e-mail: njc69@cam.ac.uk
Nicholas Cook took up the 1684 Professorship in 2009. He was formerly Professorial Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and before that taught at the universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton, where he also served as Dean of Arts. A musicologist and theorist, he holds separate degrees in music and in history/art history. His articles have appeared in leading British and American journals, and cover topics from aesthetics and analysis to psychology and pop.
His books, mostly published by Oxford University Press, include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987); Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993); Analysis Through Composition (1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), which is published or forthcoming in twelve other languages and to which a special issue of Musicae Scientiae was devoted. Oxford also publish Rethinking Music (1999), coedited with Mark Everist, and Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, coedited with Eric Clarke (2004); he also coedited the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (with Anthony Pople, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009). His latest book, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford, 2007), received the Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory in 2010. A further collection is in press: Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines, coedited with the dramaturgue Richard Pettengill (Michigan University Press). Also nearing publication is a book on performance analysis, integrating computational approaches developed at CHARM with those of cultural musicology and inter-disciplinary performance theory, while he is currently working on a study of recordings of Webern’s Piano Variations funded by an AHRC Fellowship. Planned projects thereafter includes books on music as creative practice and on relational musicology.
A former Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Nicholas Cook was Chair of the Music Panel in the Higher Education Funding Councils’ 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Europe.