DOI: 10.1111/musa.12077
Nichol Nicholas as Cook, Cook, Beyo (Oxford:: Oxford Oxford Beyond nd the the Scor Score: e: Musi Musicc as Perf erforman ormance ce (Oxford University Press, 2013). xiv + 458 pp. £32.99 (hb). ISBN 978-0-19-935740-6.
There There is no doubti doubting ng the stunni stunning ng array array of diverse diverse source sources, s, the remark remarkabl able e interdisciplinary scope, and the lucidity of expression with which Nicholas Cook has long been associated, in what could be considered his magnum opus; and, although he takes more than 400 pages to expound on it, the central claim is superficially simple. 1. Music Music – or at least least W West estern ern art music music – is normally normally performed performed;; in other word words, s, we norma normall lly y liste listen n to a perf perform orman ance ce (whe (wheth ther er live live or reco record rded ed). ). This This means that 2. not not only only does does the the scor score e fail fail to repr repres esen entt much much tha that is appa appare rent nt in a performance, but each performance is different, and so 3. any any appr approa oach ch whic which h focu focuse sess enti entire rely ly,, or prima primaril rily y, on what what is repr repres esen ente ted d (or (or can can be repr repres esen ente ted) d) in the the scor score, e, and and does does so with with an emph emphas asis is on stru struct ctur ure, e, will inevitably remain occupied with an abstraction and risk positing the self-contained musical work as an ideal object or structural entity, such that 4. any any given given performan performance ce will be concei conceive ved d as little more than a contin contingen gentt instantiation, which may be more or less successful (in terms of its fidelity to the posited universal ideal), and 5. any given performer performer will be acknowledge acknowledged d as little more than than a functional functional intermediary, whose contribution, while it may be more or less successful, by definition can never be entirely so. So argues Cook, from which follows his appeal that we recognise (academically and even even ethica ethically lly)) the creat creativit ivity y of the perform performer er qua collabor collaborator ator and coprod produc ucer er,, as well well as the the role role of perf perform orman ance ce in embo embody dyin ing g and and crea creati ting ng a mean meanin ing g that can be neither fully represented nor completely constrained by the notated score; and, as set out in those terms, most would agree. The issue here is that Beyond the Score devotes Score devotes rather a lot of space to making this this argume argument nt – one which has been made made innume innumerab rable le times times before before – as the basis for proposing a rethinking of musicological assumption. At the same time, Cook notes that his approach is ‘more conservative’ than much of the writing on musi music c that that has has been been carrie carried d out, out, or influ influen ence ced d by, by, perf perform orman ance ce stud studie iess (p. (p. 1). 1). Yet desp despit ite e this this (app (appar aren entl tly) y) mode modera rate te radi radica calis lism, m, or perh perhap apss beca becaus use e of its its oxymoronic implication, there remains a lurking sense of straw targets and tilting at windmills. windmills. We are told that musicology musicology – not delineated delineated further, as though it were a singular homogenous entity which sits outside national genealogies and and hist histori orica call traj trajec ecto torie riess – wa wass ‘set ‘set up arou around nd the the idea idea of musi music c as writi writing ng Music Analysis, 35/iii (2016) © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Street, Malden, MA 02148 02148,, USA
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rather than music as performance’ (p. 1); and the implication is that it remains largely centred on this premise. Otherwise, Cook’s desire to rethink musicology would be rendered a touch moot. However, a page later, he observes both that ‘plenty of musicologists write about performance’ and also that ‘the explosion of research in musical performance [ . . . ] show[s] that [the view that musicology has been skewed by its orientation towards music as writing] is widely shared ’ (p. 2, emphasis added). Consequently, Cook’s clarion call and its radical implications are in fact predicated on a proposition that is, by his own measure, already put into practice by many – a curious form of radicalism, but then perhaps we are all radicals now. In that sense, Cook’s central contention – or rather the backdrop against which he sets his argument – does at time carry the faint air of a French resistance fighter, still holed up in the hills of Provence and taking potshots at German tourists, unaware that the war is long since over; as he notes, the book grew out of an article (Cook 2001) published more than a decade ago (p. xiii). The introduction and first two chapters are essentially dedicated to setting out the backdrop to Cook’s argument. He claims, for example, that established theoretical approaches need to be ‘placed in context and weaned from their traditional fixation with structure’ (p. 2). This represents something of an anachronistic generalisation, given that ‘theoretical approaches’ – assuming one can meaningfully lump them all together in a single and coherently subsuming category – have long incorporated ‘fixations’ (perhaps ‘emphases’ would have been less loaded) with many different aspects of music: structure, of course; but also contour, metrical pattern, intra- and extra-musical