ABSTRACT
In his ‘Writing on Music or Axes to Grind: Road Rage and Musical Community’, Nicholas Cook critiques the tendency for musicology to provide advocacy. The worst culprits, according to Cook, are biographies and ‘writers on contemporary “art” music—what they [the writers] often call “new” music’. Having written a monograph on a composer of contemporary art music (with or without scare quotes), a good deal of my work falls into the intersection of all the practices Cook abhors-and I’ve even edited a book with the subtitle Essays on New Music! What better reason, then, to test some of Cook’s ideas? This chapter discusses the practical and theoretical problems of writing about living composers and musicians, in relation to the epistemology, methodology, and social function of musicology. The guiding questions are: who and what is musicology for, and, on that basis, how should it proceed? As I will outline, although Cook’s warning about advocacy is well advised, his proposed cure may be worse than the disease.
