A relational musicology

Nicholas Cook (2024) Music, Encounter, Togetherness, Oxford University Press.

What music is really about is, of course, a concern for everyone involved with music, whether they are music researchers, educators, or music therapists. We turn to music research to gain an understanding and legitimation of musical practice, whether we are performers or communicators. For the music therapist, for example, a core question is what it is about music that makes it so effective in so many contexts – when we play, compose, listen to music, or improvise to connect with people.

A Relational Musicology

In this latest book by Nicholas Cook, he makes a clear shift towards what we can now call a relational musicology. When I wrote my textbook on musicology, I attempted to outline some stages in the development of musicology, from positivist and historical musicology, through critical, interpretive, and empirical music research, to "new musicology" and what is now called relational musicology as the latest addition. I found the idea of a relational musicology interesting, but there was little written on the subject beyond a few articles by Georgina Born and Nicholas Cook.

I couldn't quite piece together what the core or focus of this latest shift was. For Georgina Born, the relational referred to how musical meaning is generated through the connection to other music. For Cook, music is now about the relationship or connection between people, although he also, in a keynote address for the Japanese Musicological Society in 2002, focused on connections between different musical traditions and musicologies.

Later, he stopped using the term "relational musicology." Confusion arose about what the term was supposed to mean, he writes. But also because he believed that musicology didn't need additional labels. He now sought a more thorough approach to the relational dimensions of music and had noticed that both in popular music research and jazz studies, relational dimensions were being highlighted. A prominent example is Ingrid Monson’s book Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction.

Now, fifteen years later, he writes:

"Whereas Western musicologists have traditionally thought of music as, in essence, a repertory of works connected by processes of composition, performance, reception, and so forth, the view has developed that it makes more sense to turn this on its head and think of music – even Western art music – in primarily processual terms, as a cultural practice. At the same time, we have to recognize that musicking sometimes condenses into relatively stable patterns that become institutionalized and in some ways take on the form of material culture – what we call 'pieces' of music."

It is this turn towards practice that he now follows up on, and it is not least experiences from music therapy that seem to have inspired this project of defining what fundamentally defines music.

Music Therapy and Music Research

It so happens that for music therapy, musicology might be the most important foundational discipline we can rely on. We ask: What is music really, and how is it that it can be used in so many different contexts in therapy and health work? Of course, music therapy is multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and always dependent on interactions between a wide range of disciplines. But when all is said and done, social, institutional contexts, biological conditions, or therapeutic ideologies – it is the music and the therapist's presence that are the only constant variables (even though neither music nor people are constant entities). And if we leave the therapist out of the equation, we are left with the question of whether there is something essential to say about music, something unique that we can point to and that is common to the various music therapy approaches – whether it be performance, listening, songwriting/composition, or improvisation.

When I wrote the textbook Musicology (2016), I turned the question around by asking whether there was something that music therapy could contribute to musicology, when my project was about shedding light on music as a phenomenon. As a unique musical practice, it might be that music therapy's working methods could shed light on essential aspects of music itself. I carried the same thought with me when writing a chapter on music pedagogy. For me, this was about fields of practice that were different from other subfields of musicology and therefore could offer experiences that could shed light on the nature of music.

The Relational Turn

It will still be the case that music therapy will turn to musicology and music thinking to get better answers to "why music?" But it turns out that one of the foremost music researchers of our time is now turning to music therapy and asking if some of the answers lie there. For Cook writes in the preface that by reading Gary Ansdell, and particularly his book How Music Helps in Music Therapy and Everyday Life (2014), he comes to realize the significance of music for relational dimensions. That is, how music connects people, creates networks, not only between people but between cultures.

Or as Cook writes:

"…it is well known that music encourages people to bond into groups. But music therapy shows how it also mediates the creation of relationships between individuals, and music in performance involves fine-grained interactions between performers that build into networks of relationships that are both musical and social. Music’s ability to shape subjectivity has occupied much musicological attention in recent decades, but at the expense of the social and relational dimensions that contribute in essential ways to music’s effects – and that are at work wherever music is experienced, in therapy or at home as much as in the jazz club or concert hall."

This relational understanding is about the idea that "our sense of self" (selfhood) is fundamentally constituted through people's relationships with each other, Cook writes, and that this involves a continuous participation in each other's becoming. In other words, we come into being through each other.

"In this way, a relational approach sees society as produced bottom-up by human relationships, resulting in network-like patterns – the very patterns of interaction, mutual dependence, and trust that are brought into being whenever people make music together. Musicking, then, can be described as a practice of creating relationships in and through sound. It is a relational practice."

Transcultural Encounters with an Ethical Foundation

This book, spanning over five hundred pages, covers a variety of topics divided into different sections that address issues related to transcultural encounters and the ethical foundation for how we engage in each other's lives. The ethical dimension is explored through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, with Cook writing:

"Just as music shapes the therapeutic encounter, so it shapes transcultural encounters: encounter is the process through which togetherness is negotiated across difference. In both cases I see encounter in terms derived from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. (...) At the core of my approach are Levinas’s ideas of openness to the other, a willingness to accept others for who and what they are, and a preparedness to call one’s own self into question in order to do so."

Musicology’s Foundational Problems Gain a Political Agenda

Cook also has much to say about traditional musicology, including musical style, historical musicology, music theory, notation, deterministic music sociology, the relationship between modernization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its impact on our understanding of classical music, laying the foundation for contemporary music studies, the focus on studying musical works as quasi-literary texts, the importance of studying musical performances, the development of individualism, music as a social and creative practice, and intercultural encounters. He continues themes from his previous book, "Music: Why it Matters," criticizing the ideology surrounding creativity and the Great Men (also known as "dead white males"), which has contributed to a regime of "possessive individualism"—an ideology focused on personal material possessions at the expense of community and social obligations. This ideology, he argues, is responsible for the social and economic inequalities that permeate today’s world.

"Such habits of thought have also inhibited appreciation of the deeply collaborative nature of social action—including music—and the extent to which humans are interdependent, things that the pandemic and the climate emergency have made as brutally obvious as they are critical for everyone’s future. It is against this background that a better understanding of musical togetherness might help us understand things that matter even more than music."

Choirs, Vocal Groups, Symphony Orchestras, and Social Harmony

Cook begins his exploration of musical cultural practices by referencing choral research, particularly as it is known in the music and health field. He pays special attention to Bailey and Davidson’s research on choirs for the homeless, highlighting the choir that disbanded in 2003 as many members stabilized their lives and returned to paid employment. Cook also touches on the barbershop genre, presenting it as “not just as a metaphor—collective music making is a symbol of a strongly bonded, egalitarian community—but as a metonym: choral performance structured according to the spirit of harmony creates a better world, at least as long as the music lasts.”

Cook also discusses The Four Freshmen, a jazz vocal group that personally sparked my love of jazz harmony as a teenager. The point Cook wants to illustrate is how this music is portrayed as both musically and socially harmonious. These utopian dimensions are also found in Christopher Small’s assertion that music-making should “bring into existence an ideal society, a set of ideal social relationships.” Cook connects this use of metaphor to philosopher Ernst Bloch’s depiction of utopias—as a potential for liberating practices—music as a “critical hope.”

He also discusses the symphony orchestra, often depicted as a miniature model of a successful civil society, where the conductor coordinates a high level of diversity. Philosopher John Rawls described the symphony orchestra as “a well-integrated society based on notions of political liberalism, pluralism, and democracy—a community in which, as in an orchestra, each individual’s contribution makes sense only in the context of the totality, and which in this way embodies the mutual dependence of part and whole.”

To reinforce his argument, Cook references prominent figures like anthropologist Victor Turner with his theory of “communitas” and sociologist Alfred Schutz, who in his 1951 article describes how music creates a “‘mutual tuning-in relationship,’ the experience of the ‘We,’ which is at the foundation of all possible communication.” Schutz explains how performers and listeners become “tuned-in to one another... living together through the same flux... growing older together while the musical process lasts.” This creates an I-You relationship experienced by participants as a present “we.”

These theories are well-known in music therapy, as I described in articles on improvisation and jazz in the anthology I co-edited with anthropologist Odd Are Berkaak ("Den påbegynte virkeligheten (The emergent reality)," 1992) or in the book "Music Therapy: Improvisation, Communication, and Culture" (1998).

An Authoritarian Regime?

However, the symphony orchestra can also be interpreted differently. Another prominent sociologist, Richard Sennett, argues that the symphony orchestra symbolizes how charismatic authoritarian figures discipline the people they control. Sennett, a cellist himself, writes in his book "Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality" (2004) that the string quartet, in contrast, demonstrates the ideal and respectful collaboration between individuals.

