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Journal of Mathematics and Music. Edited by Thomas Noll and Robert Peck. Taylor and Francis. Triannual. Vol. 1, no. 1 (March 2007). ISSN 1745-9737 (print); ISSN 1745-9745 (online). Print and online (PDF and HTML) format. Access: http://www.informaworld.com/JMM. Subscription or inquiries originating from North America: Taylor and Francis Group Journals, 325 Chestnut Street, Suite 800, Philadelphia, PA 19106. For other countries see: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/ contact.asp. E-mail: [email protected]. $75 individual; $198 institution (print and online), $188 (online only).
The relationship between mathematics and music has fascinated philosophers and musicians for millennia. Pythagoras's mythical discovery that music was "sounding number," and thus a sensible manifestation of the underlying numeric reality of the Pythagorean universe, cast a shadow over centuries of musical thought. Neo-Platonic philosophers like Boethius, operating within the Pythagorean tradition, considered musica nothing less than a branch of mathematics itself (that branch concerned with compared quantities, i.e., wholenumber ratios). The math-music relationship has persisted in various forms since then, waxing and waning with the intellectual tenor of the age. We currently appear to be in a waxing phase: since World War II, many prominent composers and music theorists have turned to mathematics as a means of stimulating musical creation and modeling musical thought. While mathematics may not play as central a role in musical composition today as it did in the postwar heyday of Darmstadt, mathematical music theory has rarely been more active. In the United States, the visionary work of David Lewin has captured the imaginations of many scholars, spawning the musictheoretic subfield of "transformational theory." In Europe, the work of Guerino Mazzola has had a similarly galvanizing effect, stimulating a growing number of European scholars to pursue connections between mathematical category theory and an astonishingly diverse range of musical phenomena.
The present journal arrives perched atop the crest of this wave of burgeoning musicmathematical thought. As...