Bad Vibrations

The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease

James Kennaway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409426424
• eBook ISBN: 9781317176466
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: World History

Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.

Chapter 1
Introduction:
Musical Orders and Disorders

This music mads me: Let it sound more.

(Richard II, Act V)

Writing a history of the idea that music can be bad for health might seem like an eccentric or even perverse enterprise. After all, most people (including the author) are inclined to think of music in a positive light. Music therapy may be a well known if sometimes marginalized part of medical practice in many countries, but the notion that music can be pathogenic, a cause of real physical and mental conditions, is harder to grasp. The possibility that loud noise can damage hearing is obvious, but the threat posed by music as music rather than as mere sound is more enigmatic. Nevertheless, especially over the last two hundred years, music has often been treated as a genuine threat to the health of musicians and listeners alike. From widespread fears about musical ‘over-stimulation’ of the nerves around 1800 to the panic about the impact of the eroticism of jazz, from concerns about musical brainwashing to the grim reality of the role of music in the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in the so-called War on Terror, music’s benign status has been denied by countless doctors, critics and writers. This book will outline that history, considering the ways that music was imagined to damage those who heard it, and examining the scientific, cultural and political contexts in which the idea of pathological music has flourished.

There are anecdotes that suggest that music could do harm to listeners dotted throughout the written history of music and medicine. For instance, the power wielded by the Greek musician Timotheus over Alexander the Great was said to be such that he could drive him to distraction – a subject that Handel set to music in the eighteenth century. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian gave an account of a fictional musician who played the wrong note at a ritual and drove the priest mad enough to jump off a cliff.¹ Similarly, the medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus reported that King Erik I of Denmark was so maddened by music (the Phrygian mode in fact) that he killed one of his favourite servants.² The erudite early modern tradition of Humanist writing on music and medicine tended to involve listing well-known tall tales about music’s effects, some of which involved music causing illness or driving people insane. This tradition was maintained into the seventeenth century, as the Dutch philosopher Bernhard Nieuwentyt and the English clergyman and poet Robert South (in his Musica incantans), for instance, both mentioned cases of music causing madness.³

However, before the modern era these stories never amounted to a systematic medical critique of music. Until the Enlightenment the suspicions often aroused by music’s physicality and potential sensuality led to warnings of its dangers that were essentially moral rather than medical. The two principal moral approaches to the problem of music until the development of the medical critique were either to deny its physicality in a view of music that emphasized mathematical order and cosmological relationships, or to subject it to a ringing moral denunciation as a carnal vice. The former, perhaps most famously expressed in Leibniz’s claim that music was a form of ‘hidden arithmetic for a soul that does not know it is counting’, was the foundation of centuries of speculation about cosmic harmony. The latter, from Plato to countless Christian thinkers of a puritanical bent, consisted of hostile observers portraying music as a threat to manhood, morality and political order. For them, music could be a tempting but sexually voracious feminine threat to masculine self-control, something reflected in the recurring trope of the feminine musical sirens luring men to their dooms, for instance in the Odyssey or the Lorelei of Germanic myth.⁴ Music, at once the epitome of mathematical rationality and the irrationality of the senses, is stuck in a contest between an inescapable body and the urge to transcend it intellectually, as Susan McClary has put it.⁵ To a great extent, the medical critique of music of the last two hundred years is a continuation of this older tradition of moral concern. As we shall see, the same themes – anxiety about music’s physicality and its influence on masculine self-control and female sexuality – recur in both.

Despite these continuities, it is clear that the systematic debate on pathological music is essentially connected to modernity and only really emerged when specifically modern conceptions of music, selfhood, social order and medicine developed. The shift from an ethical to a medical discourse on music’s dangers around 1800 was part of a much wider medicalization of social and moral issues at the time, which Michel Foucault discussed in terms of ‘biopolitics’.⁶ Many in the past had found music’s sensuality disturbing, but for the bourgeois outlook that was becoming increasingly dominant at this time it was especially problematic. Music’s physicality, its sensual elements, the way it can undermine individual autonomy and create powerful group dynamics, were all a challenge for middle-class values of self-control and physical restraint. Defence of these values in the face of music’s supposed power to over-excite, seduce, hypnotize or brainwash listeners always seems to be in the background of the discourse of pathogenic music. The way that music acts as a kind of physical contact between people at a distance, with the actions of one body literally resonating in the bodies of others, can be both scary and liberating; now it was defined as pathological.

The disenchantment of music, the gradual shift from a model of music as an aspect of divine harmony to one based on the idea of music as a form of nerve stimulation, was both directly connected to modernity and a necessary precondition for the idea of pathological music. Previous ideas about music’s relation to health focused principally on the art’s effect on the passions, one of Galen’s six ‘non-naturals’.⁷ However, starting in the late eighteenth century, a time when many physicians blamed over-stimulation of the nerves for most sickness, concern about the direct impact of music on the nervous system itself became the centre of medical fears about its effects. Likewise, the French Revolution and the broader social and economic changes of the period radically undermined the whole idea of natural order, reinforcing the notion that music was a question of personal expression rather than universal harmony. Music, losing many of its associations with a harmonious cosmic and social order, was left in the more ambiguous position of physical stimulant and polite entertainment.

