Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease by James Kennaway (review)

In 1921 the Ladies’ Home Journal published a now-infamous article, by the music educator Anne Shaw Faulkner, denouncing jazz music. In it, she claimed that “[a] number of scientific men who have been working on experiments in musico-therapy with the insane, declare that while regular rhythms and simple tones produce a quieting effect on the brain of even a violent patient, the effect of jazz on the normal brain produces an atrophied condition on the brain cells of conception, until very frequently those under the demoralizing influence of the persistent use of syncopation, combined with inharmonic partial tones, are actually incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, between right and wrong” (“Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?” August 1921, 34). Under the authority of these unnamed “scientific men,” Faulkner’s argument rested on the idea that jazz music was not simply immoral but that it also had real, detrimental effects on the human body.

Faulkner was neither the first nor the last to warn of music’s pathogenic capabilities. In fact, the history of Western music abounds with similar portrayals of music as a harmful, even deadly force, some of which persist to this day. Like the article cited above, these portrayals are often couched in a pseudoscientific rhetoric aimed at protecting youth, women, the mentally ill, etcetera. But where did the idea that music can be medically harmful originate, and how has it remained so prevalent in popular thought? These are the questions James Kennaway addresses in Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease.

Bad Vibrations traces the genealogy of pathogenic music through the history of Western medical discourse. In a similar vein to Daniel Chua’s Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Kennaway explores a variety of historical confluences between musical and medical discourse and, in so doing, reveals a shared history that has often been overlooked by contemporary scholars. While the book is primarily positioned within the cultural history of medicine, Kennaway takes a broad interdisciplinary approach to its material, incorporating work from fields as diverse as neurology, psychiatry, musical aesthetics, gender studies, musicology, sound studies, and many others. Kennaway’s engaging prose and accessible approach to the history of medicine ultimately make this book a useful resource for any scholar in the humanities interested in the discursive junctions of Western musical and medical thought.

The book divides the history of the music-as-pathogenic concept across five chapters. In the first chapter, the author lays out his methodological framework and traces the foundation of this concept to the work of Pythagoras, Plato, and later philosophers of the Middle Ages. To his credit, instead of simply dismissing this concept outright, Kennaway seriously considers it, citing recent medical scholarship on music and the body. He concludes, however, that there is no medical basis for claims concerning music’s pathogenic capacity and instead suggests these claims are cultural constructions usually tied to moral panic.

The second chapter details how music entered the late-eighteenth-century medical discourse on nerve stimulation, where music originally was regarded as beneficial, and how the idea that music could genuinely cause disease was an outgrowth of later “medical theories that blamed over-stimulation for sickness” (p. 31). As this fear of “over-stimulating” music was thought predominantly to affect aristocratic women, Kennaway expertly deconstructs how these theories were based on classed and gendered assumptions concerning the “vulnerability of women’s nerves to music” (p. 40); the belief that music could cause miscarriages, infertility, and death thus served, he argues, as a means of policing female sexuality in the nineteenth century. Kennaway also demonstrates how the advent of German romanticism further spurred theories about music’s ability to cause disease by reshaping musical discourse to...