Christopher Small also had opinions on the symphony orchestra, viewing it as “a model of industrial society in which the conductor is the tycoon and audience members the consumers.” Anecdotal and ethnographic evidence also points to the orchestra as an institution particularly burdened with conflicts. Cook also notes that music doesn’t just unite people in a “we,” but also creates conflict by marking and delineating identities. An example he references is how unionist flute and drum parades in Northern Ireland contribute to marking the conflict.

Empathy and Participation

The ideal is found where musicians decenter themselves and listen to each other to create a collective, transparent sound where everyone is heard. This kind of mutual subjective listening, similar to free improvisation, demonstrates some fundamental societal values—how to interact with each other, how to be flexible and creative, supportive, and open to collaboration.

Cook spends considerable time discussing questions related to music, empathy, and respect—ethical questions tied to collaboration. He draws on his musicological expertise and uses examples from the 13th century’s “hocketing,” how music “sonifies” social relationships, and how Beethoven’s late string quartets created a turning point for quartet musicians. In general, the string quartets receive a lot of attention, illustrating how musicians themselves experience this demanding and finely-tuned collaboration.

Performance or Participation?

A point that should be particularly interesting, especially for music therapists, is how Christopher Small’s concept of “musicking” should be clarified. Many might feel that Small goes a bit too far when he includes ticket sellers and kiosk workers in the act of musicking, suggesting that everyone present plays a role in the performance. Sociologist and media researcher David Hesmondhalgh, criticizes Small’s attempt to portray music’s value through its potential to revive a kind of primitive sociability that has been lost and to make musicking the basis for an ideal future.

Hesmondhalgh accuses Small of conflating “performance” and “participation.” To further this discussion, Cook draws on anthropologist Thomas Turino’s book "Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation." Turino has a much more limited view of participation than Small, sharply distinguishing between “participatory music” and “presentational music.” In other words, between music where participation involves dancing to the music, playing an instrument, singing, clapping along—in short, engaging in an integrated way with the music. According to Turino, this participatory music form is more about realizing social relationships through performance than producing art that is somehow abstracted from these social relationships.

Hesmondhalgh, however, acknowledges that music performed, for example, at a concert for an audience—so-called “presentational music”—just like a football game, brings people together, thereby connecting individuals and groups with a shared identity.But he emphasizes that it is “participatory music” that more intimately and powerfully connects people through the interactive engagement of participants doing something together. Hesmondhalgh is, however, more modest in his belief in music as a social practice when it comes to creating utopian hopes for an ideal society.

Balanced View

Cook aims to create a more balanced perspective on the value of music as a social practice, relaxing the strict division between the two types of music Turino outlines. He argues that Turino's view of music is modernist and illustrates, using historical examples, how musical practice at the end of the 1600s, for instance, lacked this sharp distinction between different roles like composer, arranger, and performer. Additionally, the concept of musical pieces was more fluid. Even though the music was based on notation, it was far more participatory than presentational.

Regarding listening, Cook believes that Turino's two forms of music represent extremes on a scale rather than two separate categories. Cook states, "I am claiming that music’s construction and negotiation of socialities is fundamental to the experience of listening and not just of participation in Turino’s restricted sense."

One example of how listening to music also impacts our perception of social and cultural relations is found in a study by Eric Clarke, Tia DeNora, and Jonna Vuoskoski (2015), the latter now a music psychologist at University of Oslo. This work involved a comprehensive literature review on the topics of music, empathy, and cultural understanding, as well as an experiment. The question was whether listening to music could affect social cohesion and attachment. The experiment showed that empathetic individuals exhibited significantly stronger preferences for a culture after hearing its music.

Embodied Experience

Cook's key argument is that listening to music involves a bodily experience. The sound embeds itself in the body, making listening a form of virtual dance or virtual participation. One aspect of this is how we translate sound into real or imagined gestures based on internalized instrumental or vocal performances or by having seen live performances or listening to music (think of air guitar). Another colleague from the music department at UiO, Rolf Inge Godøy, has provided strong reasoning for how listening to music reproduces movements and gestures in us through our body-based cognition.

John Blacking also wrote about how "waves" of emotions are generated in and between bodies during music-making, creating a kind of "body empathy," Cook references. When listening, it doesn’t just happen as an individual with a body but as a member of an "intercorporeal community." This occurs not only through the musical activity Turino called "participatory" music but also in other contexts where music is experienced. Cook concludes the first chapter of his book by saying:

“Perhaps, then, music is exceptional in the way it combines potential for social bonding and inclusive community formation with ubiquitous accessibility, bringing the social into everyday life even when you are alone. If music has become an emblematic practice of socialization and interpersonal transformation, that is not because of its never-never-land qualities, but because of what it is and what it does in the real world of today.”

