Next to Knudsen Hall, Franz Hall and the Inverted Fountain, home
to physics, astronomy and psychology, lies Schoenberg Hall,
home of the music department.
It seems that placing Schoenberg Hall on the cusp of North and
South may have been the best case of going into foreign territory
up until Nixon in China. But upon closer examination, music (and
maybe the entire artistic enterprise) belongs with its
Einstein-worshipping pocket-protecting cohorts.
The division of art and science curriculum is a silly remnant of
1950s college education, where students were factory-made for entry
into corporate America. Everything was systematized into stages and
tests, and instead of learning and experiencing, you merely
graduated. Rather than force-fed facts, it’s the wonder of
experience, of seeing the Leonid meteors crashing into the
atmosphere, and curiosity that makes good scientists. Art certainly
helps create that while science makes new art possible.
Let’s dissect. Ideas about music often originate from
science. Pythagoras, the ancient Greek guy who made those theorems
about triangles, also made it possible to have complex stringed
instruments (such as guitars)Â and acoustics with his overtone
series. Musical notation represents mathematical fractions in time,
where the player must count beats. Even Arnold Schoenberg of
Schoenberg Hall thought music might benefit from being based
on 12-note formulas that were later used to generate entire pieces
of music like a quadratic equation generating a parabola.
There’s more. In 1980, Douglas Hofstadter won a Pulitzer
Prize for his book, “Godel Escher Bach.” Hofstadter
compared the work of mathematician Kurt Godel with that of artist
M.C. Escher and composer J.S. Bach. Godel found that any complex
system can never be completely proven. While he used math to prove
this idea, it’s not a far stretch to place Godel’s
nihilistic musings in a North Campus philosophy class.
Godel’s idea means that computers know only what we tell them
and that you can never fully know yourself.
The connection between science and Bach is clearer when you look
at Bach’s final work, “The Art of Fugue.” Bach
created music that could be played both right-side up and mirrored
upside-down (if “mod” was mirrored upside-down, it
would look like “pow”). Both versions of music are
different and equally beautiful, the same way molecules can have
different properties when their atoms are positioned in a mirror
image. Bach may not have known math or molecules, but his musical
games hail from the spirit of South Campus. Scientist Carl Sagan
decided putting Bach’s music into a space capsule would
constitute showing off to aliens if they ever found it.
With interdisciplinary studies emerging, the arts and sciences
will no longer needlessly be divided at birth. They should be the
brothers they once were. Chaos mathematics presents a nice place
where that’s happening.
It produces fractals, swirling images that look like abstract
tree branches on crack. With visuals this attractive, science is
becoming artsy (yes, there is hope for South Campus yet).
In 1972, meteorologist Edward Lorenz coined the Butterfly
Effect, where a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil can set off
a tornado in Texas. This is based on chaos math, where very simple
equations produce chaotic results based on the “initial
conditions,” in this case, the butterfly’s flapping.
However, 20 years earlier, Ray Bradbury had already written a short
story “A Sound of Thunder,” where a prehistoric
butterfly’s death affects the outcome of a modern
presidential election. Coincidences between what science discovers
and what art intuits is no mistake; they’re signs of a
culture’s intellectual health.
Ho’s North Campus Avenger column runs Mondays.