Product Description: Today we think of Heinrich Schenker, who lived in Vienna from 1884 until his death in 1935, as the most influential music theorist of the twentieth century. But he saw his theoretical writings as part of a comprehensive project for the reform of musical composition, performance, criticism, and education-and beyond that, as addressing fundamental cultural, social, and political problems of the deeply troubled age in which he lived...read more

Product Description: Lejos de escribir una introducción a la música convencional, con un énfasis especial en sus rudimentos técnicos para los no iniciados, NICHOLAS COOK aborda su libro desde la perspectiva de los distintos valores -personales, culturales, sociales- que ha encarnado y que encarna la música, no sólo la conocida tradicionalment...read more

Product Description: The study of music is always, to some extent, "empirical," in that it involves testing ideas and interpretations against some kind of external reality. But in musicology, the kinds of empirical approaches familiar in the social sciences have played a relatively marginal role, being generally restricted to inter-disciplinary areas such as psychology and sociology of music...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This book is the first to put forward a general theory of the manner in which different media--music, words, moving picture, and dance--work together to create multimedia. Beginning with a study of the way in which meaning is mediated in television commercials, the book concludes with in-depth readings of Disney's Fantasia, Madonna's video Material Girl, and Armide (Godard's sequence from the collaborative film Aria)...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The central theme of this book is the relationship between the reflections about and the realization of a musical composition. In his essay "Words about Music, or Analysis versus Performance," Nicholas Cook states that words and music can never be aligned exactly with one another...read more

Rethinking Music offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of current thinking about music. In this book, 24 distinguished musicologists, music theorists, and ethnomusicologists review different dimensions of musical study, revealing a range of concerns that are shared across the discipline: the nature of musicological practice, its social and ethical dimensions, issues of canon and value, and the relationship between academic study and musical experience. (view table of contents)

Product Description: In this textbook, Cook provides an unusual and stimulating new approach to teaching analytical concepts through the study of style composition. He emphasizes throughout analysis and decision-making within a practical context, drawing on musical examples from eighteenth-century works...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is acknowledged as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Western tradition. More than any other musical work it has become an international symbol of unity and affirmation. Yet early critics rejected it as cryptic and eccentric, the product of a deaf and aging composer. Nicholas Cook's guide charts the dramatic transformation in the reception of this work. The story begins in Vienna, with the responses of listeners at the first performance, and ends in contemporary China and Japan, where the symphony has acquired diametrically opposed interpretations. The account embraces many of the major figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, among them Wagner and Schenker. Including an account of the sketches, an examination of the performance tradition, and a suggested new interpretation, this book opens up new dimensions in our understanding of Beethoven's last symphony. (view table of contents)

Product Description: 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...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)