Music and Mathematics

Factual Questions
41

DrumGod, my ex was at Southwest from summer '93 to fall '96. He mostly took summer and night classes and specialized in Kodaly as he is an elementary music teacher. Southwest actually has a very good Kodaly program.

Anyway, I would call Beethoveen’s 5th symphony’s rhythmic idea (ba ba ba bum) a theme as it is used so pervasively. If it was a motif I would usually think it would only stick in one movement and maybe repeated in the finale. This one is rather tricky as it can be looked at either way, but that is how I would analyze it.

I still have my Analysis and Synthesis and Musical Styles books somewhere at home. I know one of them had some discussion of Beethoveen’s Fifth in them somewhere. I will double check and post next week.

You are still well versed in music DrumGod. :slight_smile: You will do well. You are right, Bach used his BACH motif (you are right it really isn’t a theme although I said that earlier) with all the notes in succession. I always thought of it as an early chromaticism that formed the melodic minor descending scale (in C) but I haven’t ever researched it to find out for sure so it is all up to speculation as to when the melodic minor really came into effect.

HUGS!
Sqrl

42

Medicine?? I thought the third member of the triad was
computer science/analysis/programming (unless you include that broadly under math).

43
  1. I’m going to recommend this whole thread to my students to read for their enlightenment. 2) There was an excellent article in the NEW YORKER about 20 or 15 years ago on how music, mathematics, and chess playing go together. Various reasons were given, including that they all had to do with building and releasing tension in a field and I think that there was a part of the brain more developed in composers, players, mathematicians, and chess players. The article also mentioned that these three areas had it in common that children could excell in them (ie., Mendelsohn, Mozart composing operas when 8 years old), whereas children cannot excell in writing novels or poetry, for instance or for that matter in any other intellectual or art areas. I doubt that computer people belong in this mathematics-chess-music group. 3) Was it Schoenberg or Webern, one of the two, who wrote a piece using BACH. I lost the record that it was on and would like to find out what it was for teaching purposes, but the 12-tones of the theme were all in the BACH order intervalwise. Or every two of them, or something.
    (Actually I don’t think I lost the record, I think it was stolen by prankster students. Another time they stole the bulb out of the projector for showing slides, somehow. Luckily I had another one, but admired their skill in getting it out, because they (the bulbs) aren’t easy to deal with. Except for the usual certain percentage of students already born with the curiosity gene recently announced, the students hate anything other than what they already like, and are contemptuous of Cage, Varese, the atonalists or
    dodecaphonists and or serialists, and they especially abominate Milton Babbitt on the wonderful RCA Synthesizer
    (Mark II) and Xenakis’s amplified cinders burning. In any case, some people simply can’t remember a theme in order to perceive what is being done with it even in simple rondos or theme and variations. 4) I also read that it might be possible to develop the music-mathematics part of the brain by starting early with children on a keyboard, letting them do what they want but encouraging them to keep at it. When that part of the brain develops, it will have them in its grasp and they will go on to being able to play and even compose well and do well in mathematics, to their own intrinsic satisfaction, abilities being their own reward.