Tom Lehrer Quotes

Music assists him in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion.

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

At its heart, music is all higher mathematics.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

Music is really, really mathematical.

Music is what mathematics does on a Saturday night.

Music is a science, in many ways it's mathematical.

Math and music are intimately related. Not necessarily on a conscious level, but sure.

There are only 3 colors, 10 digits, and 7 notes; its what we do with them that's important.

I could stop and say, Well that was a D minor, G seven, but I really don't want to know that. I just want to know that there's a combination of notes that makes a sound.

There are only twelve tones and they need to be treated carefully.

Music is science more than art, and it is the main code of the universe.

A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.

Music is geometry in time.

You can study orchestration, you can study harmony and theory and everything else, but melodies come straight from God.

My course is about really working on a sheet of music. You work out the chords, which note complements the other, and how they will make the feeling of tension, the feeling of resolution. It's all about harmonization. That's more of the theory of notation and everything rather than practical. I don't play any instrument.

Music is quite an enigma because it is many things together, and it is one whole body. Like a nucleus, it contains every idea, but the basic stand is the same.

Music has a lot in com­mon with math­e­mat­ics. But in music, two and two need not make four: they add up to what­ever you wish.

I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way.

Music is a discipline, and a mistress of order and good manners, she makes the people milder and gentler, more moral and more reasonable.

I've been playing piano my whole life but I'd never tried to understand how compositions are made really. Try to imagine if you'd loved paintings your whole life but had never painted one. My aspiration now is just to understand. I don't have professional pretensions. I've learned so much. So many things I've been doing in the visual, two-dimensional painting world parallel many of the inner working of music - how intervals resolve into each other, harmonic rhythm, tonal things - there's a whole vocabulary that overlaps. Sometimes people see pianos in my works - that I never think.

I'm into scales right now.