Exploring Musical Evolution and Influences: A Review

Nicholas Cook touches on a variety of subjects in the course of his book “A very Short Introduction to Music.” He explores various trends, phenomenon and evolution of music as well as the ideas that influences these different aspects of music. For this paper I will be focusing on five of the seven chapters from his work. These five will be “Musical Values” , “Back to Beethoven”, “A State of Crisis?”, “Music and the Academy” and “Imaginary Object”. Within these chapters Cook makes several overarching claims about music, many of which I agree with others less so. Cook sees music as for the most part a product of culture, rather than a natural and universal language that many see music as. Furthermore, he addresses the fact that music often is

Many musicologists hold the belief that it is the duty of contemporaries to try to play the music as it was originally intended. As we discusses about the previous chapter this seems nearly impossible as most compositions do not fully show how every aspect of the composition is to be played. Furthermore, it addresses the fact that many of these experts seek to create complete and authoritative editions of a composer’s works. This also lends itself to a few issues, which Cook points out, such as the fact that oftentimes composers will have multiple derivatives of the work each slightly different from the others (87). At which point the musicologist would have to make the judgement as to which the composer considered to be the complete and actual piece that they would want for posteriorly. These two problematic objectives make it even more difficult for contemporary musicians to actually perform, music as the composer intended. After all it becomes even more complicated when you have several different musicologists, which make the case for how a particular work is to be performed and which version of the work is the best version that the composer had