Dmitri Tymoczko (Princeton) will give a talk in the Digital Humanities Department at 5pm on Wednesday, 19 November, in Embankment Room (MacAdams Building, Strand Campus, King’s College London) for a talk and a Q+A with refreshments. All welcome to join!

Book tickets

The Rules of Music

What are the rules of (Western) music? Not the arbitrary conventions that govern particular styles but the deeper and more general principles leading to musical coherence? Once upon a time, this question had vital cultural significance, as early twentieth-century musicians gradually realized that they had inherited a syntax that was in many ways arbitrary and contingent. Over the next hundred years, many composers and music theorists proposed answers to this question but without much success. My talk will describe recent progress on this question, discussing its relevance to understanding and creating music, both by hand and using computers.

Dmitri Tymoczko (b. 1969, Cambridge, Massachusetts) is a composer and music theorist who teaches at Princeton University. His book A Geometry of Music (Oxford) has been described as “a tour de force” (The Times Literary Supplement), a “monumental achievement” (Music Theory Online), and, potentially, a modern analogue to Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre (The Musical Times). His two CDs, Beat Therapy (“far reaching yet utterly entertaining,” Newmusicbox) and Crackpot Hymnal (“ebullient … polystylistic … kinetic … vividly orchestrated and vibrantly paced,” Sequenza21), are available from Bridge Records. A third CD, Rube Goldberg Variations, will appear in 2017. The author of the first music-theory article ever published by Science magazine, he has received a Rhodes scholarship, a Guggenheim fellowship, and additional prizes from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Tanglewood, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and others. His music, which often draws on jazz and rock, has been performed and commissioned by groups including the Amernet Quartet, the Atlantic Brass Quintet, the Brentano Quartet, the Corigliano Quartet, Flexible Music, Gallicantus, the Gregg Smith Singers, the Illinois Modern Ensemble, Janus Trio, the Kitchener/Waterloo symphony, Network for New Music, Newspeak, Pacifica Quartet, Synergy Vocal Ensemble, Third Coast Percussion Quartet, and Ursula Oppens.