Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Kofi Agawu

Reviewed work(s):
Music, Imagination, and Culture by Nicholas Cook
Source: Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 117, No. 1 (1992), pp. 157-164
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Royal Musical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/766286
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157

The promise of 'New Musicology' goes unfulfilled, however, in part because

the authors follow fairly old methods of inquiry and in part because musical content and historical context are still rigorously separated. It would be fascinating
for Leon Botstein to trace the direct influence of Helmholtz on Brahms's thinking or on his art. And at points we seem to come very close with the mention of
Brahms's friends, H. A. Koestlin and Heinrich Ehrlich, in the field of music
theory and aesthetics. But Botstein eschews the specific with comments like
'Brahms, despite his dislike for theorizing, particularly about music, was no
doubt aware of the intense interest in acoustics, hearing, and aesthetics surrounding him among his medical, scientific, and musical colleagues' (p. 11). In
short, the old notion of Zeitgeist prevails.5 Peter Ostwald in 'Johannes Brahms,
Solitary Altruist' adds a few technical terms from psychoanalysis to a quite conventional psychological portrait of a kind biographers have drawn for years.6
And while Nancy Reich avoids, much to her credit, the cant of gender studies in
'Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms', her conventional biographical
approach does not tell us anything we did not know before.7
The remaining essays follow patterns we might recognize from Brahms Studies
and feature the same authors. George Bozarth's and Stephen H. Brady's history
of the pianos preferred by Brahms makes a thoughtful contribution to
organology and biography. David Brodbeck's essay on Wagner and Brahms
dwells on the same issues raised by Bailey's article in the Studies and shares its
assumptions, but puts a new spin on the ball. Brodbeck concludes that in the
Third Symphony Brahms 'seems for once determined to take the better of the
New Germans at some of their own games' (p. 75). Perhaps the most intriguing
piece comes from Walter Frisch, who gives examples of works by Zemlinsky,
Schoenberg and Reger which, he asserts, bear direct marks of Brahmsian influence (another entry in the 'conservative-progressive' debate). I am only sorry
he does not have quite enough space in this volume to give a thorough demonstration of his point.
The selection of source materials that follow the essays - roughly contemporaneous analyses and critiques of Brahms's music as well as memoirs of
acquaintances - recalls a well-known musicological genre, a 'reader' or 'companion' to the composer's work. (The title of the book might have been translated
from 'Brahms und seine Umwelt'.) And had a little more co-ordination gone into
a volume of wider scope, it might have served as an adjunct to the classroom or
as a guide for the general public. In its present state it neither fulfils our expectations of the old genre nor creates a really new one.
Jon W. Finson
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Nicholas Cook, Music, Imagination, and Culture. Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1990. vi + 265 pp. ISBN 0 19 816154 9.
NICHOLASCook's first book, A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987), was a brisk,
no-nonsense guide to the canonic techniques of music analysis. Always true to
his empirical forefathers, always concerned to reach the intelligent layman,
5 A more concrete
approach to Viennese intellectual history has long been available in books like
William J. McGrath's Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven and London, 1974)
or Carl E. Schorske's Fin-de-siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980).
6 To see an instance where
psycho-history actually makes a difference, read Maynard Solomon's
'Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity', Journal of the American Musicological Society,
40 (1987), 443-70.
7 We learn more about this relationship from Linda Roesner's 'Brahms's Editions of Schumann' in
the Studies.

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Cook sought to make less forbidding and perhaps even fun the professional
activity of analysing music. Music, Imagination, and Culture is less a sequel to
the earlier book than a reflection on some of the ways in which Westerners
imagine music. The reference to 'Westerners' is not a window-shutting device
but an honest attempt to contextualize the culture-specific activities of composing, performing and listening to music. This global impulse far exceeds
anything attempted by Cook in the earlier book. In four closely argued and
lucidly presented chapters, aided by some 48 music examples consisting mainly
of quotations from scores, Cook develops a provocative set of arguments and
counter-arguments to show that 'there is always a disparity between the experience of music and the way in which we imagine or think about it' (p. 135).
