Carmel Raz is an assistant professor of music at Cornell University whose research explores the history of music, cognition, aesthetics, and theories of mind from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
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A Scottish artist and theorist argued that the same principles governing musical harmony also determine beauty in architecture, color, geometry, and the human form, revealing how music influenced 19th-century theories of aesthetics and perception.
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Carmel Raz is an assistant professor in the Department of Music at Cornell University. Her research explores the relationship between music, cognition, and the body, with a focus on the development of musical thought and theories of mind in Europe from the 17th through the 19th centuries. She is the author of the book Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment and has published widely on the history of music perception, attention, aesthetics, and cognition. Her work examines how changing ideas about the mind, the senses, and human behavior have shaped the ways people understand music and artistic experience.
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Hearing with the Mind synthesizes two exciting approaches to music--cognitive psychology and social history--by focusing on the remarkable work of musical theorist John Holden (1729--72) during the Scottish Enlightenment. One of the first musical thinkers to propose a detailed account of how the human mind perceives music, Holden had an unconventional background as a merchant potter and appears to have been largely self-taught in music theory.
In his Essay toward a Rational Theory of Music (1770), Holden explores the cognitive aspects of music perception, focusing on chord relationships, key identification, and mental processes. He 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 work of the Scottish minister Walter Young (1745--1814) and his sister, Anne Young (1756--c.1813), a piano teacher and the inventor of a complex and intriguing musical board game.
Drawing widely from the histories of music theory, science, sociology, and philosophy, as well as from feminist criticism and ludo-musicology, Carmel Raz richly situates the lives and productions of John Holden and Walter and Anne Young within the contexts 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.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.