Giorgio vitali interviews Ingrid Carbone on Famiglia Cristiana magazine, upon the link between music and mathematics.
Sacred and profane. Mathematics and music. Pure speculation and emotions. Ingrid Carbone, an award-winning pianist from Cosenza, but also a professor of Mathematics at the University of Calabria, talks about all this. And the relationship between mathematics and music, as we know, is a millenary relationship: especially if we consider music as the harmony of the spheres descending to earth. But for Ingrid Carbone both areas are a stimulus for questions, answers, emotions and knowledge.
“I started playing the piano when my parents gave me one in the fourth grade. They weren’t musicians, even though my mother was a music lover. Then I got my GPA at the Conservatory. I passed the exam for the eighth year when I did my scientific high school diploma.”
Ingrid simultaneously developed her passion for mathematics, graduating at 21. It comes naturally to ask her what kind of relationships bind the two interests, which are very demanding among other things: «Of course, the relationship between mathematics and music has always been there, and it would be enough to cite Bach. And part of today’s music is a form of search for formulas: but I don’t have the inclination and the impression is that they are intellectual constructions. I would say above all that a musician is a researcher of music, a mathematician is an investigator of the beyond. But in both cases they are tools to get to know and get to know each other. For example, as regards academic activity, I deal with research and teaching, but in teaching I don’t want to depersonalize the contents. So mathematics is a starting point for expressing myself on current events, on values, on the doubts that must animate young people who are convinced that they only have certainties. Just as in music I look for answers: and I find them in the transition from playing, that is, from learning a piece technically, to interpreting, that is, making it my own.” Is it from this dual experience that your concert-conversations arise? “Yes, they arise precisely from my teaching activity: I discovered the pleasure of speaking to the public, of making known what I am about to play, not limiting myself to a didactic, historical vision.”
