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

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.

Review of Amy Cimini, Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (Oxford University Press, 2022)

“…Cimini refers to such a strategy as spectral a ention. Of course, such listening has been around for a long time, and fits into recent theoretical discourses on the eighteenth century (Raz 2022) and nineteenth century (Steege 2012;Hui 2012, 89-121;2021). But by deploying a ention itself as an object for composition and performance, Amacher moves far beyond these precedents.…”