The rise of the idea of pathogenic music around 1800 was also closely related to other changes in music and musical aesthetics. Views of music as a form of nervous stimulation had already been commonplace in Enlightenment aesthetics, enough to lead to a crisis in the prestige of music. With music shorn of its metaphysical justification, some observers wondered with Immanuel Kant whether it was really just a sensual pleasure rather than an art. By the early nineteenth century, however, the development of the Romantic aesthetics of music, with its autonomous works of art speaking directly to the listener’s soul, left little space for the nervous system. Whereas in much eighteenth-century thinking on the subject, all music had been a matter of nervous stimulation, in nineteenth-century medicine and aesthetics, serious music was a matter for the transcendental subject, and only over-stimulating, effeminate and dangerously sensual music was generally discussed in terms of the nervous system. Nevertheless, the nervous system played a vital role in the shift from an aesthetics of mimesis, in which music struggled to be taken seriously, to an aesthetics of the sublime, in which music’s lack of ‘content’ was seen as grounds for an exalted status.

The pattern that emerged in medical warnings about music around 1800 set the scene for much of the subsequent debate on pathological music. Just as had been the case with earlier ethical critiques of music, fears that music could unleash female sexuality to the detriment of health, morals and social order has been perhaps the most significant theme. Especially after the development of a scientific discourse on homosexuality, the notion that music could undermine masculine self-control was also a recurring motif. Often these sexual anxieties were related to broader assumptions that the modern urban lifestyles that have developed since the eighteenth century were likely to over-stimulate vulnerable nerves. At first much of this critique was aimed by (middle-class) physicians at the indulgent lifestyles of the elite. However, with rapid industrialization and urbanization it was increasingly linked to bourgeois fears about the masses and modernity in general. Critics and physicians began regarding ‘modern’ music as especially dangerous in the mid-nineteenth century, reflecting a broader cultural pessimism. In Germany in particular, this pessimism was radicalized and combined with scientific racism in the 1930s to create a discourse of musical and racial hygiene. At the same time in the United States, a medical discourse about jazz was setting the scene for many subsequent panics about music in relation to the mass media and the ‘infectious’ character of African-American music.

And what of the music itself? Has it been nothing more than a blank canvas onto which medical and cultural discourses have been projected, or has it played an active role? As we shall see, hearing music can in fact bring on certain medical symptoms, but leaving aside these rare conditions, the precise extent to which changes in music itself have contributed to anxieties about its medical effects is hard to gauge. It is certainly the case that many critical commentators linked the originality, harmonic tension, rich instrumentation and extreme emotional states valued and exemplified in Romanticism to sickness. Likewise, the cult of the genius that reached its apogee in this period also brought associations with madness. The constant innovations and expansions of ‘normal’ harmonic language in the two centuries since the start of the Romantic era – along with the technological and stylistic changes of the twentieth century – have, it seems, provided each new generation with grounds for a substantial medical and moral panic about new music, usually contrasted with the ‘healthy’ music of the previous generation. That the older music had often been subject to precisely the same sort of medical critique was soon forgotten.

To put the development of the discourse of pathological music in context, this chapter will first consider whether music really can create illness, looking at the neurological, physiological and psychological factors that connect music to the body. It will then examine the moral critique of music that foreshadowed the medical warnings that are the main subject of this book. From Pythagoras and Plato, many observers argued that music was a matter of mathematics and cosmic order, and that any appeal made by music to physical pleasure was illegitimate if not wicked, a threat to individual morality and political order. After all, music could lead to dancing, which, as Bernard Shaw was to say, is a ‘perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire’. Having looked at this theme in antiquity and the Middle Ages, I will then consider the changes in thinking about music, the body and the self since the Renaissance that allowed a medicalization of this moral critique. In the last section I will explain the scope of the study and discuss the kind of sources and methodology that lie behind it. Finally, I will give an outline of the following chapters and how they set out the history of the concept of pathological music until the present day.

Does Pathological Music Exist?

Can music really make listeners ill? It is clear that most of the claims for the direct unmediate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Musical Orders and Disorders
• 2 From Sensibility to Pathology: Nervous Music, 1700–1850
• 3 Modern Music and Nervous Modernity: Wagnerism as a Disease of Civilization, 1850–1914
• 4 Pathological Music, Politics and Race: Germany and the United States, 1900–1945
• 5 Music as Mind Control, Music as Weapon: Pathological Music Since 1945
• Bibliography
• Index