This is Henry Kaiser on the book Micromotives and Macrobehavior, by Thomas C. Schelling (Norton, 1978):
I took a course from this guy in College. It was probably worth more than all of the time that I spent in all my other classes combined. He deals with a special area of his own where economics meets human behavior meets unanticipated results. How does behavior in the aggregate become more than the sum of simple individual behavior? How do a group of musicians playing and improvising together create music that transcends their individual contributions? Why are artists who nobody likes so popular? Why does the music industry behave the ways that it does…often in ways that are bad for music? This work, for me, provides an interestingly different starting point for discussing such subjects (while of course the book never mentions music).
Read Kaiser’s full list, which also includes books by Derek Bailey and Marvin Minsky, at analogartsensemble.net. More on Kaiser at henrykaiser.net. (Found via rgable.typepad.com.)