Gematria
Gematria 101
In modern times we have one set of characters to form numbers (the digits ‘0’ through ‘9’) and another set for letters to form words (the alphabet ‘A’ through ‘Z’). In ancient Greek and Hebrew and other ancient languages this was not so – the letters of their alphabet were used for both numbers and words. So their numbers looked like weird words, and their words looked like weird numbers. Regardless, every word had a numeric value, and the ancients put this to use: the name ‘Apollo’ has the numeric value of 1061, and Zeus 612 – funny how these are two dimensions of the Parthenon.
This idea that the numeric value of an ancient word has significance (because the letters are also numbers) is called ‘gematria’ (geh-MAY-tree-uh). Gematria was rather popular in the ancient world. This included the early Christians, and gematria arguably appears in the New Testament. For example, the Book of Revelation says that the number of ‘The Beast’ is 666 – which also happens to be the gematria value of ‘Nero’. (Hmm…) Interestingly, the gematria value of ‘Jesus’ is 888. (Hmm…). And gematria shows up in Church history over the millennia as a fringe but recurring idea – some have even suggested that gematria explains the dimensions of European cathedrals. (Hmm…)
In essence gematria provides a way of relating numbers and words. Various encoding systems have been proposed for relating numbers and musical notes, but none I've found results in useful musical phrases (that is, musical phrases that remotely lend themselves to common Western music practice). So I've invented/discovered a system that works rather well IMHO, which I call 'musical gematria'. See my book Musical Gematria.
Gematria particularly came into its own with Medieval Jewish Mysticism, in which the numeric values of the names of God (for example) were used as a tools for spiritual insight.
Musical Gematria
Gematria is a way of relating words/letters and numbers. Over the centuries, various encoding systems have been proposed for relating words and musical notes. For example, here's a chart for translating the letters of the alphabet to musical notes and durations:
This isn't very musically interesting or pleasing to me. Surely there has to be another way.
First, I'm thinking that mapping musical notes to numbers is promising and might be more natural. And since with gematria we have a tried and true method for mapping numbers to letters, potentially we could map music to numbers, and map music to words/letters by means of intermediary numbers:
Music notes ⇔ Numbers ⇔ Text/letters
Part of the problem, methinks, is that we naturally think in base 10. But, for example, the standard scales like major and minor have seven notes. What would happen if we used base 7?
Using Greek gematria for Πυθαγόρας (Pythagoras) we get the value 864 base 10. Which is 2343 base 7. Let's use the obvious major scale mapping below (sometimes we need '0', so start there). Since we're using base 7, we map the digits '0' through '6' to the 7 notes of the scale:
With this approach, Πυθαγόρας (Pythagoras), maps to 2343 base 7, giving us the note sequence '2', '3', '4', '3':
This is musically useful.
Generally speaking, ne need not limit oneself to base 7. Indeed, choose the number base that makes the most sense for the musical purpose at hand. If you're playing with four beats to a bar, for example, you might want to use base 4.
Beyond musical gematria, I've found that approaches that try to generate complete music don't turn out to be very human-musical. The approach that works best for me is to let ideas like Musical Gematria generate musical fragments, then let my human skill work with them to make human music.
For more information, see my book Musical Gematria.