Music and mathematics are often said to go hand in hand. Here are three Chartered Accountants who reflect the nexus between the two disciplines. 
 
Story Tony Malkovic  
 
According to legend, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras was the first to make the link between maths and music. The man known as the father of numbers was passing a blacksmith’s shop when he heard hammers striking anvils, and realized they sounded in tune if their masses were in certain mathematical ratios. 
 
Many Chartered Accountants have also discovered a connection between numbers and music – and it’s changing their lives. Amber Lawrence used to work full-time as a Chartered Accountant in inner city Sydney until she decided to follow her dream of being a country singer. 
 
Now, the 20-something songwriter/ guitarist has just released her debut album, is winning praise for her live performances and is playing 25 concerts across Australia in five months. 
 
She says she finds it easy to draw on her maths and Chartered Accounting background in her new career, where’s she’s been charting high on the country music play lists. 
 
“I think so, because as a songwriter, songs are very structured they are formula driven the way they are resolved,” she explains. “In general, most of the songs you hear on the radio and the kind I write are that formula of verse, chorus, bridge, and they’re made up of numbers really, so it all fits.” 
 
Her love of numbers was part of the reason she ended up becoming a Chartered Accountant, having studied commerce at the University of NSW and finding her HR units didn’t quite suit her interests. “I liked the numbers, I liked the hard answers that you got in accounting so I decided at the end of the first year of uni to swap over and become an accountant,” Lawrence says. 
 
“After university, I started off in the graduate program at Qantas. There, I started in financial reporting and then I did auditing, then I worked in treasury for a few years.” Lawrence first realised she had a passionfor performing when she appeared in the musical Calamity Jane in high school. “I was the second lead, I played Katie Brown which is kind of like my story – she’s an aspiring singer who needs a break to become a singer,” recalls Lawrence. 
 
Coincidence  
“I’ve always wanted to be on stage, once I did that thing in Year 11, I decided that’s what I want to do.” 
 
But she put her singing ambitions on hold until after she obtained her accounting degree, and could afford to take singing lessons. And from there, a series of coincidences basically launched her music career. 
 
For instance, she started performing in a Sydney band, the Family Von Trapp. “That was something I did every Friday and Saturday night for three years and that worked in pretty well with a full-time job,” she says. 
 
“I also took up playing guitar and my guitar teacher insisted that I write songs and because I’d basically been listening to country music everything I wrote sounded like a country song. 
 
“It all fell into place and then I met some country musicians and they heard my songs and said ‘Yeah, you’re a country singer’.” Her first single and video – “I’ve Got the Blues” – received widespread radio play, and was a top 20 hit in the Country Music Channel charts. Her second single – “The Lonely Road” – reached number four. Along the way, she’s been touring and playing across Australia, as well as performing in the US and New Zealand. 
 
And last month Lawrence released her first album, The Mile, a collection of 12 songs she either wrote or co-wrote. The music features not only guitars, but also fiddle, mandolin and banjo. 
 
“I’d describe it as very contemporary country,” she says. “The songs are a personal look, not only of my life but of society and where I’m at in life and I think it represents my age group and the way we view life. 
 
“Where I’m at now is just a whole series of rolling coincidences, but that indicates to me that I’m in the right spot. I absolutely love being onstage, that is the main thing for me, being up there and singing my songs. 
 
"The most rewarding thing is when you’re singing a song and someone in the audience is singing along. This is the moment you wait for as a musician, people are actually singing along to your songs. It’s so surreal, but so rewarding.” 
 
Balancing Act  
Music is her life now, but her accounting past is a great asset. 
 
“It helps me when it comes to tax time because you’re basically running a business as a musician. It certainly helps seeing music as a business, not a passion, which is what it is,” she says. “It helps me analyse what I’m doing and how to best make a living out of it.” 
 
And whereas she might have been working with balance sheets as a Chartered Accountant, now she’s balancing her work, music and touring. 
 
“It’s about marketing, it’s about budgeting, it’s about funding an album and touring and promoting – it really is a full time job in some ways. 
 
“A lot of people can outsource that stuff but when you’re starting off, because this is my first album, you’ve got to do so much yourself, and I feel definitely that my business background helps.” 
 
So how hard was it to give up the office with city views for a life of uncertainty living out of hotels? 
 
“It was a difficult decision, because I had the stability of a good job and music is an up and down game,” Lawrence says. “But 
 
I’ve always really realised for me it’s more the ‘what if?’ – getting 10 years down the track and looking out that window with the great view and thinking ‘Geez, I really did want to give singing a go – and now it’s too late’.” 
 
World Music  
Dya Singh personifies the concept of world music. Born in Malaysia to a Sikh family, he trained as a Chartered Accountant in Twickenham, in England, and then moved with his family to Australia. 
 
Once here, the captivating sounds of Aboriginal music, particularly the didgeridoo, inspired him to leave the world of business to form a group specialising in meditational and spiritual music. 
 
The Melbourne-based singer has since been hailed as the greatest living exponent of Sikh traditional music, and the goal of his six-piece group is to take Sikh music to the world. 
 
“I come from a multicultural background, being born in Malaysia,” says Singh. “I had my initiation into music from my father, a musician who knew north Indian/ Punjabi spiritual/folk and classical music. “I was exposed to different forms of music while young – western pop and classical, Indian, west Indian, traditional Malay and Chinese music. 
 
“Maths also came easy to me, so it was quite natural to go into accounting. I could not have been a doctor, for example. There was no natural inclination towards the sciences.” While working as a Chartered Accountant in South Australia, he embarked on a management course with the Australian Institute of Management and also heard the sounds and rhythms that were to change his life. “I met a lecturer who suggested that I should look at the Aboriginal sector so I did a Bachelor of Arts in Aboriginal management,” Singh recalls. 
 
