Prof Nicholas Cook

Nicholas Cook held the 1684 Professorship from 2009 to 2017. Prior to that he taught at the Universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton, where he served as Dean of Arts; he was also a 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). He holds degrees in both music and history/art history, and his work ranges widely over musicology and music theory, extending at times into popular and world music. His articles have appeared in many of the leading British and American journals in these fields.

Cook’s 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 seventeen languages and to which a special issue of Musicae Scientiae was devoted (a completely rewritten second edition appeared in 2021). A collection of his essays appeared in 2007 under the title Music, Performance, Meaning: Selected Essays, while his book The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (also 2007) won the Wallace Berry Award of the Society for Music Theory. He has also coedited several collections, including Rethinking Music (1999), Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects (2004), the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (2004), and The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture (2019). He has published extensively on music as performance, sometimes involving computational methodologies; books range from Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (2013), which built on CHARM’s work, to the coedited collections The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009) and Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines (2013, with the dramaturgue Richard Pettengill). He also conducted a recordings-based project on the performance history of Webern’s Piano Variations, funded by an AHRC Fellowship.

Since retiring in 2017 Cook has developed the performance studies approach in new directions, particularly in relation to collaborarative creativity, social interaction, and transcultural encounter. Music as Creative Practice (2019) was Cook's contribution to CMPCP (the AHRC Research Centre for Music as Creative Practice), the Cambridge-based successor to CHARM. A British Academy Wolfson Research Professorship enabled him to complete Music, Encounter, Togetherness (2024) which sets out a model of music as social encounter and develops it through a series of intercultural on case studies; drawing on these ideas, a short book entitled Music: Why It Matters (2023) focusses on a range of contemporary social and political issues as seen from a musical perspective.

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 holds honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago and the ‘Gheorghie Dima’ Music Academy, Cluj-Napoca, and is a Fellow of the British Academy.