ABSTRACT
This introduction to the volume provides a survey and evaluation of Cook’s ideas as they have affected present-day music studies, beginning from his early work challenging scientific conceptions of music theory and their ethnocentric emphasis on notation, through radical new ways of imagining music as intrinsically multimedial and performative in character, up to his most recent concerns with the social, intercultural, and relational potential of music and musicology. We argue that, despite the superficial appearance Cook’s work may give of a ‘centrifugal’ or what Isaiah Berlin would call a ‘fox’-like multiplicity of themes, it can nevertheless be interpreted, in line with Berlin’s contrasting figure of the ‘hedgehog’, as pivoting around a ‘single central vision’: a socially realized conception of musical meaning, which subsumes Cook’s initial analytical concerns and sets the terms for his more recent turn to a ‘relational musicology’. This is rounded off with a brief précis of the individual chapters, making reference to their intersection with Cook’s research concerns, and summarizing the book’s two-part structure.
