DOI: 10.1111/musa.

12077

Nicholas Cook, Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2013). xiv + 458 pp. £32.99 (hb). ISBN 978-0-19-935740-6.

There is no doubting the stunning array of diverse sources, the remarkable

interdisciplinary scope, and the lucidity of expression with which Nicholas Cook
has long been associated, in what could be considered his magnum opus; and,
although he takes more than 400 pages to expound on it, the central claim is
superficially simple.

1. Music – or at least Western art music – is normally performed; in other

words, we normally listen to a performance (whether live or recorded). This
means that
2. not only does the score fail to represent much that is apparent in a
performance, but each performance is different, and so
3. any approach which focuses entirely, or primarily, on what is represented (or
can be represented) in the score, and does so with an emphasis on structure,
will inevitably remain occupied with an abstraction and risk positing the
self-contained musical work as an ideal object or structural entity, such that
4. any given performance will be conceived as little more than a contingent
instantiation, which may be more or less successful (in terms of its fidelity
to the posited universal ideal), and
5. any given performer will be acknowledged as little more than a functional
intermediary, whose contribution, while it may be more or less successful,
by definition can never be entirely so.

So argues Cook, from which follows his appeal that we recognise (academically
and even ethically) the creativity of the performer qua collaborator and co-
producer, as well as the role of performance in embodying and creating a meaning
that can be neither fully represented nor completely constrained by the notated
score; and, as set out in those terms, most would agree.
The issue here is that Beyond the Score devotes rather a lot of space to making
this argument – one which has been made innumerable times before – as the
basis for proposing a rethinking of musicological assumption. At the same time,
Cook notes that his approach is ‘more conservative’ than much of the writing
on music that has been carried out, or influenced by, performance studies
(p. 1). Yet despite this (apparently) moderate radicalism, or perhaps because of its
oxymoronic implication, there remains a lurking sense of straw targets and tilting
at windmills. We are told that musicology – not delineated further, as though
it were a singular homogenous entity which sits outside national genealogies
and historical trajectories – was ‘set up around the idea of music as writing

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rather than music as performance’ (p. 1); and the implication is that it remains
largely centred on this premise. Otherwise, Cook’s desire to rethink musicology
would be rendered a touch moot. However, a page later, he observes both that
‘plenty of musicologists write about performance’ and also that ‘the explosion of
research in musical performance [ . . . ] show[s] that [the view that musicology
has been skewed by its orientation towards music as writing] is widely shared’
(p. 2, emphasis added).
Consequently, Cook’s clarion call and its radical implications are in fact
predicated on a proposition that is, by his own measure, already put into practice
by many – a curious form of radicalism, but then perhaps we are all radicals now.
In that sense, Cook’s central contention – or rather the backdrop against which
he sets his argument – does at time carry the faint air of a French resistance
fighter, still holed up in the hills of Provence and taking potshots at German
tourists, unaware that the war is long since over; as he notes, the book grew out
of an article (Cook 2001) published more than a decade ago (p. xiii).
The introduction and first two chapters are essentially dedicated to setting
out the backdrop to Cook’s argument. He claims, for example, that established
theoretical approaches need to be ‘placed in context and weaned from their
traditional fixation with structure’ (p. 2). This represents something of an
anachronistic generalisation, given that ‘theoretical approaches’ – assuming
one can meaningfully lump them all together in a single and coherently
subsuming category – have long incorporated ‘fixations’ (perhaps ‘emphases’
would have been less loaded) with many different aspects of music: structure,
of course; but also contour, metrical pattern, intra- and extra-musical semiotic
signification, phrasing, gesture, poetics, semantics, syntax, and so on. Many of
these approaches then typically broaden such analysis out into an account of
meaning, metaphor, emotion, reception and wider issues of social, cultural and
political import. Whatever one’s perspective, one would struggle to deny the
rich sociocultural significance that Adorno – one of Cook’s go-to bêtes noires –
was able to derive from his material theory of form (where the deformation
of sonata-form structure in Mahler is read as a mediated expression of the
dialectical unmasking of the decaying bourgeois subject-ideal – hardly the
obvious foundation for a stringent and ascetic formalism, or, for that matter,
another manifestation of Plato’s curse).
Similarly, Cook claims that ‘traditional musicology is like literary studies: it
sees meaning, of whatever kind, as embodied in musical notation’ (p. 10). Some
musicology undoubtedly does. But an equal or larger proportion of musicologists
and analysts do not see the score as a reified embodiment of meaning; rather, they
make a utilitarian and retrospective use of a score, or notational presentation,
in order – in a manner which is the direct converse of that claimed by Cook –
efficiently to represent meanings and relationships that they hear in the music as
an aural experience unfolding through time (including as something performed).
That popular music typically does not have a score, but that many analysts of
popular music nevertheless make use of notation (via transcription), emphasises

