Overview
Carmel Raz studies the interrelations of music, mind, and body during the emergence of modern European musical cultures. How did the field of music cognition develop from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century? How did Enlightenment neurophysiology influence Romantic music? Many insights yielded by experiments in psychology for us today were available in early musical writings that prioritized introspection as method. Raz draws out from these writings—especially those that may be dismissed as merely speculative, amateurish, or effusive—the paradigms that also produced the most respected psychological, physiological, and philosophical treatises of their day. Her published articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of Music Theory, and Music Theory Spectrum, and her book Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment is forthcoming with in the “Studies in Music Theory” series with Oxford University Press. Other research interests include historical theories of attentive listening, a topic she explores together with Francesca Brittan in an edited collection entitled The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, under advance contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, and the history of music theory in a global perspective, the subject of a major anthology she is co-curating together with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, entitled Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory.
Raz studied violin performance at the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” in Berlin for her first degree, followed by two years in the composition PhD program at the university of Chicago. She received her PhD in music theory from Yale University, and subsequently spent three years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Columbia Society of Fellows, followed by six years as the Leader of the Research Group “Histories of Music, Mind, and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt. Her research has been supported the Baden-Württemberg Landesstiftung, the Whiting Foundation, the University of Chicago Neubauer Collegium, and the British Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Research Focus
History of musical cognition
History of music and the nerves
Attention / distraction
Music and medicine
Global histories of music theory
Scottish Enlightenment
Publications
Monograph
Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (forthcoming, Oxford University Press)
Edited Volumes
with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory. (In progress).
with Felix Wörner and Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, Lexikon Schriften über Musik III: Musikästhetik in globaler Perspektive. Bärenreiter Verlag (in progress).
with Francesca Brittan, The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, 1800-1930. Under contract, the University of Pennsylvania Press.
with James Grande, Sound and Sense in British Romanticism. “Studies in Romanticism,” Cambridge University Press, 2023. Open Access, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009277839.
with Francesca Brittan, colloquy on “Music and Forms of Attention in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72.2 (2019), 541–80.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Hector Berlioz’s Neurophysiological Imagination.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 75.1 (2022), 1–37.
“‘To ‘Fill Up, Completely, the Whole Capacity of the Mind’: Listening with Attention in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland.” Music Theory Spectrum 44.1 (2022): 141–54.
“The Kinetic Universe of Philippe Leroux’s De La Texture (2007): Drum Rudiments, Waveform Profiles, and Process Polyphony.” Music Theory & Analysis 8.2 (2021), 327–340.
“Séances, ‘Sperrits,’ and Self-Playing Accordions: Musical Instruments in Victorian Spiritualism.” Journal of Musicology 38.2 (2021), 230–59.
“How the Sheng became a Harp.” Journal of Sound Studies 6.2 (2020): 239–56.
“An Eighteenth-Century Theory of Musical Cognition? John Holden’s Essay towards a Rational System of Music (1770).” Journal of Music Theory 62.2, October (2018): 205–48. [Finalist, the Society for Music Theory’s emerging scholar award, 2019]
“Anne Young’s Introduction to Music (1803): Pedagogical, Speculative, and Ludic Music Theory.” SMT-V: Videocast Journal of the Society for Music Theory 4.3 (2018), vimeo.com/278578821.
“Anne Young’s Musical Games (1801): Music Theory, Gender, and Game Design.” SMT-V: Videocast Journal of the Society for Music Theory 4.2 (2018), vimeo.com/278344604.
“Music, Theater, and the Moral Treatment: The Case Dei Matti of Aversa and Palermo.” Special issue, “Italian Music & the Medical Sciences,” Laboratoire italien 20.2 (2017).
“‘The Expressive Organ Within Us’: Ether, Ethereality, and Early Romantic Ideas about Music and the Nerves.” 19th-Century Music 38.2 (2014): 115–44.
“The Lost Movements of Ernst Toch’s ‘Gesprochene Musik.’” Current Musicology 97 (2014): 37–59.
“From Trinidad to Cyberspace: Reconsidering Toch’s Geographical Fugue.” Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie 9.2 (2012): 227–43.
