My format below is:
passage location,
chapter title (which in the book is the name of the song Hornby discusses, which is somewhat superfluous to my tagging it as much as they act as simple starting points in Hornby’s musings),
quote,
and why I tagged it.
Page 16
A review in tabs: Nick Hornby’s Songbook
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2 Responses to “A review in tabs: Nick Hornby’s Songbook”
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The quote about solving a piece of music is really interesting. A while ago (I couldn’t find it anywhere) there was a CBC show on music and math (it may have been on IDEAS). They talked about all the interesting math sort of things that show up in music. It’s pretty easy to translate music to numbers – you can quantify beats and frequencies as actual numerical quantities – and then all sorts of things show up. Apparently Beethoven used the golden ration (1.618) throughout his pieces. There is also some relation between pythagorem and the (octave?) scale. I am sure there are tons of other examples.
The other idea they brought up was this quote by Leibniz (one of the guys resp. for calculus):
Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting. ~Gottfried Leibniz -
To answer one quote with another, a favorite line of mine was always Veda Hille’s
“Things are more beautiful when they’re obscure.”
It’s the same reason that the book is always better than the movie. When room is left for imagination, the mind fills in with its own suggestions of magnificence, and they’re usually better than anything concrete. Songs which leave space like that are songs we often want to ‘solve’: What is the story? What does the artist mean? Personally, I love the bliss of half-knowing.
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