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this point: many analysts do not ‘start out’ from the score but return to it. That
the vocabularies and graphical presentations of analysts and theorists are often
beyond the comprehension of the non-specialist, and indeed the comprehension
of many scholars concerned with music, is not in doubt; but one wonders why
this remains either a point of contention or the locus of an insidious suspicion
when the same is rarely said of the efficient disciplinary or symbolic languages
typically deployed in the sciences, psychology and analytic philosophy, or for
that matter of the adoption of often obfuscating critical-theoretical terminology
in the humanities in general. The latter is not something that can be said of
Cook, whose writing remains admirably clear and free of jargon. At the same
time, and throughout the book, Cook appeals for the rethinking of a musicology
constrained by an allegedly monolithic presumption while also undermining that
very portrayal by quietly noting musicology’s diversity and fluidity.
There are also some moments of tenuous logic. Cook notes that British fair
dealing exceptions apply to scores but not to recordings. This, he claims, implies
‘there is nothing to study in the recording, over and above what is already in the
score’ (p. 17). Yet the litigators of copyright law are unlikely to be concerned
with the vicissitudes of musicological debate; their view is almost certainly that
the recorded performance is considered the manifest realisation to which the
commercial rights most obviously apply.
Similarly, early on, when critiquing historically informed practice, Cook notes
that ‘written documents are highly problematic as sources of information on
performance practice’ (p. 27). Undoubtedly they are, and they have to be treated
with caution. Yet Cook is quite willing to bolster and support his assertions
about historical performance practice in general by frequently citing written
documents. Likewise, Cook notes that the same problems apply to paintings,
asking, ‘[C]an we assume the painters were realistically depicting what they
saw?’ (p. 27). Yet, eight pages earlier, he includes a reproduction of Carl Johann
Arnold’s Quarter Evening at Bettina von Arnim’s in Berlin to support his contention
regarding the composer-performer hierarchy: ‘what is puzzling is the extent to
which performers have connived in the hierarchy so graphically represented by
Arnold’ (p. 19). It does appear that Cook considers the questionable reliability
of historical documents and paintings to be somewhat less ‘problematic’ if they
happen to support the argument he is making.
One might also notice – the straw-target point again – a frequent return to
Schoenberg (d. 1951) and Adorno (d. 1969) as providing the basis for articulating
the central assumptions, more than half a century later, of a contemporary
musicology in need of rethinking. In keeping with this slightly unusual tack,
Schenker is the other figure to whom Cook repeatedly returns, especially in the
earlier part of the book – Ch. 3 is dedicated to him. Again, this rather reinforces
a point that has already been made and will be made again. The first half of
the book is an often fascinating and comprehensively researched account of fin-
de-siècle and early twentieth-century practice and thought (particularly as they
pertain to piano performance); it is the way in which this historical presentation

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is then elided with contemporary musicological presumption and practice that

