Music, Imagination, and Culture
by Nicholas Cook
2020-11-24 20:36:52
Music, Imagination, and Culture
by Nicholas Cook
2020-11-24 20:36:52
It is a common experience that words are inadequate for music; there seems always to be a disparity between how music is experienced, and how it is described or rationalized.This book is a study of musical imagination. Musicians imagine music by mea...
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It is a common experience that words are inadequate for music; there seems always to be a disparity between how music is experienced, and how it is described or rationalized.This book is a study of musical imagination. Musicians imagine music by means of functional models which determine certain aspects of the music while leaving others open. This means that there is inevitably a gap between the image and the experience that it models, and this gap can be a source ofcompositional creativity. Different musical cultures embody different ways of imagining sound as music, and thus every culture creates its own distinctive pattern of discrepancies between image and experience - discrepancies which are reflected in theoretical thinking about music.Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Nicholas Cook makes a clear distinction between the province of music theory and that of aesthetic criticism. In doing so he affirms the importance of the `ordinary listener'' in musicalculture, and the validity of his or her experience of music.
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