Colloquium: Carmel Raz

Carmel Raz

Assistant Professor, Department of Music, Cornell University 

The complex behavior required by musical performance has long constituted a suggestive example with which to explore different notions about what it means to be human. There seems something paradoxical about the fact that at the moment at which we express our subjectivity by creating music, our physical actions should be so fully detached from our conscious, rational selves. Here I survey accounts of musical performance as embodied, automatic, and non-cognitive by tracing the unexpectedly winding history of a single Aristotelian trope, namely, the Philosopher’s assertion that “Ars perfecta, non deliberat” [a perfect artist does not deliberate]. This claim, initially posed with regard to the ability of natural objects to act teleologically without requiring a reflecting agent, was elucidated by commentators in late antiquity using the act of writing. Just as deliberation is not necessary for natural things, such as an acorn, to undergo the processes inherent in their form, that is, sprout into a tree, competent writers do not need to deliberate regarding letters when they write out words. Six centuries later, however, the Persian philosopher Ibn Sina explained this phenomenon using the case of performing music on an oud, and his account would subsequently be troped by a series of authors ranging from Albertus Magnus to Aquinas to Jean Gerson and Giordano Bruno on various musical instruments. Enlightenment thinkers including Locke, Condillac, and Erasmus Darwin and beyond then picked up this same idea and explained it in different yet related ways. Surveying Renaissance heretics, and Enlightenment physiologists (alongside ouds, kitharas, vielles, and keyboard instruments) this talk demonstrates how unreflecting musical performance played an important role in central philosophical debates around conceptualizations of habit, learning, and ethical behavior.

About Carmel Raz

Carmel Raz is an assistant professor of Music at Cornell University, where she studies the interrelations of music, mind, and body during the emergence of modern European musical cultures. She holds degrees from the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, the University of Chicago, and Yale University. She is the author of Hearing with the Mind: Proto-Cognitive Music Theory in the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford University Press, 2025). Other ongoing projects include The Attentive Ear: Sound, Cognition, and Subjectivity, co-edited with Francesca Brittan and forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press, as well as Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory, a digital anthology co-edited with Thomas Christensen and Lester Hu, which will be published by the University of Chicago's OPS as a digitally native, open-access book in 2026.