This volume brings together some of today's most exciting music scholars to engage with the multifaceted body of work produced by Nicholas Cook over the last thirty years. It offers a forum for scholars to respond to his challenges to the discipline - to 'rethink music', to go 'beyond the score', and to build a more 'relational musicology'. Scholars from a range of subdisciplines have been chosen to reflect Cook's breadth of interest, from music theory, musical multimedia and the performance turn, popular music studies, to the question of musical meaning. Cook's work has a fundamental conceptual synthesis - one that can play an important role in the future of musical scholarship globally.

Where is the academic study of music today, and what paths should it take into the future? Should we be looking at how music relates to society and constructs meaning through it, rather than how it transcends the social? Can we 'remix' our discipline and attempt to address all musics on an equal basis, without splitting ourselves in advance into subgroups of 'musicologists', 'theorists', and 'ethnomusicologists'? These are some of the crucial issues that Nicholas Cook has raised since he emerged in the 1990s as one of the UK's leading and most widely read voices in critical musicology. In this book, collaborators and former students of Cook pursue these questions and others raised by his work-from notation, historiography, and performance to the place of music in multimedia forms such as virtual reality and video games, analysing both how it can bring people together and the ways in which it has failed to do so.