Where math and music share common denominator
Christopher Taylor’s interest in and aptitude for music and math had been established definitively by age 7. (Photo: Jeff Miller)
According to Christopher Taylor, internationally renowned concert pianist, sometime mathematician and newly appointed assistant professor of piano performance, rigorous intellectual analysis is the heart of both disciplines.
He explains this notion by describing a Möbius strip, “a shape like a piece of paper twisted and stapled together at its two ends. If you were to take a pen and trace a line along one side of the twisted, stapled paper, you’d discover that when you finished, the line you started drawing on one side is now on the other side of the paper,” he says. “The behavior of the Möbius strip defies what we would come to expect from our usual three dimensions — the shape has its own internal logic.”
Wresting order and meaning from such apparent chaos has fascinated Taylor since childhood. His interest in and aptitude for music and math had been established definitively by age 7.
Three years later he made his concert debut at a music teachers’ conference in his hometown of Boulder, Colo. Taylor performed one of his own compositions, “Thunderstorm,” a 10-minute piece he says reflected his early fascination with the style of Beethoven.
Taylor followed a bachelor’s degree cum laude in mathematics from Harvard in 1992 with a master’s earned in 1999 from the New England Conservatory of Music.
During these years, his concert appearances astounded audiences from Korea to Spain to the Philippines to the Caribbean to France. American performance venues have included Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York, and the Kennedy Center in Washington, among others.
He recently toured with the Polish Chamber Philharmonic and has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Pops, and the Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis and Houston symphonies, and others.
Taylor has won many prestigious music awards and last year was named an American Pianists’ Association Fellow.
If his performance achievements were not enough cause for envy, Taylor modestly reveals his ability to memorize complex pieces of music — Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Messiaen among them — while traveling, piano-free, on short domestic flights. These feats are possible and repeatable, he says, because he carefully has studied the music’s innards.
“You understand the music’s internal logic, how it was put together, what Bach was thinking when he wrote the “Concerto in D minor,'” Taylor says. “When beginning students first start to memorize a piece, they often are remembering where their fingers go next — it’s pretty frightening if you have a memory lapse. But if you know how the composer constructed the music, you have much better sense of it and can reason your way through if your mind freezes,” he says.
One of Taylor’s students, Joanna Yi, is following Taylor’s own academic science-art path. This semester she is finishing her junior year majoring in pharmacology and toxicology and says she is serious about pursuing her piano studies. She calls Taylor an inspiration, adding that she treasures his guidance all the more in light of the route he took to get here.
“Because he was able to keep up with piano while getting a degree in math, he shows me that I can keep up with my piano while majoring in science,” she says.
At the moment, Yi is working on her technique and musicality, following Taylor’s technique of deconstructing the music note by note, phrase by phrase.
“When you first become acquainted with someone like Bach, you’re overwhelmed by a sea of sixteenth notes,” Taylor says. “How do you come to terms with them, let alone tell a story to an audience? But if you know how the piece was put together, you can identify where the cadences are, what harmonies are surprising and which ones are expected, what themes recur and which ideas have special dramatic significance. That all affects your performance and ability to tell the story. Maybe the audience won’t understand it exactly, but they can respond to it.”
Indeed, critics around the world have responded enthusiastically to Taylor’s lucid interpretations; he has been celebrated equally for the passion and intensity he brings to his playing. According to Taylor, however, emotional depth and richness spring from intellectual understanding, not the other way around.
“Without doubt, music appeals to people on a visceral, fundamental level in the chemistry of the brain, and a lot of teachers and performers rely on that intuitive aspect alone to communicate musically. I think there has to be something more as well. There needs to be a certain knowledge behind the emotion,” he says. “I hope to not only help my students play more convincingly, but to impart an appreciation for the complexities and boundless possibilities of their art.”
Taylor’s next concert will be April 9 at 7:30 p.m. in Mosse Humanities Building’s Morphy Hall. Information: 263-1900.