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Tipple, Esther Watson (Mrs. Albert Nelson Tipple), December 11, 1947.
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are most definitely objects of scientific research in the fields of music and sociology. I have often longed for your mind on my mathematical problems. The evolution of the materials of music is so clearly a matter of evolution of human consciousness which, in the 20th century with Debussy and later the atonal concepts, is a subconscious realization of relativity. Actually nothing is lost from the materials of Greek modal melody, Gregorian plainsong, the harmonic consciousness developed in the Renaissance. We are coming to see them in greater relative perceptions. What a wealth is ours if we do not cancel out opposite aspects, but can resolve them by precision processes! I believe the violinists and the a capella singers could amplify the research of technologists in acoustics, but the subtle art of the mathematician is basic. When I received, yesterday, twelve years to a day from the time of my father's death in 1934, the notice of your role in the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, I decided to communicate with you. "Only then shall we find courage" means to me: when each of us is tuned to his own true harmonic series, we shall find points of harmonic union with others similarly tuned by life's experience. In this harmonic-union, by cosmic law there grows a beauty newly created from divine substance. This beauty can only be good. At least, when the harmonic union is truly cyclical, it is of the nature of goodness. My father showed that the process of harmonic-union-creation may take place around an idea which is powerful but a tangential nature. He explained prophetically the rise of the Nazis thus. If you are interested in my geometric diagrams and tables of facts, I shall be pleased to forward the two monographs of data to you. Faithfully yours, Esther Watson Tipple