Performing Togetherness

The next chapter first addresses how music can create new social relationships, not by referring to marginal music forms like free jazz or string quartets, but to "clubbing," music that "grooves," group singing—or musical activity in general. Cook delves into the mechanisms, processes, and interactions that form the basis for the experience of community and belonging.

When he draws examples from clubbing, it’s about how participants, through dance and music, experience a form of "liquid solidarity." This involves a kind of social contact that arises where participants may not know each other well but still create a form of closeness in the relationship. This is also described as a form of sociability suited to an urban context characterized by heterogeneity, anonymity, and instability. Ethnographic research shows that those who participate in singing in such settings "break the ice" and create quicker bonds with strangers.

Cook then references archaeologist Steven Mithen, who also believes that collective music-making can weaken an overly strong individual self-conception. This can result in a shared emotional experience, thereby helping to create a social rather than an individual identity. Another prominent music researcher, Ian Cross, finds that music's adaptive functions relate to its ability to foster affective coordination between people, especially in situations characterized by social uncertainty and lack of trust. This includes the idea that music doesn’t make assertions but carries a kind of "fluid intentionality." Cook notes that music is "polysemic," meaning it has no fixed meaning but offers a wide range of meanings that are interpreted differently by participants in various contexts. This is because music doesn’t create a specific meaning but instead forms a neutral zone that doesn’t cause division among different social, ethnic, or religious groups.

Communicative Musicality and Musical Empathy

Cook links the idea that music-making fosters affective coordination to Trevarthen and Malloch’s understanding of "communicative musicality," how infants are programmed for social contact and that early communication with caregivers happens through sound with musical qualities. Cook sees this as the "archetype" of Schutz's previously mentioned "mutual tuning-in relationship," the experience of a "we" as the foundation of all communication, a proto-music-making that is also a form of proto-conversation, a conversation without words.

Cook is, of course, aware that this is foundational knowledge for music therapy and revisits it in a later chapter. However, he also references Gary Ansdell, who suggests that people can be musically characterized and thus addressed through a musical characterization. This idea or practice has been elaborated in detail by the American music therapist Kenneth Bruscia through his psychodynamic form of music therapy.

Cook then goes further, drawing on an article by Gary Ansdell and Brynjulf Stige, where they attempt to understand music in the same way one tries to understand a person—or as it’s described: "allowing the music as an object in the world to reveal its ‘personhood.’" Cook refers to Daniel Stern’s theories on how vitality affects and "the present moment" can be recognized in musical interpretations, how music captures intimate dimensions of human consciousness, how it feels to be a person.

This leads to the idea that when you have an empathetic relationship with music, the music empathizes with you. This is something many stories from music psychology attest to, such as when people say "the music understands me." Research also shows that children who participate in musical play can improve their ability to empathize.

Here, phenomena like "synchronization" and "entrainment" can contribute to our understanding. Ethnomusicologist Martin Clayton has pointed out how our ability to perceive "beat" is innate, even though the ability to distinguish between different metric or rhythmic patterns varies between cultures. Perceiving regularity is crucial for social coordination. Through the rhythmic movements we make when listening to music, entrainment—a coupling or synchronization—occurs. In a world of collective human action, such a process of entrainment is mutual, a two-way, relational process. “It is a process of dynamic interaction between individuals that constructs as much as reflects social relationship, and that may converge on but never quite achieves a wholly mechanical, metronome-like regularity,” writes Cook.

Music that "grooves" particularly relies on entrainment, and there are numerous references to how musicians in groove culture experience interaction as relational, as a feeling of walking "arm in arm," as one jazz musician puts it. The groove, again, is about trust and becomes a condensation of social relationships through sound. I could agree with Steven Feld and Charles Keil when they write in the book "Music Grooves" that "a groove is a good place to be," if I remember correctly.

Distributed Agency

In the mutual adaptation musicians make during interaction, a form of distributed agency arises. Each musician’s intentions must adapt to those of the other musicians to create the groove. Musical performances are neither purely intention-driven nor purely deterministic, as determined by the music itself or fellow players. Cook argues that all performed music is, in a way, improvised. It depends on choices made in the moment, on mutual adaptation between musicians, on shared or distributed agency. But underlying music-making are the intimate affective processes we can observe in parent-infant communication. It’s this "proto-musical" communication that forms the foundation for slightly later "teleological" musical communication, where the sound itself becomes of interest to the child, and we can trace the start of a musical development with affective roots in the relational.

