Re: Who's better Tom Poore, or this kid?

Raptor wrote:
No - I never studied music in college. For many years, in many
places, I pursued an instrument seriously, but only as an intramural
passion for my own enjoyment. Music is where I have always gone when
I hit dead ends in the rational world.

Maybe you hit dead ends because the world is not rational. :-)

That does not mean I consider music irrational;

It most certainly is irrational and that has been known since Pythagoras. This drives "rational" people nuts. Us "irrational" folks are already NNUTS.

no one who loves the baroque as much as I do believes that.

My personal feeling is Bach knew music was irrational and numbers meant a lot to him and his view of life.

But music does serve as a vehicle for accessing areas
of consciousness which I've never really been able to do by purely
rational means.

I think the words rational and irrational are confusing.

That's just me. I know theoretical physicists for
whom an equation can be a thing of great beauty

Hardy was famous for using the word beauty.

"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics."
-G.H. Hardy

Then, of course there is Albert:

"In the realm of algebra, in which the most gifted mathematicians have been busy for centuries, she discovered methods which have proved of enormous importance... Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. ... In this effort toward logical beauty, spiritual formulas are discovered necessary for deeper penetration into the laws of nature."
-Albert Einstein, in a tribute to Emmy Noether [NYT1935ae]

....and many others...

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in"
Richard Feynman

"One thing that's always astonishing is that, occasionally, one realizes that in mathematics the truth is beautiful."
-Laurent Lafforgue

and I know enough calculus to recognize the difference
between an ugly and an elegant solution.

Elegance is a word lots of computer folks love to use. I think they may be avoiding the word beauty. What I want to know is why does recursion is beautiful to so many yet it can also make us laugh.

As for whether you could have classical guitar without
math, well no - somebody had to identify temperment and fret locations
and some other important relationships in luthery.

Music itself is irrational and we all have adopted this basic irrational Pythagorean system to this day.

I doubt Maestro Segovia, Julian Bream or a host of others
studied much differential calculus or would have been better
artists even if they had.

Who knows? Why would the study of math and science hurt the artist? Does the study of art hurt the scientist? Da Vinci seemed to have no problem studying math, science, music and art. There are so many other examples that one begins to see a myth in this culture about specialization (not Jackson's kind :-)

But knowing what I do about Asian educational systems, I would not be at
all surprised if those kids we keep seeing from China and Taiwan
possess advanced math skills vastly beyond the average conservatory
student in the U.S.

Asian students in the US are doing the same thing. Look at Kit Armstrong:

http://www.geocities.com/kitcarmstrong

This is about as high as it gets for math and music at his age.

They're not necessarily smarter, but as children
they've been put through very rigorous academic training in addition
to their formal educations in music theory and performance.

Kit had good instruction in both music and math but his parents had a lot to do with that.

Here is what I think is at the heart of it:

"Most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are quite ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity."
-G.H. Hardy.


Thanks for responding to this silly question and hope your playing giving you as much satisfaction as mine gives me.
.

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