Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (review)

Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity. Edited by Peregrine Horden. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2000. [viii, 401 p. ISBN 1-84014-299-5. $69.95.]

Music as Medicine is a collection of essays that grew out of a 1997 conference held at the University of London, where the editor, Peregrine Horden, is a lecturer in the history of medicine. The essays, contributed by historians, musicologists, anthropologists, and one music therapist, focus primarily on Western European texts on the performance and reception of music as therapy. This collection is the first scholarly historical examination of the theory and practice of music therapy based on extant manuscripts and texts to be published in English. As such, it represents a long overdue effort to define and describe a group of practices that is often discussed, but with few concrete references to the past. In addition, it brings scholarly critical tools to bear on a clinical professional field that is still finding its way toward an accepted identity within the larger practice of medicine.

The title of the book, as well as Horden's introduction and opening essay, however, give the reader a false expectation of the actual scope of this work. It is neither a comprehensive history of music therapy in the Western tradition (as the title implies) nor an explicit examination of the practices using music in various healing and experimental settings (as Horden's first chapter, despite his caveats, might lead one to hope). The majority of the essays deal explicitly or implicitly with Galenic humoral medicine, the philosophical tensions between Platonic and Aristotelian theories of knowledge, and the applications of these traditions to the human condition as recorded in various texts of Western intellectual history.

This undertaking alone is an enormous accomplishment, and the collection is welcome for its contribution to our understanding of both historical and contemporary ideas and practices in context. One author after another, however, laments the lack of documentation of actual practices, tunes, texts, and other supporting information. The result is that, with the exception of the tarantella as treatment for tarantula bites, neither the music nor its practical therapeutic applications have been accessed and examined. For the most part, the authors can do little more than the repetitive sources they cite, that is, recount the extant testimonies as well as the arguments for and against them that have survived.

Several essays, however, transcend these limitations and open windows into the minds of both practitioners and theorists of music as a healing element in human existence. Among the essays, Penelope Gouk's chapter, "Music, Melancholy, and Medical Spirits in Early Modern Thought," provides the most cogent and thorough introduction to premodern medicine and the role music is likely to have played within that field. All of the essays in part 3, "Renaissance and Early Modern Europe," succeed in moving beyond the Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical academic struggles to place them in a larger social and cultural context. That context is, however, that of wealthy, educated, literate men, their sufferings and solutions. This is a limitation with which most historians of premodern Europe must contend. It is also one that readers of this volume who are not trained historians might find difficult to accept as representative of the practice of music therapy. This situation is not directly addressed in either Horden's section commentaries or the essays themselves in a way that invites readers from other fields to consider these texts and arguments as forming the basis for many of the philosophical and practical struggles surrounding the theory and practice of music therapy both then and now. It is precisely this intellectual heritage of Plato, Aristotle, and Galen that has set much of the Western agenda for disciplined inquiry, and that, to a great extent (except for Galenic medicine), continues not only to frame the questions we ask, but also to limit the answers we might consider.

These limits are stretched by the presence of essays on...