In the age of the internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, ... more In the age of the internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and embeddedness in people's lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most intimate and solitary, and public and collective, kinds-from an individual with her smartphone and headphones, to large-scale live events and global simulcasts; and it increasingly brings together a huge range of cultures and histories, through developments in world music, sampling, the reissue of historical recordings, and the explosion of informal and home music-making that circulates via YouTube. For many people, involvement with music can be among the most powerful and potentially transforming experiences in their lives. At the same time, there has been increasing interest in music's communicative and affective capacities, and its potential to act as an agent of social bonding and affiliation. This review critically reviews a considerable body of research
This discussion article, principally authored by Prof. Eric Clarke of Oxford University, includes... more This discussion article, principally authored by Prof. Eric Clarke of Oxford University, includes a response from me on the idea of complexity ion music, and how this idea can help to understand the process of meaning creation in my string quartet <i>A Brisge Betweeen Heaven and Earth</i>
Complementing the 2011 publication Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cul... more Complementing the 2011 publication Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, this edited volume of 17 essays is organized into three parts. The chapters in Part I (‘Music, consciousness, and the four Es’) question the assumption that consciousness is a matter of what is going on in individual brains, and investigate the ways in which musical consciousness arises through our embodied experience, is embedded in our social and cultural existence, extends out into world, and is manifested as we enact our relationships with and within it. Part II (‘Consciousness in musical practice’) engages with music as a corporeal and culturally embedded practice, conjoining individuals in the social sphere, and extending consciousness across actual and virtual spaces. The chapters in this part explore composition, improvisation, performance, and listening as practices, and consider how music, a paradigmatic example of meaningful action, reveals consciousness as grounded in doing, as well as being. Part III (‘Kinds of musical consciousness’) considers the nature of consciousness under a wide range of musical situations. The chapters in this part seek to deconstruct any invidious distinction between everyday and altered states of consciousness, suggesting that, through the manifold range of experiences it affords, music discloses consciousness across a phenomenological continuum encompassing multiple modalities. Taken as a whole, the volume exemplifies many fertile ways in which music studies can draw upon and contribute to larger debates about consciousness more generally.
Introduction Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink, Personal takes: le... more Introduction Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink, Personal takes: learning to live with recording Susan Tomes, A short take in praise of long takes Peter Hill, 1. Performing for (and against) the microphone Donald Greig, Personal takes: ...
The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including... more The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including changes in the size and nature of the orchestra and the rise of the modern conductor. The coordination and musical leadership of orchestras has taken a variety of forms historically, but from around the middle of the nineteenth century silent conducting gradually began to supplant other forms of time keeping and instrumental leadership in opera and concert orchestras. Little or no empirical work has attempted to investigate the musical, social and perceptual consequences of this development, largely due to the technical challenges that must be addressed. This article describes the development and implementation of innovative digital methods to provide a detailed and multifaceted picture of a large ensemble in action, investigating the consequences of different distributions of individual musical agency for: 1) musicians’ playing experiences; 2) ensemble coordination and expressive timin...
Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2014
In music, the rhythms of different instruments are often syncopated against each other to create ... more In music, the rhythms of different instruments are often syncopated against each other to create tension. Existing perceptual theories of syncopation cannot adequately model such kinds of syncopation since they assume monophony. This study investigates the effects of polyphonic context, instrumentation and metrical location on the salience of syncopations. Musicians and nonmusicians were asked to tap along to rhythmic patterns of a drum kit and rate their stability; in these patterns, syncopations occurred among different numbers of streams, with different instrumentation and at different metrical locations. The results revealed that the stability of syncopations depends on all these factors and music training, in variously interacting ways. It is proposed that listeners’ experiences of syncopations are shaped by polyphonic and instrumental configuration, metrical structure, and individual music training, and a number of possible mechanisms are considered, including the rhythms’ aco...