Cook thus makes a preliminary summary:

“In this way music’s relational dimensions—its fostering of bonding, empathy, and other dimensions of musical togetherness—inhere in classical, popular, and world musics, as well as in contexts that range from concert and recorded music to community music, music therapy, and other musical practices that fall outside the traditional purview of musicology.”

Two Concepts

In the final part of this chapter, Cook aims to construct a general model for understanding music as a form of collaborative work. This is intended to counterbalance the focus in musicology on individual expression and style history, which often comes at the expense of the relational dimensions of music. Cook begins by considering how improvisation involves working together in real-time to achieve tight temporal coordination in an ongoing and highly uncertain situation, and how the interactive processes involved are a primary source of creativity.

Cook introduces two key concepts: "entailment" and "the emergent." Everything a musician plays has implications for what will happen next. Some actions follow meaningfully, while others do not. Each subsequent intervention therefore narrows down or eliminates certain possibilities, or alternatively opens up new ones—this is what "entailment" refers to. As the musicians play and the music unfolds, these sequential entailments lead to "the emergent"—what arises as something newly initiated. In other words, this refers to a cognitive representation of the musical progression that is in constant flux and is collectively produced and owned by the collaborators, which in turn influences what happens next in the music.

Thus, an infinite number of possibilities emerge from each participant's contributions, creating an unpredictable musical trajectory. These two concepts are characterized precisely by a collaborative creativity: "First, it is in the unpredictability of its outcomes that creative thought diverges from rational thought oriented towards the resolution of predefined problems. Second, what happens is not a simple function of any one musician’s agency or intentionality, but is rather a product of interaction at group level." Creativity thus becomes a property of a larger system that surrounds it, while agency itself is both relative and relational.

Distributed Agency and the Agency of Instruments and Technology

Cook also provides several examples from music history to show how technology, recording situations, the use of sheet music, and pre-written arrangements influence interactions, musical agency, and relationships. Even non-human or material agents play a role in this system. Recording technology, sheet music, and instruments all have an impact. Cook cites saxophonist Evan Parker: “it’s as though the instrument comes alive and starts to have a voice of its own.”

Cook seeks to illustrate how different forms of collaboration, technologies, the use of sheet music, etc., influence relationships within the musical ensemble. To exemplify this, he uses Paul Simon’s collaboration with South African musicians on the recording of Graceland, pan-African improvisations, Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios production of Rainbow, and the Kronos Quartet's collaboration with vocalist Alim Qasimov from Azerbaijan and rubab player Homayun Sakhi from Afghanistan—two traditional musicians.

In many discourses on different forms of music, a binary opposition is often created between music characterized by terms like “improvisation,” “flow,” “process,” “participation,” “embodiment,” and “dialogue,” and music characterized by terms like “fixity,” “structure,” “objectification,” “reification,” “system,” “distance,” and “detachment.” Cook attempts to dissolve such oppositions by not discussing lasting musical products, but rather focusing on live musical processes in real-time.

He summarizes as follows:

"I have developed the idea of interactive networks from the small scale of communicative musicality, with its adaptive and ecological grounding of interpersonal and social relationship, through increasingly complex situations of collaborative musicking, to assemblages that embrace not only highly differentiated social roles but also various modalities of temporal and spatial shifting. My aim has been to counterpose the traditional concept of the musical work—an ideal entity constituted by writing and the ideology of reproduction—with more flexible and less deterministic ways of thinking grounded in real-time musicking, in which technologies of graphic and sonic specification are embraced within increasingly diversified networks of interaction."

Music as a Framework for Social Relationships

An approach that prioritizes music rather than musicking, product rather than process, reifies sound into texts and treats people as resources rather than as actors, Cook writes. This textualization depersonalizes performers and denies their creativity. It reduces active and deliberate behavior to automatic and mechanical responses. It carries with it overtones of colonial exploitation of labor. Musical structures are seen as formal patterns and not, as jazz researcher Ingrid Monson writes, "there are always personalities interacting, not merely pitches or instruments or rhythms."

In other words, musical structures are frameworks for social relationships, and the function of music is to construct a social context. "My key argument is that music can be understood as an environment optimized for the emergence of relational being," writes Cook, as he turns to psychologist Kenneth Gergen's concept of "relational being."

The Rationalization of Music

But before turning to Gergen and writing much more about music therapy, Cook undertakes a lengthy discourse on the rationalization of music throughout history, based on sociologist Max Weber's book The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. In short, this concerns how an orally transmitted musical culture from antiquity onwards eventually became written into tonal systems, with the development of musical notation, the adjustment or tempering of intervals, and how this facilitated the emergence of more complex musical designs. Notation enabled the rapid spread of music, leading to a standardization of instruments, and more.

