Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment synthesizes two of the most exciting current approaches to music: cognitive psychology and social history, by focusing on the remarkable work of John Holden (1729-1772). A Glaswegian merchant potter by day, Holden was one of the first musical thinkers to propose a detailed account of how the human mind perceives music. In his Essay toward a Rational Theory of Music (1770), Holden hypothesizes how the act of perception entails a constant analysis of sensory impressions—both visual and auditory—into smaller groups of equally sized units. Accordingly, our general preference for simple integer ratios in music proves to be a feature of cognition itself rather than determined by acoustical or numerological properties. To further explain our experience of music, Holden reinforces his cognitive claims using tenets of contemporaneous Scottish psychology pertaining to attention and memory. His ideas continued to resonate, as can be seen in the music-theoretical writings of the Scottish siblings Walter (1745–1814) and Anne Young (1756–1813?), which display similar cognitivist orientations. Drawing widely from the histories of music theory, science, sociology, philosophy, as well as from feminist criticism and ludomusicology, the book richly situates the lives and productions of these three figures within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Hearing with the Mind thereby shows how the contributions of relatively marginalized figures in the history of music theory reflect Britain’s social transformations—and global entanglements—in the rising age of empire.

Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment will be published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Related publications:

Carmel Raz, “‘To ‘Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind’: Listening with Attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland.” Music Theory Spectrum 44.1 (2022): 141-154.      Link

Carmel Raz, “Music of the Squares: David Ramsay Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics,” Public Domain Review, May 16, 2019.   Link

Carmel Raz, “An Eighteenth-Century Theory of Musical Cognition? John Holden’s Essay Toward a Rational System of Music (1770),” Journal of Music Theory 62.2 (October, 2018): 205–248.        Link

Carmel Raz, “Anne Young’s Introduction to Music (1803): Pedagogical, Speculative, and Ludic Music Theory,” SMT-V: Videocast Journal of the Society for Music Theory 4.3 (October, 2018).       Link

Carmel Raz, “Anne Young’s Musical Games (1801): Music Theory, Gender, and Game Design,” SMT-V: Videocast Journal of the Society for Music Theory 4.2 (September, 2018).      Link

Press:

Listen to a BBC Radio 3 feature about the project here (the segment starts about 11 minutes in).