The first question to ask about this 'disparity' or 'difference' (p. 1) is whether it
presents a valid distinction. That thinking and talking about music require a
language-based conceptual apparatus there is no question. But what about the
experience of music? Is it accessible by means other than through 'the individuation of a language'?' If yes, how do we know of its existence? If no, then this
distinction, like many of the binary opposites that act as enabling structures for
Cook's arguments, needs to be 'problematized', that is, it needs to be called into
question at the same time as it is being promulgated.
The introduction (pp. 1-9) supplies some of the ecology that sustains Cook's
main theme. Music is immediately accessible when heard, this experience is
'intrinsically rewarding', and the listener needs no special 'trained understanding of what he [or she] hears' (p. 2). Cook's enthusiasm for the 'ordinary
listener' leads to a near erasure of the differences between connoisseur and
layperson; it also leads to an undermining of the value of 'follow[ing] a piece in
technical terms' or 'explain[ing it] in theoretical terms'. There is apparently a
'normal way' in which we listen and an 'everyday experience' about listening.
Cook is not yet ready to reveal what this normality is, only what it is not. It is not,
for example, Schenkerian analysis, which constitutes a metaphorical rather than
scientific explanation of music. By now, the difference between normal and
prescribed listening has given rise to a huge conceptual gap. Cook does not say
whether the gap is subject to closure some day; rather, he affirms its role as a
defining feature of a musical culture.
With such a bold, summary claim (repeated at the end of chapter 2), Cook is
obliged to retrieve his universalizing instincts. He now declares an interest in the
idea of wholeness from aesthetic theory and quotes the ethnomusicologists John
Baily and Gerhard Kubik, not to show that some African musical cultures are
content simply to make music rather than talk about it (this would undermine
the book's basic theme), but to make the point that 'audibility . . . is not
everything in music'. To approach music as music, however, we need 'some
degree of meaningful or gratifying perceptual engagement with it'. Later on,
this argument will be seen to require considerable refinement in order to allow
for the possibilities that some people 'enjoy musical compositions . . . without
really perceiving them at all' (p. 68) and that there are 'real' as opposed to
'imaginative' perceptions (p. 86).
Although packed with many valuable points (of view), the introduction is not
free of problematic formulations. First, to (re)state that 'music is an essentially
democratic art' (p. 2) without taking on board the numerous complex problems
that arise in cross-cultural musical understanding is disconcerting in view of
Cook's admirably broad terms of discussion. Second, it is not at all clear that one
can ever 'bracket' technical knowledge about music. I know of no 'ordinary
listener' who enjoys music and lacks technical knowledge about it, if by
'technical knowledge' we include the ability to identify the number of
movements in a symphony, the difference between the loud bits and the soft
' Roland Barthes, Elements
of Semiology (New York, 1967), 10.

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ones, the location of climaxes and so on. Although Cook later indicates that
Formenlehre (and all that it implies) forms an important component of
technical knowledge, he never takes on the most fundamental task of drawing
firm circles around the domains of technical and non-technical knowledge.
Third, Cook's point that Schenkerian analysis constitutes a 'metaphorical
explanation' prompts one to ask whether there are any analyses that escape the
intervention of metaphor. Theorists of language and literature continue to remind us that language, whether it is of the 'ordinary' or 'poetic' variety, is essendichotomy is a
tially metaphorical. Perhaps, then, the scientific/metaphorical
'myth' of the sort described in the closing pages of the book.
The focus of chapter 1 is musical form, one of the most basic categories
employed in talk and writing about music. Perception of form turns on a distinction between musical and non-musical listening, and this distinction in turn calls
for a definition of music. Rejecting the notion of 'fixed pitches' and of John
Blacking's unacceptably broad 'music as organized sound', Cook extracts from
Cage's composition 4' 33" the important attributes of context and intention.
