A solid reason why musicians need to understand math

“Music is math,” one musician told me. “It’s also about physics. The more you understand both, the more musical possibilities open up to you. Once you see the relationships and ratios inherent in music, you’ll never look at it the same way. And that’s a good thing.”

Open Culture takes a look at this idea by focusing on something known as the “Coltrane circle.”

Physicist and saxophonist Stephon Alexander has argued in his many public lectures and his book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Einstein and John Coltrane had quite a lot in common. Alexander in particular draws our attention to the so-called “Coltrane circle,” which resembles what any musician will recognize as the “Circle of Fifths,” but incorporates Coltrane’s own innovations. Coltrane gave the drawing to saxophonist and professor Yusef Lateef in 1967, who included it in his seminal text, Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Where Lateef, as he writes in his autobiography, sees Coltrane’s music as a “spiritual journey” that “embraced the concerns of a rich tradition of autophysiopsychic music,” Alexander sees “the same geometric principle that motivated Einstein’s” quantum theory.

Neither description seems out of place. Musician and blogger Roel Hollander notes, “Thelonious Monk once said ‘All musicans are subconsciously mathematicians.’ Musicians like John Coltrane though have been very much aware of the mathematics of music and consciously applied it to his works.”

Keep reading, especially if you’re a musician. This could change everything for you. (Thanks to Larry for the link.)