[microsound] Bach and mathematics

[Andrew Salch]

I'm glad somebody has already posted a link to Dave Benson's excellent 
book.

It seems to be standard to mention the attempts of Cage and Xenakis to use 
some stochastic methods in their compositions. Of course there is a good 
deal of mathematics used in composition both before and after (and 
during/in between) those two; for example, a good deal of mathematics is 
necessary to understand serial music, probably most especially in Webern's 
work.

Tom Fiore maintains a page here:

http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~fiore/1/music.html

...with links to some interesing papers on music and mathematics. There's 
a little bit of discussion of Bach in the "Musical actions of dihedral 
groups" paper. Looking up the papers cited in those papers will get you 
even deeper into the subject; a fair bit has already been written about 
mathematical music theory.


On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, Paulo Mouat wrote:

> Some of the relationships between math and music are covered here:
> http://www.maths.abdn.ac.uk/~bensondj/html/maths-music.html
>
> and here:
> http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10916
> http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11102
>
> As usual, there's a lot more to each and composers and mathematicians went
> beyond what's described in these books, but still it's good coverage of such
> a broad topic.
>
> //p
> http://www.interdisciplina.org/00.0
>