Along the way, he introduces further distinctions: between 'music' and 'Muzak'
(p. 12), and between 'hearing something as music' and 'hearing something as not
music'. I wonder, though, how accurate it is to assert that 'Mozart, when played
in factories, supermarkets, or airport waiting-lounges, is rarely heard as music'
(p. 12). Some musicians find it almost impossible to hear Mozart; they cannot
help but listen to him. For such musicians, Mozart in the supermarket never
ceases to be heard 'as music'.
The next best thing to a single, all-embracing definition of music is an emphasis on 'the listener's imaginative activity' (p. 15). Hanslick and R. G. Collingwood
are enlisted to support distinctions between art and amusement and between art
and entertainment. Listening, in short, is creative, and 'criticism can play an
essential part in the constitution of the artwork' (p. 18). It follows, then, that a
distinction can be drawn, following Roger Scruton, between 'literal perception'
and 'imaginative perception'. Cook realizes, of course, that this, too, is a problematic dichotomy, for it is hard to imagine a perception that is not, on some
level, 'imaginative'. Still, the terms may support the somewhat abstract exercise
of showing how literal and imaginative perceptions merge into each other.
In the second part of the chapter, Cook begins his musical discussion by
rehearsing some well-known aspects of psychological theory on the perception of
tones. He is able to show how certain lines in music can only be heard in certain
ways, while some require the active intervention of the performer. His main
demonstration is of hearing a fugue not merely as an imitative texture but as
fugue. To hear music as fugue 'means interpreting the sound of the music as a
token of something that exists in some sense independently of the sound; it
means not so much hearing the sound as hearing the composition through the
sound' (p. 35). But what is the 'composition' or the 'resultant', that which Ralph
Kirkpatrick claims 'lies beyond'? Cook the empiricist here turns mystical: that
which 'lies beyond' is left to the imagination. Further distinctions between hearing and listening and between the work and its realization lead to the important
claim that 'to hear music as form . . . is to hear it as in some sense logically
distinct from any external context' (p. 38). The internal context, in turn,
demands that we pay as much attention to the temporal as to the spatial experience of sound.
In the third part of this chapter, Cook reports the results of some mainly informal tests to show the limitations of ordinary listeners' perception of musical
form. His focus is on endings or closure. Predictably, his tests showed that
listeners need conventional signs to know when a piece is about to end, that
although people can perceive musical forms they do not necessarily do so normally, that 'form is not so much something to hear as a way of hearing', and that
'tonal closure has psychological reality for the listener only when the time-scale

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involved is very small'. These findings might have been supplemented by specific
information about conventions of closure in tonal music.
Experiments involving real listeners carried out in university classrooms hardly
constitute unequivocal demonstrations of what the ordinary listener hears, so
Cook concludes this chapter by adding two further sources of information on the
perception of musical form. The first is an interpretation of how some composers
go about structuring their compositions. Here, too, Cook relies on distinctions
between a work and 'the genre which it exemplifies' (p. 60), and between 'aspects
of a work designed in terms of acoustic and expressive effect' and 'aspects that
are the result of historical and stylistic sedimentation'. As a concrete illustration
of these distinctions, Cook singles out the variation set as a genre with relatively
few composerly constraints. His argument is that 'a variation set ... is likely to
be a more direct reflection of its composer's beliefs about how listeners experience structure than a piece belonging to a genre such as symphony or sonata'
(p. 60). This interesting idea would hold only if, in fact, we could establish the
absence of constraints in the composition of variation sets. In the eighteenth
century, however, there was something of a protocol for composing variations:
one knew when to embellish the melody, when to change mode, when to write a
contrapuntal study, and so on.2
The other challenge to the perception of musical form derives from what Cook
describes as 'people's overt behaviour when responding to music'. Some people
listen in fragments, not necessarily to wholes. Some listen to a favourite movement. Some do not even recognize changes in the order of movements. Cook insists once again on 'a rather glaring disparity between the way in which the
arbiters of musical taste approach musical structure and the way in which
listeners generally respond to it' (p. 68). It follows that we have often mistaken
what is no more than an 'aesthetic ideal' for a 'perceptual fact' (p. 69). Anyone
who detects a hint of anti-intellectualism here and welcomes Cook's attack on
snobbery may find it a little disappointing that Cook does not follow the political
imperatives of his own position, but merely interprets 'the divergence between
the way in which music is thought about and the way in which it is experienced'
not as 'a failing, but rather a defining attribute of musical culture'. What a flat
conclusion to a provocative chapter!
