Nicholas Cook

Nicholas Cook took up the Professorship of Music in 2009. He was formerly Professorial Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), and before that taught at the universities of Hong Kong, Sydney, and Southampton, where he also served as Dean of Arts. A musicologist and theorist, he holds separate degrees in music and in history/art history. His articles have appeared in leading British and American journals, and cover topics from aesthetics and analysis to psychology and pop.

His books, mostly published by Oxford University Press, include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987); Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993); Analysis Through Composition (1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), which is published or forthcoming in twelve other languages and to which a special issue of Musicae Scientiae was devoted. Oxford also publish Rethinking Music (1999), coedited with Mark Everist, and Empirical Musicology: Aims, Methods, Prospects, coedited with Eric Clarke (2004); he also coedited theCambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music with Anthony Pople (2004). His latest book is The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Oxford, 2007), while two edited collections are in press: Music as Performance: New Perspectives Across the Disciplines, coedited with the dramaturgue Richard Pettengill (Michigan University Press), and The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music. He is currently writing a book on performance analysis, which will attempt to integrate computational approaches developed at CHARM with those of cultural musicology and inter-disciplinary performance theory; planned projects thereafter includes studies of cross-cultural interaction and creativity in music.

A former Editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Nicholas Cook was Chair of the Music Panel in the Higher Education Funding Councils' 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in the same year.

Publications