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Richard Tiegs
| Special to the Iowa City Press-Citizen
Welcome to 2025. Or, as the nerd in me is thinking, 34(52)which is 3 to the fourth power times 5 squared).
It is not common among my musical friends to be this into mathematics. But, I did take three semesters of calculus in undergrad work and several semesters of stats in grad school. I don’t use them enough daily anymore to claim to be the expert.
My interest at one time lay in exploring math, music, and our sister discipline, physics. I enjoyed my physics classes because there was so much math involved. I explored “Acoustics, Light, and Color” in a physics class.
I enjoyed exploring sound waves and how these waves are formed and carried to the ear. And lest you think I intend to bore you with my interest, I have probably forgotten more than I should have in almost 50 years since I took these courses. Several of my music friends and I used to walk into concert halls and test the acoustics. It informed our playing. I no longer do this, to everyone’s delight.
I still geek out on those things that mathematically thrill me. We tune to A440 and on a really good day, I might be able to sing that in full voice. But I thrill more to the musical knowledge that I sing an A220, which it the octave lower, and periodically can eke out a decent A110. I love to hear the string bass and tuba give me a solid A55; but to tell you the truth, I cannot tell if the lowest A is in tune or not. A27-1/2 is hard for me to hear. I chalk it up to old age.
More importantly, I need to understand the overtone systems that knowing these numbers yields. More of the scores I am playing depend on my understanding of the vibrating nodes on my viola and how these nodes affect the sound my audience hears. The harmonics of the A440 will yield me a creditable A880. Between these numbers are other nodes, harmonics, and sounds that will yield strong harmonics or eerie sounds from my viola. In stopping the string and creating new nodes, I get the other sounds that make my instrument sing. Those are the harmonics; regularly, I am shortening the string each time I place my fingers firmly on the fingerboard.
Understanding the overtone system informed my French horn playing when I was younger; the French horn’s overtone system was very forgiving. I use that information today as I teach the bugling merit badge. I still find all that information helpful as I help my students learn their calls and why all the other notes we could play are not present in the calls we have. If I would just invest in a bugle, it might make more sense than learning the calls on a trumpet or trombone.
Tune in next week as we hear about more musical opportunities in our community.
Richard Tiegs coordinates the music column whiles he sings and plays his way through life.
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