ics is one of the
»Fine Arts
« that possesses the gift of being at the same time the most elaborated and sophisticated of all sciences. This is a very difficult sentence to understand for common people. However, science is an effective and elegant way to understand the universe. Science corrects itself. Our life and our destination are indissolubly bound to science. It is essential for our simple survival that we understand science. For those who understand it, science is a pleasure. We have evolved in such a way that the fact of understanding provides us with pleasure, because the one that understands has bigger possibilities to survive.
Mathematics, contrary to music, is not for spectators. It is like a »language«: if does not speak it one does absolutely not understand it. There are no stadiums of mathematics for a big audience. Both are created, recreated, we can appreciate and enjoy them. An advantage or disadvantage, as it is wanted to be seen, is that, for mathematics, there isn’t a musical instrument for it to be played, it stays at score level, it could be said that it goes directly from mind to mind.
For me, the most important relationship between mathematics and music is that both are »Fine Arts«. They possess similar characteristics. They are related in the sense that mathematics provides a way to understand music and gives musicology a scientific basis in order to be considered a science. I want to conclude this exposition writing once again that mathematics is one of the »Fine Arts« , the purest of them, which has the gift of being the most precise (and the precision) of all sciences.
References
BARTOK, BELA (1918). Allegro Barbaro. Universal Edition.
BIRKHOFF, GEORGE DAVID (1929). Quelques Elèments Mathèmatics de L’art, vol. 1. Atti Congr. Intern. d. Matem., Bologna.
BIRKHOFF, GEORGE DAVID (1932). A Mathematical Theory of Aesthetics, vol. 19. Rice Institute Pamphlet.
BIRKHOFF, GEORGE DAVID (1933). Aesthetic Measure. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
BIRKHOFF, GEORGE DAVID (1945). Medida Estética. Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Rosario, Argentina.
LENDVAI, ERNÖ (1979). Bela Bartok: An analysis of his music. Kahn & Averill, London.
MAZZOLA, GUERINO (1998). Towards Big Science. Geometry and Logic of Music and its Technology. In BERND, ENDERS and KNOLLE, NIELS (eds.), Symposionsband Klangart ’95. Rasch, Osnabrück.
MAZZOLA, GUERINO (2000). Mathematical Music Theory--Status Quo 2000. In LLUIS-PUEBLA, EMILIO (ed.), Memoirs of the First International Seminar on Mathematical Music Theory. Publicaciones Electrónicas de la Sociedad Matemática Mexicana, Series Memorias, Rasch, www.smm.org.mx