Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium

30 April-1 May 2004

The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

Nick Cook

Nicholas Cook is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, where (from April 2004) he will direct the AHRB Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM); he has also taught in Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton. He has worked on topics from music aesthetics and analysis to psychology and pop, and his books include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987), Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990), Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993), Analysis through Composition (1996), Analysing Musical Multimedia, and Music: A Very Short Introduction (both 1998). He co-edited Rethinking Music (with Mark Everist, 1999) and two forthcoming collections: The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (with Anthony Pople), and Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects (with Eric Clarke). The idea that musical cultures can be thought of as traditions of imagining music - an idea that might be called in essence ethnomusicological - is one of the recurring leitmotifs in his work, from his doctoral thesis ('Musical Analysis and the Listener', subsequently published by Garland) and Music, Imagination, and Culture (essentially the book of the thesis) to his Very Short Introduction, which represents a second and in some ways very different pass through some of the same material.

Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association and Chair of the Music Panel in the 2001 UK Research Assessment Exercise, Nicholas Cook was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in the same year. His is currently completing Schenker and Others: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna.