What music did : the story of numerocracy in the West /

"In What Music Did, experimental filmmaker and violinist Tony Conrad explores in depth the relationship between music and mathematics. A work of decades that was left unfinished at the time of his death in 2016, Conrad’s expansive history of the interrelationship of music and mathematics is pub...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Conrad, Tony (Author)
Other Authors: Nickleson, Patrick (Editor)
Format: Book
Language:English
Published: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2026.
Subjects:

MARC

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035 |a (OCoLC)1538462354 
050 4 |a ML3812  |b .C66 2026 
100 1 |a Conrad, Tony.  |e author.  |1 https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJpjjdDj9WdfT7GBWBCmh3 
245 1 0 |a What music did :  |b the story of numerocracy in the West /  |c Tony Conrad ; Edited by Patrick Nickleson. 
264 1 |a Ann Arbor :  |b University of Michigan Press,  |c 2026. 
300 |a xiv, 449 pages :  |b illustrations ;  |c 23 cm 
336 |a text  |b txt  |2 rdacontent 
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338 |a volume  |b nc  |2 rdacarrier 
504 |a Includes bibliographical references (pages 395-441) and index. 
505 0 |a Pythagoras, part 1 -- Pythagoras, part 2 -- Augustine -- The Middle Ages and Renaissance -- Galilei -- Descartes -- Maurice -- Lully/Louis -- Rameau/Rousseau -- Helmholtz. 
520 |a "In What Music Did, experimental filmmaker and violinist Tony Conrad explores in depth the relationship between music and mathematics. A work of decades that was left unfinished at the time of his death in 2016, Conrad’s expansive history of the interrelationship of music and mathematics is published here for the first time. Editor Patrick Nickleson describes Conrad’s method as that of an anarchic, interarts haberdasher; much of the research comes from musty and out-of-print sources, giving the impression that Conrad followed paths opened up for him in used book shops and conversations, rather than seeking a direct scholarly argument. Throughout the book, readers encounter scenes from over two thousand years of history, mathematics, and music: Pythagoras using pebbles to articulate didactic number games to his disciples; Galileo fretting a hill and listening with a musician’s ear to calculate the rate of acceleration under gravity; Rameau trapping Western music in a five-limit tuning system, and what could have been if he were more adept with numbers. Even when drawing on classical sources to explore canonical figures like Saint Augustine, What Music Did offers idiosyncratic critical insights that highlight our ongoing cultural reverence when answers result in simple whole number ratios like 3:2, 4:3, or 5:4. What Music Did is Tony Conrad’s extended indictment of music’s role, from the Pythagoreans to the twentieth century, in upholding the use of number as a clandestine and circumscribed armature of power."--Press.umich.edu. 
650 0 |a Musical intervals and scales  |x History. 
650 0 |a Musical temperament  |x History. 
650 0 |a Music theory  |x Mathematics. 
650 0 |a Music theory. 
650 0 |a Music  |x Philosophy and aesthetics. 
650 0 |a Pythagorean theorem. 
650 6 |a Théorie musicale  |x Mathématiques. 
650 6 |a Théorie musicale. 
650 6 |a Musique  |x Philosophie et esthétique. 
650 6 |a Théorème de Pythagore. 
700 1 |a Nickleson, Patrick,  |e editor,  |1 https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PCjyG8JC8CvwY7fXkHd9vBK  |1 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2588-133X  |1 https://ror.org/05m7pjf47 
710 2 |a Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan),  |e publisher. 
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