renders tendentious certain aspects of the putative central claim.
Ch. 3 represents the start of the book proper and is centred on an illuminating,
and forensic, discussion of two 1905 performances captured on piano roll, by
Eugen d’Albert and Wassily Sapellnikoff, of Schubert’s Op. 90 No. 3. In noting
d’Albert’s deviation from the imperatives of the general ‘analysis-to-performance’
approaches, Cook suggests that this ‘could of course be because such approaches
have embodied too narrow a concept of structure’ (p. 67). Here we have a
tantalising proposition: that ‘structure’ is neither something deducible only from
the score, nor something that emerges sui generis by virtue of the performer’s
stylistic predilection. In other words, a theoretical ‘fixation’ with structure is not
in itself a distorting emphasis; it only becomes so if it neglects the performative
possibilities afforded by a given score. Cook explicitly acknowledges this nuance
later (p. 87). But this renders blunt and unnecessary the dismissal of theoretical
structuralism. After all, both theorist and performer are dealing, at some point,
with the same thing (i.e. the score); and so it is not about getting ‘beyond the
score’, but about not limiting oneself only to what one presumes it presents.
The dialectical model suggested by this representation is not obviously
broached or pursued. However, such a line would have enriched Cook’s
convincing and salutary observation both that the structural(ist) and/or
Schenkerian-derived variants of performance imperative are themselves to be
recognised as historically emergent styles, no better or worse than others; and also
that the tendency to cleave to those stylistic presumptions, in certain conservatory
settings in particular, has compelled a delimiting and limiting of a performer’s
creative freedom (and so the relevance of his or her original contribution). It is
here that Cook’s argument is at its best and most forceful. For example, his noting
the way in which some theorists sought to prescribe that a performance of Webern
should render clear the series is a good example of theoretical stricture trumping
performative potential (pp. 54–5) – which, as Adorno himself argued (though in
relation to composition), would flatten the dialectical interplay between object
and subject, between material and expression, and so risk the palette’s becoming
the painting.
In Ch. 4 Cook develops this idea, reminding us that he has already quoted
Mitchell Ohriner’s suggestion that ‘structure is best seen as produced by
performers within the framework of compositional affordances’ (p. 91). One
might propose that ‘co-produced’ would work better, since affordances are, after
all, finite in nature and number (otherwise they are not really affordances). In
fact, Cook then quotes – favourably, one presumes, in that he does not contest
it – Mine Dogantan-Dack’s observation that ‘some pieces admit of only one
structural interpretation’ (p. 91). In other words, some pieces do not in fact offer
up a range of compositional affordances in respect of structural interpretation.
Once again, we encounter a peculiar incongruence between, on the one hand,
the nuance that Cook often admirably acknowledges and, on the other, the
stridency with which he depicts the (straw) target of his critique. Correlatively,

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I know of few analysts – Schenkerian or otherwise – who would explicitly posit

their structural interpretation as the one and only inviolable and universal model
which all analysts must accept and all performers must acknowledge. Typically,
analysts and theorists simply offer their take on one, and only one, of the hearings
they believe to be afforded by the score; and so, instead of the insidious constraint
of an ideological imposition, they are – rather in the manner of Wittgenstein’s
duck/rabbit – proffering a particular way of hearing a piece that serves to
enrich and multiply our potential interpretations of it. Just as do performers.
Analysts and theorists have been the whipping boys of self-styled ‘progressive’
musicological discourse for at least two decades, and it is therefore something of
a shame that Cook – who is, even if reluctantly, and as his discussion of specific
works demonstrates, a perceptive analyst – should feel the need, if not to jump
on the bandwagon, then at least to ride alongside it.
This is exemplified by Cook’s subtle and illuminating comparative discussion
of nine different performances of the opening movement of Mozart’s Sonata
in F major, K. 332. He demonstrates persuasively how the performances of,
among others, Wanda Landowska, Malcolm Bilson and Glenn Gould – I had
forgotten just how jolting the latter is – could be said to have clear ontological
import. His analogy with role play in virtual worlds is original and revealing,
and I wished he had developed this further. The analogy suggests a series of
fascinating (philosophical and musicological) questions, although Cook does not
pursue them. One obvious, if superficially facile, point – partly a consequence of
semantics – is that when we speak of the ‘interpretations’ of a work, we naturally
imply the existence of an invariant (of which the interpretations are so many
manifestations, and to which they yet recognisably adhere even as they diverge).
This is not the place to delve into the complexities of the sorites paradox or a
variant thereof: that is, at what point does an interpretation cease to count as
an interpretation of K. 332/i. How and in what sense are Landowska’s K. 332/i
and Gould’s K. 332/i the same ‘thing’? That said, it is unfortunate that Cook did
not pursue this line at least a little further (as have innumerable writers, from
Lydia Goehr – whom Cook briefly mentions – to Roman Ingarden),1 although he
returns to it briefly and tangentially in Ch. 7 via a reference to Nelson Goodman.
This reiterates an observation already made: there is so much here that rarely
does Cook pause for breath (or allow his reader to do the same).
And yet, this is the very crux of his central claim. In so far as it focuses only
on the score (and what is represented in it), analysis engages with, but therefore
also reciprocally constructs, an ideal object (of which performances are then
conceived as so many secondary or derivative manifestations); and in so far as
it focuses only on structure (as only derivable from what is represented in the
score), theory posits a conception of music as an intentional object – which
latter point explains both the emphasis on structural modelling and also why
some, whom Cook notes, propose a ‘silent’ reading of the score as a preferred
(or at least entirely sufficient) mode of engagement. At the same time, the ‘in
so fars’ are important; and so, ironically, Cook’s monolithic representation of

