Implications for Music Studies
Nicholas John Cook · 2014
Abstract To speak of the expressivity of music is to refocus attention from musical artefacts such as scores towards the experience of music as performed: rather than the expressivity of the performance adding to that of the work, the listener's concern is with the total expressiveness of what is heard. This refocusing of attention represents a radical reconstruction of the object of musical study—one that does not entail forgetting about scores, but rather seeking to understand the role that they play in the culture of music as performance. Seen in this perspective, musicology is able to draw on the tradition of cross-disciplinary research, ranging from cultural to computational perspectives. It might indeed become the first field to deliver on the potential for productive interaction between traditional and digital approaches to the humanities.