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SUMMARY:Foresight in Music - Professor Nicholas Cook\, University of Cambr
 idge
DTSTART:20130215T173000Z
DTEND:20130215T183000Z
UID:TALK39998@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Janet Gibson
DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\nThe idea of music as a harbinger of future social 
 trends is associated with French banker\, economist\, and all-purpose inte
 llectual Jacques Attali\, but the idea that music gives access to a time t
 hat is different from that of the everyday world seems to be as old as mus
 ic itself. The conception of musical works as abstract objects\, located i
 n time but not intrinsically temporal\, reflects Platonic and medieval thi
 nking yet remains fundamental to the still dominant orthodoxies of moderni
 st music aesthetics and theory: just as in a recording\, time is translate
 d into space\, with the past always present and the future always already 
 known. Such rationalising models do little justice to the varieties of mus
 ical time as experienced\, performed\, and indeed composed. As practice ra
 ther than theory\, music is highly unpredictable\, both at the micro-level
  of individual musical experiences and the macro-level of changes in music
 al style and in patterns of consumption. Hence the conspicuous lack of for
 esight that has devastated the contemporary record industry\, which attemp
 ted to perpetuate an outdated business model rather than embracing the tec
 hnological and social changes that Henry Jenkins\, Lawrence Lessig\, and A
 ram Sinnreich respectively call convergence culture\, remix culture\, and 
 configurable culture. Sinnreich provides the most fully developed version 
 of Attali's idea of music as harbinger of social trends: networked pattern
 s of musical production and consumption are seen as a template for democra
 tised patterns of social interaction. But the linkage of musical micro-lev
 el and social macro-level remains unconvincing\, and many aspects of Sinnr
 eich's configurable culture can be found in earlier musical cultures (it i
 s only modernist aesthetics and theory that blind us to them). I conclude 
 that\, rather than seeing music as providing special insight into the futu
 re\, it is more productive to see it as a privileged arena within which to
  understand aspects of the present.\n\nBiography\n\nNicholas Cook took up 
 the 1684 Professorship in 2009. He was formerly Professorial Research Fell
 ow at Royal Holloway\, University of London\, where he directed the AHRC R
 esearch Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM)\, an
 d before that taught at the universities of Hong Kong\, Sydney\, and South
 ampton\, where he also served as Dean of Arts. A musicologist and theorist
 \, he holds separate degrees in music and in history/art history. His arti
 cles have appeared in leading British and American journals\, and cover to
 pics from aesthetics and analysis to psychology and pop.\n\nHis books\, mo
 stly published by Oxford University Press\, include A Guide to Musical Ana
 lysis (1987)\; Music\, Imagination\, and Culture (1990)\; Beethoven: Symph
 ony No. 9 (1993)\; Analysis Through Composition (1996)\; Analysing Musical
  Multimedia (1998)\; and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998)\, which i
 s published or forthcoming in twelve other languages and to which a specia
 l issue of Musicae Scientiae was devoted. Oxford also publish Rethinking M
 usic (1999)\, coedited with Mark Everist\, and Empirical Musicology: Aims\
 , Methods\, Prospects\, coedited with Eric Clarke (2004)\; he also coedite
 d the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (with Anthony Pople\, 2
 004) and The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009). His latest book
 \, The Schenker Project: Culture\, Race\, and Music Theory in Fin-de-sièc
 le Vienna (Oxford\, 2007)\, received the Wallace Berry Award of the Societ
 y for Music Theory in 2010. A further collection is in press: Music as Per
 formance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines\, coedited with the dram
 aturgue Richard Pettengill (Michigan University Press). Also nearing publi
 cation is a book on performance analysis\, integrating computational appro
 aches developed at CHARM with those of cultural musicology and inter-disci
 plinary performance theory\, while he is currently working on a study of r
 ecordings of Webern’s Piano Variations funded by an AHRC Fellowship. Pla
 nned projects thereafter includes books on music as creative practice and 
 on relational musicology.\n\nA former Editor of the Journal of the Royal M
 usical Association\, Nicholas Cook was Chair of the Music Panel in the Hig
 her Education Funding Councils’ 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. He is
  a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Europe.\n\n
LOCATION:LMH\, Lady Mitchell Hall
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