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Music and Numbers, Part II
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Event Series:
The Quintessence of Music
April 6, 2022 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm CEST
Watch the recording
a webinar produced, presented, and performed by
Dr Donna Coleman
Streaming from Studio OutBach® Santa Fe, situated in the heart of the deep Indigenous history of Native New Mexico, from ancient Paleoindians to Keres- and Tanoan-speaking peoples who were raided by the Comanches.
Wednesday April 6
9:00am PDT | 12:00pm EDT | 5:00pm BST | 6:00pm CEST
Thursday April 7 at 2:00am AEST (Australia)
“What is above is as what is below.”
The Book of Thoth
This session will continue the journey we began in Music and Numbers, Part I. Having embarked upon the landscape comprised of dissonant intervals and avoidance of tonality, we will explore the music of composers working with the so-called Twelve-Tone System: Riccardo Malipiero, Anton Webern, and Luigi Dallapiccola, for whom numbers provided the pathway to their idiosyncratic musical languages. We will begin by considering the way interval relationships in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sinfonia in F minor create what we know as consonance and compare it to Riccardo Malipiero’s (1914 Milan – 2003 Milan) Invenzione #7, a dissonant work that is modelled upon it. Dr Coleman will demonstrate the way Webern created 144 possible versions of his twelve-tone row using the Magic Square.
Repertory to be explored on this leg of the Quintessence of Music journey:
Johann Sebastian Bach: Sinfonia in F minor, BWV 795 (1723)
Riccardo Malipiero: Invenzioni, No. 7 (1949)
Anton Webern: Variationen für Klavier, opus 27 (1936)
Luigi Dallapiccola: Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera (1952)
The discussion will also dwell upon traditional number attributes, delving back to the Sephiroth of the ancient Qabalah, the significance of the ten numbers assigned to the branches of the Tree of Life, its seven planes, twenty-two intersections, and the hermetic adaptation of these into the Tarot. As always, we will look for the meaning behind all of these inter-related manifestations of the Ethereal Universe.
On Wednesday April 6, Donna will open our monthly monthly musical and philosophical journey with a presentation and followed by discussion and Q&A.
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO EVERYONE!
Join our Zoom meeting via the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83082713624
If you would like to participate, have any questions or need any help just contact Eleanor Peat: eleanor@paricenter.com
Suggested Reading
- Crowley, Alistair. The Book of Thoth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians, Being the Equinox Volume III No. V. Newburyport MA: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1974. https://echoesofegypt.peabody.yale.edu/egyptosophy/fragments-book-thoth
- ———. Crowley Thoth Tarot Deck. http://www.thule-italia.net/esoterismo/Aleister%20Crowley/Crowley%20Thoth%20Tarot%20Deck.pdf
- Morris, Robert. Mathematics and the Twelve-Tone System. https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/229011/mod_resource/content/1/Mathematics%20and%20the%20Twelve-Tone%20System%20(Morris%202007).pdf
- Papus. The Tarot of the Bohemians. https://www.labirintoermetico.com/02tarocchi/papus_the_tarot_of_the_bohemians.pdf
- Tufts University Faculty (unnamed). Twelve-Tone Technique: A Primer. https://sites.tufts.edu/markdevoto/files/2015/10/12TonePrimer.pdf
Donna Coleman is a multi-award-winning concert pianist, recording artist, author, performance researcher and philosopher, and master teacher whose career spans a half-century, of which more than half has been based in Australia. She is also an accomplished weaver and photographer and an amateur but passionate astronomer and archaeologist with a keen interest in the culture of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the United States. As Head of Keyboard and of Postgraduate Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, she convened weekly thought-provoking seminars that explored relationships between music and other disciplines. Donna is writing a book entitled Dancing with the Piano, a collection of essays distilled from these sessions and from her many years of phenomenological engagement with her ultimate dance partner, the piano.