Seeing is Believing at Shepherd School’s ‘Chaos’ Event

Seeing is Believing at Shepherd School’s ‘Chaos’ Event

BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff

Those who attend a special Shepherd School of Music event Feb. 12 will not just hear music. They will see it.

Inside Stude Concert Hall, audience members will experience a blending of mathematics and music as they view fractal images that suggest musical designs. These images, which will be projected on a large screen, are generated from recent findings and techniques in chaos research.

Throughout the unique presentation, audience members will hear electrifying works by some of the world’s great composers, performed by the Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra, a German pianist and others, and gain insight into how we experience music, while a German expert in the fields of chaos research and fractal geometry provides commentary.

This special presentation on the relationship between visual and auditory patterns is titled “Chaos and Order.” The Shepherd School of Music is presenting the event in association with Germany’s University of Bremen and the Goethe Institute. The 7:30 p.m. event is free and open to the public.

Heinz-Otto Peitgen, professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Bremen, will moderate the event with narration and commentary. Peitgen has done pioneering work in chaos research and fractal geometry. His award-winning books have contributed to a greater public understanding of fractal geometry.

During the musical event, audience members will view computer-generated fractal images. Research into music’s complex set of vibrations through technology and analytical theory yields a deeper understanding of how listeners experience music.

Michael Hammond, dean of the Shepherd School of Music, believes it will be “an evening that will delight and inform” audience members, “whatever their basic interests and provide insights into the whole process of music making.”

Music will be performed by the Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra, directed by Larry Rachleff; pianist Volker Banfield of Hamburg, Germany, and percussionist Nathan Davis, a Shepherd School graduate.

The musical program will include “The Depiction of Chaos” from “The Creation” by Haydn, movement III from “Phases” by Risset, “Etudes” by Ligeti and “Rebonds” by Xenakis and music of Messiaen and Debussy.

Hammond says that a connection between math and music has existed for a very long time, dating back to Pythagorean philosophy.

Noting that the music of every period in human history not only reflects the social thoughts of the time but also the scientific thinking, Hammond says that the presentation will focus on recent discoveries in chaos theory and fractal geometry and highlight some of the modern composers who have been influenced by these new concepts.

Chaos theory is a developing scientific discipline that is focused on the study of nonlinear systems. Hammond says that chaos theory researchers who have studied designs in nature have observed repeating patterns that exist at various levels of analysis. Such patterns can also be employed to model musical structure, he says.

Fractal geometry, which is described in algorithms, deals with objects in noninteger dimensions, unlike classical Euclidean geometry.

A separate lecture-demonstration on musical design with Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot from the New England Conservatory will begin at 6:30 p.m. in room 1133 of the Shepherd School. During that presentation, Cogan, a composer and theorist, will show spectrographs revealing the sound frequency patterns of complex musical events taken from well-known works.

Spectrographs, Hammond says, “show us how what we hear looks when reduced to frequency distributions of complex sound events.” Escot, a composer and theorist, will speak about the mathematical modeling of musical structures.

A Feb. 16 Shepherd School contemporary music concert will feature works by Cogan and Escot. The 8 p.m. performance in Duncan Recital Hall will include works for voice and tape, for two solo voices, for solo clarinet and more.

For more information on the “Chaos and Order” event call the concert office at (713) 348-4933.