Music as Creative Practice by Nicholas Cook

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music as Creative Practice by Nicholas Cook Sinan Carter Savaskan Music as Creative Practice. By Nicholas Cook. (Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. [xiv, 248 p. ISBN 9780199347803 (hardcover), $78; ISBN 9780199347834 (Oxford Scholarship Online).] Notes, illustrations, references, index. [End Page 597] This is the final volume of the fivebook series Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice, edited by John Rink—a project that had its origins in the work of the Arts and Research Council's Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which was based at Cambridge University from 2009 to 2014. The previous volumes, by a selection of scholars who are at the forefront of creativity studies in music today, tackle aspects of creativity in a broad manner as manifested in four areas of activity: The first volume is on the creative development of musicians in learning contexts, as a lifelong, complex process (John Rink, Helena Gaunt, and Aaron Williamon, eds., Musicians in the Making: Pathways to Creative Performance [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017]). The second volume looks into the world of interactivity and extemporization in music making today and how it enables and constrains creativity in the activities of composers, improvisers, and performers (Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman, eds., Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017]). The third volume advocates the value of a spatial, gestural construct to work in sound to help musicians rehearse, debate, teach, and think about what they do (Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Helen M. Prior, eds., Music and Shape [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017]). New approaches to the appreciation of large orchestral ensembles are discussed in terms of their creative, social, and political dimensions in the fourth volume (Tina K. Ramnarine, ed., Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017]). In the present volume, Nicholas Cook brings together many of his life-long concerns and research interests. As in all his writing, Cook's references cover a fascinating range of composers, performers, genres, and extramusical disciplines. Gustav Nottebohm, Michael Jackson, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Immanuel Kant can, for example, all populate a paragraph on the genius myths. Incidentally, it is notions such as "divine inspiration," "creativity comes from the unconscious," "product of a genius," "originality," "creativity ex nihilo," and "the prodigy phenomenon" that form a good part of his discussion in the three main chapters of his book. His argument throughout is that music as creative practice is an outcome of people making music and that the creativity is based on and made out of their actions and interactions, not a divine gift. The substantial introduction is a fascinating and informative history of what was throughout the centuries considered to be the creative acts in music, as in the work of composers and the performers who translated, transmitted, and interpreted the printed text. The strength of the chapter is, in fact, its exceptionally good digest of the creativity studies as they take place now. This very young field of study, which essentially emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, has systematically engaged in testing and dismantling the romantic myths and notions mentioned above. In the fourteen pages of the chapter there are over sixty references to people working in this field, and as always in Cook's writings, they are accompanied by meticulously selected citations from the sources. The three main chapters of the book, to great extent, illuminate aspects of compositional process and the true nature of the creative act involved in it. Although he aims to go beyond the mysteries of the "score" as the ultimate "text," Cook always returns to the issues related to the creation, realization, and historical and contemporary meaning [End Page 598] and place of the composition as presented in notation. In the seven sections of the first chapter, he discusses three premises: that music making is a social activity, that the performance of music is central to this, and that the unpredictability is an inseparable part of performing. This last observation takes up much of the chapter (pp. 33–67). There are many colorful quotations, test cases, rehearsal...