Cook connects this musical modernization to how we unconsciously link Western music history with the idea of the liberal subject or autonomous individual, thereby limiting our understanding of what music is or can be. He refers to anthropologist Judith Becker, who connects this to the typical Western notion of "selfhood" as represented by the typical middle-class listener. This is an individual with a strong sense of separateness and the experience of being unique and different from everyone else. This is a person with emotions and feelings that fully and completely belong to themselves, who values their physical and psychological private sphere, and whose emotional response to a given piece of music is not perceived to be in any relation to anything outside their own unique self-history or personality.

Gergen's Relational Being

It is this notion of a self separate from others, the idea that we are all autonomous individuals, that Kenneth Gergen reacts against. The fact that we are supposed to be such "bounded beings," as he calls it, means that we are fundamentally alienated from one another. We can look each other in the eyes, yet my private world is inaccessible to the other. This underlies the experience of isolation that has reached epic proportions in the modern world, Gergen argues. But this also leads to everyone being responsible for their own value and capacities, putting individuals in competition with one another. This motivates us to see the worst in each other and creates a regime of constant evaluation, fostering an extensive fear of failure. When people perform altruistic acts, we are inclined to ask what they stand to gain from it. This "me first" attitude does not encourage commitment to others and has created a consumption orgy that threatens to destroy the planet.

What Cook wants to convey is a society consisting of "mutually constitutive relationships" where people participate in each other's "coming-into-being." He refers to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who writes, "one cannot be a self on one’s own. I am a self only in relation to certain interlocutors. A self consists only within what I call 'webs of interlocution.'" Or as stated: "Human beings are constituted in conversation."

It is through interaction that we become individuals with our individual identities. This conversation metaphor is the same as we saw in the description of creative forms of musicking, where creativity emerges through the way something has been said or played and is open to reinterpretation. Creativity and relationships cannot be separated. For Gergen, it is about how through co-action we are constantly innovative by being sensitive to the diversity of relationships we are involved in.

In contrast to the aforementioned ideology of "the bounded being," Gergen argues that a relationship is a precondition for the self, rather than the opposite. The word "I" does not denote the origin of an action, but a relational emergence. "And if musical identity is constructed through playing with others, then it follows that in making music together—in committing yourself to a course of collaborative action with unpredictable consequences—you are placing your own identity on the line. It is fundamentally a matter of trust," writes Cook.

Music Therapy – A Place for Transformation

Cook avoids creating utopian notions about the transformative power of music, particularly when it comes to music's ability to change global economies, economic stratification, poverty, and racism. However, he believes that music can change social organization and turns to music therapy as an example of how playing together can create an enclave where transformation can occur. Cook references Gary Ansdell and Tia DeNora, who seek an understanding or theory of music therapy that can explain sociomusical practices based on the music itself—within a context of people, environment, and culture. Cook expresses his desire to contribute to this project in his book. He also mentions how we might develop a new type of "health musicians," referencing an article by this author.

Gergen's idea of the relational individual has resonated in music therapy—the concept that we become who we are through relationships with others and that we are social beings from the start. Music, too, is not something that only exists in our minds but between us and the world. The idea that music creates an environment that facilitates encounters or is optimized for cultivating the relational individual is a fundamental assumption in music therapy. This reviewer is cited as having written that "musical improvisation is close to a musical actualization of human interaction and relation with its concomitant possibilities to create a common space for reflection.” Trondalen and Bonde are also referenced, noting that music is "the therapeutic catalyst through which change will take place. The relationship itself is formed in the music."

It is through negotiations about a musical understanding that interaction is established. This occurs through music therapy techniques like mirroring, matching, imitation, etc., as well as through eye contact, awareness of bodily expressions, turn-taking, emotional and musical synchronicity. On this foundation, relationships are built, and it is in this way that a "self" is established.

Cook returns to Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins, providing an independent analysis of one of their cases (Elisa) as presented in the book Creative Music Therapy. He identifies one of the many "magical" moments that Paul and Clive brought about and understands these interpersonal and intimate interactions through Daniel Stern's concept of a shared emotional journey.

The idea that music, or in this case, musical improvisation, can reveal something about who a person "is" through music and, in this way, create contact, is invoked again. Levinas is mentioned once more, and Ansdell asks, "How can we hear the call of others? How can we respond?" Clinical improvisation becomes, in Pavlocevics's words, an interpersonal event rather than a purely musical interactive event.

