Music, Imagination and Culture

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. Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Cook here defines the difference between music theory and aesthetic criticism, and affirms the importance of the "ordinary listener" in musical culture.Cook, Nicholas is the author of 'Music, Imagination and Culture', published 1990 under ISBN 9780198161547 and ISBN 0198161549.