Greenberg Yoel

In my primary research, I focus on the stylistic changes in eighteenth-century music. It seems nothing connects this subject to mathematics and computers, and until now, anybody who worked in this field used the well-known and practiced methods of historical research and musical analysis. My toolbox enables me, naturally, to combine these methods with other techniques, especially those in the field of data science. Instead of an in-depth analysis of a number of representative musical works, I superficially analyze approximately 1,500 musical pieces. Then I analyzed the received data using statistical analytic tools to identify gradual changes and trends that accumulate into a style exchange. Even conceptually, my research relies on understanding the composition world as a dynamic system that moves between moments of (relative) stability (but never stagnation…) and instability.

When I started applying this approach to my doctoral studies, I was rather isolated. There were some enthusiastic responses to my work, but others felt that the statistical techniques were alien to humanities. Today, perhaps due to the relative availability of big data online and via data analysis and management programs, data-driven research is becoming very popular. Thus, as it happened, the “wrong turn” I took at the beginning of my academic carrier played to my advantage, and I find myself at the forefront of contemporary research.

Another new focus of mine these days connects the perception of musical work from the eighteenth century and the general perception of “things” in the world. Here too, mathematical and scientific thinking are required, for mathematics was used to explain phenomena in the world, and thus, the direction those explanations took reflects the perception of the explained objects. I show how, for example, alongside the rise of the differential mathematics (bringing a sequence of things closer together by breaking them into many lines or small rectangles), there is also a new perception of music, from viewing it as a continuous thing to something that is dismountable. Some of that period’s music composition books, even present combinatorial calculations tools (at the time, fresh out of the workshop!) to calculate how many melodies can be composed using a fixed number of notes—three notes, four, five, and so on.

My research interests include the rise of sonata form from a corpus-based, system theory inspired approach; music and culture post WWI; and musical style recognition in machine learning. I am currently working on a monograph on the evolution of sonata form. In addition to my research activity, and my position as lecturer in the music department in Bar-Ilan University, I am also active as violist with the Carmel Quartet, with whom I present the publicly and critically acclaimed explained concert series, Strings and More.