Music and the Making of Modern Science

Music and the Making of Modern Science

Peter Pesic
Role: Author
Written by the musiscian in residence and a Tutor Emeritus of St. John’s College.

A wide-ranging exploration of how music has influenced science through the ages, from fifteenth-century cosmology to twentieth-century string theory. In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, “liberal education” connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science – that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right.