Conceptualizing Diatonicity
The School of Music's 2015 William Poland Lecture features guest speaker Dr. Thomas Noll, whose presentation is entitled “Conceptualizing Diatonicity,” engaging the history of theory and the structure of concepts, as well as mathematical music theory. “A ramified network of concepts around the diatonic scale and its substructures has its anchors in more than two millennia of music-theoretical thought. One might suspect that the attempt to assemble these concepts systematically in a unified framework would lead to an overly intricate and unproductive eclecticism. But quite surprisingly this is not the case. Mathematical methods help to detect logical cross-connections between seemingly remote concepts and motivate new questions concerning their constitutive role in analytical levels of description such as harmony, voice leading, and counterpoint.”
Dr. Thomas Noll (Germany, Spain) is a leading researcher in mathematical music theory, on the faculty of Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya in Barcelona. In addition to his PhD from Technische Universität Berlin, he holds degrees in mathematics and semiotics. His 1995 dissertation, Morphologische Grundlagen der abendländlischen Harmonik was subsequently published, followed by over 50 journal articles and book chapters. Co-editor of the Journal of Mathematics and Music from 2006–2012, and founding member of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music, he co-authored several articles with David Clampitt, including one that received the Society for Music Theory 2013 Outstanding Publication Award.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
