Anthony “Tony” Atienza’s career spanning almost 30 years also includes directorial credits for musical productions, such as Grease, The Rocky Horror Show, and The Wiz. In addition to these credits, Tony Atienza was also a music teacher in California.
For students, music can be an outlet to get through the tedium of academics, and for years, many have connected a student’s participation in music with their math achievement. However, this connection has its foundation on a central principle established centuries ago by Pythagoras.
Pythagoras set the foundation for making the correlation between music and math. Anyone who has taken a math class is familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem, which postulated a (square) + b (square) = c (square) with each variable representing the side of a triangle.
A 1982 New York Times article, however, made the connection between ratios created when drawing lines within a triangle with intervals found in music. Referred to as the “golden ratio” or the “golden triangle,” a line divides the section to become a ratio, and this is repeated. What is left is an infinite series of ratios within the golden triangle.
This intervallic structure has appeared in the music of great composers. These themes or intervals are thought to be expressed in Bach’s fugues and Beethoven’s sonatas. However, composer Bela Bartok is probably the most obvious example of the way the golden triangle was used in music. The same article states that Bartok simply used ratios within the golden triangle to mark divisions and subdivisions, in essence, to set up a musical structure.
Tony Atienza 