Christopher Longuet-Higgins, a pioneer of the modern psychology of music, died at the end of Marc... more Christopher Longuet-Higgins, a pioneer of the modern psychology of music, died at the end of March, aged 81. A Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the Royal Society of Arts, Christopher was a quite exceptional scientist who had been a professor in three subjects: theoretical chemistry, theoretical physics and artificial intelligence (AI). It was within his work in AI that Christopher made his far-sighted contribution to the psychology of music, bringing his acutely analytical thinking and passion for elegant solutions to an understanding of tonal and rhythmic structure in western music. Christopher was an organ scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied for a degree in chemistry; while there, he developed his formidable musical skills and (even as an undergraduate) made important discoveries in chemistry (a ground-breaking paper published in the Journal of the Chemical Society). He went on to a DPhil in chemistry at Oxford, and then, after relatively short periods in Chicago and Manchester, was appointed to a Chair in Theoretical Physics at Kings College London. Two years later (in 1954) he
The majority of studies of performance focus on the tonal and metric music of the common-practice... more The majority of studies of performance focus on the tonal and metric music of the common-practice period, studied at the moment of performance rather than over a period of rehearsal, and usually divorced from the context of real rehearsal and performance (schedules, audiences, auditoria). This paper reports part of a larger project in which three newly commissioned works for solo piano have been studied from the moment that the performer received them, through a period of preparation and rehearsal, to their first public performance. The data consist of interview and diary data, audio recordings, and MIDI data taken from the piano at rehearsals and the public premiere. The paper is a collaboration between one of the composers (Bryn Harrison), the performer (Philip Thomas), and two analysts (Nicholas Cook and Eric Clarke). The paper demonstrates the stability of the performer's approach to this complex music from a very early stage in the rehearsal process; some interesting attrib...
The fingerings used by keyboard players are determined by a range of ergonomic (anatomic/motor), ... more The fingerings used by keyboard players are determined by a range of ergonomic (anatomic/motor), cognitive, and music-interpretive constraints. We have attempted to encapsulate the most important ergonomic constraints in a model. The model, which is presently limited to isolated melodic fragments, begins by generating all possible fingerings, limited only by maximum practical spans between finger pairs. Many of the fingerings generated in this way seldom occur in piano performance. In the next stage of the model, the difficulty of each fingering is estimated according to a system of rules. Each rule represents a specific ergonomic source of difficulty. The model was subjected to a preliminary test by comparing its output with fingerings written by pianists on the scores of a selection of short Czerny studies. Most fingerings recommended by pianists were among those fingerings predicted by the model to be least difficult; but the model also predicted numerous fingerings that were not...
There is a very long history of writing about the moving effects of literature, art, and music. B... more There is a very long history of writing about the moving effects of literature, art, and music. Being moved has consistently been one of the most frequently reported feelings by listeners when describing strong, emotional experiences with music (Gabrielsson, 2011). Surprisingly however, despite its prevalence in everyday life, the feeling of being moved by music has received very little academic attention. No well-founded, distinctive understanding of this phenomenon and its underlying mechanisms currently exists in the literature, and current models of music and emotion (Juslin, 2013; Zentner et al, 2008) offer no account of these feelings. Aims: The main aim of our exploratory, empirical study was to understand what it means to feel moved by music – to capture the character of this elusive feeling, and understand why it is experientially meaningful. To this end, we analyzed listeners’ emotional responses to an experimenter-selected as well as a participant-selected moving audio clip. We also tested whether prosocial trait empathy is related to how moved listeners feel in response to familiar and unfamiliar music. Methods: 138 participants around the world completed a web-based questionnaire designed to evoke the experience of being moved in real time. The survey consisted of five sections: emotional responses to an experimenter-selected moving musical excerpt; general questions on past experiences of being moved by music; emotional responses to participant-selected moving music; the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (a measure of trait empathy); and demographic information. We used word clouds as well as thematic content analysis on participants’ free descriptions, and ran a correlation analysis on quantitative data. Results: Our findings suggest that being moved by music may be: (1) experienced in two forms: as ‘beautiful-sadness’ causing contemplation; or as ‘overwhelming exuberance’ leading to bodily motion; (2) deeply immersive, viscerally felt, and a powerful prosocial motivator; (3) consistently related to the higher-order concept of empathy. A statistically significant relationship is shown to exist between listeners’ dispositional empathy scores (specifically, the Fantasy and Empathic Concern sub-scales) and how moved they reported feeling in response to both familiar and unfamiliar music. Conclusions: Through this study, we provide the beginnings of a framework for better understanding the prevalent and powerful emotional experience of being moved by music. Furthermore, we highlight the relationship between dispositional empathy and moving experiences with music. Finally, we discuss applications of this research – A critical examination of moving musical experiences may provide an important perspective on the paradox of sad music enjoyment; and the role of empathy in being moved, as well as the acoustic characteristics of moving music, may shed new light on music and social bonding. References: Gabrielsson, A. (2011) ‘Strong Experiences with Music: Music is much more than just music’, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Juslin, P.N. (2013) ‘From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: Towards a unified theory of musical emotions’, Physics of Life Reviews, 10, 235–266. Zentner, M., Grandjean, D., and Scherer, K.R. (2008) ‘Emotions evoked by the sound of music: characterization, classification, and measurement’, Emotion, 8, 494–521.
