Nicholas Cook

In the early twentieth century systematic musicology, which was based on the comparative method, played a prominent role in the discipline: however it was appropriated by the Nazis and fell out of favour after the war. It was replaced by ethnomusicology and structuralist music theory, both of which emphasized the individual context and eschewed comparison between contexts. Both also developed an epistemology based on the generation of meaning through the act of "experiencing and understanding music" : this epistemology, characteristic of cultural musicology and theory in general, is quite distinct from that of the cognitive sciences of music. The otherwise confusing variety of musicological practices subsumed under the category "systematic musicology", as set out in Honing's article on which this is a commentary, can be usefully seen in terms of two distinct dimensions, those of method and of epistemology. It follows from this that empirical methods are as consistent with, and as potentially valuable to, CMT as they are to CSM, and that EMR has the potential to reach both constituencies.

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. “Multimedia” is not simply a genre category but also a mentality. Aesthetic thinking has been conditioned by text-based approaches according to which meaning is inherent. By contrast, multimedia practice and theory are predicated on dynamic interaction of media and generation of emergent meaning in real time. Digital and Internet technologies have enabled significant extension of multimedia practices, transforming principles of montage and extreme intertextuality into a core cultural practice. The chapter illustrates this through a case study of the remix trio Eclectic Method, whose work ranges from Web-based multimedia to live performance and from subversion of copyright to innovative forms of marketing for multinational corporations. The chapter also considers the collision between such practices and intellectual property law, which identifies creativity with individual authorship. The media business has been based on the exploitation of intellectual property, but aesthetic and technological developments suggest that it is becoming a service industry.