Music and Madness

Catalog description

This course offers historical, critical, and cross-cultural perspectives on music as a cause, a symptom, and a treatment of madness. Why are there so many reports of uncontrollable singing and/or dancing from medieval Europe? Why, around 1800, were women regarded as particularly susceptible to the sounds of the glass harmonica? Did certain kinds of music really cause members of the Issawa brotherhood to burn themselves with red-hot coals? In each class meeting we will investigate a number of approaches to a given mental state in the light of readings by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, historians, disability studies, scholars and medico-scientific researchers. (MUSIC-HC)