Our program opens with the puzzling case of one little bird: the hermit thrush. For all of humanity’s admiration of birdsong, there is generally no consensus that bird calls bear any similarity to the forms of human music. Our outlier here is the hermit thrush, which appears to sing in the harmonic series; the set of tones whose fundamental mathematical relation to each other form the building blocks of tonal music. American composer Amy Beach could not have known this when composing her set of pieces devoted to this bird, “A Hermit Thrush at Eve and Morn,” but perhaps there was a certain spark of recognition between the composer and the avian songwriter.

Thelonious Monk once said “All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.” There is no better example of this in practice than the works of jazz great John Coltrane. For many, his level of application of mathematics to music bordered almost on the Divine, and has drawn many parallels, even by Coltrane himself, to the quantum theories of Albert Einstein. Giant Steps illustrates the confounding simplicity at the heart of Coltrane’s theories, constructed as a modulatory cycle that forms the backbone of one of the most famous jazz works ever written.

Though computer generated art is a hot topic of discussion, the Illiac Suite raised the question decades before the 21s century becoming the first musical work created by a computer. As new technology inevitably becomes a tool for art. Hiller gave the new Illiac I computer a set of rules and parameters and transcribed the data it gave back to him.

The fugue, a form that Bach was known to master, is an example of music's sonic reflections of mathematical principles and concepts. Taking a single “shape” of music, Bach transforms, inverts, reflects and manipulates musical material in ways that often parallel geometric forms. Here, we are treated to a remix of several Bach fugues by another household name; Mozart.

Join us for an afternoon of math and music-we promise there won’t be a pop quiz.