In Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment, Carmel Raz 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. Raz investigates Holden’s proto-cognitive music theory and its afterlife in the writings of the Scottish siblings Walter (1745–1814) and Anne Young (1756–1813?), situating their lives and productions 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 June 2025.

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

• Winner, 2024 Emerging Scholar Award (article), The Society for Music Theory

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).