Chapter 2 focuses on the ways in which musicians imagine music. Cook begins
by noting a 'drastic asymmetry between productional and receptive capacity'
(p. 74), but forgoes an opportunity to link and contrast his view with that enshrined in Jean-Jacques Nattiez's poietic-neutral-esthesic
tripartition.3 Some
discussion of the practical problems raised by learning to play the piano leads to
the conclusion that a fingering 'embodies an interpretation of musical structure'.
If fingering is not literal but imaginative, not mechanical but interpretational,
then how can a perception be literal as opposed to imaginative, and how can
listening be musical as opposed to non-musical?
It is in the second part of this chapter that Cook begins to address some of 'the
specifically musicianly ways of grasping music' (p. 86). This is one of the most
stimulating sections of the book and it is perhaps ironic that its strength derives
less from empirical evidence than from 'introspection and anecdotal evidence'.
Cook discusses two specific experiences: going around with 'a familiar tune "on
the brain"', and listening to one piece while trying to recall another. When one
is stuck with a tune on the brain, one is utilizing 'an imaginative perception, not
a real one'. The temporal dimension is accordingly frozen, but it does not collapse entirely. The musician has 'an image of the music' on the brain. So rich is
2 For
Leonard
3 The
Toward

further discussion of the protocol for composing variation sets in the eighteenth century, see
G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (New York, 1980), 255-9.
most recent elaboration of this tripartition is in Jean-Jacques Nattiez's Music and Discourse:
a Semiology of Music (Princeton, 1990), 10-16.

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what goes on in the imagination that different perspectives for viewing an object
and different aspects of the object can exist simultaneously in this quasitemporal world. As for trying to listen to one piece while recalling another, this
is quite difficult because of the way music is constituted temporally - Edward T.
Cone once imagined the musical mind 'chained to the vehicle of the moving
sound'.4
Two types of productional imagery are employed by musicians, the first
kinaesthetic, having to do with internalized performance actions, and the second
visual, having to do with notation. Both vocal and instrumental performance
provide sources of kinaesthetic imagery, and Cook devotes some space to a
discussion of the importance of 'inner singing'. He even sees Schenkerian analysis
as 'a manifestation of this urge towards vocalization' (p. 98). There is a discussion of the physical and phenomenal attributes of certain instruments (oboe,
guitar and keyboard) and Cook shows how some composers exploit these
indigenous conditions.
As a source of imagery, notation raises questions about orality, memory and
recall. Cook draws on his own attempts to recall a piano piece he had memorized
years before, Debussy's Danseuses de Delphes, to show that 'recollection has an
improvisatory dimension', and that 'there is a . . . continuity between what it
means to know a pre-existing piece of music . . . and what it means to compose
music' (p. 113). Accounts of the ways in which some composers recall whole
compositions do not necessarily improve upon the theoretical points made
earlier in the chapter; nor does the account of Beethoven's practice elevate it to
the level of the paradigmatic.
