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"The world teems with different kinds of music--traditional, folk, classical, jazz, rock, pop--and each type of music tends to come with its own way of thinking. Drawing on a wealth of accessible examples ranging from Beethoven to Chinese zither music, this Very Short Introduction considers the history of music and thinking about music, focussing on its social and cultural dimensions. Nicholas Cook balances the Western Classical traditions within the context of many other musical cultures in today's world, tracing the way in which their development since the eighteenth century has conditioned present-day thinking and practice both within and beyond the West. He also considers the nature of music as a real-time performance practice; the role of music in contexts of social and political action; and the nature of musical thinking, including the roles played in it by instruments, notations, and creative imagination. of colonisation and decolonisation to its present-day significance as a vehicle of cross-cultural communication.In this new edition Cook explores the impact of digital technology on the production and consumption of music, including how it has transformed participatory music-making and the music business. He also discusses music's position in a globalized world, from the role it played in historical processes of colonisation and decolonisation to its present-day significance as a vehicle of cross-cultural communication." --… (more)
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“Words do work because they do not simply reflect how things are. We do work with words by using them to change things, to make things the way they are. Or to put it more abstractly, language constructs reality rather than merely reflecting it. And this means that the languages we use of music, the stories that we tell about it, help to determine what music is – what we mean by it, and what it means to us. The values wrapped up in the idea of authenticity, for example, are not simply there in the music; they are there because the way we think about music puts them there, and of course the way we think about music also affects the way we make music, and so the process becomes circular. It is this kind of continuity in thinking about things that creates what we call ‘traditions’, whether in music or anything else.”
“High art or ‘art’ music, meant the notation-based traditions of the leisured classes, … Low art meant everything else, that is to say the limitless variety of popular and mainly non-notated – and hence historically irretrievable – musical traditions. Some low art, according to this view, might have valuable qualities of its own, in particular the rural folksongs … such folksongs were seen as conveying something of the unspoilt national character of the countryside and its inhabitants. But that did not stop them being seen as low art, because they did not spring from the individual vision of an inspired composer. The voice of the people might be heard through them, but hardly the voice of Music.”
“students are being inducted into the world of Western musicianship, in which music is made up of ‘things’ to hear, constructed out of notes in the same sense that houses are constructed out of bricks. And this has two results. The first is that music is transformed from being primarily something you do (but do not necessarily know how you do) to something you know (but may not necessarily do); … The second is that it becomes increasingly difficult to conceive that music might work in other ways, or to hear it properly if it does; the harder you listen, the more you hear it in terms of the notes and chords and formal types of the Western tradition, and the less you can understand music that works primarily in terms of timbre and texture, say.”