Cook conveys Ansdell and DeNora's understanding of how music therapy is not grounded in a formal theory that makes it applicable across all situations. Music therapy is a situated practice. Just as musical performance depends as much on tacit knowledge as on explicit knowledge, music therapy's essence lies in how musical actions and sounds build relationships between people and create a potential for communication by lowering the barriers that separate a "bounded being" from a "relational being." But this barrier can also be lowered when the focus is on musical goals rather than interpersonal relationships, as in music therapy.

Such interactive and communicative processes are not unique to music therapy. Ingrid Monson's analyses of jazz improvisations find the same processes in "magical moments" in larger musical networks. Musical emotional journeys occur just as much in concert performances as in music therapy. This means that the principles underlying therapeutic encounters can inform us about other forms of music-making aimed at communication across cultural barriers, especially where people are unfamiliar with each other and where opportunities for verbal communication are limited.

Orientalism

After establishing music as part of the relational work that binds people together, Cook turns to intercultural issues. The question becomes whether music can contribute to cultural dialogue without appropriating and dominating non-Western cultural expressions. Edward Said's book Orientalism becomes the starting point for a lengthy critical discussion about the possibility of cultural exchange, despite long traditions where non-Western cultures have been treated as resources for renewing Western culture. Said's book gave rise to the term "orientalism," which denotes Western stereotypical constructions of Asian cultures.

Cultural traditions always overlap without necessarily involving hierarchies, incorporation, or conflict. Through a close reading of the British encounters with an Indian musical culture (Hindostannie air) from the 18th century onwards, Cook shows how musical transculture has the potential to contribute to greater intercultural dialogue. Despite the colonial and imperialist context, there may be room for a more "counterpoint" reading of cultural encounters, as Said was also open to in a later book.

I will not delve into the highly critical-analytical and detailed discussion Cook conducts, drawing from an impressively broad range of sources. Many pages are devoted to critiquing music research based on transcriptions that have not considered how transferring music from other cultures to the Western notation system always involves translation and interpretation. Despite imperialist and colonial dominance, Cook shows that there was room for more authentic musical encounters between performers and audiences, at least before Western racism took hold in British-dominated India.

Cultural Influence

Cook continues the discussion with a long chapter ("When Java Came to Paris"), centered around how Debussy was influenced by Indonesian gamelan music he encountered at the World Exhibitions in Paris in 1889 and later in 1900. Again, Cook mobilizes all his music history and analytical knowledge in detailed discussions where the concept of "influence" is debated. There seems to be an intense discussion among music historians about the extent to which Debussy was "influenced" by this musical encounter, whether he was merely an "imitator," whether he went beyond creating a superficial exoticism of Javanese music, or whether he simply "confirmed" a musical intuition he was already developing.

Much is at stake for music historians when it comes to placing Debussy within a French national tradition or as an early modernist. For Cook, the goal is to show that many of the analytical attempts he reads overlook how Debussy could indeed be influenced; he had agency, and he could choose which aspects of gamelan music he could build upon. In this encounter with gamelan music, a "cognitive transformation" occurred, Cook emphasizes. He bases his understanding on philosopher Levinas's model of a human encounter. For Debussy, it is about transcultural meaning-making, where he, as a musician and composer, opens himself to something different, in moments where his own musical self-understanding is set aside.

This can be read as a story of mutual respect, recognition, and negotiation between individuals from different cultures. But it also involves historical context. This period of world exhibitions represented the peak of European imperialist mentality and presented the world as it was—or was supposed to be—at that time. There is therefore another side to this story, and in Debussy's case, it involves his central place in Western music history.

From China and Australia to Mozart and Mashups

In the final four chapters, Cook undertakes new deep dives into music history as it has played out in the development of Chinese music culture, the special situation in Shanghai, and in musical negotiations and performances between Australian Aboriginals and various composers and music groups.

How classical music has been subject to condemnation and acceptance throughout Chinese history is fascinating reading. Cook applies his theoretical framework here as well to show how musical encounters between people and traditions have contributed to giving classical music the status it holds in China today—where between 40 and 60 million children play the piano (sic!). And where music and nationalism become central themes, questioning whether classical music can still be defined as a Western art form, and addressing globalization and cosmopolitan identity.