Consciousness, both generally and in music, has been regarded as an individual capacity or attrib... more Consciousness, both generally and in music, has been regarded as an individual capacity or attribute, despite increasing recognition of the extended, embodied, embedded, and enactive character of the human mind, and the intersubjectivity of human experience. This chapter proposes empathy as a fruitful way to engage with the collective quality of musical consciousness. It touches upon broader and narrower conceptions of empathy, and considers the ways in which aesthetic objects, including music, as well as living subjects, can afford empathic engagement. A discussion of neuroscientific, psychological, and cultural understandings of empathy leads to a consideration of empirical evidence for musically mediated empathy, and a more speculative attempt to understand people’s ‘strong experiences with music’ in terms of empathic musical consciousness—with a particular focus on the voice. Recordings of performances by Janis Joplin and Chet Baker illustrate what it is about their voices that ...
Cognitive theory as applied to music has regarded the meaning, critical content or ideological v... more Cognitive theory as applied to music has regarded the meaning, critical content or ideological value of music as too rarified and abstract, and too remote from empirically verifiable properties, to figure in its account of music perception. Ecological perceptual theory, however, offers a framework within which the directness and immediacy of these attributes can be understood, and a link with such apparently distant domains as critical theory and aesthetics established. Following an outline of how such a theory might work, a brief perceptually-motivated analysis of Strugglin by Tricky is offered as an example of how a different approach to perception may make the connection with the meaning and critical impact of music more obvious. 1 Cognitive Music Theory Over the past 15 years or so, a good deal of progress has been made in bringing the psychology of music and music theory closer together. Lerdahl and Jackendoffs Generative Theory of Tonal Music from 1983 is perhaps the mos...
In the age of the internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, ... more In the age of the internet and with the dramatic proliferation of mobile listening technologies, music has unprecedented global distribution and embeddedness in people's lives. It is a source of intense experiences of both the most intimate and solitary, and public and collective, kinds-from an individual with her smartphone and headphones, to large-scale live events and global simulcasts; and it increasingly brings together a huge range of cultures and histories, through developments in world music, sampling, the reissue of historical recordings, and the explosion of informal and home music-making that circulates via YouTube. For many people, involvement with music can be among the most powerful and potentially transforming experiences in their lives. At the same time, there has been increasing interest in music's communicative and affective capacities, and its potential to act as an agent of social bonding and affiliation. This review critically reviews a considerable body of research
This discussion article, principally authored by Prof. Eric Clarke of Oxford University, includes... more This discussion article, principally authored by Prof. Eric Clarke of Oxford University, includes a response from me on the idea of complexity ion music, and how this idea can help to understand the process of meaning creation in my string quartet <i>A Brisge Betweeen Heaven and Earth</i>
Complementing the 2011 publication Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cul... more Complementing the 2011 publication Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, this edited volume of 17 essays is organized into three parts. The chapters in Part I (‘Music, consciousness, and the four Es’) question the assumption that consciousness is a matter of what is going on in individual brains, and investigate the ways in which musical consciousness arises through our embodied experience, is embedded in our social and cultural existence, extends out into world, and is manifested as we enact our relationships with and within it. Part II (‘Consciousness in musical practice’) engages with music as a corporeal and culturally embedded practice, conjoining individuals in the social sphere, and extending consciousness across actual and virtual spaces. The chapters in this part explore composition, improvisation, performance, and listening as practices, and consider how music, a paradigmatic example of meaningful action, reveals consciousness as grounded in doing, as well as being. Part III (‘Kinds of musical consciousness’) considers the nature of consciousness under a wide range of musical situations. The chapters in this part seek to deconstruct any invidious distinction between everyday and altered states of consciousness, suggesting that, through the manifold range of experiences it affords, music discloses consciousness across a phenomenological continuum encompassing multiple modalities. Taken as a whole, the volume exemplifies many fertile ways in which music studies can draw upon and contribute to larger debates about consciousness more generally.
