This book is one of a series of five co-ordinated volumes that owe their existence to the work of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (RCMPCP), which, from 2009 to 2014, conducted a programme of research into live musical performance and creative music-making. The author aims to present ‘a coherent, or at least joined-up approach to the topic of creativity in music’ (p. ix): as such it is much needed and to be welcomed. Creativity studies have tended to be dogged by silo thinking: for the neuroscientist creativity is located in the brain; to the psychologist it resides in the mind; to sociologists it is all about human interaction. Increasingly within the embrace of musicology, a writer with the depth of interdisciplinary knowledge on display here may ‘join up’ thinking across and between disciplines, genres, people and centuries.

Cook lays out his stall as succinctly as possible. Creativity is generally associated with doing something new and useful; in music, it is essentially interactive; the notion of creativity remains divisive, slippery and inherently unstable. In 17^th century music making, for example, creativity was expressed less in terms of originality, more in terms of imitation, emulation and the surpassing of models. Originality is a more recent component of creative action, whose pursuit can put unsustainable demands on performers. Below the surface and ever-present lurk two uncomfortable questions: is the notion of creativity more harmful than helpful, and do we need to think about musical creativity in a different way?

Each of the three chapters is divided into seven sections. The first chapter establishes three fundamental premises: that all music is in some sense social (p. 20); that the creativity of music is most immediately a phenomenon of its performance (p. 19); and that unpredictable emergence is a fundamental source of creativity (p. 36). The performer's reaction to unpredictability, implies Cook, is what counts in creative performance. Because sonic outcomes are never far from surprise, creative musicians do not always, in that sense, know what they are doing – a revelation that in your reviewer's experience tends to cause disappointment or incredulity among listeners.

The second chapter offers solid musicological analysis of the sketchbooks (the ‘improvisations on paper’, p. 117) and scores of Beethoven, Mozart and Mendelssohn intertwined with generous amounts of ‘lone genius’ myth-busting. The origins of the conception of music as score and the processes of composition are viewed from the perspective of creativity distributed across performers and composers, and the living and the dead. While the products of contemporary collaborative music-making may be novel, there is little new in the process: the creative collaboration of the kind with which we are familiar in the 21^st century was also evident in 17^th century musicking, in which the composition was ‘a “gist” capable of any number of sonic instantiations’ (p. 83). Highlighted in chapter three is the importance within the ecology of creative performance of relationships with ‘significant others’, often non-performers such as family and personal and professional friends (p. 149). The relationships between Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten, between Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger and between Edward Elgar and his ‘alter ego’ August Jaeger neatly illustrate the powerful contribution of the significant other as confidant and critic. Ultimately the finger is pointed at the devaluing of copying, imitation and repetition of the second half of the 20^th century as leading, in part, to the ‘official discourse’ of ‘creativity as innovation’, as against the notion of ‘creativity as improvisation’, the creative practice of everyday life (pp. 197–9). Cook asserts his preference for a continuum, not an opposition, between the recall of memorised materials and the generation of new ones through improvisation.

The investigative path winds gloriously from Joe Meek (Telstar) to free jazz, from Benjamin Britten to David Byrne, from Ligeti to Kraftwerk and on to the Kronos Quartet and Stan Getz, passing briefly through such diverse topics as musical prodigies, the imagination–creation cycle and copyright law. It stretches back to 16^th century composition and forward to computational creativity, data sonification and hip-hop. Also examined are ideas and cultures of creative repetition, creative innovation as against creative improvisation, and the deeply ingrained presumptions and attitudes ‘outside the room’ that condition face-to-face interaction (p. 59).

In keeping with the relational and sociological undertow of the book, the link between musical community and real-world relationships is depicted in the collaborative actions of various ‘assemblages’ such as the Kronos Quartet, the Azerbaijani singer Alim Qasimov's Ensemble and the Guarneri Quartet. The author draws also upon a series of RCMPCP case studies to highlight the ‘essential difference between authorship and the cultural practices of creative collaboration, where the contributions of the individuals – while not necessarily equal, are impossible to disentangle’ (p. 57), an observation that would resonate with anyone collaborating in the invention of music in a contemporary popular music group.

The writing style is economical, breezy and business-like, as befits a scholar of Cook's experience; the range of references sufficiently broad to take on theists, atheists, fundamentalists and agnostics alike. Intriguing examples and supporting evidence are threaded together from the seemingly unrelated fields of film criticism, literature, perfumery, biography, copyright law and architecture. This cornucopia is framed within theories of extended mind, of distributed creativity and of the kind of embodied knowledge indispensable in performance. The author excels at the fascinating cross-reference, the little-considered linkage and the artful juxtaposition of, for example, descriptions of jazz and classical performances or of Michael Jackson and Amadeus Mozart in a discussion of prodigy archetypes. In a rare moment of over-extension, music is characterised as ‘the sound of social interaction’: the reader might suggest that social interaction has other sounds as well, such as those of breaking glass or marching feet. Very occasionally the path becomes accessible to only the most determined of souls:  linkages between conceptual metaphor theory, musical motion and emotion, gestural dynamics, vitality effects and transsensorial perception are all made in the space of a single paragraph (p. 116). However, generally the argument is presented with the high degree of coherence essential for navigation through such a rich thicket of topics.

Music as Creative Practice will do much to advance the proposition that all music is in some way social and that ‘this social dimension is fundamental to the creative practice of music’ (p. 20). The author delivers on his promise to ‘bring performance and composition, collaborative and solo creativity, into an integrated conception of music as creative practice’ (p. 130). The book makes an exemplary contribution to the field of study and is highly recommended, not least for every practitioner who has ever speculated upon what ‘creative practice’ might means in relation to music.