Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS History of Music Theory Study Group.

This study session focuses on music cognition in a historical context, asking two main questions:

1) What are the vernacular theories of the senses and mental faculties that emerge, more or less explicitly, from music-theoretical writings?;

2) What kinds of cognitive processes and aesthetic dispositions appear to be at work in historical texts and artifacts about music, including music-theoretical treatises, diagrams, notations, or musical instruments? Can we take such sources as archives of the ways in which their historical makers and users reflected upon and made sense of the phenomenon they knew as “music”?

If the first question considers music-theoretical writing as an historical source for (proto-)cognitive theories, the second instead examines music-theoretical texts and artefacts as mediators and reifications of historically situated cognitive processes. Both put the stress on how perception and theories of perception are constructed.

For the first part (30’), Giulia Accornero and Siavash Sabetrohani will speak with Carmel Raz about her recent book (Hearing With the Mind: Proto-cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment, 2025). For the second part, Accornero, Sabetrohani, and Raz will moderate an open discussion with the audience on several pre-circulated texts examining both strands of the historical study of music cognition outlined above. Those texts will be uploaded towards the end of October on the Study Group website: https://historyoftheory.com/ . We will also invite our audience to bring examples from their own work into the conversation.

For information, feel free to reach out at giulia.accornero@yale.edu and siarohani@gmail.com