Three-Part Invention

[Erik]

This was the first dialog in the book.

It acts as a great transition in to the first chapter from the introduction. If the book were a play, this would be a great distraction during a set change.

Just about every noun seems to be a symbol, so I'm sure I didn't get all the meaning involved.

I liked the comment about "not having time for Beauty". It was particularily ironic, since we just finished "Beautiful Code".

[Steph]

This 3-part invention and the next chapter Mu-Puzzle have made me become a “ricercar” through Hofstadter’s landscape of ideas. A ricercar is a musical form of the Italian Renaissance. It means “exploring” and the musical form takes a motif and then plays with it in different voices and with different voice accompaniments. The version I played were written for the Lute and that is the instrument on which I played. Another development of the ricercar was the Fantasy or Fantasia. This form had a longer form of melodic idea that was explored in the same ways described by Hofstadter about Bach and the fugue. Over the Renaissance and the Baroque periods the ricercar – fantasy evolved into its highest form, the fugue. And no one wrote more intriguing fugues than Bach.

So the landscape we start exploring contains ‘strange loops’, formal systems, and prescient, Achaean characters. Since this is just the start of the book I can only ask one question about what will develop later on…

The half-way step puzzle of Zeno: is it the first voice in an endlessly rising canon?