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| Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium30 April-1 May 2004The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AHImagining things: mind into music (and back again) Professor Nicholas Cook, FBA1 Everybody, perhaps, would sign up to the description of music as a culture of the aural imagination. But such a formulation could equally encompass Romantic conceptions of music as the audible trace of unfettered fantasy, and the post-war avant-garde's view of it as the last word in rational construction: in this way it begs more questions than it addresses. In this paper I make a second pass over some of the arguments in my book Music, Imagination, and Culture (which was published in 1990 and so predated the so called 'New' musicology), focussing on the inherent limits of all imaginative models of music, and the role of the remainder that lies beyond them-the excess of real experience over imagination. Drawing examples from Roger Reynolds's recent book Form and Method: Composing Music and from an ongoing project investigating the performance of contemporary piano music, I argue that imaginative models of music are best understood not as attempted comprehensive specifications (as music theorists have generally seen them), but as spurs or prompts to performative action. Seen this way, music provides perhaps a model of how people can work together towards a common vision and yet retain their own autonomy: it shows how individual imagination is consummated in social action.
1. Professor of Music, Royal Holloway University of London |
