Music, Encounter, Togetherness

Abstract

Music is a basic dimension of society in today’s world. This book aims to promote ways of thinking about music that create space for both human agency and social relationship. It is written from the perspective of Euro-American musical traditions but puts them into dialogue with other world music cultures. It adopts perspectives that make sense across multiple traditions, such as how music affords interpersonal relationship and social togetherness, and what happens when musicians from different cultures interact. The idea of encounter highlights the dynamic and processual nature of musicking, in therapy or at home as much as in the jazz club or concert hall. Western musicologists have traditionally thought of music as primarily a repertory of objects; Nicholas Cook shows how thinking of it in processual terms—through an expanded idea of performance—makes as much sense of Western art music as it does of other traditions. Basing an understanding of music on acts rather than objects, and focussing on people and their relationships rather than on the impersonal forces of evolutionary or stylistic histories, opens up ways of thinking that counter some of the dehumanising aspects of musical thinking and practice in global modernity. Theory-driven approaches are complemented by case studies that range from late eighteenth-century India to contemporary China, and from Debussy’s encounter with Javanese music and dance to cross-cultural musicking in Australia and in cyberspace. The book concludes by looking at Viennese classical music from some of the perspectives developed in the preceding chapters.