New Faculty: Carmel Raz

Carmel Raz

Assistant Professor, Music

Academic focus:

History of music theory, history of musical cognition music and the history of science, "global" history of music theory

Current research project: 

I am currently investigating a tradition of texts concerning the habitual, automatic actions involved in playing a musical instrument in a variety of philosophical texts by authors from Avicenna to Locke and beyond. Musical proficiency, it turns out, is a recurrent trope in discussions of various aspects of mind-body relations. I am exploring how successive writers' alterations of details with regard to the instrument, the agency and the identity of the performer reflect the influence of musical culture on a central philosophical debate.

Previous positions:

• Research Group Leader, “Histories of Music, Mind, and Body” Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 2018–2025
• Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University, 2015–2018

Academic background:

• Ph.D., Music theory, Yale University, 2015
• M.A., Composition, University of Chicago, 2006
• Diplom. Violin Performance, Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler,” Germany, 2004

Last book read:

“The Woman in White” by Wilkie Collins

In your own time/when not working:

Spending time with my husband and son, spending time with friends, traveling, cooking, going to concerts

Courses you’re most looking forward to teaching:

Music and Madness!!!!

What most excites you about Cornell:

I'm excited to join the intellectual community here, and I've been really impressed by the openness and interdisciplinarity of the university. And after six years in a research-only institution, I am really looking forward to teaching Cornell students.