Hearing With the Mind Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment

Hearing with the Mind synthesizes two approaches to music--cognitive psychology and social history--by focusing on the work of John Holden (1729--72), one of the first musical thinkers to propose a detailed account of how the human mind perceives music. Carmel 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--c.1813), within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment. Raz shows how the contributions of marginalized figures in the history of music theory reflect Britain's social transformations and global entanglements in the rising age of empire.

About the author

Carmel Raz is Assistant Professor of Music at Cornell University and Research Group Leader of Histories of Music, Mind, and Body at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main. She has published widely on the intertwined histories of music and the neural sciences and on the histories of musical attention and cognition. She is co-editor with James Grande of Sound and Sense in British Romanticism.

Product details

• Authors: Carmel (Assistant Professor of Music Raz, Carmel Raz
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Content: Book
• Product form: Hardback
• Publication date: 06.06.2025
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Music > Music history
• EAN: 9780197786178
• ISBN: 978-0-19-778617-8
• Pages: 304
• Series: Oxford Studies in Music Theory
• Subjects: European History, MUSIC / History & Criticism, MUSIC / Instruction & Study / Theory, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, SCIENCE / Cognitive Science, British & Irish history, Social and cultural history, Theory of music and musicology