// μ = m // dayvan cowboy // music is math

I’ve been wading through my better posts — the ones that actually “deliver the goods” — and I noticed an important difference between my writing and that of people who appear to be able to succintly convey comparably complex messages. There are two “styles” of storytelling, which I’ve nicknamed the mathematician style and the journalist style.

In a nutshell, the mathematician style is bottom-up and the journalist style is top-down, which means the journalist presents the gist of what’s being said right at the beginning, while the mathematician will demonstrate what he’s trying to say from ideas he assumes you’ll find trivial or obvious. On a blog journal post, that will often prevent the reader from getting his point at all. [The way this post is constructed, it has the journalist style if you read this paragraph or the mathematician style if you strike this one out. Try and start re-reading this post skipping this paragraph.]

A mathematician will always start in familiar territory. If you have basic (calculus, linear algebra, etc.) mathematical training, you can walk into a post-doc lecture on Anosov diffeomorphism in non-ergodic systems and understand the first two or three minutes of it. Much of advanced mathematics relies generalizations of simple structures one has learnt in basic training, and if you’re fluent in Riemann integration you might get an intuitive idea of the Stieltjes integrals the lecturer is drawing on the board. Sure, you’ll get lost soon because you never had the prerequisite knowledge to understand the actual point of the talk.

There are multiple reasons for this phenomenon. A mathematical lecture will often start behind its prerequisites, to get everyone’s brain into “math mode”, to ensure everyone’s in the same starting point — often terminologies vary, and what a brazilian calls a “body” (corpo) is what’s known in english as a “field” — and no one’s thinking of diffeomorphisms in ordinary topology, for example. This is also the way mathematics is done since calculus 101, and it probably trickles up throughout a mathematician’s career. The more important thing, though, is that mathematics is all about deriving the nontrivial from the trivial — which is why the obvious is stated first.

Sim, as obras puramente “organísticas” de Rick Wakeman são fake, são kitsch, são patéticas no seu pseudo-bachiano despido de substância, no seu envergar orgulhoso de uma imagem que não corresponde ã substância. Éo eterno destino do roque de feições clássicas. Não que o erudito impregnado de roque (como a parte menos Broadway de _Jesus Christ Superstar_) ou a mitologia roqueira feita erudito (como em Glenn Branca) não sejam possíveis, mas a absorção de uma capa estética filistino-barroca por roqueiros grandiosos como Rick Wakeman ou Yngwie Malmsteen.

Mas o que o grand-rock faz é destilar a _tensão_ presente na grandiosa música dos mestres e apresentá-la crua, pura, sem a compaixão, a profundidade e a ambição à universalidade destes. As tocatas de Bach são uma consolidação da humanidade total, onde as tocatas de Rick Wakeman são obras de tensão absoluta pela tensão absoluta, esquartejando os ouvintes puxando-lhes as extremidades do corpo.

Wakeman, Malmsteen, Johansson extraem do barroco a tensão pura como os melhores fotógrafos e _fashionistas_ do rock extraem a tensão pura do rock da música, e o fazem _pose_. Éa abstração aristotélica — abstrair é arrancar.

Éisso que faz com que eu, que entendo, sim, a música erudita, que sei cantar as vozes do “Stabat Mater” de Giovanni Pergolesi e sei reconhecer as fugas da _Kunst_ de Bach pelo número, aprecie tanto o grand-rock pretensioso de “Catherine Parr” do Rick Wakeman, “Black Star” do Yngwie Malmsteen ou “Eternity” do Stratovarius.

Um dos temas centrais do aprendizado musical da minha vida é que o fato cultural da música é _além_ do seu valor intrínseco. Uma audição benevolente de “Catherine Parr” do Rick Wakeman revelará isso aos leitores com espírito de experimentação.