Listening with attention in late eighteenth-century Scotland

Music scholars have generally discerned in Adam Smith’s essay “Of the nature of that imitation which takes place in what are called the imitative arts” a unique 18th-century harbinger of the listening practices associated with theories of “Absolute Music” in the 19th century. I offer a complementary perspective on Smith’s innovations by contextualizing his ideas as part of a broader shift in Scottish conceptions of musical listening, and attention itself, in the decades around 1760 and 1770, which I trace to the psychology of Thomas Reid and the music-theoretical writings of John Holden.