To “Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind”: Listening with 
attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland

Raz, Carmel

doi:10.1093/mts/mtab012

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To “Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind”: Listening with attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland

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Raz, Carmel
Research Group Histories of Music, Mind, and Body, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Max Planck Society;

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Citation

Raz, C. (2022). To “Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind”: Listening with attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland. Music Theory Spectrum, 44(1), 141-154. doi:10.1093/mts/mtab012.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0009-FF9A-B

Abstract

This essay explores a hitherto unsuspected intellectual relationship among three important thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. The great philosopher and economist Adam Smith is known to have had a conception of instrumental music exceptional for his time in its foreshadowing of ideas generally associated with Eduard Hanslick. As I show here, Smith’s views were decisively influenced by the psychological theories of his countryman Thomas Reid in all likelihood by way of the extraordinary proto-cognitivist music theory of their contemporary John Holden, in particular the latter’s conceptualization of the faculty of attention. The innovative contributions of these writers constitute a compact and suggestive case study in the circulation of ideas about perception and listening between philosophy and music, and suggest that the Scottish Enlightenment attitude to psychology enabled a new kind of theorizing about the musical experience: one that foregrounded the importance of the faculty of attention in the process of perceiving music and sound.