Music, Imagination, and Culture

Download or read book Music, Imagination, and Culture written by Nicholas Cook and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musicians imagine music by means of functional models which determine certain aspects of the music while leaving others open. This gap between image and the experience it models offers a source of compositional creativity; different musical cultures embody different ways of imagining sound as music. Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Cook here defines the difference between music theory and aesthetic criticism, and affirms the importance of the "ordinary listener" in musical culture.