Klarinet Archive - Posting 000448.txt from 1999/02

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.edu>
Subj: [kl] Musical/mathematical interview
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 17:41:14 -0500

Lelia Loban told me something about Bach that I did not know. (That's
not a hard thing to do. I know very little about J.S. Bach.) But
this was a special thing. She suggested that Bach was interested
in Gemytria or the use of the number values obtained by taking the
numeric values of the letters of a word (in Hebrew mostly, but also
possible in Greek, Persian, Arabic, and a few other alphabets) and
calculatings the word's numeric value.

I have taught several classes in the History of Mathematics and a very
popular part of the class deals with Gemytria. Of particular interest
in the biblical reference to the value of "the number of the beast"
which has a gemytria of "666." Mind you, the words "the number of
the beast" don't have that value. It is rather that there is a biblical
reference to some rather unclear thing, and that thing will have a value
of "666."

I kind of gave up on gemytria when Albert Schweitzer's name added up
to 666. And that is one of the problems with gemytria. Given a
particular number value that you are looking for, you can, by slight
changes of spelling of the name involved, produce exactly what you
want. In several cases, there were examples in which the number 666
could only be achieved when one used Greek instead of Hebrew. That is
not dissimilar to lowering the river instead of raising the bridge.

Given a specific word, there is only one gemytria that can be derived
from that word. But given a gemytria, there are thousands of words that
can be invented, found, developed, misspelled, etc. to achieve that sum.

I wonder if Bach knew that. There are lots of things he didn't know,
such as how to write a great passage for bass clarinet!

=======================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
leeson@-----.edu
=======================================

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