Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment

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.

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.