La Vérité du Beau dans la Musique

This book, written in French, stems from a series of lectures given in 2005 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. According to the author, the French language was chosen because it is ‘la langue de la culture par excellence’. In present times, it certainly is a courageous editorial choice. The opus makes use of the richness and subtleties of the language, with an extensive vocabulary verging on the recherché.1 This might make the reading difficult for non-native readers, but it also does justice to the nuances of the author’s thought. As the course in Paris was purportedly for non-specialists, either in music or in mathematics, this book is far more readable than Mazzola’s magnum opus, The Topos of Music [1], which contains with due rigour all the mathematical tools and theorems of Mazzola’s ‘théorie mathématique de la musique’, together with many of the aesthetic ideas of the present book. More generally, most of the scientific results to be found in this book have already been published during the author’s career, from Geometrie der Töne [2] to The Topos of Music: Geometric Logic of Concepts, Theory, and Performance [1]. This might appear as a flaw to the happy few who have been able to follow Mazzola’s constructions through his tough, technical, previous works: they will know most of the notions of mathematical music theory that are presented here as illustrations of Mazzola’s idea about la vérité du beau, ‘the truth about beauty’ (its title notwithstanding, Mazzola’s theses are much bolder than Hanslick’s in his similarly titled essay [3]). But in accordance with the intended audience, the perspective is entirely different. Although it cannot hurt (not by a long shot) if the reader has some knowledge of mathematics, the math only exemplifies ideas of a philosophical nature, among which the most provocative and intriguing might be those about the relationship between mathematics and perception of beauty in music. Hence the book’s title is fully appropriate to its content; this is no ‘Topos of Music for Dummies’. On the other hand, it might give useful and valuable insights on the importance and power of Mazzola’s theory to those who cannot or will not delve into it [1].