What atonal music theorists know about metric probability spaces
Thursday, May 23 | 4:30 p.m.
Steitz 202
You don’t need to know anything about music theory to understand the talk, and in spite of the fancy math words in the last paragraph, you only need to know some basic probability to follow everything.
In the early 20th century, a subversive composer and music theorist named Arnold Schoenberg began to compose in a radical new way, completely breaking with the centuries-old tenets of Western harmony. He inspired composers, musicologists, and music critics, and his ideas are taught at music schools around the world. His music practice was, to put it lightly, controversial, and it never caught on in popular music.
In spite of this, Schoenberg’s music and the music of his disciples have inspired a mountain of papers in a new kind of music theory, one that some have derided as too mathematical for musicians and too musical for mathematicians. But there is interesting, surprising math to excavate from this mountain nonetheless, and in this talk, we’ll see how a funny coincidence in the basic tenets of atonal music theory leads us from cyclic groups to surprises with spheres to abstract metric probability spaces and back to finite graphs. And maybe we’ll even listen to some of Schoenberg’s music along the way.