From the Cheesegrater to the Parthenon: A Musical Odyssey
Terry Trickett

Proceedings of Bridges 2018: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture
Pages 309–316
Regular Papers

Abstract

The close relationship that can exist between architecture and music was brought home to me, recently, by one particular building in the City of London. Its architects had not set out to produce architecture with a musical agenda but music can happen anyway when a building generates its own harmony, pattern, discord, repetition and silence. These were the qualities I found in the Leadenhall Building (known colloquially as the ‘Cheesegrater’) which prompted me to produce a piece of Visual Music linking the two art forms. The result, Citirama, enables me to formulate a considered view on how music and architecture can be found to coexist: how our understanding of the concept of space/time can bring an art form concerned primarily in mapping sound in time closer to a form focused on what we experience in moving through space. For a building to elicit an emotional response a chord needs to be struck inside us that delivers an inner sense of harmony. Such an experience is rare even though the synchronicity that exists between architecture and music, underpinned by mathematics and the laws of physics, was discovered long ago by the Ancient Greeks.

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