In this programme we’re talking about the recently published new edition of a book that first came out over twenty years ago, Nicholas Cook’s Music: A Very Short Introduction. (And full disclosure: I was the commissioning editor of that first edition.)
Some new editions are fairly rudimentary affairs: a few updates here and there, a quiet deletion or two, some recent titles added to the bibliography, a new preface on the front. Not so Nicholas Cook’s book. It’s more even than a thorough rewrite: it’s like a completely new book built on the chassis of the old one, or to use a metaphor that Nick prefers: it shares some of the same genetic material.
Not that Nick has repudiated his earlier view of music. This, from the foreword to the original edition, gives a good idea of where he is coming from:
Every music is different, but every music is music, too. There is a level at which you can talk of ‘music’ (and I can write this Very Short Introduction), but it isn’t the ABC level. To talk about music in general is to talk about what music means – and more basically, how it is (how it can be) that music operates as an agent of meaning. For music isn’t just something nice to listen to. On the contrary, it’s deeply embedded in human culture (just as there isn’t a culture that doesn’t have language, so there isn’t one that doesn’t have music). Music somehow seems to be natural, to exist as something apart – and yet it is suffused with human values, with our sense of what is good or bad, right or wrong. Music doesn’t just happen, it is what we make it, and what we make of it. People think through music, decide who they are through it, express themselves through it.
(Music: A Very Short Introduction, first edition, p. viii.)
The original edition made a splash. Most music students in the past two decades have been recommended to read it. An academic journal in 2001 devoted a whole issue to digesting its implications; translations have appeared in a host of languages. And in the past two decades, rather than Nick’s view of what music is and does undergoing a profound shift, it’s the world of music itself which has experienced massive change.
When the first edition came out, mp3 players were only just beginning to come on the market. The first iPod was a few years in the future. The first iPhone was around a decade away. Streaming services, the idea of vast music libraries that you could access almost anywhere for a monthly subscription likewise all still in the imprevisible future. Back then, I was still delighted to have a portable CD player, which was pretty good as long as you didn’t jolt it when it was playing…
The technology changes our relationship with music, how we curate the music we listen to; it changes the range of different music we can have a relationship with, from all parts of the world, all periods of history; it changes the musician’s relationship with their audience, it changes the economics… You begin to see why Nick’s new edition is a root-and-branch rewrite.
We explore these issues in the interview, but I wanted to begin with Nick’s own beginnings in music. Back when he was a boy, learning the oboe…
