Timecode-Supported Polytemporal Music: What It Is and How to Write It
£19.99
Description
Timecode-Supported Polytemporal Music: What It Is and How to Write It
We are thrilled to announce the publication of Timecode-Supported Polytemporal Music: What It Is and How to Write It, released on the 1st November 2025.
In his new book, introduced by a warm and insightful foreword from composer and writer Dr Alastair White, Marc Yeats presents timecode-supported polytemporal music — a unique compositional method developed from his WRoCAH AHRC-funded PhD research at the University of Leeds (2017–2021). It offers a detailed guide for composers and performers interested in creating orchestral music with multiple, independent tempos. Unlike traditional approaches relying on conductors or unified scores, this method uses fully notated individual parts embedded with timecodes—timestamps displayed on performers’ loosely synchronised mobile phone stopwatches. Each musician navigates their own tempo, resulting in a complex, layered soundscape Yeats terms ‘sonic flux’, where controlled indeterminacy balances global structural coherence with unpredictable localised performance outcomes.
The approach eliminates the need for a conductor or click tracks, decoupling players from a central score. Timecodes provide a temporal framework, allowing musicians to adjust their pacing while maintaining notated structure, rhythm, and pitch. This flexibility addresses challenges in polytemporal music, such as performer coordination and rhythmic complexity, while preserving compositional intent. Drawing from works like a point in the landscape (2020), performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at Tectonics Glasgow 2024, and earlier compositions from 2007–2021, Yeats demonstrates how this method ensures structural consistency while allowing nuanced, performer-influenced variations in performance outcomes.
The book traces the development of these techniques, exploring their conceptual and practical foundations. It examines rhythm perception, notation challenges, and the evolving roles of the orchestra and score. Through clear definitions and a step-by-step guide, readers learn to create polytemporal compositions, from conceptual design and computer modelling to preparing performance materials. The approach is adaptable, allowing composers to tailor it to their aesthetic goals. Informed by Yeats’s reflections on subjectivity, inspired by Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy, and supported by performance analyses comparing live and computer-generated renditions, the text provides a rigorous yet accessible framework. It invites composers and performers to explore new possibilities in orchestral music, where independent temporal layers create a dynamic interplay of structure and spontaneity.
Available now on Composers Edition for £19.99 excluding p&p.
This insightful book by Marc Yeats is a lucid and fascinating exegesis of ‘timecide-supported polytemporal music’. Opening with an outline of Yeats’s personal background as a composer, the text moves through an overview of the broader context of other examples of different approaches to the temporal in music over the last sixty years, to a detailed explanation of how the author has utilised this unique approach in recent work. The book balances technical insight and broader philosophical themes about critical creative practice in a way that will appeal as much to the interested layperson as to the specialist composer and university student.
Dr Mic Spencer, Associate Professor of Music, School of Music, University of Leeds.
But Marc’s book is, like him, warm and generous: a lucid narrative of hard-won techniques and methodology. This, in itself, would have been enough. And yet, it is presented here with such—I say the word again—generosity—it is given, a gift, much before it is outlined or explained or advanced, etc. That’s how I felt reading it. For composers, there are provocations, starting points, a flowerbed of ready dirt just waiting for your hands to plunge into its worms and tendrils. But there is much here for others, too: delightful musicological considerations, self-reflections on the process of creation, as well as teachings of complex musical ideas that will make this text a must-read for students of modernism. And more, and more, and more. At the heart of the book is the wager that everything is possible, that many things can be true—that contingency does not preclude structure (and vice versa). This profound insight is not asserted, but proved; in technique, in artworks. Look. It’s right there.
Dr Alastair White, Composer and Writer.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD – Dr Alastair White
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE – A PERSONAL CONTEXT
From the Beginning
Pulse, Tempo, Polymeter and Notational Reformatting
The Third Way
Indeterminacy as Soft-Focus
Measuring Soft-Focus
Quid Pro Quo: Flexibility and the Orchestra
CHAPTER TWO – THE WIDER CONTEXT
Introduction
Cage
Berio, Segerstam, Lutosławski and Boulez
Ives, Stockhausen, Ferneyhough and Brant
Davies, Carter and Ferneyhough
Czernowin, Nancarrow (Murcott) and Johnson
Kirk, McGowan and Fein
Saunders
Finnissy and Harding
Hope and Clarke
Drawing the Threads Together
CHAPTER THREE – TIMECODE-SUPPORTED POLYTEMPORAL MUSIC AND HOW IT FUNCTIONS
Introduction
A Combination of Familiar Functionalities, Actions and Conditions
Assemblage, Territorialisation and Deterritorialisation
The Model: Audio Assemblages and Notation Networks
The Model Tripartite Relationship
Mediation: Composer Control, Performance Flexibility and Sonic Flux
The Performer’s Share: Mediating Clock Time and Musical Time
No Conductor, No Score
Sonic Complexity, Not Notational Complexity
The Model: Plato, Flux, Indeterminacy and Complexity
Recognition, Compositional Modelling and Performance Outcomes
Synopsis
CHAPTER FOUR – BUILDING THE MODEL
Introduction
Notational Transformation and Obsessive Self-Borrowing
Tempo Transformations
Rhythm, Time-Stretching and Referent Perception
Pitch Transformations
Transposition and Voicing
Creating Materials that ‘Work’ in Shifting Contexts
Assembling the Assemblage
Consolidating with Timecode
Final Thoughts
