This vignette makes a number of analytical observations about Philippe Leroux's octet De la texture (2007), with a particular focus on the composer's transformation of gestural materials drawn from drum rudiments and waveform shapes into formal processes unfolding at various levels throughout the piece. It demonstrates how Leroux deploys his primal building blocks, whether composed of rudiments, waveform profiles, or non-pitched materials, within processes of kinetic ebb and flow that include alterations in dynamics, register, and tempo, as well as changes in pitch and/or rhythm.

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.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract