Nicholas Cook > Quotes

“I said that foundational figures of rock can be accommodated within a Beethovenian model of greatness, and the masculinism of 20th-century rock stars finds its contemporary equivalent in the sometimes overt misogyny of hip hop. I also”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“Joy through suffering: this phrase (extracted from one of Beethoven's letters, where it actually referred to an uncomfortable coach journey) became the central motto of the Beethoven cult [..].”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“This aggressive gendering of creativity renders it highly exclusionary, as reflected in Clara Schumann’s belief that women should not even wish to compose. Equally it genders the sense of identification with the composer that was central to the classical star culture.”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“These things have a huge impact on how music is experienced by listeners; they can make one performance profoundly moving, another dull or ridiculous or unintelligible, even though the notes are the same.”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“because Beethoven did not know where it was going to end up. That, of course, is the point of sketching.”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“universal features shared by all musics. The very word ‘universal’ should put us on our guard: as the postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha says, ‘universalism…masks ethnocentric norms, values, and interests’.”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“The basic principle of Western staff notation is that passing time is represented through a series of marks arranged from left to right on the page. Within the five lines of the staff (or stave), notes are arrayed from high to low. So a score is a kind of two-dimensional plot in which the horizontal axis is time and vertical one is pitch;”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“By the 19th century, a stereotyped lexicon of alterity had come into being that included twisting, melismatic melodic lines and non-standard scales often featuring augmented seconds:”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction

“The historical role of classical music as the taken-for-granted high-cultural expression of Western civilization was built on a network of interlinked ideas that included masculinity, whiteness, greatness, national destiny, the colonial order, and a future understood as firmly grounded on the status quo.”
― Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction