Generalising Euler’s Tonnetz
3 PM, 17 Oct 2025
Konstanze Rietsch explores Euler’s Tonnetz through the lens of modern geometry, revealing new links between music, symmetry and harmony.
In 1739, Euler devised the Tonnetz, a lattice to visualise harmonic relations in music. In this talk, Prof. Konstanze Rietsch revisits Euler’s Tonnetz from a modern point of view, exploring Tonnetze on tiled surfaces. She presents examples on triangulated tori related to crystallographic reflection groups, as well as a diatonic case tied to finite geometry, yielding elegant new visualisations of chord progressions.
Konstanze Rietsch is a professor at King’s College London. She works on the geometry of flag varieties and is also interested in total positivity, a theory that allows many geometric objects occurring in Lie theory to be defined, in some sense, over the positive real numbers.















