Mazzola

Guerino Mazzola (Mathematician, Music Theorist, Jazz Pianist; Professor of Creativity, Improvisation, and Mathematical Music Theory, University of Minnesota)

Guerino Mazzola earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Zurich University, where he also qualified as a professor in algebraic geometry with Peter Gabriel and in computational science with Peter Stucki. In 2000, he was given the medal of the Mexican Mathematical Society, and in 2014 he earned Dr honoris causa from the Mexican Universidad de Guadalajara.

He has profiled the European school of mathematical music theory since 1980 and has written six books on the subject, among them The Topos of Music, published by Birkhäuser, and proposed by the American Mathematical Society as the mathematics book of the year 2005. His French book, La vérité du beau dans la musique, is about the philosophy of music and was published in 2007 by Delatour. Mazzola’s approach to music includes sophisticated mathematics of topos theory, but also classical tools from group theory to homotopy theory.

Mazzola has published 24 LPs and CDs as a free jazz pianist and composer, over 20 books and 130 peer reviewed papers in number theory, topology, algebraic geometry, semiotics, music theory, music informatics, art history, computer graphics, cognitive science, and Depth-EEG research. He is the author of two music composition, performance, and analysis software Presto and Rubato. 

His book Flow, Gesture, and Spaces in Free Jazz—Towards a Theory of Collaboration was published in 2009 by Springer and applies mathematical gesture theory to free jazz. His book Musical Performance was published in 2010 by Springer; it is the first comprehensive treatment of performance theory, including philosophical and empirical approaches, qualitative methods from musical ontology, and quantitative methods from differential geometry and their implementation in the performance software rubato. His book Musical Creativity was published in 2011 by Springer; it is co-authored with Joomi Park and Florian Thalmann and describes creativity in a tutorial for students, a theoretical part and a number of advanced case studies. His book Computational Counterpoint Worlds, co-authored with Octavio Agustin and Julien Junod, and his book Computational Musicology in Hindustani Music, co-authored with Soubhik Chakraborty et al.  are published in 2014 by Springer. His next book, The Musical Multiverse of Gestures, to be published in 2016 by Springer, and co-authored with René Guitart et al., will present latest developments in musical gesture theory and its philosophical implications. It is planned as a follow-up to The Topos of Music.

Website — www.encyclospace.org

Youtube channel — www.youtube.com/user/guerinomazzola (includes free jazz performances by Mazzola)