Introduction Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink, Personal takes: le... more Introduction Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink, Personal takes: learning to live with recording Susan Tomes, A short take in praise of long takes Peter Hill, 1. Performing for (and against) the microphone Donald Greig, Personal takes: ...
The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including... more The nineteenth century saw a number of significant changes in European musical culture, including changes in the size and nature of the orchestra and the rise of the modern conductor. The coordination and musical leadership of orchestras has taken a variety of forms historically, but from around the middle of the nineteenth century silent conducting gradually began to supplant other forms of time keeping and instrumental leadership in opera and concert orchestras. Little or no empirical work has attempted to investigate the musical, social and perceptual consequences of this development, largely due to the technical challenges that must be addressed. This article describes the development and implementation of innovative digital methods to provide a detailed and multifaceted picture of a large ensemble in action, investigating the consequences of different distributions of individual musical agency for: 1) musicians’ playing experiences; 2) ensemble coordination and expressive timin...
Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2014
In music, the rhythms of different instruments are often syncopated against each other to create ... more In music, the rhythms of different instruments are often syncopated against each other to create tension. Existing perceptual theories of syncopation cannot adequately model such kinds of syncopation since they assume monophony. This study investigates the effects of polyphonic context, instrumentation and metrical location on the salience of syncopations. Musicians and nonmusicians were asked to tap along to rhythmic patterns of a drum kit and rate their stability; in these patterns, syncopations occurred among different numbers of streams, with different instrumentation and at different metrical locations. The results revealed that the stability of syncopations depends on all these factors and music training, in variously interacting ways. It is proposed that listeners’ experiences of syncopations are shaped by polyphonic and instrumental configuration, metrical structure, and individual music training, and a number of possible mechanisms are considered, including the rhythms’ aco...
Christopher Longuet-Higgins, a pioneer of the modern psychology of music, died at the end of Marc... more Christopher Longuet-Higgins, a pioneer of the modern psychology of music, died at the end of March, aged 81. A Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the Royal Society of Arts, Christopher was a quite exceptional scientist who had been a professor in three subjects: theoretical chemistry, theoretical physics and artificial intelligence (AI). It was within his work in AI that Christopher made his far-sighted contribution to the psychology of music, bringing his acutely analytical thinking and passion for elegant solutions to an understanding of tonal and rhythmic structure in western music. Christopher was an organ scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied for a degree in chemistry; while there, he developed his formidable musical skills and (even as an undergraduate) made important discoveries in chemistry (a ground-breaking paper published in the Journal of the Chemical Society). He went on to a DPhil in chemistry at Oxford, and then, after relatively short periods in Chicago and Manchester, was appointed to a Chair in Theoretical Physics at Kings College London. Two years later (in 1954) he
The majority of studies of performance focus on the tonal and metric music of the common-practice... more The majority of studies of performance focus on the tonal and metric music of the common-practice period, studied at the moment of performance rather than over a period of rehearsal, and usually divorced from the context of real rehearsal and performance (schedules, audiences, auditoria). This paper reports part of a larger project in which three newly commissioned works for solo piano have been studied from the moment that the performer received them, through a period of preparation and rehearsal, to their first public performance. The data consist of interview and diary data, audio recordings, and MIDI data taken from the piano at rehearsals and the public premiere. The paper is a collaboration between one of the composers (Bryn Harrison), the performer (Philip Thomas), and two analysts (Nicholas Cook and Eric Clarke). The paper demonstrates the stability of the performer's approach to this complex music from a very early stage in the rehearsal process; some interesting attrib...
