On Thursday, Feb. 19, Colorado College’s Music Department welcomed back Dr. Laura Farré Roazada for a lecture-recital exploring the relationship between mathematics and musical memory at Packard Hall.
Blending performance with research, the evening moved between analytical explanation and live piano demonstrations, with each piece serving not only as a technically difficult performance but also as a case study demonstrating the structural patterns Rozada uses to memorize complex musical pieces.
Rozada, a mathematician and concert pianist, has built her career at the intersection of both disciplines. She earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) before pursuing advanced musical training, where she then completed a master’s degree in Music at the Royal College of Music.
Throughout the evening, Rozada performed classical works such as “I Am a Girl” by Komitas and “Toccata” by Dimitar Nenov, alongside more contemporary repertoire including “The Butterfly Effect” by Ofer Ben-Amots. Each piece’s complex keys shifted between deep and thin tones which reverberated throughout the hall.
During the lecture portion, Rozada challenged the perception that music and mathematics occupy opposite intellectual worlds, saying that “composers since the Middle Ages have been working with mathematics.”
She added that musical memory relies on structural understanding, using concepts of pitch, harmony, rhythm and patterns to enhance performers’ musical understanding rather than memorization alone.
Similar to mathematicians or computer scientists, performers subconsciously use structural, basic, interpretive and technical techniques to memorize lengthy and complex pieces of music.
“For us, it is about asking important questions like what is essential to a piece and what is ornamental and we can go from there,” Rozada said.
To demonstrate the idea, she implored the audience to break down numerical sequences into simpler patterns before gradually rebuilding them, mirroring how musicians simplified long passages.
With symmetry, repetition and variation, Rozada argued that performers could “create mental frameworks that allow them to navigate complex compositions with more confidence, greater connection to the audience and higher levels of spontaneity.”
By the end of the evening, Packard Hall transformed into a space where mathematical equations and musical expression converged. Through complex recital and engaging lecture, the mathematician-pianist illustrated that mathematics and music are not opposing disciplines, but similar fields grounded in pattern, structure and creative interpretation.