Historical perspectives on music as a cause of disease

The relationship between music and medicine is generally understood in the benign context of music therapy, but, as this chapter shows, there is a long parallel history of medical theories that suggest that music can cause real physical and mental illness. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of music as an expression of universal harmony was challenged by a more mechanistic model of nervous stimulation. By the 1790s, there was a substantial discourse on the dangers of musical overstimulation to health in medicine, literature, and etiquette books. During the nineteenth century, the sense of music as a pathogenic stimulant gained in influence. It was often linked to fears about sexuality, female gynecological health, and theories of hypnosis and degeneration. In the twentieth century, the debate on the medical perils of the wrong kinds of music became overtly politicized in Germany and the Soviet Union. Likewise, the opponents of jazz, particularly in the United States, often turned to medicine to fend off its supposed social, moral, and physical consequences. The Cold War saw an extensive discourse on the idea of musical "brainwashing," that rumbled on into the 1990s. Today, regular media panics about pathological music are mirrored by alarming evidence of the deliberate use of music to harm listeners in the context of the so-called War on Terror. Can music make you ill? Music therapy is a common if perhaps rather neglected part of medicine, but its diametric opposite, the notion that music might lead to real mental and physical illness, may seem improbable. In fact, over the last two hundred years, there have been many times when as much was written about the medical dangers of music as about its potential benefits. Since the eighteenth century, fears about music's effects on the nerves and the mind have created a remarkably extensive discourse on pathological music based on a view of both music and the causation of disease as matters of nervous stimulation (Kennaway, 2010, 2012a). From concerns about young ladies fainting from excessive stimulation while playing the keyboard in the Georgian period and Victorian panics about Wagner to the Nazi concept of "degenerate music" and Cold War anxieties about musical brainwashing, the debate on the medical dangers of music has generally combined a theoretical and terminological basis in the medicine of the period concerned with broader agendas about gender, sexuality, race, and social order. Each generation has tended to regard the music it grew up with as the epitome of rationality and healthy mindedness while ascribing hair-raising medical consequences to newer music. This debate has continued right up to the present day, with the depressing difference that, with the systematic use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror, the idea that music can be bad for you has become a much more realistic prospect. Although the debate about music's ill effects has largely been bogus, there are ways in which music can in fact adversely affect health. Most directly of all, there is of course the power of sheer volume to cause psychological strain and hearing damage. It was only really with the advent of the modern age, with its industrial noise, expanded orchestras, and amplified sound systems, that this became a widespread concern. Although the high-decibel sound can include music, it is not its character as music that causes health problems, so it falls rather outside our purview. Medical problems that do relate to specifically to music itself include the rare conditions of arousal-related arrhythmia and musicogenic epilepsy, but in both of these contexts, music is essentially a trigger rather than a fundamental cause of sickness (Sharp, 1997; Viskin, 2008; Wieser et al., 1997). There is a long history of medical accounts of musical hallucinations, which are certainly sometimes associated with serious medical conditions, but they are by no means always experienced as pathological (Berrios, 1990; Evers and Tanja, 2004). It should also be remembered that it is quite possible that many of the accounts of music causing disease refer to real physical symptoms and suffering, albeit generally with a psychosomatic rather than direct physiological explanation. This kind of psychological impact of music has meant it has been linked to a variety of culturally bound syndromes. Having said that, it is also clear that the most of the discourse on pathological music is basically fallacious. Over and over again, fundamentally moral objections to music relating to sexuality, gender, social order, and self-control have been clear beneath a veneer of medical language.