Chapter 3, entitled 'Knowing and Listening', continues where chapter 2 left
off, noting 'the inadequacy of conventional musical notation as a means of
specifying the intended musical sound', something that ethnomusicologists know
very well. When we read music, we are not merely reading the notes but 'synthesiz[ing them] into an imaginative awareness of sound'. Playing a piano prelude
by Chopin 'fluently and expressively is in a real sense improvising' (p. 128). Improvisation is equally characteristic of ensemble playing, and Cook devotes some
space to a discussion of the dynamics of interaction among members of a string
quartet. This type of 'communal improvisation' (p. 131) is different from what
one encounters when playing in a work like Stockhausen's Gruppen, where, lacking a context for musical prediction, the percussion player, for example, merely
executes the notes, but does not improvise. It is good to be reminded that musicians working within a written tradition are often engaged in 'improvisation',
but it does take away from the significance of improvisation to claim that jazz
pianists (playing without written notation) and classical pianists (playing from
notation) are similarly engaged in improvisation. The difference may be one of
degree, but it is a considerable one none the less, and should have been so stated
in the text rather than buried in a footnote on p. 131. In the hands of
certain readers with specific political agendas, Cook's argument could be read as
a challenge to, and perhaps demystification of, the practice of jazz improvisation. I doubt that Cook would allow such an inference to be drawn from his
statements.
The subtitle of the first part of chapter 3, 'The Two Sides of the Musical
Fabric', is a take-off on a quotation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which the
writer, like the weaver, is seen working on one side of the fabric, while meaning
and significance are communicated on the other side. (One is reminded of
Ferdinand de Saussure's classic distinction between a signzfiant and a signifii
which occupy two sides of the same sheet of paper.) Having identified this
central problem of meaning, Cook's discussion in the rest of this wide-ranging
4 Edward T. Cone, 'Words into Music: The Composer's Approach to the Text', Sound and
Poetry, ed. Northrop Frye, English Institute Essays 1956 (New York, 1957), 9.

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chapter concerns images, symbols and their interpretation. Thus Cook reminds
us of Charles Seeger's exploration of similar problems, framed as a distinction
between 'speech knowledge of music in particular' and 'music knowledge of
music' (pp. 135-6), without inquiring into the degree of autonomy that the
latter can claim. The problem of temporality, especially the contradiction between the temporality frozen in an unfolding musical work and that in which
we conduct our business about the work: this gap, too, is recalled from Alfred
Schutz. And the difficulties of transcription of unnotated music are shown
always to involve a carry-over of a certain amount of notational baggage.
What is most likely to attract attention in this chapter is another of Cook's
dichotomies: 'musical listening' as opposed to 'musicological listening'. Musical
listening is 'listening to [music] for purposes of direct aesthetic gratification'
while musicological listening is 'listening to music for the purpose of establishing
facts or formulating theories' (p. 152). Of all the dichotomies invoked in this
book, this one is probably the most contentious, not merely for what it asserts,
but more importantly for the attendant strain of anti-intellectualism it subtends.
Nobody would dispute the fact that we listen differently depending on context,
occasion, mood, familiarity with performers or recording, and so on. There are
not therefore two types of listening but many different types. Consider Cook's
argument regarding our understanding of Beethoven's First Symphony:
Nobody today will find its opening surprising. . . . [O]ne can only find the
passage surprising through an exercise of intellect - by preparing oneself to be
surprised. And this means that the music's surprisingness is again no longer a
musical fact, but a musicological one (p. 147).
But Cook grossly underestimates the baggage that ordinary listeners bring to the
audition of a work. To know that a work was composed by Ludwig van
Beethoven or by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is already to be implicated in a
large number of 'musicological facts'. To be surprised by the opening of
Beethoven's First Symphony is, according to Cook, to have prepared oneself by
internalizing the conventions of eighteenth-century musical beginnings. But this
type of musical education, far from representing an esoteric musicological exercise, is what many keen 'ordinary listeners' acquire with repeated exposure to
different musical works. That is how they can tell when something is new,
unusual or strange. It would take an extraordinary effort to acquire the sort
of phenomenological virginity that would deny such knowledge. In any case,
even to make the effort is to be trapped in the same epistemological space. All
listening, in short, involves an exercise of the intellect, and is therefore
'musicological'.
