Book review: Music and the making of modern science, by Peter Pesic

Abstract

In his latest book Peter Pesic skillfully frames the interrelationship between music and science in the context of intellectual exploration. He leads the reader from the ancient historical connections of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy (the Quadrivium) to concepts that shape our modern understanding of nature by Riemann and Holtz. Importantly, the investigations start from the musical or auditory concept and work towards the related scientific or mathematical idea and not, as is often the case in literature on these subjects, in the other direction. As a composer, my relationship with mathematics, physics and science in general is both explicit in the acoustic properties of the sounds that I want to hear produced, and implicit in the structural and conceptual background work (the pre-composition)