I've heard that very mathematically inclined people love

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

>>8539985
It's a meme.
Like the Euler equation.

>>8539985
>>8540061
is right, it's all a meme.

>>8539985
Bach thought he was the Newton of music. Which is hilarious because music doesn't affect life the same way that math does.

>>8540052
This is pretty interesting. thanks m8

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>>8539985
It's definitely a meme, but there are some things that makes Bach a musical mathematician.

Primarily, he was the master of fugue writing. Think of your favorite melody, and try playing two copies of it at once, staggered. Then four. Then six. Now try improvising it on a keyboard. This is not easy. Today's music is 'horizontal,' a simple repeating chord progression and some kind of melody on top. Bach composes on both vertical and horizontal axes, meaning that all of the woven melodies combined must also have musically coherent chord pairs, kind of like Sudoku. No composer before or after him has been able to better Bach in this form.

Besides this, there are a few other notable examples such as the Fourteen Canons on the Goldberg Ground, which are a series of musical puzzles he composed after the Goldberg Variations on the back of his copy of the manuscript. He basically writes a short simple canon, let's say in three parts, and then writes a quaint caption like "Double Canon over said fundamental notes. (in five parts)" and expects you to invert the voices, quintuple them, and play them staggered from a denoted start symbol. Fun fact: he's holding one of those canons in that portrait

>>8540136
fucking A+ post, dude. Hiw was he capable of improvising fugues? he must've been a near-genius, right?

>>8540250
No; he was very much a genius.

>>8540250
fugue was already an established musical form/technique. Bach just happened to be the greatest composer ever. some of Beethoven's fugues are up there too

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>>8540250
I won't sugarcoat it, many musicians in his time were able to improvise fugues, but from all accounts Bach was able to improvise the most complex fugues; this is actually what got him famous at the time.

There is a relevant story of when Bach went to Potsdam, the Prussian capital, to visit one of his sons for the birth of his grandson. When Fredrick the Great got news that the great improviser Bach was in town, he summoned him to his palace.

Something you should know about Bach- he was known to be quite stubborn, stern, untrusting of authority- there's even a rumor he stabbed a bassoonist for speaking badly of him behind his back.

Bach arrives, probably reluctant, tired from his carriage journey to Potsdam. The King has him try his newly purchased Forte-Piano, the precursor to the modern piano. He asks Bach for his opinion, but Bach wasn't impressed. The King, annoyed at Bach's remark, presents Bach with a theme. Not just any theme, but a theme crafted to be basically fugue proof. He then asks Bach to improvise a fugue in three parts with that theme. He does, and so the indignant King asks him to do it not in four- but six parts. The tired Bach respectfully denies, but improvises a six part fugue with a theme of his choice.

Bach home, however, Bach started writing that fugue, and then did a complete overkill and wrote an entire suite of works inspired by the King's royal theme. He called it the "Musical Offering," and mailed it to Potsdam. It was found unopened years later in the Kings palace.