REFLECTIONS ON A THELONIUS MONK QUOTE ON MATH AND MUSIC

 

REFLECTIONS ON THELONIUS MONK: "All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians" Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in common. Alexander in particular draws our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize as the “Circle of Fifths,” but incorporates Coltrane’s own innovations. Coltrane gave the drawing to saxophonist and professor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who included it in his seminal text, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Where Lateef, as he writes in his autobiography, sees Coltrane’s music as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a rich tradition of autophysiopsychic music,” Alexander sees “the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s” quantum theory.

Neither description seems out of place. Musician and blogger Roel Hollander notes, “Thelonious Monk once said ‘All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.’ Musicians like John Coltrane though have been very much aware of the mathematics of music and consciously applied it to his works.”

For musicians, music as language elevates communication between the players to a realm that includes the listener. And if Monk said all musicians are mathematicians then we will shall not quibble. Einstein and his theories have had broad influence on a variety of artists, from the novelist Lawrence Durrell to Coltrane and beyond.

https://www.franklin.uga.edu/news/stories/2017/mathematics-music

Fron my latest book, Sociological Realism: Society as the Walls of Our Imprisonment (Wiley Blackwell, March 1926):

We come full circle from Einstein to Coltrane and connect their two genius cultures when we encounter Coltrane’s Circle of Tones, a precipitate of relativity theory and quantum mechanics (per Alexander, 2016; for details of the Coltrane Circle see Hollander, 2016).  Coltrane introduced physics and geometry into his music, including Einstein's theory of general relativity.  The theory of relativity is manifested in relative perception.  Tempo, pitch, and harmony are experienced differently in different contexts.  Time can be made to seem dilated, that is stretched or compressed by changing tempo and rhythm.  Novel chord changes or key modulations can be disorienting, changing one’s perspective; multiple melodic lines playing at the same time can represent different frames of reference accessible simultaneously; the fluidity of improvisation can be viewed as analogous to spacetime; a central pitch or chord can be viewed as a reference node with other pitches or chords orbiting around it.  This last example shows the fallacy of making connections to physics since gravity in general relativity is not a force of attraction between bodies.

          What we have here are loose analogies and similarities.  Bending notes is not the same as the relationship between space and time which do not mathematically bend over and into one another.  One of the fallacies in linking jazz and physics in these ways is the fallacy that jazz improvisation is unpredictable in the same way that the spacetime universe is not entirely predictable.  As I demonstrated earlier, jazz improvisation is more predictable than commonly thought, and so is the universe.  Unpredictability is a function of the degree of openness in the system at issue, in the degrees of freedom associated with any given musical or cosmic situation.  The fact that Coltrane’s spiritualism made him susceptible to being influenced by a certain mystical interpretation of relativity theory and quantum mechanics is an interesting fact of experience but not a demonstration that jazz is relativistic in the same way that space and time are.  The general motif linking Cubism, relativity theory, literature, and jazz is the coming into dominance of a relative view of space and time as opposed to an absolute view of space and time.  The project of linking jazz and physics faces problems similar to those I discuss in my analysis of efforts to link physics and mysticism (Restivo, 1983).  Einstein mused that his discoveries in physics were driven by the intuitions of music perceptions.

BOTTOM LINE: If everything is interconnected in networks of relationships, everything has variously determinate rules of relationships that can be written in more or less complex numerical notations. Music is no more or less subconsciously mathematical than mathematics is more or less subconsciously musical.  Mathematics can be consciously exploited.  When the aborigines constructed the boomerang they mechanically exploited natural world relationships which at a later time came to be representable in terms of the calculus.  One could say they understood calculus intuitively, but this doesn’t mean they had calculus or could invent it. 

MUSICA UNIVERSALIS

CRIBBED FROM THE INTERNET:

Pythagoras:

Proposed that the Sun, Moon, and planets each emit a unique sound based on their orbital movement, and that these sounds combine to create a cosmic harmony. He noted that the pitch of a musical note is related to the length of the string producing it, and that harmonious intervals correspond to simple numerical ratios. 

·  ·  Kepler:

Refined the theory by linking the distances between the planets to the ratios of the distances between nested spheres and Platonic solids. He further suggested that the planets could be assigned different musical voices, like a choir, creating a celestial symphony. 

·  ·  Ptolemy:

Expanded on the concept by theorizing that the rising and falling of planets in the sky corresponded to rising and falling in pitch. 

·  ·  Modern Interpretation:

The concept is now seen as a metaphor for the mathematical and physical order of the universe, which has been a source of inspiration for artists and composers who have sought to give it musical form. 

To which I add: the mathematician Paul Dirac said: God is a mathematician.