have developed, hand
in hand. From historical concepts such as ‘Musica universalis’ and celestial
spheres, through Kepler’s ‘Harmonici Mundi’ to modern harmonics and String
Theory. With: Rachel Erickson (M), Joseph Norman, Catja Pafort, Isabella van
Elferen, Hannu Rajaniemi...
I had a thought the other day...
Hmmm...I need to back up here before I launch into this
essay.
Thesis: Every Human on Earth has grown up with music. “Music
is found in every known culture, past and present, varying widely between times
and places. Since all people of the world, including the most isolated tribal
groups, have a form of music, it may be concluded that music is likely to have
been present in the ancestral population prior to the dispersal of humans
around the world. Consequently music may have been in existence for at least
55,000 years and the first music may have been invented in Africa and then
evolved to become a fundamental constituent of human life.” (The Origins of
Music, Nils Lennart Wallin, Björn Merker, Steven Brown (eds)).
Seeming non-sequitur: The school district I work for
originally banned the use of headsets, cellphones, ipods, and any other
electronic device during the school day. Battle was joined and eventually the
district retreated. The thing is that it wasn’t only he students who fought on
the side of music access. It was the young teachers as well. They wanted to be
able to use their playlist whenever they wanted to...This revolution was
virtually universal, championed by students with learning disabilities and no
interest in school through students who scored perfectly on the ACT test and
got straight As in all honors classes...
Seeming non-sequitur: I
had accordion lessons at an early age, switched to coronet for a very
BRIEF sojourn, then discovered that vocal music was my forte (pardon the music
pun). Not long after that, I discovered the guitar, and have in my possession
an 11-string, Yamaha FG230 that is (at LEAST) 45 years old, in a case given to
me by an ex-girlfriend then repaired by my brother, and travelled some million
or so miles with me to various and sundry concerts. I have been in choirs since
I can remember; in my case, from seventh grade onward (though it was probably
before that!). I sang in a choir all the way through my second year of college,
then in small groups for another decade, traveling not just in the US but in
Canada, Nigeria, Cameroun, and Liberia – as well as Hawaii and Haiti – where I
was privileged to hear music from very different traditions. I am, as it were, no stranger to music.
Seeming non-sequitur: That said, I pose the following
question: what if star-roving intelligence REQUIRED the admittedly off fusion
of music and mathematics? Did anyone ask this question – it seems like a
logical extension from “Panelists discuss how music and our understanding of
the universe have developed, hand in hand.”
Posit: What if the development of music was a necessary component in the
development of orbital mechanics, Titus-Bode Laws, and for taking advantage of competing gravitational tugs...which create a
vast network of passageways by which a spacecraft can travel over large
distances while expending very little energy, “Grasping [Newton’s
inverse-square] law, we can further derive equations which describe the motion
of the sun, the planets and the Voyager spacecraft flying between them.” ?
Seeming non-sequitur: In his book, The New Music (Oxford
University Press, 1987, pp 42-3), Reginald Smith Brindle says, “...mathematics
is ‘the basis of sound’ and sound itself ‘in its musical aspects... exhibits a
remarkable array of number properties’, simply because nature itself ‘is
amazingly mathematical’.”
Conclusion: What if we are alone in the Universe because no
one else has ever developed the fraternal twin fields of music and math?
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