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music-theoretical structuralism – as depicted in the opening of the book –

is as blind to the surface nuances and multiple manifestations of the same
as he argues analytical practice is to the multiple performative potentials of a
given work. Moreover, Cook does not dispute that the nine recordings capture
performances of K. 332/i; and since his focus is on highlighting the very different
nature of the nine realisations, it follows logically that what allows them all to be
conceived as instantiations of K. 332/i – their necessary if not sufficient identity
conditions – is, in effect, the remainder, the distillate. This, of course, is precisely
what the score represents. Cook appears to acknowledge a dialectic somewhat
later when he suggests that ‘rhetorical and structuralist approaches represent
complementary possibilities for construing music as thought and action’ (p.
129). As ever, the stridency of the purported agenda belies the more conciliatory
compromise apparent in the detail. Cook closes the chapter, somewhat oddly,
via a detour into copyright law and its ramification – now ascribing to its
development a significance that I earlier argued he had neglected when claiming
that recording and production practice was the primary cause of Western art
music’s diminishing role in musical life.
Ch. 5, one of the more focussed chapters, is concerned with style analysis.
Even here, however, one encounters another of those peculiar contradictions.
Having suggested that emphasising the ‘vertical dimension’ (work centred) as
opposed to the comparative ‘horizontal dimension’ (performance centred) has
become the norm for musicology, he notes that ‘this was not always the case. The
concept of musical style has been subject to remarkable vicissitudes since Guido
Adler [ . . . ] divided the field [of musicology] into the historical and systematic
approaches to music’ (p. 137). Yet, as noted, Cook had earlier claimed explicitly
that musicology was ‘set up around the idea of music as writing rather than
music as performance’ (p. 1). Once again, the radical rethinking proposed in the
first chapter is given the lie by the gritty complexity and granulated nuance of a
historical reality which Cook subsequently acknowledges.
From that point, Cook proceeds with an instructive, almost textbook-style
overview of the methodologies and technologies of analysing performance – the
stylistic disjuncture between this and the preceding chapter speaking to the book’s
composite assemblage of his earlier scholarship, even if substantially re-worked. It
also incorporates a not entirely disguised promotion of Sonic Visualiser software –
which, of course, was developed in conjunction with the AHRC Research Centre
for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), of which Cook was
the director (see www.charm.rhul.ac.uk); and a digression through the ‘Hatto
hoax’, which remains as tantalising as ever (pp. 151–4). Ch. 6 is effectively a
companion to the chapter that precedes it, informed as it is by further detailed
use of empirical and visualised data. If it appears that later chapters are short-
changed here, then this is because the sheer length and scope of the book compels
selectivity (and Chs 5 and 6 are unobjectionably what they are).
The book then takes yet another turn, with Ch. 7 focussed on improvisation,
cutting back and forth between jazz and Corelli’s Op. 5 (the latter, in part,

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via recourse to historical documents which, despite Cook’s earlier caveat,

