Professor Dmitri Tymoczko, the professor of music at Princeton University, visited SUSTech and gave a public lecture on the Geometry of Music on March 14,2019. For a long time, in particular elementary musical concepts like chord, scale, voice leading map onto basic concepts of modern geometry, such as quotient space, orbifold, and tangent vector. The lecture will include an overview of the principles underlying such linkages. Dmitri Tymoczko is a composer and music theorist who teaches at Princeton University.  His book A Geometry of Music (Oxford) has been described as “a tour de force” (The Times Literary Supplement), a “monumental achievement” (Music Theory Online).

Lecture topic: 《The Geometry of Music》

Lecture time: 19:00, March 14, 2019

Lecture venue: Faculty cultural activity center

Lecture speaker: Dmitri Tymoczko

Abstract:

In the past decade, musicians have realized that there is a deep connection between music and geometry.  In particular elementary musical concepts like chord, scale, voice leading map onto basic concepts of modern geometry, such as quotient space, orbifold, and tangent vector. In this talk, Prof. Tymoczko will review the principles underlying this connection and demonstrate some recent applications of these ideas: games and instruments that allow people to interact directly with abstract musical geometry, and new computational tools that reveal how composers from Beethoven to contemporary rock musicians have exploited these structures.

Biography:

Dmitri Tymoczko is a composer and music theorist who teaches at Princeton University.  His book A Geometry of Music (Oxford) has been described as “a tour de force” (The Times Literary Supplement), a “monumental achievement” (Music Theory Online), and, potentially, a modern analogue to Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (The Musical Times).  His two CDs, Beat Therapy (“far reaching yet utterly entertaining,” Newmusicbox) and Crackpot Hymnal (“ebullient … polystylistic … kinetic … vividly orchestrated and vibrantly paced,” Sequenza21), are available from Bridge Records. A third CD, Rube Goldberg Variations, will appear in 2017.  The author of the first music-theory article ever published by Science magazine, he has received a Rhodes scholarship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and additional prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Tanglewood, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and others.  His music, which often draws on jazz and rock, has been performed and commissioned by groups including the Amernet Quartet, the Atlantic Brass Quintet, the Brentano Quartet, the Corigliano Quartet, Flexible Music, Gallicantus, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Illinois Modern Ensemble, Janus Trio, the Kitchener/Waterloo symphony, Network for New Music, Newspeak, Pacifica Quartet, Synergy Vocal Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion Quartet, and Ursula Oppens.