Polyphonies + Micropolyphonies

ISSUE #152

In the mornings, I drive to work and watch as more cars swarm me every day. As of late, they remind me of micropolyphony—each vehicle is its own instrument, with separate tempos and rhythms, woven together into traffic's oily buzz.

I'll explain micropolyphony: the human voice is monophonic, meaning it can sing only one part of a tune (a melody) at a time. We can only achieve polyphony—the singing of two or more melodies at once, like the left and right hands of a piano player—by gathering as a choir and assigning a part to each. The pleasure of hearing multiple melodies as they weave through one another is as voyeuristic as it is edifying, like overhearing the sublime grammar of a couple’s secret language.

Polyphony reigned until the twentieth century bred something new: micropolyphony, coined by Hungarian avant-gardist György Ligeti. He called his technique "micropolyphony" because it creates such a dense “woven cobweb” of voices—a tangle of dozens of discrete melodies, each with its own rhythm and tempo and instrument—that the melodies themselves are microscopic in the immense, moving cloud of sound.

Unlike the polyphonic beauty of a choir, micropolyphonic pieces tend to buzz with menace, like flies over a desert carcass. It’s a disturbing sound used in scores for films like The Shining and There Will Be Blood. For the latter, Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood uses micropolyphonies to underscore the hatred of an oilman ripping the Earth apart.

It's that same buzzing that I hear in traffic—the cackle and screech of minds so isolated that we can’t help but pull towards blinding narcissism. If we focus too fully on belting our own lines, we contribute nothing to the choir but cacophony. But an instinct for beauty is buried within us, innate like a pack of the Afghan Salukis:

“In each pack there were two principal dogs whose role it was to watch the hawk as they ran. [...] To follow the subtlety of the hawk’s signals overhead while running at speed was a demanding and exhausting feat: the two principal dogs worked in concert, the one taking over while the other rested its concentration and then back again. [...] It suggested that the ultimate fulfilment of a conscious being lay not in solitude but in a shared state so intricate and cooperative it might almost be said to represent the entwining of two selves.” | Rachel Cusk, from Transit.

To find that ultimate fulfillment, we must share, support, listen for each other's part. I made a playlist that's embodied the spirit, chock full of traded melodies, the polyphony of popular verse. Think Beach Boys, "Breezeblocks," every song by Taking Back Sunday. As long as we're conscious of the choir, we don't have to give up singing our own tune—but we ought to learn to harmonize or we risk buzzing forever like scavengers.