are presumably deemed sufficiently reliable here). It is somewhat heavy with
quotations, a technique that occurs frequently throughout the book: on p. 236,
for example, where in the space of half a paragraph we have a chain of quotes from
Adorno, Alfred Schultz, Ingrid Monson, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Anthony
Frost and Ralph Yarrow. While this undoubtedly serves to demonstrate that the
author has read a lot of things, one does detect, at times, a kind of discursive
ventriloquism at work, wherein an argument is made, and considered proven,
effectively by proxy – by citing half a dozen people who appear to agree with
it. Nevertheless, it is an interesting discussion, proposing – though would many
actually disagree? – that improvisatory practice, in jazz or in Corelli, be seen not
as a different kind of performance (or music), but rather as limit cases for a form
of production (rather than only reproduction) that actually applies to all music.
This is because even the most deterministic scores (in so far as they are not
intended for mechanical reproduction) remain, so to speak, underdetermined.
For that reason, from an organisational perspective, it would have made a better
early chapter, even first chapter, since its central point serves to illustrate the
book’s purported central contention.
Chs 8 to 10 represent a kind of Part 2. For example, Cook observes that,
in contrast to sound structures, ‘a wide range of other things that happen in
performance are considered not to matter, and these extend from the visual
appearance and physical gesture [ . . . ] to social interaction’ (p. 249). Ch. 8 begins
with a standard dismissal of Adorno and a reminder that the ‘New Musicology’
was still ‘built on music as writing’ (p. 251). While I would not wish to appear as
yet another apologist for Adorno – he has enough – Cook’s depiction, and those
of the sociologists (such as Howard Becker) whom he cites favourably, reveal
a fundamental misreading. Adorno’s dialectical framework was predicated, by
definition, on an antipathy towards the presumption, and the very possibility,
of an empirical, value-neutral, objective sociology (which, in seeking to explain
society, simply reproduced it); and, in his deeply historicist understanding of
‘musical material’ (anything but ‘only the notes’), the ‘aesthetic’ was not arrayed
in the manner of the ideological fiction deconstructed by the new musicology,
sociology, and Cook alike, but rather was seen as the last remaining normative
‘other’ both to an instrumental reason that might reduce music to commercial
exigencies and also to a positivism that might reduce its study to the illusion of
empirical objectivity. Adorno, more than anyone, was well aware that music’s
‘autonomy’ was a socially produced fiction. He appears to remain an itch that
Cook must repeatedly scratch.
We then turn to ethnographic approaches via another reference to CHARM –
and the summary repetition here, already given in Ch. 5, speaks to the collation
of pre-existing materials. Chs 9 and 10 are interesting digressions, albeit their
very focus on the signifying body renders them codas to a discussion often
concerned with recordings (and so excluding the visual). Ch. 12 provides a
convincing (mainly ethnographic and anecdotal) account of the development of

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assumptions around recording and production practices, observing that most

contemporary classical recordings are no more realistic reproductions of a
presumed ‘live’ experience than are most popular recordings. In fact, they are
not really ‘recordings’ at all.
At the same time, one of Cook’s more striking claims (also made early in the
book), is that a ‘vicious cycle’ – wherein a recording aims to reproduce a live
experience, which itself aims to reproduce a recording – is ‘largely responsible’
for the diminishing role of Western art music in the modern world (p. 4). Striking,
but not entirely convincing. First, a directed engagement with Western art music
was only ever a minority pursuit (in Europe, let alone the world); and it is
likely that radical transformations in economic, social and class structures, as
well as industrial and distribution contexts, throughout the twentieth century
have played a more significant role than the fidelity of recording technique or the
vacillations of production values. Secondly, it is not necessarily that its role per se
has diminished, but rather that the perception of its significance has diminished as
the democratisation of taste and value assumption gradually eroded the power of
the ‘guardians of culture’ to place it at the centre of presumed edification (whether
via the captive audience of a BBC radio broadcast or a school curriculum).
Moreover, it seems surprising that Cook should consider that ‘recording’
practices have had more of an impact on the place of such music than the advent
of a modernist style which served to lock the repertoire – such as most audiences
were willing to pay to hear – into a museum-like representation of the ‘great
works’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Consequently, rather as in the
case of academic fashions, commercial imperative would then necessarily compel
the ‘new’ to be realised less in the composition of new music, and more in the
new interpretation of old music (the analogical parallel is with the development
of new media, as exemplified in a line from the film Men in Black: ‘This is gonna
replace CDs soon, guess I’ll have to buy the White Album again’). At the same
time, and conversely, people are in fact now more exposed to music that is, or
is derived from, Western art music than at any time in history; they just do not
necessarily realise it. In short, what has diminished is the notion of Western art
music as a rarefied aesthetic object to be attended to purely in and of itself – yet
even this notion was always something of an abstract and discursively posited
fiction, and only ever the preserve of a few (mainly philosophers and feuilleton
critics, along with some composers).
Barring the few fleeting paragraphs that close Ch. 12, the book appears to
lack an obvious conclusion (in the sense of a concluding chapter), which – given
the size and scope of the book – would very much have assisted in pulling
together, into some sense of coherently retrospective overview, the sheer volume
and diverse array of material hitherto incorporated.
Few people would deny the relevance of analysing performance or disagree
that some – note: some – music-theoretical work can appear to reify a particular
structural interpretation as ‘correct’ and so relegate performance to the more
or less successful transmission of the same. Similarly, even those who are able

