Carmel Raz - Böcker

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.

A radical re-imagining of the relationship between sound and sense took place in Britain in the decades around 1800. This new approach reconfigured sound as central to understandings of space and temporality, from the diurnal rhythms of everyday life in the modern city to the 'deep time' of the natural world. At the same time, sound emerged as a frequently disruptive phenomenon, a philosophical and political problem, and a force with the power to overwhelm listeners. This is the first book devoted to the topic and brings together scholars from literary studies, musicology, history and philosophy through the interdisciplinary frameworks of sound studies and the history of the senses. The chapters pursue a wide range of subjects, from 'national airs' to the London stage, and from experiments in sound to new musical and scientific instruments. Collectively, they demonstrate how a focus on sound can enrich our understanding of Romantic-era culture. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.