He turns to topical analysis to show how we can find traces of various musical references in Mozart's works—such as Kofi Agawu's analysis of the Piano Concerto in F major (K.332): aria style, song style, Alberti bass, learned style, minuet, horn duet fanfares, amoroso style, etc. The leap to Beyoncé may seem large, but today's "mashups" in popular music also involve a musical mix, cultural references, and negotiations that contribute to creating musical meaning and intercultural communication.

Throughout, the focus is on how music can create interactive processes, affective intimacy, solidarity, mutual dependency, and trust. "Just as in daily life people create and communicate relationships with one another through almost imperceptible nuancing of gesture and deportment, so acts of communicative musicality take place on a micro level that leaves no trace in notation," Cook writes.

Afterword

In his concluding afterword, Cook focuses on modernization and rationalization, which have created a "mindset" where the measurable, the notatable, and the explainable have shaped post-war Anglophone music theory. What we call "new musicology" gave this approach a humanistic and political perspective without changing its core, Cook argues. These musicologists emphasized the aesthetic subjective aspects of music and musical experience but placed less emphasis on the social and relational dimensions.

What Cook calls "scripticism"—the textualization of music, the focus on notation—causes music research to miss the micro-processes where communication occurs. But when musicians perform music, they improvise within the spaces that notation opens up. "And if we think in this way, the iron curtain between the worlds of notated and non-notated music begins to fade away. The combination of the regime of the reified musical work, the concomitant idea of performance as reproduction, and what I called scriptism have together created an ontological communication barrier between Western art music and many other musical traditions—both the other traditions of the West, and the traditions of the West's others,"Cook writes.

Cook’s project with this book has been to show how a relational approach, built on nearly universal values regarding human relationships and musical unity and understanding (togetherness), can offer ways to communicate meaningfully across cultural differences and contradictions. Different cultural forms depend on language, while music is an arena where the culture of the other can be deeply and immediately appealing. This requires us to speak and think about music in a more inclusive way than we have in the West and as we have inherited from the past.

Another sociologist is brought in towards the end of the book. Howard Becker, in his book Art Worlds, also points out how improvisation and musical performance must be considered social and relational practices. Even where they involve a single person in an otherwise empty room, they depend on ways of thinking where interaction, “otherness,” and “togetherness” are deeply present. Here, Cook draws on Martin Buber’s words: “All music calls to an ear that is not the musician’s own.”

I’ll let Cook summarize the book himself:

"The point is that, understood as social action and relational practice, musicking offers a comprehensive, ubiquitous, and working model of a society based on dialogue, transparency, and openness to the other, and hence free from the excessive certainty of individual, non-negotiable belief. It takes place in—or creates—a time that is not mechanically imposed but rather socially negotiated. It is predicated on recognition, respect, and mutual listening—which is not to say that such values are necessarily present in all musicking, but their absence is palpable. Musicians have to listen to one another because everyone depends on everyone else, much as roped mountaineers depend on one another. And mutual listening means empathy, in the sense of placing yourself in the position of the other, hearing yourself through the other’s ears; that is what I mean when I describe music as creating an environment optimized for the emergence of relational being. In a word, music creates togetherness. All this will sound hopelessly utopian, but in reality is so only if you think that playing music—or even just listening to it—is enough to create a society based on mutual care and obligation. There are crucial ways in which music can illustrate the potential for a better society, and even some of its workings, but music alone will not create that society. It takes people to do that."

A concluding reflection

There are several reasons why this book has made a strong impression on me. One thing is, as mentioned, that Cook builds his framework on theories and research from music therapy. In this way, he also includes music therapy in musicology, indeed, he actually gives it a central place. Although I have worked at a musicology department for most of my life, I have often felt that what I do is on the periphery of what many consider "proper musicology." But I got to write my doctoral dissertation on "Music as Communication and Interaction"—and that is essentially what Cook is now saying music is about.

When I wrote my textbook, Musicology, as a summary of what I had read and reflected on over the years, I had the same feeling that musicology was being stretched too far, as I included all sub-disciplines within musicology, including music pedagogy and music therapy. In my book, there is (of course) no attempt to create a synthesis or a musicological framework where all this knowledge base is actualized and applied to music history and musical life. Nicholas Cook, with his enormous knowledge—it’s almost unfathomable what he has read, the associations he makes, the sources and arguments he brings into play—brings together music psychology, music pedagogy, and music therapy, music analysis and music theory, the sociology and anthropology of music, aesthetics, historical sources, and historiography into a synthesis that could create an entirely new paradigm for musicological research—a relational musicology.

This translation is made by Chatbot, with some minor editing.