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to read a score silently would likely agree that, pace Schoenberg and others,
there is something a little perverse in proposing that the best (rather than an
alternative) way of engaging with music is via a reading of the score – not least
because, and Cook makes this point well, the relevance of scholarly work is surely
predicated in good part on its seeking to understand its object in relation to the
human contexts and relations of which it is a part. And the vast majority of
people engage with Western art music as something ‘sounding’, and normally as
something ‘performed’, albeit the situation is somewhat muddied when dealing
with much post-1960s popular music (where ‘live versions’ are typically viewed
as derivations of, and sometimes actually measured against, the primary text
represented by the recording produced in a studio and released commercially).
Beyond the Score ranges across an astonishing amount of material. At the same
time, and for all that Cook’s central claim is to challenge the primacy of structural
unity (in the analysis and performance of music), the reader will at times wish
that the book itself had been subject to a little more structural organisation, given
its breathless ‘and another thing’ mode of presentation. As another review put it:
‘such a miscellany implies scanning rather than probing’ (Williams 2014, p. 103).
Two examples will suffice. A seven-page section on speech (pp. 74–80) gives the
impression of a stream of consciousness, (too) rapidly traversing performance,
speech, rhetoric, public speaking, gesture, emotion, philosophy, and so on – and
accomplishing all of this via a dizzying array of (often metonymic) references
to innumerable examples, anecdotes and authors. Similarly, Ch. 4, as discussed
above, incorporates a reflection on structure and interpretation, an analysis of
renditions of K. 332/i, a summary of conceptions of musical rhetoric, a discussion
of historical renditions of Mozart’s Rondo alla turca (K. 331/iii), musings on time
and temporality and a summary critique of copyright law. Cook often appears
to have wanted to cram in just about everything he could possibly think of –
tangential detours, anecdotes, metonymic allusions and multiple quotations,
among other things.
Overall, what we have is a book that cannot quite decide what it is. Is it
something akin to a ‘collected essays’ compendium on music and, and as,
performance (it is not, but much of the text is clearly derived from prior research
and publication spanning more than a decade, which accounts for some of the
internal disjuncture in respect of material and style)? A position paper on the
discipline of musicology (with a long series of de facto illustrative working-outs)?
A partly philological presentation of Schenker and the (mis)appropriation of
the theoretical principles he espoused? An introduction to the empirical study
of performance practice? Or a disquisition on the exigencies of performative
interpretation in the (recorded) twentieth-century presentation of nineteenth-
century repertoire? It is at its best as the latter; another way of putting this is that
are at least three books here.
One detects that Cook may have been uncomfortable with presenting (only)
an otherwise admirable exercise in rigorous empirical research (such as is
afforded, for example, in Chs 4 through 6) and so felt compelled to clothe

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the exercise in a (moderately) radical disciplinary manifesto. The point here,

in what might otherwise seem a somewhat critical precis, is that the kernel
of the enlightening and erudite exposition that Cook is seeking to forward,
as well as the many, many moments of discretely engaging scholarship, are
globally undermined by an unnecessary recourse to the kind of straw-target
depiction and overreaching claims of disciplinary import required to dramatise
the radicalism of the purported rethinking. Cook demonstrates a humbling
mastery of a remarkable breadth of material, and many (almost all) of the parts
are on their own terms fascinating and lucid in their scholarly presentation; yet
the whole somehow remains less than their sum.
Sometimes – as many of the best performers will tell you – less can be more.

GILES HOOPER

NOTE
1. See, for example, Goehr (1992) or Ingarden (1986).

REFERENCES
Cook, Nicholas, 2001: ‘Between Process and Product: Music and/as Perfo-
rmance’, Music Theory Online, 7/ii. http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/
mto.01.7.2.cook.html.
Goehr, Lydia, 1992: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: an Essay in the
Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Ingarden, Roman, 1986: The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press).
Williams, Peter, 2014: ‘Freely Rendered’, The Musical Times, 155/mcmxxix
(Winter), pp. 98–104.

NOTE ON THE CONTRIBUTOR

GILES HOOPER completed his PhD at the University of Keele in 2003. After
teaching at the Universities of Keele, Exeter and Bristol, he was appointed as a
lecturer at the University of Liverpool in 2005, where he served as head of the
department between 2010 and 2014. His research interests include twentieth-
century music, critical theory and analysis and the use of inter- or cross-
disciplinary approaches which seek to interpret different repertoires of music
from a range of critical perspectives.

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