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Inscrutable Harmonies: The Continuous and the Discrete as Reflected in the Playing of Jascha Heifetz and Glenn Gould

2011; Springer Nature (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-94-007-0214-1_26

2215-1974

Joel Bennhall,

We owe the Pythagoreans the revelation that the harmonies of music derive from number, that is, from the discrete. This must be seen as a triumph of inscrutability. Inscrutable indeed is the resulting subsumption of music within mathematics, a colourless, forbidding subject to most, indeed the polar opposite of music, whose gaudy, yet profound, epiphanies offer a striking contrast. The Pythagoreans are to be blamed for the fact that music came to find itself in the embrace of such unlikely bedfellows as arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, the other members of the mathematical quadrivium.