“And I found that the didge – which as far as I’m concerned is a very sacred Aboriginal instrument was the perfect ‘drone’ for my north Indian classical music. We have a drone instrument called the tanbura and the didge was the perfect substitute. 
 
“The didge is actually called ‘yidhaki’. ‘Didgeridoo’ is an Australian or British name, because of the way it sounds.” 
 
Universal  
His world music group – which includes two didgeridoos – is based in Melbourne but he performs around Australia and the world. “Every musician is from a different background, and they add their own embellishments, making our music uniquely universal,” he explains. 
 
“My fellow musicians love playing with me because it allows them to explore their own spirituality, retaining their own core identity and yet complementing my core music. “It is like accounting, the basic rules for accounting are universal, yet each country has its own tax and industrial laws.” He says his mathematical and analytical skills have definitely shaped his music. “My music is about meditation – which means reaching out beyond the limitations of the mind,” says Singh. 
 
“And you cannot travel into the unknown unless you are fully conversant with the known – otherwise the music just becomes noise, a mish-mash without depth and totally meaningless. 
 
“My music is a form of jazz. It has rules but then the joy and exhilaration is in the interpretation of those laws and in some cases bending them. You cannot bend the laws if firstly you do not know them. 
 
“It is like tax. One needs to be fully conversant with tax laws to be able to minimise tax. If you do not know the tax laws well, then you are probably evading tax.” 
 
Satisfaction  
Singh says he’s now swapped the world of accounting for world music, with his time as a Chartered Accountant now helping him to maximise his returns from music. 
 
“I had to step into one vocation, and as time went on it was not hard – there was certainly greater joy and personal satisfaction in music,” Singh says. “All I do now is my own accounts. I also 
 
help my daughters with their returns and the family business as a consultant. Even then we have a firm of accountants to look at the finer details!” 
 
Singh says there is no greater joy than performing. 
 
“The exhilaration, it’s like opium,” he explains. “The audiences are not sure exactly what they are going to get, and neither are we sometimes! 
 
“I guess my idea of spirituality is more akin to what the Dalai Lama has in mind. There’s a sense of freedom. There’s a sense of non-restrained joy and happiness. “I have my own background as a Sikh but I reach out to a mainstream audience, some of whom do not want anything to do with religion or spirituality. By the end of the performance, the audience knows that it has had a spiritual experience because each performance is a spiritual experience to me and my group. 
 
“To me, that is the greatest joy and reward that I can ask for.” 
 
Classical Music 
Every day, Bernie Eastman takes his 200- year-old German-built violin and practices for some 30 minutes. 
 
And when he does, his home studio is filled with the sounds of light classical music, tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan and classic musicals such as My Fair Lady. Music has been a life-long passion for Eastman, who from the age of 23 has performed violin solos for friends and family at social gatherings. 
 
“I come from a musical family and studied piano for a couple of years, before taking up the violin,” says the Perth-based Chartered Accountant and businessman. “I fell in love with the violin when I heard Fritz Kreisler playing one of his wonderful violin pieces. I also came to admire some of the world-class violinists who backed such singers as Bing Crosby.”  
 
In his early 20s, Eastman became a violinist with the WA Arts Orchestra, the major pit orchestra for musical productions in Western Australia. “It was a very good orchestra,” he recalls. “We were the orchestra that accompanied Perth’s Gilbert and Sullivan productions, the ballet, the opera, the musicals. We were the orchestra in thepit, while the main act was onstage.” 
 
But partly at the urging of his parents, he became an accountant, which represented a somewhat more secure career path than the orchestra pit. 
 
Creative Pursuit  
A lifetime of working with figures and playing music has taught Eastman that a creative pursuit such as music can help give you a different perspective on things. 
 
“I was a tax accountant, a tax partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers – or Price Waterhouse then – and you certainly have to be creative to look at various ways that business opportunities can be arranged, structured, funded, all that sort of thing.” Eastman then went on to found the Motorcharge vehicle credit card company in 1980, which was sold 20 years later at a time it was turning over some $350 million annually. He now happily combines his business and musical interests. 
 
Eastman is the head of the musical entertainment company The Eastman Group which he formed to help develop new Australian musical works and stage them around the world. 
 
He also mentors upcoming CEOs as part of a global CEO membership organisation, TEC (The Executive Connection). After some 40 years of playing, Eastman still finds an affinity with his violin and performing. 
 
“When music is in your genes, it’s something you want to do. Music brings joy to many people so as a performer there is a rewarding feeling in playing well, a feeling that you have created something special which people like listening to.” 
 
He says accounting and music might not always be perceived as going together, but he knows of several accountants who sing or play instruments very competently. And he has some advice for those who wish they could but talk themselves out of making an attempt. 
 
“If you feel that you might like to try something musical, give it a go. Take some lessons, if you later decide you don’t wish to continue, the itch will have been scratched with no harm done. I think a lot of people don’t try because they fear failure. That musical have-a-go attitude is very much a part of a strong motivating force with Eastman. 
 
He’s producing three full-scale musicals, one of which is about Nostradamus, the 16th century French seer who still has a cult following because of his prophecies that supposedly heralded many real events over the centuries. 
The project’s been some 10 years in the making (see also Charter’s August 2005 issue). 
 
“Nostradamus is at the stage where the only thing left to do is raise the money and put it on. We did a large-scale workshop in Melbourne last September-October and at the end of it (Tony Award winning producer) John Frost said to me ‘This could be the next big one, just put it on!’.” 
 
But staging a full-scale musical doesn’t come cheaply, and Eastman and his team are looking to maximise the opportunity for commercial success by premiering Nostradamus in London’s West End.