Book Notice: Music and Chess: Apollo Meets Caissa
Achilleas Zographos's Music and Chess: Apollo Meets Caissa is a unique chess book - or perhaps it would be better to say that it's a unique book that's partially about chess. The author has a background in both music and chess, and teaches both in Greece. In this book, he tries to show the relationship between the two fields, but the book is more of a grab bag than a unified whole.
Nevertheless, the first main section of the book has a pervasive motif, that of analogy. Chess is like music, in the book's way of seeing things, in its exemplification of analogies to the musical components of time, rhythm, tempo, melody and movement, harmony, texture, structure, and even timbre/color. And both music and chess exhibit complexity, paradox, and humor. It struck me while reading that many of his points didn't necessarily show a deep relationship or affinity between chess and music, but instead resulted from both arts (granting that chess is an art, and not just a game with artistic elements) having highly structured elements. The point is that any field that can be described via a structural catalog can be analogized with chess or music. Writing, for instance, or architecture, both easily fit the bill.
Some of his analogies fit together well, but others were less plausible. For instance, in his discussion on timbre (that feature of a musical sound that makes two different instruments or voices playing the same pitch at the same volume sound different), he offers the following equivalences between chess pieces and musical instruments:
- Pawn - Violin
- Knight - Vibraphone
- Bishop - Trombone
- Rook - Bass drum
- Queen - Harp
- King - Contrabassoon
"Mathematically" certain? Definitely not. Plausible? I'll leave that up to you. He says this: "As stated in the prologue, in the arts there are issues we cannot rationalize but rather perceive them intuitively. This is 100% the case. I was strongly tempted to explain how I have come up with these pairs. On second thought, I would rather not; it is a nice issue for us all to ponder on" (p. 77).
While a case can be made for the preceding comparisons, I think his attempt to draw an analogy between the sonata form and the progression of a chess game is more strained. The sonata form of exposition-development-recapitulation/coda has a much tighter connection than the opening, middlegame and endgame in chess. Sometimes there's a logical thread that carries through the course of a chess game, but this is relatively rare. Many chess games don't even reach an endgame and some don't make it to the middlegame, either. And when a chess game does have a consistent thread, it's generally something static, involving the pawn structure, and not a dynamic element, as in music.
The last "part" of the book turns away from the formal and the abstract and to particular individuals. A (short) chapter on Francois Philidor and Jean Philippe Rameau (both were 18th century French composers) analogies the former's famous line that the pawn is the soul of chess with Rameau's view that the basso continuo played a similar role to harmony. Zographos cites Argentine composer and pianist Juan Maria Solare, who thinks that Philidor's dictum may have been inspired by his music education, which would have included Rameau's Treatise on Harmony. Thus the pawn is the basso continuo of chess, on this understanding!
Further chapters look at analogies between Richard Reti's hypermodernism and atonality in music, Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg's "coalition chess", the love of chess of Sergey Prokofiev, and the Reunion of John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. The remaining personality chapters will be more "natural" to the chess player. Mark Taimanov (two-time world championship candidate and world-class pianist), Vasily Smyslov (former world champion and talented opera singer), Mikhail Tal (former world champion), Vladimir Kramnik (former world champion, and the son of a sculptor and a music teacher), Levon Aronian (world class player and "maniacal" jazz fan).
And on it goes: there are 30 chapters in this fascinating and attractive book, and while I don't think it has the unity the author claims for it, it's an enjoyable book in its episodic way. I wish it well, not only for the book in its own right, but because it's a good thing for publishers to take chances on books that aren't on openings or chess improvement in the narrowest sense. So a tip of the hat to Russell Enterprises for boldly publishing this experimental work.
The publisher's page for the book is here; please have a look, and check out the excerpt as well.