During the long, rather dark and cold winter semester, it is always
pleasant to look forward to the music which is traditionally played in
Germany at Christmas. In the winter semester of 2005 - 6, I had two
different lectures on "Elementary Number Theory". Thus I thought it
would be nice to devote the last lecture before Christmas in each
course to a talk on the numbers in music, together with practical
demonstrations of these numbers on various flutes. Unfortunately, a
proportion of the students in the first lecture were somewhat overly
concerned about the problems of passing the exams at the end of the
semester. I had the feeling that they were impatient about the fact
that a lecture was being "lost" to mere music, rather than training
them to succeed in the exam. The lecture wasn't a success. However it
was well received in the second course where there were far fewer
students, all of whom were well motivated to think about all aspects of
elementary number theory. Thus I have decided to write this lecture up
- in English - in a pdf file, which you can look at here.