Towards a Pre-History of Music Cognition

questions about perception occupy a prominent place in the research program of the field of music cognition, which seeks a better understanding of the psychological and physiological processes by which we experience music.1 Studies in these fields typically make use of such empirical research techniques as questionnaires, production and response (e.g., singing and tapping), measurement of physiological data, neuroimaging, and so on. Researchers employ such techniques to gain insight into the various sensory and mental mechanisms involved in music perception and production, ranging from the processing of raw acoustic sense data to the ways in which enculturation determines expectations at the level of musical syntax. They attempt in this way to answer questions such as, What kinds of sounds do we like or dislike, and why?, How do we recognize a given tonal context?, How do our minds represent different musical rhythms?, and, most fundamentally, How do we perceive music as a temporally structured auditory stimulus with an intuitive, comprehensible organization that can evoke physical and emotional responses?Such questions are not entirely new. They belong to the field that today is configured as music cognition, an important strand of which can be found in historical works of music theory. Here we do not mean to invoke the long history of acoustic investigations, which has been amply treated by historians of music theory, historians of science, and music cognition researchers themselves, and which is frequently portrayed as anticipating modern psychology (see, e.g., Lee 2017 and Deutsch 2001). Rather, we have in mind the history—as yet largely unexplored and unwritten—of thinkers’ awareness and consideration of the roles played by our senses and other mental faculties in the perception and performance of music, a history that extends back at least to Aristoxenus. In the eighteenth century alone, for instance, issues pertaining to the perception of music were explicitly raised by figures including Leonhard Euler, John Holden, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Alexander Malcolm, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Walter Young. Unsurprisingly in view of their historical distance from us, such discussions typically take forms very different from those of the present. In the case of Holden and Young, as Raz has argued elsewhere, their anticipation of contemporary results in the field of music cognition cannot be recognized as such—much less understood—shorn of the context of eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy of mind (Raz 2018, 2022, 2025). Similarly, as Cohen has demonstrated, in the theories of Rameau, a premodern (Aristotelian) conception of the senses and the mind paradoxically gives rise to the basic understanding of musical harmony to which we largely subscribe even today (Cohen 2001).As to what might constitute music cognition avant la lettre, an appropriately broad characterization may be drawn from a formulation provided by Theo C. Meyering (1989: xiv) in his longue durée history of cognitive science, which speaks of “the gradual emergence of a cognitive theory of perception according to which perception involves information processing of an essentially interpretive character.” This suggests that what distinguishes precursors of the modern field of music cognition is their concern with how listeners respond to musical stimuli with interpretive acts of identification, recognition, comparison, evaluation, and so on, regardless of the faculty to which such acts are assigned.We believe, then, that a pre-history of music cognition has long been hiding in plain sight. What has obscured it is, first, the fact that the concepts of the mind, the senses, and cognition with which earlier thinkers operated are in some ways so profoundly different from ours as to render them opaque to modern eyes. And, second, the fact that the methods by which these earlier thinkers reached their conclusions—usually some combination of reliance on past authorities, introspection, casual observation, and a priori deductive argument—seem far removed from the more rigorous empirical methods that undergird modern psychology.Methodology, however, serves the study of music cognition; it does not define it. The development of empirical research techniques has certainly altered both our questions about the experience of music and the ways in which they are answered. Nonetheless, we regard substantial differences between historical and modern approaches to the subject not as a disadvantage but rather as an invitation for new interpretations of the musical mind.Alertness to these issues can illuminate earlier attempts to grapple with the perception of music, as we aim to demonstrate in this special issue, taking the seventeenth century as an example. Each of the three essays identifies and discusses a precursor of modern music cognition in that century. The first examines René Descartes's Compendium musicæ (1618) and its claim that our delight (delectatio) in certain musical sounds reflects our senses’ preference for objects structured simply enough as to render their perception and apprehension easy. The second also concerns the Compendium, addressing its (partly implicit) discrimination among distinct modes of hearing involving aural exertion, syntactical expectation, and synthetic apprehension. The third investigates various of Wolfgang Caspar Printz's late-seventeenth-century treatises, analyzing their account of discrepancies between the empirical identity of certain musical events and the perception of those events, as well as his ideas regarding the intellect's understanding of sensory input, notions inspired by but departing from Descartes's Compendium.Since Descartes's music treatise figures prominently in all three studies, its unusual genesis is worth briefly recapitulating here. Written in 1618 when its author was twenty-two years old as a gift for his friend, the Dutch natural-philosopher Isaac Beeckman, the Compendium was published posthumously in 1650.2 Reissued in 1656 and 1683, the treatise was translated from its original Latin into English (1653), Dutch (1661), and French (1668). Leading thinkers soon engaged with the work, including Descartes's correspondents Constantijn Huygens, Frans van Schooten, and John Pell, who owned copies prior to the treatise's publication, as well as the English mathematicians William Brouncker and Isaac Newton, who encountered it after its author's death.3 The initial reception of the Compendium cannot be separated from Descartes's preeminence within the seventeenth-century intellectual firmament. Indeed, Beekman may have been one of a tiny group of readers—if not the only reader—of the Compendium who could have encountered the text in a world untouched by Descartes's later thought.Descartes's renown has long attracted the musically curious to his early treatise on that subject. Perhaps the earliest sustained engagement with the Compendium was that of Printz. As this issue's third study newly demonstrates, Printz found Descartes's treatise to be a fruitful starting point for substantial sections of his Exercitationes musicae theoretico-practicae curiosae (1687–89). There, Printz engaged in depth with Descartes's youthful account of sensory