Beyond the Score: Music as Performance

by Nicholas Cook

In Beyond the 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 produced 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.

Publication of this book was supported by the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Genres: Music

458 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Nicholas Cook is a British musicologist and writer. In 2009 he became the 1684 Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Darwin College. Previously, he was professorial research fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM). He has also taught at the University of Hong Kong, University of Sydney, and University of Southampton, where he served as dean of arts.

He is a former editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2001.

Reviews

[Thomas Feng · Rating 5 out of 5]

will confess i did not read the entire thing but the 2/3ish of the book i read vastly served my purposes. a sprawling argument that, even in the Western classical tradition, the site of meaning making is in the performance of music and not merely latent in the score-text waiting to be reproduced. more theoretically dense/precise than Christopher Small’s “Musicking”, though also certainly more jargon to leaf/skip thru. still great

[Henri Kähkönen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cook lays out a vast argument for addressing music and its meanings more with the methods and perspectives elsewhere called "musicing" instead of viewing musical works as monoliths to be interpreted as faithfully as possible.

Cook's arguments, analysis and prose takes sometimes a lengthy form (dubbed "jargony" in some review on this book). I found that Cook articulates and repeats his core arguments clear enough, making some of the lengthier comparative analysis, like that on different performances on the first chapters, good cursory reading. Where the reader feels compelled to examine the points of analysis, though, the provided examples do a great job of illuminating Cook's rhetoric. I approached some of the works examined with more rigor and others more approximately - Cook's prose and the points made feel well written and legible no matter the level of engagement with the nitty gritty.

Beyond The Score also summarizes past musicological and theoretical paradigms excellently and makes great observations about the current music-cultural-economic landscape. The theme of fidelity between recordings, performances and the mythologized "ideal" of a given musical work is discussed and problematized through a plethora of viewpoints.

Throughout his analysis Cook places all musical operation as more or less socially realized phenomena, i.e. arguing for it being sensible to analyze recordings through the lense of performance analysis on the grounds that music unveils itself temporally and is realized in its listener phenomenologically - even "impossible" sounds construed in a studio setting communicated through time in a determined sequence can be viewed as a performance.

Positioning performance analysis as a viable tool for broader musical analysis, Cook illuminates how cultural, personal, historical and other aspects all affect the meanings of a given performance, delightfully and exhaustively displaying his distaste for rigid Schenkerian views on performance as an inferior manifestation of an ideal musical work.

All in all Beyond the Score makes for a very fascinating and applicable read.

[Mills College Library]

781.17 C7717 2013