Sunday, November 23, 2014

Bernard Chazelle on the "Cosmology" of Bach's music

Bernard Chazelle, "Discovering the Cosmology of Bach" (On Being, November 13, 2014):
Bernard Chazelle is Eugene Higgins Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University,  a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences. He's authored an extensive collection of essays on music for A Tiny Revolution.
Chazelle has an original take on what music works in us — especially the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Just as mathematicians talk about discovering rather than inventing great equations, so, he says, Bach set out to “discover” the musical rules behind the universe. After hearing this conversation, you may never listen to any piece of music — whether Bach or Jay-Z — in quite the same way again.
[Hat tip to M.W.]

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