Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook was published back in August 2020, a surreal time during the pandemic when I had just started a new job. A strong team of four of us - Eric Clarke, Ross Cole, Matthew Pritchard and I - had embarked in this project four years ago, during my last year as a Leverhulme Fellow at Cambridge. Nick had been an incredible PhD supervisor to me and had later also turned into a skilful mentor. But beyond the personal, here are three reasons why I have always admired Nick's work.
Nick's contribution to blurring the boundaries between the sub-disciplines of Music. It is not only that he actively wrote about the inconvenience of calling music scholars by different names, when we were pursuing, effectively, comparable objectives (e.g. his contribution to The New (Ethno) musicologies). He also, and this became clear in his first book (Guide to Musical Analysis), took musicology and the study of Western classical music (WAM as he calls it) with a pinch of salt: imbued with a healthy scepticism and irreverence, that was more powerful for his unfaltering commitment to the cause.
Nick wasn't alone in this; he was part of a movement that made me, at least, feel more welcome in a world where jumping from one radio station to another, and later from one playlist to another, was the natural thing to do. A movement that made it possible to study classical music - the London Symphony Orchestra in my case - from an ethnographic perspective, or pop, rock and film music - in his case - with the technical rigour of music theory. As his supervisee, his contributions to this movement embodied positive change in the making.
Nick's accessible writing. Nick writes as he speaks and speaks as he writes. This can be uncanny at times, especially hearing him talk for the first time and recognising the same cadence. But there's more to it. He made the study of music accessible to a degree that is still rare in the discipline (e.g. his Very Short Introduction to Music).
This is important. It is a political act in a world in which too many aspiring scholars or simply curious readers are put off by the stuffiness and complacence of academic writing - as if cryptic writing somehow made the content more transcendental. Far from it, Nick approached Wittgenstein and Freud casually, and allowed - at least a non-native English speaker like me - to engage easily and enthusiastically in his arguments.
Nick's embracing of diversity. Born in Athens, as he likes to point out, he later went to build his career in Hong Kong. On his return, he made it a point to take students from all over the world. When I think of the diverse colleagues that surrounded me during my studies and later at Cambridge, they were mostly there through connection with Nick. Apart from myself - a Colombian woman - I had colleagues from Canada, Greece, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, as well as from British working class backgrounds.
Again, like his contributions to the blurring of boundaries between the sub-disciplines of music studies and his accessible writing, his embracing of diversity made us all feel at home, made it possible for us to think ourselves in the footsteps of our mentors. At least this was the case for me, when, for reasons unrelated to my professional career, I decided to stay in the UK and found myself successfully applying for a job at - who would have thought? - Cambridge.
In these three acts and countless more, Nick turned the study of music into a friendlier place, a place in which political commentary about the Other was turned into positive action, a place that embraced diversity of thought, skills and background. It is with gratitude for this exceptional achievement that I embarked in a project honouring his work: Remixing Music Studies.
I thank my co-editors and contributors for joining me in this project. The contributors are Philip Bohlman, Julie Brown, Nicola Dibben, Anija Dokter, Björn Heile, Michiel Kamp, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, John Rink, Floris Schuiling and Georgia Volioti - it was a pleasure and honour to work with you.
I thank Matthew Pritchard for early and thoughtful discussions on Nick's contributions to music studies.
For a preview of the book, including the full introductory chapter, follow this link.