The Sound of Thinking - A Listener's Companion to Conceptual Music

A lively compendium of musical practices and compositions that upend notions of creativity and expressivity while diversifying our sense of the musical canon.

An artist draws two octaves of pitches randomly from a hat, just enough to set each syllable of the dictionary definition of imprimer (to score, to print). Trawling the internet for cute videos of cats "playing" piano, an artist splices together a complete, note-perfect performance of Arnold Schoenberg's Opus 11. Half a century after the release of Miles Davis's album Kind of Blue, a jazz quintet spends months of focused practice to reproduce the original exactly. These performances share a common denominator: absolute fidelity to the outcome of a system. From Marcel Duchamp to Yoko Ono, Steve Reich to Sun Ra, The Sound of Thinking brings together a diverse array of musical or sonic works that are algorithmic, automatic, permutational, procedural, or otherwise structured in contrast to the creative expressivity typically associated with artistic production.

In twenty-six short essays, each keyed to a term that begins with a different letter of the alphabet, Dworkin discusses work composed or performed according to a predetermined rule, transforming artistic creation into a system running its course. The pieces detailed here, drawn from more than a century of musical experimentation, offer a fresh perspective on the history of innovative music by decoupling music from expression and by shunting creativity from the level of organizing sounds to the level of devising a system that can do the organizing. Not only does this book spotlight the critical role of music in twentieth-century conceptual art, but it also identifies previously overlooked links among diverse artists and movements.

About the author

Craig Dworkin teaches literary history and theory at the University of Utah. He is the author of Reading the Illegible, No Medium, Dictionary Poetics, and Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality.

Product details

• Authors: Craig Dworkin, Dworkin Craig
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 26.03.2026
• EAN: 9780226847719
• ISBN: 978-0-226-84771-9
• No. of pages: 336
• Weight: 454 g
• Illustrations: 1 line drawings
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Essays, Music, Media Studies, Poetry, MUSIC / History & Criticism, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, POETRY / American / General, POETRY / Women Authors, POETRY / Native American, MUSIC / Essays, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, Literary essays, Music reviews & criticism, Crime and criminology, Music reviews and criticism, Urban communities / city life, Poetry / Poems, Relating to Latin / Hispanic US American people, Literature of the United States of America (USA)