Fine Line Between Mathematics and Music

On Saturday, March 9, the warm glow of the interior of the First Church Congregational was intensified with a superb performance by the Musica Sacra choir. Included among the diverse pieces performed was a choral adaptation of Psalm 23 composed by famed Harvard Professor of Mathematics Noam D. Elkies. Elkies, a campus personality remarkable for the winning combination of his youth and achievements, sat quietly in the second row throughout the performance of his composition, standing only for a few unassuming seconds afterwards to offer the audience a short wave, a little kiss and an understated bow.

Elkies is a man who seeks to move effortlessly between two spheres. While he has been known to teach math’s toughest first-year course, Mathematics 55, he also composes breathtakingly beautiful and complex music. This is a gift he does not take lightly; he pursues music with a vigor equal to that of his academic career. This dedication has seen many of his compositions performed by leading professional music groups in the area within the past several years.

One of these professional performances was the companion piece to Psalm 23, Psalm 90, performed in 1988 and now published by Broude. The texts of both psalms deal with the theme of life after death. Elkies chose to write these pieces after being asked to perform the perfect poetry of Psalm 90 to a rather bland early American musical setting, which he found did not do justice to the verse. While Elkies stresses that for him creating music is more like composing poetry than making quantitative discoveries in mathematics, he admits that his type of composing has “a mathematical flavor” and supposes that his background in math predisposes him “to such procedures.”

To Elkies, art is not mathematical, although he declared in an e-mail, “to be sure, the best mathematics has something of the poetic.” In truth, the best creative works are all imbued with the selfsame essential genius, and Elkies has demonstrated this by achieving great acclaim in two separate areas of creativity.

The connection of math to poetry manifests itself in the effortless way Elkies weaves the theme of the text and the themes of the music together in Psalm 23. At times soft and ethereal, light and melodic, the music then gathers to a roar. The male voices sing the words of the text while the female voices rise in pitch to a height sufficient to portray the magnanimity of divine presence. Elkies’ piece was incredibly moving.

The title of this memorable performance was “20th Century Psalm Settings for Chorus.” Within that program Elkies was nestled among composers as diverse as Charles Ives and Ralph Vaughan Williams, in a program that presented a cross-section of great composers of the 20th century. Elkies was very much deserving of the company.