The fingerings used by keyboard players are determined by a range of ergonomic (anatomic/motor), ... more The fingerings used by keyboard players are determined by a range of ergonomic (anatomic/motor), cognitive, and music-interpretive constraints. We have attempted to encapsulate the most important ergonomic constraints in a model. The model, which is presently limited to isolated melodic fragments, begins by generating all possible fingerings, limited only by maximum practical spans between finger pairs. Many of the fingerings generated in this way seldom occur in piano performance. In the next stage of the model, the difficulty of each fingering is estimated according to a system of rules. Each rule represents a specific ergonomic source of difficulty. The model was subjected to a preliminary test by comparing its output with fingerings written by pianists on the scores of a selection of short Czerny studies. Most fingerings recommended by pianists were among those fingerings predicted by the model to be least difficult; but the model also predicted numerous fingerings that were not...
There is a very long history of writing about the moving effects of literature, art, and music. B... more There is a very long history of writing about the moving effects of literature, art, and music. Being moved has consistently been one of the most frequently reported feelings by listeners when describing strong, emotional experiences with music (Gabrielsson, 2011). Surprisingly however, despite its prevalence in everyday life, the feeling of being moved by music has received very little academic attention. No well-founded, distinctive understanding of this phenomenon and its underlying mechanisms currently exists in the literature, and current models of music and emotion (Juslin, 2013; Zentner et al, 2008) offer no account of these feelings. Aims: The main aim of our exploratory, empirical study was to understand what it means to feel moved by music – to capture the character of this elusive feeling, and understand why it is experientially meaningful. To this end, we analyzed listeners’ emotional responses to an experimenter-selected as well as a participant-selected moving audio clip. We also tested whether prosocial trait empathy is related to how moved listeners feel in response to familiar and unfamiliar music. Methods: 138 participants around the world completed a web-based questionnaire designed to evoke the experience of being moved in real time. The survey consisted of five sections: emotional responses to an experimenter-selected moving musical excerpt; general questions on past experiences of being moved by music; emotional responses to participant-selected moving music; the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (a measure of trait empathy); and demographic information. We used word clouds as well as thematic content analysis on participants’ free descriptions, and ran a correlation analysis on quantitative data. Results: Our findings suggest that being moved by music may be: (1) experienced in two forms: as ‘beautiful-sadness’ causing contemplation; or as ‘overwhelming exuberance’ leading to bodily motion; (2) deeply immersive, viscerally felt, and a powerful prosocial motivator; (3) consistently related to the higher-order concept of empathy. A statistically significant relationship is shown to exist between listeners’ dispositional empathy scores (specifically, the Fantasy and Empathic Concern sub-scales) and how moved they reported feeling in response to both familiar and unfamiliar music. Conclusions: Through this study, we provide the beginnings of a framework for better understanding the prevalent and powerful emotional experience of being moved by music. Furthermore, we highlight the relationship between dispositional empathy and moving experiences with music. Finally, we discuss applications of this research – A critical examination of moving musical experiences may provide an important perspective on the paradox of sad music enjoyment; and the role of empathy in being moved, as well as the acoustic characteristics of moving music, may shed new light on music and social bonding. References: Gabrielsson, A. (2011) ‘Strong Experiences with Music: Music is much more than just music’, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Juslin, P.N. (2013) ‘From everyday emotions to aesthetic emotions: Towards a unified theory of musical emotions’, Physics of Life Reviews, 10, 235–266. Zentner, M., Grandjean, D., and Scherer, K.R. (2008) ‘Emotions evoked by the sound of music: characterization, classification, and measurement’, Emotion, 8, 494–521.
Consciousness, both generally and in music, has been regarded as an individual capacity or attrib... more Consciousness, both generally and in music, has been regarded as an individual capacity or attribute, despite increasing recognition of the extended, embodied, embedded, and enactive character of the human mind, and the intersubjectivity of human experience. This chapter proposes empathy as a fruitful way to engage with the collective quality of musical consciousness. It touches upon broader and narrower conceptions of empathy, and considers the ways in which aesthetic objects, including music, as well as living subjects, can afford empathic engagement. A discussion of neuroscientific, psychological, and cultural understandings of empathy leads to a consideration of empirical evidence for musically mediated empathy, and a more speculative attempt to understand people’s ‘strong experiences with music’ in terms of empathic musical consciousness—with a particular focus on the voice. Recordings of performances by Janis Joplin and Chet Baker illustrate what it is about their voices that ...