perception, reordering, reworking, and expanding the Compendium's content, thereby placing principles of music cognition at the center of his own treatise's music-theoretical project.Readers who expected to find adumbrations, or outright anticipations, of Descartes's mature ideas often came away disappointed. In the late eighteenth century, Charles Burney (1789: 417) asserted that “this little work added nothing but method and geometrical precision to the praecognita of music”; some fifty years later, François-Joseph Fétis (1837: 292) pronounced the Compendium “unworthy of its author's name”; while in the early twentieth century, André Pirro (1907: v) attributed the Compendium “less to Descartes the philosopher than to Descartes the gentleman honnête homme, curious and cultivated.” Modern scholars have taken a different view. For Frédéric de Buzon (2019: 267), the work is “part of the philosopher's mathematico-physical research program.”4 Bertrand Augst (1965: 121) commended the Compendium as “an exercise in method,” one that thus foreshadows the Regulae and “anticipates the development of what is the mainspring of Cartesian physics: mechanism.” Jairo Moreno (2004: 4) makes a stronger claim, identifying the Compendium as the site wherein the “early modern subject” as “a cognitive figure of hearing or listening . . . emerges out of the logical and categorical distinction between object and subject made most sharply by Descartes” in that work.Rather than studying Descartes's Compendium through the lens of its author's mature philosophy (a methodologically suspect procedure, as the first paper in our set demonstrates), Cohen and Raz's interpretive strategy instead resembles the approach articulated by Pirro above.5 That is to say, Cohen and Raz read the Compendium as the product of an interesting mind, but not yet that particular interesting mind which subsequently shaped the modern concept of the human subject and the history of modern thought more broadly. The young philosopher we thereby encounter still subscribes to a postmedieval Latin scholastic version of Aristotelian psychology, the study of the soul (psychē; anima), and his novel interventions are, paradoxically, characteristic of that intellectual tradition. This approach resonates with Mutch's interpretation of Printz's oeuvre. Printz's late writings begin to articulate an early-modern view of music psychology that is not present in his earlier works. In the former, the listener's intellect acts upon the percepts received by the senses, while in the latter Printz never describes a perceiving agent, even while displaying a repeated interest in how music “appears” or “is understood.” Mutch thus avoids imposing Printz's mature view of perception on those earlier works, attending instead to the particularities of their implications about music cognition.This approach frees us to recognize and appreciate the ways in which these treatises constitute a proto music cognition. Thus, the first study in this issue identifies several specific ways in which Descartes's project in the Compendium adumbrates that field's fundamental aim of providing natural-scientific, psychological explanations of specific elements of human musical behavior and experience. This intention, it should be emphasized, is almost entirely absent from the discourse of music theory prior to that moment. The second study examines the phenomenological account of musical hearing implicit in the Compendium, wherein pitch and rhythmic relationships of various kinds are apprehended by the ear, aided by other psychic faculties, in distinct yet complementary ways. The implications of these modes of listening, it argues, suggest that Descartes was working with what amounts to an unconscious musical grammar. The third study examines Printz's ideas concerning meter and pitch. In both domains he was interested in discrepancies between how music appears or is understood and how it actually sounds: regarding meter he proposed an early account of metrical accentuation, and regarding pitch he developed a sophisticated theory of how different cadence types are perceived.For readers who may wonder if we are trying to perpetrate a teleological, Whig history or anachronistically reading modern ideas back into historical sources (see Christensen 1993), we wish to clarify the nature of our project. We do not assert (nor do we believe) that those later ideas are actually “in” those earlier texts in any straightforward way. Rather, what we think we have detected, in some very carefully evaluated instances, are recognizable precursors of certain modern ideas. We do not mean ancestors: we do not claim that there is a traceable lineage of direct influence connecting the earlier idea to the later, modern one (although that may sometimes turn out to have been the case). They are, instead, precursors insofar as there is a distinct and strong resemblance between them, a shared conceptual core, in spite of the important differences that will inevitably separate them owing to their differing historical-intellectual contexts.6 Identifying these precursor ideas can, in turn, reveal that concepts we assume to be native to the regime of modern empirical science were, in fact, already available to earlier thinkers, even if by very different means and in unfamiliar guise.Regarding teleology, that charge refers to historiography in which selected ideas of earlier thinkers are evaluated only or principally for their contributions (or lack thereof) to a historical trajectory of progress that culminates in the present day. Often, too, they are treated in isolation from their original context, both within and beyond the text. We however make no assertion to the effect that the only, or even the principal, insights of value or interest in the musical writings of Descartes and Printz are the ones to which we call attention here, nor do we attempt to make them serve a larger triumphalist narrative. Indeed, our explicit goal is to read these works on their own terms, insofar as this is possible, though with the considerable advantage of hindsight and with a particular disciplinary bent.In conclusion, we hope that this special issue will contribute to the development of the history of music cognition as a new subfield within the discipline of the history of music theory, whereby that discipline's historical approach may be informed by and integrated with the so-called cognitive turn in the humanities. The latter, of course, has already led to the development of other interpretative frameworks—including cognitive historicism, cognitive poetics, and cognitive literary theory—based on historical and contemporary sciences of mind. What we propose here, however, is not the application of theories from cognitive science to musical works (a path that, particularly with regard to the eighteenth century, has already been well trodden by music theorists such as Robert Gjerdingen and Danuta Mirka), but rather the excavation of previously overlooked engagements with questions regarding the roles played by our senses and other mental faculties in the experience of music. Doing so, we believe, has the potential to cast new light on how people of the past and the present have endeavored, and still endeavor, to understand not only music itself, but also its powerful effects on us as listeners.