semiotic signification, phrasing, gesture, poetics, semantics, syntax, and so on. Many of these approaches then typically broaden such analysis out into an account of meaning, metaphor, emotion, reception and wider issues of social, cultural and political import. Whatever one’s perspective, one would struggle to deny the rich sociocultural significance that Adorno – one of Cook’s go-to b eˆ tes noires – was able to derive from his material theory of form (where the deformation of sonata-form structure in Mahler is read as a mediated expression of the dialectical unmasking of the decaying bourgeois subject-ideal – hardly the obvious foundation for a stringent and ascetic formalism, or, for that matter, another manifestation of Plato’s curse). Similarly, Cook claims that ‘traditional musicology is like literary studies: it sees meaning, of whatever kind, as embodied in musical notation’ (p. 10). Some musicology undoubtedly does. But an equal or larger proportion of musicologists and analysts do not see the score as a reified embodiment of meaning; rather, they make a utilitarian and retrospective use of a score, or notational presentation, in order – in a manner which is the direct converse of that claimed by Cook – efficiently to represent meanings and relationships that they hear in the music as an aural experience unfolding through time (including as something performed ). That popular music typically does not have a score, but that many analysts of popular music nevertheless make use of notation (via transcription), emphasises © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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this point: many analysts do not ‘start out’ from the score but return to it. That the vocabularies and graphical presentations of analysts and theorists are often beyond the comprehension of the non-specialist, and indeed the comprehension of many scholars concerned with music, is not in doubt; but one wonders why this remains either a point of contention or the locus of an insidious suspicion when the same is rarely said of the efficient disciplinary or symbolic languages typically deployed in the sciences, psychology and analytic philosophy, or for that matter of the adoption of often obfuscating critical-theoretical terminology in the humanities in general. The latter is not something that can be said of Cook, whose writing remains admirably clear and free of jargon. At the same time, and throughout the book, Cook appeals for the rethinking of a musicology constrained by an allegedly monolithic presumption while also undermining that very portrayal by quietly noting musicology’s diversity and fluidity. There are also some moments of tenuous logic. Cook notes that British fair dealing exceptions apply to scores but not to recordings. This, he claims, implies ‘there is nothing to study in the recording, over and above what is already in the score’ (p. 17). Yet the litigators of copyright law are unlikely to be concerned with the vicissitudes of musicological debate; their view is almost certainly that the recorded performance is considered the manifest realisation to which the commercial rights most obviously apply. Similarly, early on, when critiquing historically informed practice, Cook notes that ‘written documents are highly problematic as sources of information on performance practice’ (p. 27). Undoubtedly they are, and they have to be treated with caution. Yet Cook is quite willing to bolster and support his assertions about historical performance practice in general by frequently citing written documents. Likewise, Cook notes that the same problems apply to paintings, asking, ‘[C]an we assume the painters were realistically depicting what they saw?’ (p. 27). Yet, eight pages earlier, he includes a reproduction of Carl Johann Arnold’s Quarter Evening at Bettina von Arnim’s in Berlin to support his contention regarding the composer-performer hierarchy: ‘what is puzzling is the extent to which performers have connived in the hierarchy so graphically represented by Arnold’ (p. 19). It does appear that Cook considers the questionable reliability of historical documents and paintings to be somewhat less ‘problematic’ if they happen to support the argument he is making. One might also notice – the straw-target point again – a frequent return to Schoenberg (d. 1951) and Adorno (d. 1969) as providing the basis for articulating the central assumptions, more than half a century later, of a contemporary musicology in need of rethinking. In keeping with this slightly unusual tack, Schenker is the other figure to whom Cook repeatedly returns, especially in the earlier part of the book – Ch. 3 is dedicated to him. Again, this rather reinforces a point that has already been made and will be made again. The first half of the book is an often fascinating and comprehensively researched account of finde-si e`cle and early twentieth-century practice and thought (particularly as they pertain to piano performance); it is the way in which this historical presentation Music Analysis, 35/iii (2016)
