Baumbusch described the project as “drawing influence from some of my early, deep cathartic enjoyment of certain periods of musical minimalism, especially early minimalism. That music could stir up a particular flavor of euphoria that had the ability to distort my perception of time and settle my mind into a flow state.” He talks about La Monte Young as an important influence, but

the intertwining lines of Baumbusch’s music come together in a mix of rhythms, counterpoint, and timbres that both Philip Glass and Michael Gordon found their way to, though not relying on repetition in the same way. Baumbusch’s music also has the long-form structure and melodic sound of Indonesian ceremonial gamelan music; indeed Baumbusch had spent a decade teaching Balinese music at the University of California, Santa Cruz when he began creating Polytempo Music. Baumbusch composed about half of the music while completing a 10-day COVID-19related quarantine in Jakarta, on his way to Bali (note the title of movement 7, “Adzan”, which refers to the Muslim call to prayer which Baumbusch would hear through his quarantine window five times per day).

Left: Brian Baumbusch at Mansard Studio, March 2024. Photo by Claudia Baumbusch.

Polytempo Music strives for catharsis, an internal transformation that comes from being immersed in an interwoven flow of tempos. The harmonies narrow and expand and wind, like a combination mountain highway and squeezebox. Instrumental lines come together like runners on a track pulling alongside each other and then moving ahead or falling behind in undulating waves that perpetually move forward in time.

One way of describing how this music works would be to call

it polytempo heterophony, where heterophony could be described as multiple instruments playing different versions of the same melody at the same time. Smith thinks that the way Baumbusch organizes this heterophony is possibly one of the most important features of his music:

“While the main innovative element of this music is its advanced explorations into what one can do with simultaneous tempo streams, Baumbusch doesn’t simply forget about other parameters of the

music. Rather, he uses them to his advantage to help clarify the bustling listening experience—various other musical elements such as mode, harmony, dynamics, articulation are tethered to and therefore highlight significant tempo moments. When a group of instruments reach a point of convergence, or suddenly stabilize, one notices sudden changes of harmony or melodic contour, aiding us in learning to hear the complexity of simultaneous tempi.”

Baumbusch describes this

by saying “music like this is new to our ears; we’ve never heard music that stacks this many tempos that accelerate and decelerate simultaneously while maintaining coordinated melody and harmony throughout. We’ve heard cacophonous and layered fragmented music of a similar nature before where dense amalgamations of musical phrases combine into clouds of sound. Take Terry Riley’s inceptive work In C which, although not using polytempo, creates stacks

Previous spread, left to right: Musicians recording at the Polytempo Music sessions at Mansard Studio (photos by Brian Baumbusch); the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players performing Polytempo Music in concert at San Francisco’s Atrium Theater in April, 2023 (photos by Stephen Hahn).

of musical fragments that we manage to hear as a wonderful cacophonous musical body. But in In C, and in much of minimalism, changes take place gradually. What we don’t hear are moments where the ensemble will suddenly and dramatically change their dynamics or their harmonies on a dime. It took me a long time to figure out how to make those sudden changes while tracking simultaneous polytempo streams, and I want those moments to come off sounding like magic tricks.”

Taken simply as music, this is a considerable compositional achievement. The process of notating and recording the piece was necessarily complicated, and was produced over an 8-month period between November of 2022 and June of 2023, some of it recorded

on microphones that Baumbusch built himself for the project. But you don’t hear complication, instead you hear complexity, or what Charles Amirkhanian refers to as “inconspicuous complexity.” The difference between complicated music and complex music is that complicated music is just, well, complicated, while complex music is transparent, coherent, compelling while being impossible to fully explain.

Within this complexity, what you will hear over time is deep structure, interconnectivity between different chapters of the piece with timelines pointing forward and backward, deterministic, yet chaotic. This might as well be the universe itself we’re talking about. Or universes.

POLYTEMPO MUSIC ARTIST BIOS

Brian Baumbusch, born April 23, 1987, in Washington, D.C., is a multifaceted composer, instrument builder, musicologist, and software developer, renowned for his pioneering contributions to the realm of polytempo music and cross-cultural collaboration. Baumbusch is the recipient of numerous awards from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, The Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, among others. His music has been commissioned and produced by institutions such as The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco); The Smithsonian Institution (Washington D.C.) and Bayerischer Rundfunk (Munich, Germany). His innovative work draws inspiration from American Mavericks like Conlon Nancarrow, Lou Harrison, and Harry Partch, and is distinguished by his development of new music technologies and alternative acoustics paradigms through the creation of new instruments and tuning systems. Baumbusch is a champion of new performance practices achieved through intercontinental collaborations as well as computer-assisted live performance and recording projects. His music has been celebrated for its inconspicuously complexity,

particularly through his use of polytempo in the performance of live acoustic music achieved via computer programmed click-track matrices.

