Multitemporal movement and embodyment through Rhythmic Design
An artistic resarchproject by Peter Bruun 2023 - 2025 at The Danish National Academy of Music
introduction
The project Multitemporal Movements and Embodiment through Rhythmic Design is an artistic investigation into how rhythm can function both as a structural framework and as a sensory starting point for compositional and performative practice. Through seven different sessions with musicians and composers, the project has explored and refined a repertoire of structures—a field of rhythmic designs and tempo-dynamic models that serve as both material and method.
Three focal points formed the foundation of the investigation:
-
Structure Repertoire: The development of metric and form-shaping rhythmic designs—or tempo design, as the term has often been tempting to use. This involves creating fluid, multidimensional tempi within a steady pulse, where points of gravity, fields of tension, and rhythmic displacements form the basis for interplay and composition.
-
Artistic Method and Process: The pursuit of a purposeless and resultless space—a conscious shift away from aesthetic decisions and rejections, allowing the material to be sensed and embodied without needing to "become something." This opens space for a multiperspectival understanding, where intuition and the body can serve as primary tools of navigation.
-
Meta-reflection: The idea of the artwork as a window into a process—and the more radical (and likely paradoxical) question: can the process itself be presented as a work? Can one create an artistic focus that is not about the result, but about the act of creation itself—and about the human, artistic work in motion?
Each session has, in its own way, illuminated and challenged these focal points—from playful purposelessness to precise structural tensions, from bodily exploration to compositional transmission. Together, they form a multiperspectival portrait of rhythmic design as practice, method, and a space of possibilities.
structure repertoire
The structural repertoire consists of rhythmic designs and tempo-dynamic structures that function as open templates – or architectural frameworks of movement. It serves as a point of departure for improvisation and composition in both open and closed musical forms. It is not a method to be mastered, but a material to be explored – with the body as an active participant.
The repertoire contains seven related concepts, each staging structures in multiple metric dimensions simultaneously. Within a steady pulse, new tempi are composed – accelerating, decelerating, or irregular – which displace the perception of time and open up ambiguous rhythmic perspectives. The music becomes a field rather than a line.
A central method in working with the repertoire is autonomous examination: a practice in which the musician is released from the demand for correct execution and instead engages intuitively and physically with the tensions and gravitational points of the material. The aim is not to reproduce the structure precisely, but to let it shape the way one senses and plays.
If the structure is a river, autonomous examination is like throwing stones into the water and letting the disturbance create its own rhythm – with focus on experience, not understanding.
Multiple perceptions can exist simultaneously. One musician maintains a rhythmic line, another perceives it as a displaced, fluctuating pulse movement, while a third engages in autonomous examination. This coexistence of perspectives is conceived as a form that enables a deeper and more flexible embodiment than that which arises from motor memory. In this process, the investigation itself becomes an artistic statement.
session 1:
core ensemble / juniper fuse
-
Development of a Structural Repertoire
-
Playful, Purpose-Free Practice
-
Focus: Opening Possibilities—Potentials Opening Potentials Opening Potentials
The aim of this session was not to create a musical result like a finished piece, but to explore and develop a structural repertoire: strictly composed polydimensional metric designs, where layers of tempo relations and underlying pulse coexist and form a multidimensional rhythmic field.
The musicians were introduced to the structures through notation and visual explanations that pointed to "portals" between different metric experiences. The ensemble—two prepared pianos and two percussion setups—worked within a continuum between strict rhythmic precision and free, textural play.
A key element of the practice was what we called “autonomous examination”: a sensory-based, intuitive approach where each musician freely engaged with the tensions and centers of gravity that arose in the music.
Embodiment in this context was not merely motor memory, but a sensory and intuitive experience—an internalization that emerged not only through repeated play, but through shifting perspectives and intuitive walks within the continuum between strict rhythmic precision and free, textural play.
The paradox of trying to explain and grasp a complex system while relinquishing purpose and aesthetic ambition generated confusion, resistance, and moments of deep flow. Bodily understanding took root as musicians moved between dimensions—listening, sensing, responding.
The intention to steer clear of aesthetic choices—though never entirely avoidable—was aligned with the nature of the structural repertoire itself, which was designed not as a finished form but as a set of potentialities: possibilities opening possibilities opening possibilities.
session II
juniper fuse – “jointures”
work by Matt Choboter
-
Aesthetic Exploration
-
Testing Structures in the Context of Matt’s Narrative Composition
I asked Matt Choboter to compose a piece for Juniper FUSE based on the structural repertoire we had developed in the first session—a process he had participated in himself as part of the core ensemble.
Jointures is composed as a score that spans both concrete structures from the repertoire and inspired rhythmic designs created by Matt himself. The musical narrative of the piece is carried by his harmonic and aesthetic language, but nourished and animated by the polydimensional tempo movements from the structural repertoire.
Most importantly, the work functioned as a practice-based sharing of knowledge—not only of methods and structures, but as a fusion of bodily experience, artistic process, and collective creation.
It confirmed that the rhythmic designs can serve as an open, non-prescriptive canvas that invites interpretation and further development. I wouldn’t change anything about this session—it was a gift to witness how the structural repertoire could take on new form through Matt’s independent and deeply musical approach.