Music, Encounter, Togetherness

Modern Western musical thought tends to represent music as a thing--a pattern, a structure, even an organism--than as a human practice. Music, Encounter, Togetherness focusses on music as something people do, as a mode of encounter between individuals and cultures, and as an agent of interpersonal and social togetherness. It presents music as a utopian dimension of everyday life.

Nicholas Cook is 1684 Professor Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. He previously taught at Royal Holloway (University of London) and at the Universities of Southampton, Sydney, and Hong Kong. His recent books include Beyond the Score: Music as Performance (2013), Music as Creative Practice (2018), and Music: Why it Matters (2023), while in 2021 his Music: A Very Short Introduction (originally published in 1998 and translated into sixteen languages) appeared in a completely rewritten second edition. A former British Academy/Wolfson Research Professor, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2001 and holds a Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Chicago.

Acknowledgements
List of illustrations
Introduction
1: Socialities of music
1.1 A zone of magic
1.2 Webs of listening
1.3 Beyond participation
2: Performing togetherness
2.1 A readiness for human company
2.2 Networks of musicking
2.3 Musicking on paper
3: Dynamics of encounter
3.1 Rationalising music
3.2 Music and relational being
3.3 Dehumanising music
3.4 Hearing the call of others
4: Between Lucknow and London
4.1 Beyond suspicion
4.2 The dancing girl
4.3 Listening across cultures
4.4 The nabobina
5: Java comes to Paris
5.1 Anxieties of influence
5.2 Turning heads
5.3 Taking your memories home
5.4 Gongs in the Erard
5.5 How Debussy heard the gamelan
6: Music and modernisation in China
6.1 Visions of modernity
6.2 People's musicians
6.3 A national music
6.4 The future is China
6.5 Modernity with Chinese characteristics
7: Music in a cosmopolitan world
7.1 Shanghai then and now
7.2 Everyday cosmopolitanism
7.3 Mobilising music
8: Transcultural musicking
8.1 Imagining a new Australia
8.2 Beyond style
8.3 Virtual worlds
9: Other classics
9.1 Period remix
9.2 Modes of musical sensemaking
9.3 Vienna through the looking glass
9.4 Listening against the grain
Afterword: On certainty
References