Could it be, perhaps, that the real purpose of Cook's distinction between
musical and musicological listening is not epistemological but ideological? When
Cook quotes Alfred Schutz approvingly to the effect that 'the listener responds
neither to sound waves, nor does he perceive sounds, he just listens to music'
(p. 160), he immediately raises the question, what exactly does 'just listening' entail? The best that Cook can do is to offer two descriptives, 'effortless quality' and
'overhearing' (after Eric Blom) as features of 'just listening'. It will take more
than what is given here to convince the sceptical reader since musicological
listening, for example, can become effortless after some time, while success at
'overhearing' will depend on a resistance to listening.
The entire discussion of 'Appreciation and Criticism' (pp. 160-86) continues
to play up this distinction. There is thus a 'musicological beauty' as opposed to a
'musical beauty' (p. 166), and some people's 'musicological responses. . . get . . .
in the way of their musical ones'. Cook goes on to criticize music appreciation
teachers for depending on 'a kind of explicit hermeneutics' (p. 167). Granting
that some works embody overt political, ideological or social content, Cook implies that the majority do not. Arnold Schering's interpretations of Beethoven,

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for example, are breezily dismissed (p. 173), but Cook says nothing about
Lawrence Kramer's recent attempt to uncover parallels of strategy between
poems and musical compositions.5 Cook concludes his argument on meaning,
following Wolfgang Iser, by stating that 'what the listener is basically concerned
with is not the meaning of the work but its effect; and this is something that requires no mediation and indeed brooks none' (p. 173).
It is a great pity that in seeking to redress the imbalance between deep and
shallow experiences of music, Cook has gone overboard with his problematic
dichotomy between musicological and musical listening. Has Cook misconstrued
the basic purposes of musicology, which have little to do with 'aesthetic participation' and more to do with establishing facts about musical works? What
sort of baggage does a medievalist studying the origins of notation bring to the
appreciation of Mahler? Is such a person guilty of letting 'expertise' interfere
with the listening experience? Or perhaps Cook's profound ambivalence about
the scholarly study of music harbours the more radical position that musicology
is ultimately irrelevant to the musical experience? These supercharged matters
betray particular ideological leanings, and therefore need to be confronted
openly and explicitly. For example, when Cook quotes Max Kaplan's view that
'music, like poetry or painting, is best served by exposing them [sic] to young
people with a minimum of teacher-interference' (p. 174), he does not pause to
consider the politics of choosing. Do you just tell 'young people' that Beethoven
is good for them and that Viotti is simply not worth bothering with, or that male
composers are just better than female ones, or that it is more rewarding to listen
to Webern than to Duke Ellington? Music may well be a 'democratic art', but as
long as there are institutions for its study and dissemination, we cannot merely
'complete' our understanding of music 'through some kind of aesthetic participation' (pp. 185-6). The aesthetic itself must be politicized.6
Chapter 4, 'Composition and Culture', begins by distinguishing 'real' from
'imagined' sound, and uses this distinction to introduce a series of 'modelling
transformations', of which the most important is the progression from simple to
elaborate in musical composition, or from idea sketches through continuity
sketches to score sketch in the over-idealized schema of sketch study. Cook
bypasses the precedents for this type of discussion in eighteenth-century theory,7
and goes on to consider a specific musical example, Geminiani's playing version
of the finale of Corelli's Violin Sonata op. 5 no. 9. It is not that Corelli's sketchy
notation, intended as the basis for elaboration in actual performance, is lacking
in musical interest (the interdependency of register and voice-leading is vividly
portrayed in the movement), but that Geminiani's is not just another version of
the piece but a different piece altogether.
