Aspects of the development of multiplicity of voice in music
With its own set of rules, each of the stages of polyphony shown below displays an aesthetic world of sound, a world characterised by the degree of distance created between the tonal worlds of the individual voices.
It turns out that both harmonically and rhythmically, an ever-expanding distance between the individual voices can be perceived as a musical ‘whole’.
The distance between the voices can consist in differing harmonic spaces or different rhythmic levels … or in both together.
Mental polyphony exists where the listening or performing consciousness is nevertheless able to comprehend musical events taking place in otherwise dissociated tonal worlds as part of the same musical situation.
Awareness of the diversity of possible tonal languages/tonal worlds and a growing ability to grasp this fact and enlist it artistically are both a source of enrichment for the palette of musical possibilities for latitude in the composition and production of contemporary musical events.