Remixing Music Studies

Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should we be looking at how music relates to society and constructs meaning through it, rather than how it transcends the social? Can we ‘remix’ our discipline and attempt to address all musics on an equal basis, without splitting ourselves in advance into subgroups of ‘musicologists’, ‘theorists’, and ‘ethnomusicologists’? These are some of the crucial issues that Nicholas Cook has raised since he emerged in the 1990s as one of the UK’s leading and most widely read voices in critical musicology. In this book, collaborators and former students of Cook pursue these questions and others raised by his work―from notation, historiography, and performance to the place of music in multimedia forms such as virtual reality and video games, analysing both how it can bring people together and the ways in which it has failed to do so.

Ananay Aguilar is Policy Advisor at Cambridge Enterprise and Affiliated Researcher at the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL) at the University of Cambridge. She previously held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, also at the University of Cambridge, focusing on music copyright and policy.

Ross Cole is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. His research interests extend from the late nineteenth century up to the present, with a particular focus on popular culture and experimentalism. His first book, The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination, is forthcoming with University of California Press.

Matthew Pritchard is Lecturer in Musical Aesthetics at the University of Leeds. He has published on aspects of music aesthetics from c. 1750–1930 in Germany, and is working on a book examining the aesthetics of this period through the lens of the ‘history of emotions’. He also writes on and translates the songs and musical essays of Rabindranath Tagore.

Eric Clarke is Heather Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, and a professorial fellow of Wadham College. He has published on topics in the psychology of music and related areas. His books include Empirical Musicology (2004), Ways of Listening (2005), Music and Mind in Everyday Life (2010), Music and Consciousness (2011), and Distributed Creativity (2017).