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is then elided with contemporary musicological presumption and practice that renders tendentious certain aspects of the putative central claim. Ch. 3 represents the start of the book proper and is centred on an illuminating, and forensic, discussion of two 1905 performances captured on piano roll, by Eugen d’Albert and Wassily Sapellnikoff, of Schubert’s Op. 90 No. 3. In noting d’Albert’s deviation from the imperatives of the general ‘analysis-to-performance’ approaches, Cook suggests that this ‘could of course be because such approaches have embodied too narrow a concept of structure’ (p. 67). Here we have a tantalising proposition: that ‘structure’ is neither something deducible only from the score, nor something that emerges sui generis by virtue of the performer’s stylistic predilection. In other words, a theoretical ‘fixation’ with structure is not in itself a distorting emphasis; it only becomes so if it neglects the performative possibilities afforded by a given score. Cook explicitly acknowledges this nuance later (p. 87). But this renders blunt and unnecessary the dismissal of theoretical structuralism. After all, both theorist and performer are dealing, at some point, with the same thing (i.e. the score); and so it is not about getting ‘beyond the score’, but about not limiting oneself only to what one presumes it presents. The dialectical model suggested by this representation is not obviously broached or pursued. However, such a line would have enriched Cook’s convincing and salutary observation both that the structural(ist) and/or Schenkerian-derived variants of performance imperative are themselves to be recognised as historically emergent styles, no better or worse than others; and also that the tendency to cleave to those stylistic presumptions, in certain conservatory settings in particular, has compelled a delimiting and limiting of a performer’s creative freedom (and so the relevance of his or her original contribution). It is here that Cook’s argument is at its best and most forceful. For example, his noting the way in which some theorists sought to prescribe that a performance of Webern should render clear the series is a good example of theoretical stricture trumping performative potential (pp. 54–5) – which, as Adorno himself argued (though in relation to composition), would flatten the dialectical interplay between object and subject, between material and expression, and so risk the palette’s becoming the painting. In Ch. 4 Cook develops this idea, reminding us that he has already quoted Mitchell Ohriner’s suggestion that ‘structure is best seen as produced by performers within the framework of compositional affordances’ (p. 91). One might propose that ‘co-produced’ would work better, since affordances are, after all, finite in nature and number (otherwise they are not really affordances). In fact, Cook then quotes – favourably, one presumes, in that he does not contest it – Mine Dogantan-Dack’s observation that ‘some pieces admit of only one structural interpretation’ (p. 91). In other words, some pieces do not in fact offer up a range of compositional affordances in respect of structural interpretation. Once again, we encounter a peculiar incongruence between, on the one hand, the nuance that Cook often admirably acknowledges and, on the other, the stridency with which he depicts the (straw) target of his critique. Correlatively, © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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I know of few analysts – Schenkerian or otherwise – who would explicitly posit their structural interpretation as the one and only inviolable and universal model which all analysts must accept and all performers must acknowledge. Typically, analysts and theorists simply offer their take on one, and only one, of the hearings they believe to be afforded by the score; and so, instead of the insidious constraint of an ideological imposition, they are – rather in the manner of Wittgenstein’s duck/rabbit – proffering a particular way of hearing a piece that serves to enrich and multiply our potential interpretations of it. Just as do performers. Analysts and theorists have been the whipping boys of self-styled ‘progressive’ musicological discourse for at least two decades, and it is therefore something of a shame that Cook – who is, even if reluctantly, and as his discussion of specific works demonstrates, a perceptive analyst – should feel the need, if not to jump on the bandwagon, then at least to ride alongside it. This is exemplified by Cook’s subtle and illuminating comparative discussion of nine different performances of the opening movement of Mozart’s Sonata in F major, K. 332. He demonstrates persuasively how the performances of, among others, Wanda Landowska, Malcolm Bilson and Glenn Gould – I had forgotten just how jolting the latter is – could be said to have clear ontological import. His analogy with role play in virtual worlds is original and revealing, and I wished he had developed this further. The analogy suggests a series of fascinating (philosophical and musicological) questions, although Cook does not pursue them. One obvious, if superficially facile, point – partly a consequence of semantics – is that when we speak of the ‘interpretations’ of a work, we naturally imply the existence of an invariant (of which the interpretations are so many manifestations, and to which they yet recognisably adhere even as they diverge). This is not the place to delve into the complexities of the sorites paradox or a variant thereof: that is, at what point does an interpretation cease to count as an interpretation of K. 332/i. How and in what sense are Landowska’s K. 332/i and Gould’s K. 332/i the same ‘thing’? That said, it is unfortunate that Cook did not pursue this line at least a little further (as have innumerable writers, from Lydia Goehr – whom Cook briefly mentions – to Roman Ingarden),1 although he returns to it briefly and tangentially in Ch. 7 via a reference to Nelson Goodman. This reiterates an observation already made: there is so much here that rarely does Cook pause for breath (or allow his reader to do the same). And yet, this is the very crux of his central claim. In so far as it focuses only on the score (and what is represented in it), analysis engages with, but therefore also reciprocally constructs, an ideal object (of which performances are then conceived as so many secondary or derivative manifestations); and in so far as it focuses only on structure (as only derivable from what is represented in the score), theory posits a conception of music as an intentional object – which latter point explains both the emphasis on structural modelling and also why some, whom Cook notes, propose a ‘silent’ reading of the score as a preferred (or at least entirely sufficient) mode of engagement. At the same time, the ‘in so fars’ are important; and so, ironically, Cook’s monolithic representation of Music Analysis, 35/iii (2016)
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music-theoretical structuralism – as depicted in the opening of the book – is as blind to the surface nuances and multiple manifestations of the same as he argues analytical practice is to the multiple performative potentials of a given work. Moreover, Cook does not dispute that the nine recordings capture performances of K. 332/i; and since his focus is on highlighting the very different nature of the nine realisations, it follows logically that what allows them all to be conceived as instantiations of K. 332/i – their necessary if not sufficient identity conditions – is, in effect, the remainder, the distillate. This, of course, is precisely what the score represents. Cook appears to acknowledge a dialectic somewhat later when he suggests that ‘rhetorical and structuralist approaches represent complementary possibilities for construing music as thought and action’ (p. 129). As ever, the stridency of the purported agenda belies the more conciliatory compromise apparent in the detail. Cook closes the chapter, somewhat oddly, via a detour into copyright law and its ramification – now ascribing to its development a significance that I earlier argued he had neglected when claiming that recording and production practice was the primary cause of Western art music’s diminishing role in musical life. Ch. 5, one of the more focussed chapters, is concerned with style analysis. Even here, however, one encounters another of those peculiar contradictions. Having suggested that emphasising the ‘vertical dimension’ (work centred) as opposed to the comparative ‘horizontal dimension’ (performance centred) has become the norm for musicology, he notes that ‘this was not always the case. The concept of musical style has been subject to remarkable vicissitudes since Guido Adler [ . . . ] divided the field [of musicology] into the historical and systematic approaches to music’ (p. 137). Yet, as noted, Cook had earlier claimed explicitly that musicology was ‘set up around the idea of music as writing rather than music as performance’ (p. 1). Once again, the radical rethinking proposed in the first chapter is given the lie by the gritty complexity and granulated nuance of a historical reality which Cook subsequently acknowledges. From that point, Cook proceeds with an instructive, almost textbook-style overview of the methodologies and technologies of analysing performance – the stylistic disjuncture between this and the preceding chapter speaking to the book’s composite assemblage of his earlier scholarship, even if substantially re-worked. It also incorporates a not entirely disguised promotion of Sonic Visualiser software – which, of course, was developed in conjunction with the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), of which Cook was the director (see www.charm.rhul.ac.uk); and a digression through the ‘Hatto hoax’, which remains as tantalising as ever (pp. 151–4). Ch. 6 is effectively a companion to the chapter that precedes it, informed as it is by further detailed use of empirical and visualised data. If it appears that later chapters are shortchanged here, then this is because the sheer length and scope of the book compels selectivity (and Chs 5 and 6 are unobjectionably what they are). The book then takes yet another turn, with Ch. 7 focussed on improvisation, cutting back and forth between jazz and Corelli’s Op. 5 (the latter, in part, © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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via recourse to historical documents which, despite Cook’s earlier caveat, are presumably deemed sufficiently reliable here). It is somewhat heavy with quotations, a technique that occurs frequently throughout the book: on p. 236, for example, where in the space of half a paragraph we have a chain of quotes from Adorno, Alfred Schultz, Ingrid Monson, Wilhelm Furtwa¨ ngler, and Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow. While this undoubtedly serves to demonstrate that the author has read a lot of things, one does detect, at times, a kind of discursive ventriloquism at work, wherein an argument is made, and considered proven, effectively by proxy – by citing half a dozen people who appear to agree with it. Nevertheless, it is an interesting discussion, proposing – though would many actually disagree? – that improvisatory practice, in jazz or in Corelli, be seen not as a different kind of performance (or music), but rather as limit cases for a form of production (rather than only reproduction) that actually applies to all music. This is because even the most deterministic scores (in so far as they are not intended for mechanical reproduction) remain, so to speak, underdetermined. For that reason, from an