His extensive ethnomusicological research spans Argentine-Quechua folkloré to Balinese gamelan, influencing his compositions and instrument designs. He founded the Lightbulb Ensemble in Northern California in 2013, a group known for performing on unique instruments created by Baumbusch. He has also collaborated with leading ensembles in Bali, with premieres at the Bali Arts Festival (Denpasar, Indonesia). His two sets of “American

Gamelan” instruments, built between 2010 and 2021 are housed in Bali and performed on by the Balinese ensemble Nata Swara.

Baumbusch’s dedication to cross-cultural exchange and music education continues as he teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz, while residing in Alameda, California.

San Francisco Contemporary Music Players is the West Coast’s most long-standing and largest new music ensemble, comprising twentytwo veteran musicians. For more than 50 years, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players have

Previous page: Image taken from the Virtual Reality environment of Polytempo Music. All similar images in this booklet are taken from the same source.

created innovative and artistically excellent music and are one of the most active ensembles in the United States dedicated to contemporary music. Holding an important role in the regional and national cultural landscape, the Contemporary Music Players are a 2018 awardee of the esteemed Fromm Foundation Ensemble Prize, and a ten-time winner of the CMA/ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming. The Players have performed more than 1,300 works by over 600 composers and the organization has commissioned over 80 major works including pieces from composers such as John Adams, John Cage, Earle Brown, Olly Wilson, Michael Gordon, Du Yun, Myra Melford, and Julia Wolfe. The Contemporary Players have been presented by leading cultural

festivals and concert series including San Francisco Performances, Los Angeles Monday Evening Concerts, Cal Performances, the Stern Grove Festival, the Festival of New American Music at CSU Sacramento, the Ojai Festival, and France’s prestigious MANCA Festival. The Contemporary Music Players nourish the creation and dissemination of new works through world-class performances, commissions, and community and education programs. The Players perform the music of composers from across cultures and stylistic traditions who are creating a vast and vital 21st-century musical language featuring the work of iconic and emerging composers while shining a spotlight on works for large-ensemble and Bay Area/ California artists.

POLYTEMPO MUSIC PRODUCTION CREDITS

San Francisco

Contemporary Music Players

Oboe/English Horn – Kyle Bruckmann

Bb Clarinet – Matthew Boyles

Bass Clarinet/B b Clarinet – Jeff Anderle

Guitar – David Tanenbaum

Harp – Kristin Lloyd

Piano – Keisuke Nakagoshi

Vibraphone – Haruka Fujii

Violin 1 – Hrabba Atladottir

Violin 2 – Kevin Rogers

Viola/Violin 3 – Christina Simpson

Cello – Douglas Machiz

Double Bass – Richard Worn

Album Production

Charles Amirkhanian – Executive Producer

Brian Baumbusch – Recording/Mixing Engineer/Mastering Engineer; Producer

Eric Dudley – Producer

Richard Aldag – Producer

George Grella – Liner Notes

Mark Abramson – Art direction & design

Brian Baumbusch – Cover Art

Polytempo Music was made possible through generous support from the Creative Work Fund (a program of the Walter & Elise Haas Fund); The Clarence E. Heller

Charitable Foundation; The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; and the Alice M. Ditson Fund.

Other Minds Records OM 1047-2

The producers of this album would like to thank the following individuals:

Jay Arms, Constantin Basica, Violet Battaglia, Claudia Baumbusch, Peter Baumbusch, Cherry Baumbusch, Paul Baumbusch, Brett Carson, Colin CodyWaters, Sam Cushman, Daniel Duvall, Brian Ellis, Andrej Hronco, Andrew Jamieson, David Evan Jones, Jean-Marc Jot, Scott Looney, Katy Luo, Doug Machiz, Christopher Luna Mega, Jon Myers, Balot Ne, Lisa Oman, Bradford Paley, Frances Phillips, Steph Ramaley, Steph Ramaley, Putu Septa, Oscar Smith, Blaine Todd, Natalia Vigil, Wayne Vitale, and Samuel Wantman.