Next comes a discussion of what it might mean 'to grasp music in purely conceptual or in purely aural terms' (p. 195). Cook relies on the results of tests
carried out by Melissa Howe which consist of modest experiments in composition
using assigned blocks of material. It is interesting that, in evaluating this experiment, Cook dismisses the subject Robert as a 'musicological composer' for relying more on notational symbols than on 'how the music actually sounds'. Since
Robert actually heard the individual blocks of musical material, at what point
did he suppress this knowledge in order to concentrate exclusively on the
manipulation of notational symbols? More important, it might be pointed out
that Robert's 'method' has distinguished precedents in the eighteenth-century
ars combinatoria and more generally in the mechanical strain of eighteenthLawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley, 1984).
6 For further discussion of this point as it applies to the reading of literary works, see Terry
Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990).
7 See Ian D. Bent, 'The "Compositional Process" in Music
Theory 1713-1850', Music Analysis, 3
(1984), 29-55.

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century culture. Cook could easily have settled the score by providing readers
with two lists, one of musical composers, the other of musicological composers,
with some acknowledgment that some musical composers sometimes compose
musicologically. He would then have needed to confront the possibility that, in
certain contexts, it may be more appropriate to listen musicologically than
musically.
The book concludes with a section entitled 'Reification and Explanation' in
which Cook restates and refines some of the earlier themes of the book. Musical
sounds 'are imaginative entities which have a history and a geography of their
own' (p. 219). Far from being 'simply a technology for communicating musical
sounds', notation actually becomes implicated in the cognitive process itself.
Cook believes that 'the fallacy of reification' is to be found in 'much theoretical
thinking about music' and searches Schoenberg's writings for examples of
reification. Cook is right to stress the difference between something that is
'believed to have a real existence' and something that is 'purely an artifice of
representation', and he shows convincingly that Schoenberg was not always alert
to the difference, and that the composer was 'caught in a confusion between
musical and musicological listening'.
The final section of the chapter consists of what is fast becoming a fashionable
and ritualistic attack on formal analysis. Cook first criticizes Boretz for implying
that intervals can be transformed into music, arguing that 'formal classifications
of pitch-class content do not suffice to specify the context within which musical
sounds are heard as similar or dissimilar, coherent or incoherent' (p. 234). Cook
does not, however, suggest ways in which we might make the transition, except
by observing that any talk of 'combinations of pitches or intervals' is at best a 'use
of metaphor'. Formal analysis is further problematic because 'it purports to
establish or explain what is significant in music while circumventing the human
experience through which such significance is constituted; . . . it aims at
"deleting the subject"'. From here it is but a small step to two suggestive
generalizations, first, that formal analysis functions as a kind of psychoanalysis,
and second, that the explanations advanced by formal analysis resemble myths.
Cook claims that 'objectivity is neither a feasible nor a desirable aim for accounts
of music based on music-theoretical concepts' (p. 243).
This partial summary and critique of Nicholas Cook's Music, Imagination,
and Culture will have made it clear that one need not always agree with Cook in
order to find the book extremely stimulating. It is well conceived and clearly
written, uses quotations effectively, and synthesizes a great deal of specialized
research for the general reader. Cook's demonstration of the ways in which musicians conceive of music, imagine it, recall it, even read it: these all provide
challenges to any lazy habits of thought that we might have. Let us hope,
however, that the return of the 'ordinary listener' will not lead to a celebration of
mediocrity. Why should we be afraid to acknowledge the differences in perceptual and imaginative capacity among listeners? Finally, Cook's foundational
claim that there is a 'difference between how people think or talk about music on
the one hand, and how it is experienced on the other' (p. 1) needs some refinement. Such refinement will require a more explicit engagement with history and
convention, and with style and norms, since these formed an important component of both formal and informal education of listeners in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. The claim also calls for a more positive confrontation with
the musical experience, not as it differs from talk about music, but as it is in
itself.
Kofi Agawu
Cornell University