organisational perspective, it would have made a better early chapter, even first chapter, since its central point serves to illustrate the book’s purported central contention. Chs 8 to 10 represent a kind of Part 2. For example, Cook observes that, in contrast to sound structures, ‘a wide range of other things that happen in performance are considered not to matter, and these extend from the visual appearance and physical gesture [ . . . ] to social interaction’ (p. 249). Ch. 8 begins with a standard dismissal of Adorno and a reminder that the ‘New Musicology’ was still ‘built on music as writing’ (p. 251). While I would not wish to appear as yet another apologist for Adorno – he has enough – Cook’s depiction, and those of the sociologists (such as Howard Becker) whom he cites favourably, reveal a fundamental misreading. Adorno’s dialectical framework was predicated, by definition, on an antipathy towards the presumption, and the very possibility, of an empirical, value-neutral, objective sociology (which, in seeking to explain society, simply reproduced it); and, in his deeply historicist understanding of ‘musical material’ (anything but ‘only the notes’), the ‘aesthetic’ was not arrayed in the manner of the ideological fiction deconstructed by the new musicology, sociology, and Cook alike, but rather was seen as the last remaining normative ‘other’ both to an instrumental reason that might reduce music to commercial exigencies and also to a positivism that might reduce its study to the illusion of empirical objectivity. Adorno, more than anyone, was well aware that music’s ‘autonomy’ was a socially produced fiction. He appears to remain an itch that Cook must repeatedly scratch. We then turn to ethnographic approaches via another reference to CHARM – and the summary repetition here, already given in Ch. 5, speaks to the collation of pre-existing materials. Chs 9 and 10 are interesting digressions, albeit their very focus on the signifying body renders them codas to a discussion often concerned with recordings (and so excluding the visual). Ch. 12 provides a convincing (mainly ethnographic and anecdotal) account of the development of Music Analysis, 35/iii (2016)
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assumptions around recording and production practices, observing that most contemporary classical recordings are no more realistic reproductions of a presumed ‘live’ experience than are most popular recordings. In fact, they are not really ‘recordings’ at all. At the same time, one of Cook’s more striking claims (also made early in the book), is that a ‘vicious cycle’ – wherein a recording aims to reproduce a live experience, which itself aims to reproduce a recording – is ‘largely responsible’ for the diminishing role of Western art music in the modern world (p. 4). Striking, but not entirely convincing. First, a directed engagement with Western art music was only ever a minority pursuit (in Europe, let alone the world); and it is likely that radical transformations in economic, social and class structures, as well as industrial and distribution contexts, throughout the twentieth century have played a more significant role than the fidelity of recording technique or the vacillations of production values. Secondly, it is not necessarily that its role per se has diminished, but rather that the perception of its significance has diminished as the democratisation of taste and value assumption gradually eroded the power of the ‘guardians of culture’ to place it at the centre of presumed edification (whether via the captive audience of a BBC radio broadcast or a school curriculum). Moreover, it seems surprising that Cook should consider that ‘recording’ practices have had more of an impact on the place of such music than the advent of a modernist style which served to lock the repertoire – such as most audiences were willing to pay to hear – into a museum-like representation of the ‘great works’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Consequently, rather as in the case of academic fashions, commercial imperative would then necessarily compel the ‘new’ to be realised less in the composition of new music, and more in the new interpretation of old music (the analogical parallel is with the development of new media, as exemplified in a line from the film Men in Black: ‘This is gonna replace CDs soon, guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again’). At the same time, and conversely, people are in fact now more exposed to music that is, or is derived from, Western art music than at any time in history; they just do not necessarily realise it. In short, what has diminished is the notion of Western art music as a rarefied aesthetic object to be attended to purely in and of itself – yet even this notion was always something of an abstract and discursively posited fiction, and only ever the preserve of a few (mainly philosophers and feuilleton critics, along with some composers). Barring the few fleeting paragraphs that close Ch. 12, the book appears to lack an obvious conclusion (in the sense of a concluding chapter), which – given the size and scope of the book – would very much have assisted in pulling together, into some sense of coherently retrospective overview, the sheer volume and diverse array of material hitherto incorporated. Few people would deny the relevance of analysing performance or disagree that some – note: some – music-theoretical work can appear to reify a particular structural interpretation as ‘correct’ and so relegate performance to the more or less successful transmission of the same. Similarly, even those