The Music of the Temporalists

A Parisian drugstore owner (André Pogoriloffsky), a man in his early fifties, who is also a skilled amateur piano player, experiences a two year long mental trip to a parallel (Temporalist) world, as an avatar. He will soon find out that he was purposely "imported" there in order to be taught the basics of that culture's music theory. Pogoriloffsky is permanently accompanied by a local musicologist --Philippe, an expert in the European musical tradition --^ and, for a while, initiated by an old psychologist in the cognitive aspects of Temporalist music theory. The two men ask Pogoriloffsky to memorize as much as he is capable to from the theoretical notions that he is presented with so that, once returned to Paris, be able to transcribe all that information for the use of his own musical culture. In order to become more familiarized with Temporalist music and musical interpretation, in the following months Pogoriloffsky tours an important number of music schools, universities, musical libraries, concert halls and audition rooms or is encouraged to attend various lectures and conferences. The music of the Temporalists describes a journey into a parallel world that is populated with humans like us who just happened to have cultivated music as "the art of time" and not as "the art of sounds". Pogoriloffsky recounts all that experience with honesty, doing his best to meet his two guides' expectations.^ For this reason, with a very few exceptions, he only describes Temporalist music theory, pedagogy and practice -- ignoring most of the unusual things that the parallel world (in which he spends more than two years) surprised him with ... The main focus of the book resides in the music theory chapters that contain a perceptual approach towards the way humans process the many possible aspects of discrete, musical time. The theory is the result of a 20 year long effort by its author to define an alternative system for the classical bar-rhythmical theory. In order to achieve that, he had to read literally thousands of pages of scientific contributions, articles and books on time perception/cognition and rhythm production -- all that being consequently filtered down to a standalone theory, presented in the main section of the book.--Amazon.com description.