Beethoven

Posted by Parson Thru on Mon, 25 Aug 2014

So then, friends and assorted great minds, lovers of the Arts, intelligentsia... The thought just crossed my mind while trimming my beard that my favourite piece of music might be a big lovely fractal (or similar). Is this possible? Is there such a book as "What Maths is Really Telling You" (but your teachers couldn't explain)? Was Beethoven describing God (was he Catholic?), or the universe (or protestant?) seen through the eyes of scientists and mathematicians? Listen to those strings and wind instruments interplaying in the most precisely engineered and elegant way. Natural beauty aurally experienced. Beethoven's Symphony Number 7, Allegretto (Christian Thielemann) makes me weep. As a funeral piece, will beautifully describe resolution.

Comments

Submitted by Steve on

I've always loved Beethoven and I see math everywhere in his music. I often wonder if the Fibonacci sequence can be translated into music.

Nature has its numbers and sequences, but music, especially German music expresses my tormented emotions and translated it into a mathematical, natural, and lyrical state.

Nietzsche was one of the first cultural critics of the Western World and he followed Schopenhauer in saying that music was an expression of universal Will which moves all things in the universe and is infused with an animism and an pantheism. In this sense, music may align one to universal rhythms and rhymes which are universal, but I tend to think music is essentially personal. 

There is the movie "pie" which explores this theme but rather in a superficial manner.

 

Submitted by Parson Thru on

Hell, Steve. I waited a while for your reply, but it was worth it. I was just talking about a friend of mine who is sufficiently cultured to lead me along the path you have just illuminated. When he returns from his travels in Italy I'll take it up. Yes to all those things. Music is intensely personal, no doubt, but I (I am an innocent) like to think that what we find pleasing are the patterns and relationships that are real and universal and so can be described in mathematics. The genius of the great composers is that they can construct it almost without hearing it. They understand the relationships and can predict how the instruments, singly and together, will sound. The real beauty is still in the human performance of the work. You watch each individual musician in the orchestra putting all their skill and concentration into each part, then you watch the whole come together under a great conductor. Then you feel your soul raised to heaven in all its ordered natural glory. Amen.

Parson Thru