John Chalmers’ Letter of Support

John H. Chalmers, Ph.D.
P.O. Box 665
Rancho Santa Fe, CA 92067-0665
(858) 756-3365
Email: jhchalmers@ucsd.edu

 

March 26, 2007

To Whom It May Concern:

For over thirty years, I have been following the pioneering work of Cristiano Forster in musical instrument design and construction as he has painstakingly designed and constructed the ensemble of instruments necessary to embody his highly personal musical concepts. Cris is a gifted composer, a superb engineer of new musical instruments, a scholar of great depth, and the author of a unique book on the practical application of mathematics to the construction of new musical instruments for new 21st Century music.

If I had to choose just a few words to describe Musical Mathematics, they would clarity, explicitness and comprehensiveness. From the first chapters where Cris addresses the problems of the lack of appropriate units of mass and distance in the English System and the necessity for musical engineers to continually juggle several systems of measurement without error to the finally chapters, where his own beautifully designed and crafted instruments are depicted, all the cognitive and mathematical steps are described with such clarity that no beginner should have any difficulty whatever in following the argument and learning the requisite skills to become a competent instrument designer and builder.

Following this general introduction to musical engineering, concrete examples of the acoustics of various sounding bodies, including both wound and unwound strings, pipes open and closed, free and clamped bars and volume resonators are covered in extenso. This kind of information in sufficient detail for the non-physicist to make use of is very difficult to find elsewhere and potential instrument builders will find this section extremely valuable.

Similarly, the chapters on tuning theory are models of exposition. All the difficulties students may have had conceptually and operationally with ratios, logarithms, cents, etc. are identified and clarified in such detail that they are abolished forever.

Cris then reviews the history of musical scales starting with the Ancient Greeks. Greek music theory is amazingly relevant to 21st Century music as the Greeks were not only the first to apply mathematics to music, the tetrachords, scales, and modes they left for us are a fascinating materia musica for contemporary composition. Furthermore, Greek theory forms the basis for much of historical and extant Islamic and Byzantine music as well, so a knowledge of it is essential for understanding this portion of World Music.

Other types of World Music are then discussed in detail, including a very welcome section on Indonesian tunings as they differ greatly, not only from each other, but especially from other ratio or cycle of fifths based traditions. In this case, the use of cents and logarithms is essential but, happily, the reader will be well-familiarized with them from the earlier chapter. This section ends with an introduction of various kinds of equal and linear temperaments, of both historical and contemporary interest.

The remainder of the book is devoted to the documentation of Cris’s instruments, including his own custom string-winding machine. Forster’s artistic sensibilities, as much as his engineering skills, are shown in this section. In a word, his instruments are simply stunning visually, as well as acoustically. There is none of the rough-hewn, amateurish construction of other experimental musicians here. Let his be an example to others.

The book ends with extensive bibliographies and appendices of information for musical instrument designers and builders. Together with the chapters on the acoustics of musical instruments, they form a collection of essential data not easily acquired elsewhere.

It has also been a pleasure to read Cris’s Musical Mathematics, and if I can be of any further assistance in evaluating Forster’s book for publication, please do not hesitate to contact me. Though currently working on the Urey/MOD Mars biomarker detection instrument system as an astrobiologist/prebiotic chemist at the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, I am the founding editor of the journal Xenharmonikôn whose Spring, 1979 issue featured Cris Forster’s instruments, and the author of Divisions of the Tetrachord, a book on the application of Ancient Greek musical concepts to contemporary composition.

Sincerely,

John H. Chalmers, Ph.D.