who are able © 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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to read a score silently would likely agree that, pace Schoenberg and others, there is something a little perverse in proposing that the best (rather than an alternative) way of engaging with music is via a reading of the score – not least because, and Cook makes this point well, the relevance of scholarly work is surely predicated in good part on its seeking to understand its object in relation to the human contexts and relations of which it is a part. And the vast majority of people engage with Western art music as something ‘sounding’, and normally as something ‘performed’, albeit the situation is somewhat muddied when dealing with much post-1960s popular music (where ‘live versions’ are typically viewed as derivations of, and sometimes actually measured against, the primary text represented by the recording produced in a studio and released commercially). Beyond the Score ranges across an astonishing amount of material. At the same time, and for all that Cook’s central claim is to challenge the primacy of structural unity (in the analysis and performance of music), the reader will at times wish that the book itself had been subject to a little more structural organisation, given its breathless ‘and another thing’ mode of presentation. As another review put it: ‘such a miscellany implies scanning rather than probing’ (Williams 2014, p. 103). Two examples will suffice. A seven-page section on speech (pp. 74–80) gives the impression of a stream of consciousness, (too) rapidly traversing performance, speech, rhetoric, public speaking, gesture, emotion, philosophy, and so on – and accomplishing all of this via a dizzying array of (often metonymic) references to innumerable examples, anecdotes and authors. Similarly, Ch. 4, as discussed above, incorporates a reflection on structure and interpretation, an analysis of renditions of K. 332/i, a summary of conceptions of musical rhetoric, a discussion of historical renditions of Mozart’s Rondo alla turca (K. 331/iii), musings on time and temporality and a summary critique of copyright law. Cook often appears to have wanted to cram in just about everything he could possibly think of – tangential detours, anecdotes, metonymic allusions and multiple quotations, among other things. Overall, what we have is a book that cannot quite decide what it is. Is it something akin to a ‘collected essays’ compendium on music and, and as, performance (it is not, but much of the text is clearly derived from prior research and publication spanning more than a decade, which accounts for some of the internal disjuncture in respect of material and style)? A position paper on the discipline of musicology (with a long series of de facto illustrative working-outs)? A partly philological presentation of Schenker and the (mis)appropriation of the theoretical principles he espoused? An introduction to the empirical study of performance practice? Or a disquisition on the exigencies of performative interpretation in the (recorded) twentieth-century presentation of nineteenthcentury repertoire? It is at its best as the latter; another way of putting this is that are at least three books here. One detects that Cook may have been uncomfortable with presenting (only) an otherwise admirable exercise in rigorous empirical research (such as is afforded, for example, in Chs 4 through 6) and so felt compelled to clothe Music Analysis, 35/iii (2016)
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the exercise in a (moderately) radical disciplinary manifesto. The point here, in what might otherwise seem a somewhat critical precis, is that the kernel of the enlightening and erudite exposition that Cook is seeking to forward, as well as the many, many moments of discretely engaging scholarship, are globally undermined by an unnecessary recourse to the kind of straw-target depiction and overreaching claims of disciplinary import required to dramatise the radicalism of the purported rethinking. Cook demonstrates a humbling mastery of a remarkable breadth of material, and many (almost all) of the parts are on their own terms fascinating and lucid in their scholarly presentation; yet the whole somehow remains less than their sum. Sometimes – as many of the best performers will tell you – less can be more.
GILES H OOPER NOTE
1.
See, for example, Goehr (1992) or Ingarden (1986).
REFERENCES
Cook, Nicholas, 2001: ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance’, Music Theory Online, 7/ii. http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/ mto.01.7.2.cook.html. Goehr, Lydia, 1992: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: an Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Ingarden, Roman, 1986: The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Williams, Peter, 2014: ‘Freely Rendered’, The Musical Times, 155/mcmxxix (Winter), pp. 98–104. NOTE ON THE CONTRIBUTOR
GILES HOOPER completed his PhD at the University of Keele in 2003. After teaching at the Universities of Keele, Exeter and Bristol, he was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Liverpool in 2005, where he served as head of the department between 2010 and 2014. His research interests include twentiethcentury music, critical theory and analysis and the use of inter- or crossdisciplinary approaches which seek to interpret different repertoires of music from a range of critical perspectives.
© 2016 The Author. Music Analysis © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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