![]() ![]() "Everything is math when you get down to it. That didn't stop a group of scientists at Yale University in the 1970s, among them Willie Ruff, a jazz musician and musicologist, from turning Kepler's inaudible planetary calculations into sound using computer synthesis. "Finally, he realized the idea was wrong." I dare say that 30 years of his short life were wasted, searching for the orbit of the planets in musical laws of harmony," Maor says. The idea influenced science "negatively," says Maor, for a few thousand years, right up until the astronomers Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei came along. "And from that he made this huge leap of faith to say that the whole universe ran according to these simple numbers," says Maor. Read more: In-App Purchases: a mobile app developer's key to 'consumer lock-in' Pythagoras and his followers believed numbers ruled the universe Image: Public Domain He found that if you divide a string by a ratio of 2:1, 3:2 or 4:3, and pluck the string, as you would on a guitar or violin, the resulting notes have a "harmonious relationship." They are in consonance. As a result, little or no written records survived.īut we do know that Pythagoras experimented with vibrating strings. They swore to keep their discussions secret. "Music was ranked equal to science and they used it to explain the orbits of the planets and stars." They looked at the cosmos as a single "unity of music, astronomy, geometry and number theory, which they called arithmetic," says Maor. Led in large part by Pythagoras, their motto, as it were, was "numbers rule the universe." Eli Maor, professor of history of mathematics and life-long music lover Image: Privat The ancient Greeks were the first "real mathematicians," says Eli Maor, a retired professor of the history of mathematics and author of Music by the Numbers. Also presented at Music Theory Midwest’s 26th annual conference, Oakland University, MI (2015), honorable mention for the Arthur J.Call it human, a natural instinct - our species is desperate to understand and control nature, if not the entire universe. I take this in-depth look at the Fancy Free variations to illustrate how choreo-musical analysis can enrich our understanding of the synergy of music and movement. The third movement is the most metrically straightforward and the choreography matches effortlessly with the main motives, providing a slick characterization for the group’s suave leader. I illustrate how the choreography can confirm or contradict the waltz topic, portraying the sailor’s unassuming playfulness. I focus on the second variation, which while titled “Waltz” is not in a pure triple meter. The energetic first variation features the acrobatic, gregarious sailor, and the tension between choreographic and musical phrases depicts a man of vigor. Building on recent discussions by music theorists and dance scholars, my analysis aligns the dance steps alongside musical analysis to see how they inform each other, paying close attention to choreographic and musical accents. The placement and repetition of rhythmic and choreographic phrases distinguish the personalities of each sailor. I argue that the complementary metric and rhythmic choices create unique characterizations for each of the three sailors’ solo variations in the sixth movement. This paper presents a choreomusical analysis of the ballet exploring the intertwining relationships between music and dance. The ballet Fancy Free premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1944, marking the beginning of the creative collaboration between composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins.
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