Music, Encounter, Togetherness

Music, Encounter, Togetherness
Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2024-04-23
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197664008

In today's technological and globalised world, music remains a basic dimension of society. Music, Encounter, Togetherness outlines a relational approach to music that creates space for both human agency and social relationship. Throughout the book, author Nicholas Cook puts Euro-American musical traditions into dialogue with other world music cultures, complementing theory-driven approaches with comprehensive case studies ranging from late eighteenth-century India to contemporary China, and from Debussy's encounter with Javanese music and dance to cross-cultural musicking in Australia and in cyberspace. Through these examples, Cook examines how music affords interpersonal relationship and social togetherness, and what happens when musicians from different cultures interact. Central to the book is the idea of encounter, which highlights the dynamic and processual nature of musicking, as much in therapy or at home as in the jazz club or concert hall. Western musicologists have traditionally thought of music as primarily a repertory of objects; Cook illustrates how thinking of it in processual terms--through an expanded idea of performance--can make as much sense of Western art music as of other traditions. In basing an understanding of music on acts rather than objects and focussing on people and their relationships rather than on the impersonal forces of evolutionary or stylistic histories, the book opens up ways of thinking that counter some of the dehumanising aspects of musical thinking and practice in global modernity.

Beyond the Score

Beyond the Score
Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2013
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199357404

In Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, author Nicholas Cook supplants the traditional musicological notion of music as writing, asserting instead that it is as performance that music is loved, understood, and consumed. This book reconceives music as an activity through which meaning is generated in real time, as Cook rethinks familiar assumptions and develops new approaches. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on the Western 'art' tradition, Cook explores perspectives that range from close listening to computational analysis, from ethnography to the study of recordings, and from the social relations constructed through performance to the performing (and listening) body. In doing so, he reveals not only that the notion of music as text has hampered academic understanding of music, but also that it has inhibited performance practices, placing them in a textualist straightjacket. Beyond the Score has a strong historical emphasis, touching on broad developments in twentieth-century performance style and setting them into their larger cultural context. Cook also investigates the relationship between recordings and performance, arguing that we do not experience recordings as mere reproductions of a performance but as performances in their own right. Beyond the Score is a comprehensive exploration of new approaches and methods for the study of music as performance, and will be an invaluable addition to the libraries of music scholars-including musicologists, music theorists, and music cognition scholars-everywhere.

Music as Creative Practice

Music as Creative Practice
Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2018
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199347808

Not long ago, ideas of creativity in music revolved around composers in garrets and the idea of genius. In the last decade there has been a sea change in thinking: musical creativity is seen in terms of collaboration and real-time performance. Music as Creative Practice is a first attempt to synthesise both perspectives.

Music, Encounter, Togetherness

Music, Encounter, Togetherness
Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2024
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197663982

Modern Western musical thought tends to represent music as a thing--a pattern, a structure, even an organism--than as a human practice. Music, Encounter, Togetherness focusses on music as something people do, as a mode of encounter between individuals and cultures, and as an agent of interpersonal and social togetherness. It presents music as a utopian dimension of everyday life.

Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari

Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari
Author: Pirkko Moisala
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2017-01-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1501316745

This is the first volume to mobilize encounters between the work of Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari and the rich developments in cultural studies of music and sound. The book takes seriously the intellectual and political challenge that the process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari poses for previous understandings of music as permanent objects and primarily discursive texts. By elaborating on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in innovative ways, the chapters of the book demonstrate how musical and sonic practices and expressions can be reconsidered as instances of becoming, actors in assemblages, and actualizations of virtual tendencies. The collection pushes notions of music and sound beyond such long-term paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification, and the centrality of the human subject. The chapters of the volume bring a range of new topics and methodological approaches in contact with Deleuze and Guattari. These span from movement improvisation, jazz and western art music studies, sound and performance art and reality TV talent shows to deaf musicians and indigenous music. The book also highlights such fresh ways of doing analysis and shaping the methodological tools of music and sound studies that are enabled by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Their philosophy, too, gains renewed capacities and potential when responding to ethnographic, cultural, ethnomusicological, participatory, aesthetic, new materialist, feminist and queer perspectives to music and sound.

Taking It to the Bridge

Taking It to the Bridge
Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2013-05-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0472051776

Musicologists and performance studies scholars reach across their disciplines to examine the role of performance in musical culture

Music, Imagination, and Culture

Music, Imagination, and Culture
Author: Nicholas Cook
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1990
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780198163039

Musicians imagine music by means of functional models which determine certain aspects of the music while leaving others open. This gap between image and the experience it models offers a source of compositional creativity; different musical cultures embody different ways of imagining sound as music. Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Cook here defines the difference between music theory and aesthetic criticism, and affirms the importance of the "ordinary listener" in musical culture.

Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance

Collaborative Intimacies in Music and Dance
Author: Evangelos Chrysagis
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-04-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1785334549

Across spatial, bodily, and ethical domains, music and dance both emerge from and give rise to intimate collaboration. This theoretically rich collection takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collective dimension of sound and movement in everyday life, drawing on genres and practices in contexts as diverse as Japanese shakuhachi playing, Peruvian huayno, and the Greek goth scene. Highlighting the sheer physicality of the ethnographic encounter, as well as the forms of sociality that gradually emerge between self and other, each contribution demonstrates how dance and music open up pathways and give shape to life trajectories that are neither predetermined nor teleological, but generative.

Empirical Musicology

Empirical Musicology
Author: Eric Clarke
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2004-09-02
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 019516749X

Rather than advocating a new kind of musicology, 'Empirical Musicology' aims to provide a practical guide to empirical approaches that are ready for incorporation into the contemporary musicologist's toolkit.