“Wagnerpunk: A Steampunk Reading of Patrice Chéreau’s Staging of Der Ring des Nibelungen (1976).” Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies 4.2 (2011): 91–107.
Book Chapters
“Music, Culture, and the Brain” (with Nori Jacoby). In Neurosciences of Music: Interdisciplinary Insights, ed. Jessica Grahn & Jonathan De Souza. Oxford University Press, in progress.
“At Adama: A Musical Vignette.” In Art Musics of Israel, ed. Malcolm Miller, Brepols, forthcoming.
“‘Ossianic Sounds’: Berlioz on Memory.” In Berlioz and His World, ed. Francesca Brittan and Sarah Hibberd. Chicago University Press, 2024.
“Of Sound Minds and Tuning Forks: Neuroscience’s Vibratory Histories.” In The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future, ed. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Psyche Loui, & Deirdre Loughridge. MIT Press, 2023, 115–129. [Featured on The MIT Press Reader, June 2023]
“Operatic Fantasies in Early Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry.” In Nineteenth-Century Opera and the Scientific Imagination, ed. David Trippett & Benjamin Walton. Cambridge University Press, 2019, 63–83.
“Musical Glasses, Metal Reeds, and Broken Hearts: Two Cases of Melancholia Treated by New Musical Instruments” (with Stanley Finger). In The Routledge Companion to Music, Mind and Wellbeing: Historical and Scientific Perspectives, ed. Penelope Gouk, Jacomien Prins, Wiebke Thormaehlen, & James Kennaway. Routledge, 2018, 77–92.
“Tafillalt’s ‘Soulmate’ and the Israeli Piyyut Revival.” In Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas: Musical Exodus, ed. Ruth F. Davis. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, 165–80.
Other Writing
Entries in Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press.
“John Holden,” 2024 (in press).
“Walter Young,” 2024 (in press).
“Anne Gunn,” in progress.
Entries in Lexikon der musikalischen Schriften II, ed. Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann & Felix Wörner. Barenreiter, 2022.
“John Holden, ‘Essay towards a Rational System of Music,’” pp. 388–390.
“James Beattie, ‘On Poetry & Music, As They Affect the Mind,’” pp. 92–94.
“Christian Conrad Moritz, ‘Die Wirkungen der äußern Sinne in psychologischer Rücksicht: Über das musikalische Gehör’” (with David E. Cohen), pp. 605–607.
“Attention, Anxiety, and Audition’s Histories,” (co-authored with Francesca Brittan), introduction to colloquy on “Music and Forms of Attention in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72.2 (2019), 541–46.
“Talking to the Hand: The “Hysterical Epistemology” of the Migrating Sensorium.” Colloquy on “Music and Forms of Attention in the Long Nineteenth Century.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 72.2 (2019), 552–557.
“Music of the Squares: David Ramsay Hay and the Reinvention of Pythagorean Aesthetics,” Public Domain Review, May 16, 2019.
“Going Global, in Theory,” (with David E. Cohen, Roger M. Grant, Andrew Hicks, Nathan J. Martin, Caleb Mutch, Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, Felix Wörner, and Anna Zayaruznaya). IMS Blog: Musicological Brainfood 3.1 (2019).
Review, “Deirdre Loughridge, Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism.” Music and Letters 99.1 (2018): 126–28.
Review, “Music and the Nerves: 1700–1900, ed. James Kennaway.” Social History of Medicine 29.3 (2016): 638–39.
“Of Sound Minds and Tuning Forks: Charcot’s Acoustic Experiments at the Salpêtrière,” Musicology Now, October 2015. https://musicologynow.org/of-sound-minds-and-tuning-forks-charcots-acoustic-experiments-at-the-salpetriere/
“Ossian’s Folk Psychology,” by John Savarese [English Literary History 80.3].” Journal of Literature and Science 7.2 (2014).
Review, “Cute Boy, Charming Girl: Children’s Songs of the Modern Hebrew Nation (1882–1948).” Asian Music (2014), 45.2, 132–33.