Description

Show Notes

For the second episode in our unofficial “uhh is this even popular music” series, I speak with Dr. Patrick Nickleson about (early) minimalism, the damage musicology can do, and music’s role in consolidating property relations via copyright law—among other things!

Patrick’s first book is The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute(University of Michigan Press, 2023). He is also the editor of Tony Conrad’s What Music Did: The Story of Numerocracy in the West(University of Michigan Press, 2026).

Show Timeline

Intro 0:00

Authorship and weirdness in musicology 5:24

Dispute among early minimalists 18:30

Tony Conrad and What Music Did 32:40

How Music Renders Property Under Colonial Copyright 41:35

What’s making guest cry 58:45

Show Playlist

Books Referenced

Cachopo, João Pedro, Patrick Nickleson, and Chris Stover, eds. 2020. Rancière and Music. Edinburgh University Press.

James, Robin. 2019. The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics. Duke University Press.

Morrison, Matthew. 2024. Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States. University of California Press.

Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford University Press.

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