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. . . A number of years ago,
1966 as a matter of fact,
there was a panel at Columbia University on the secrets of life. Now I
don’t want you to think that this title in any sense is to be taken as
one of these light journalistic affairs. It wasn’t. It was a very heavy
conference indeed, and it involved a biologist and a mathematician and
a philosopher and a physicist, all very eminent
men. . . . This is a newspaper
report. . . . Let me quote the
newspaper. . . . “The biologist’s pique
turned to pleasure as the panel gamboled for nearly fifteen minutes with
the musical analogy. The chairman inspired this excursion when he read
a quotation. It proposed that to seek physical and chemical explanations
of life as a final goal of biology was like hoping that a logical analysis
could provide the explanation of a Bartok quintet. The physicist said that
he was not so sure of the absurdity of that proposition.
‘Not at all,’
he said, ‘because we’ve all heard of the new music being
composed right
out of the analysis and being built up in this way.’
‘Oh boy!’ the mathematician
broke in. ‘Have you heard it?’ ”.
. . . . I’d like to think of what would happen if I as a musician were under the same circumstances, at a serious panel, and said, “Boy! Have you seen this stuff they call modern mathematics? You know it has no numbers or anything, just words like homotopy and omalogy—oh boy!”
Milton Babbitt
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