‘In 2020, I found myself investigating cyclical structures of time. I began thinking about how to approach melody and harmony in new rhythmic ways and found that an underlying pulse at a fixed tempo of 160 beats per minute could be a point of departure. I then found the following relationships between parent and sibling tempi:
| 180bpm | 9/8 | Prestissimo |
| 170bpm | 17/8 | Presto |
| 160bpm | 4/4 | Allegrissimo |
| 150 bpm | 15/8 | Allegrissimo |
| 140bpm | 7/8 | Vivacissimo |
| 130 bpm | 13/8 | Vivace |
| 120bpm | 3/4 | Molto allegro |
| 110bpm | 11/8 | Allegro |
| 100bpm | 5/8 | Allegretto |
| 90bpm | 9/4 | Moderato |
| 80bpm | 4/2 | Andante |
Tempo allows us to make sense of our own perception of time – our clocks’ individual and collective push and pull. Styles of music and genres around the globe are built from certain tempo-rhythm, which allows us to form our musical memories. What looks like an academic list of metres, tempo and BPM above has allowed me to find more fluid and freer forms of composition. By structuring ideas at fixed and repeated intervals, I found myself returning time and again to build upon or to change them in some way. That which feet predictable in 4/4 metre could be skewed and opposed in the complementary metres of the rhythmic grid. A sort of audio palimpsest – returning to the top of a figure only to blur the previous one.’
Credits
Composer: Maxwell Sterling
Double bassist: Maxwell Sterling
Additional percussion and horns: Kenichi Iwasa
Audio Mixing: Maxwell Sterling
Commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary – Public Programmes and Research