Pythagorean Dreams

Steven Lubin

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Music at Reed College.

Mr. Lubin is Distinguished Professor at the College at Purchase, State University of New York. He studied philosophy at Harvard, piano at the Juilliard School, and earned a Ph.D. in musicology at New York University, writing a dissertation on Beethoven's music. In addition to his wide-ranging career as a performer on the modern piano, he has been one of the pioneers of performance on today's reproductions of the fortepiano, the instrument on which Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert played. in 1987 he was chosen as soloist by the Decca label to record all the Beethoven piano concertos with Christopher Hogwood and the Academy of Ancient Music; among the praise lavished by critics on the series of recordings was the judgment of a German music journal--"phenomenal." Mr. Lubin describes his lecture as tracing certain perennial themes involving music and mathematics down through Western history.