Cognitive theory as applied to music has regarded the meaning, critical content or ideological v... more Cognitive theory as applied to music has regarded the meaning, critical content or ideological value of music as too rarified and abstract, and too remote from empirically verifiable properties, to figure in its account of music perception. Ecological perceptual theory, however, offers a framework within which the directness and immediacy of these attributes can be understood, and a link with such apparently distant domains as critical theory and aesthetics established. Following an outline of how such a theory might work, a brief perceptually-motivated analysis of Strugglin by Tricky is offered as an example of how a different approach to perception may make the connection with the meaning and critical impact of music more obvious. 1 Cognitive Music Theory Over the past 15 years or so, a good deal of progress has been made in bringing the psychology of music and music theory closer together. Lerdahl and Jackendoffs Generative Theory of Tonal Music from 1983 is perhaps the mos...
An exploratory empirical analysis was conducted to investigate the little-studied, albeit ubiquit... more An exploratory empirical analysis was conducted to investigate the little-studied, albeit ubiquitous, phenomenon of ‘being moved’ by music. Using an online questionnaire, 138 participants listened to experimenter-selected and self-selected moving music. Thematic content analysis of participants’ free descriptions suggests that the feeling of ‘being moved’ is an immersive and often physiologically-experienced one, which manifests in two forms – through beautiful-sadness (inspiring quiet contemplation) or overwhelming exuberance (motivating action). In both cases, it appears to invoke prosocial feelings and empathically engage listeners. Additionally, correlation analysis reveals a statistically significant relationship between dispositional empathy measures (Fantasy and Empathic Concern) and musical moved-ness.
• ABSTRACT The majority of studies of performance focus on the tonal and metric music of the comm... more • ABSTRACT The majority of studies of performance focus on the tonal and metric music of the common-practice period, studied at the moment of performance rather than over a period of rehearsal, and usually divorced from the context of real rehearsal and performance (schedules, audiences, auditoria). This paper reports part of a larger project in which three newly commissioned works for solo piano have been studied from the moment that the performer received them, through a period of preparation and rehearsal, to their first public performance. The data consist of interview and diary data, audio recordings, and MIDI data taken from the piano at rehearsals and the public premiere. The paper is a collaboration between one of the composers (Bryn Harrison), the performer (Philip Thomas), and two analysts (Nicholas Cook and Eric Clarke). The paper demonstrates the stability of the performer's approach to this complex music from a very early stage in the rehearsal process; some interesting attributes of his approach to rhythm and tempo; the function of notation as a " prompt for action " rather than as a recipe for, or representation of, sound; and the concealed social character of solo performance and apparently solitary composition. The paper concludes with a discussion and critique of the " communication " model of performance that prevails in psychological studies of performance. INTRODUCTION One of the criticisms of research in music performance is that most of it has been done in rather artificial " laboratory " conditions, reflecting few if any of the factors that real concert life inevitably involves: the influence of an audience, the pressure of practical considerations, the nature of the venue, and the whole sense of occasion. The increasingly extensive research that makes use of existing commercial recordings (e.g. Repp, 1990; Ashley, 2002) deals, of course, with a thoroughly " real " phenomenon — but one which represents only the carefully controlled final state of
Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should... more Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should we be looking at how music relates to society and constructs meaning through it, rather than how it transcends the social? Can we ‘remix’ our discipline and attempt to address all musics on an equal basis, without splitting ourselves in advance into subgroups of ‘musicologists’, ‘theorists’, and ‘ethnomusicologists’? These are some of the crucial issues that Nicholas Cook has raised since he emerged in the 1990s as one of the UK’s leading and most widely-read voices in critical musicology. In this book, collaborators and former students of Cook pursue these questions, and others raised by his work – from notation, historiography, and performance to the place of music in multimedia forms such as virtual reality and video games, analysing both how it can bring people together and the ways in which it has failed to do so.
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