What Music Did
Product details
- ISBN 9780472057917
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Mar 2026
- Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Tony Conrad (1940–2016) was a musician, composer, filmmaker, and teacher. After completing his degree in mathematics at Harvard in 1963, Conrad moved to New York where he collaborated with the director Jack Smith on Flaming Creatures; with La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and John Cale in the Theatre of Eternal Music; and with his partner Beverly Grant on a series of important structural films including Coming Attractions and Straight and Narrow. In 1976, Conrad joined the new Media Study Department at SUNY-Buffalo, where he was an influential professor and artist across film, video, public access television, music, protest, and visual art for the rest of his career.
Patrick Nickleson is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Alberta, where his work explores theories of authorship, ownership, and collaboration in experimental musics. His past writing on Conrad has been published in Twentieth Century Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and in his book The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute.
