Music, imagination and culture

It is a common experience that words are inadequate for music; there seems always to be a disparity between how music is experienced, and how it is described or rationalized.This book is a study of musical imagination.Musicians imagine music by means of functional models which determine certain aspects of the music while leaving others open.This means that there is inevitably a gap between the image and the experience that it models, and this gap can be a source of compositional creativity.Different musical cultures embody different ways of imagining sound as music, and thus every culture creates its own distinctive pattern of discrepancies between image andexperience – discrepancies which are reflected in theoretical thinking about music.Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Nicholas Cook makes a clear distinction between the province of music theory and that of aesthetic criticism.In doing so he affirms the importance of the `ordinary listener’ in musical culture, and the validity of his or her experience of music.