Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease by James Kennaway (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease by James Kennaway
“Child!” Richard Wagner wrote to a friend in 1859, “this Tristan is becoming something terrible! The last Act!!! ... Perfectly good [performances] must drive people mad” (p. 65). Wagner did not know the half of it. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, his music became a byword for sickness, perversion, and degeneration—ironically, given its later promotion as an art of virile health by Adolf Hitler. For its critics, the blatant eroticism of Wagner’s music would overpower vulnerable female listeners, turning them “neurasthenic,” inducing premature menarche in the young and orgasms in the mature. In men, it would bring out latent homosexuality. In a privately printed book of 1908, called The Intersexes, Xavier Mayne (pseudonym of Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson) appended a questionnaire by which the reader could self-diagnose homosexuality. Alongside being unable to whistle and enjoying cross-dressing, it offered, as a clinching symptom, an especial fondness for Wagner (p. 89). Nietzsche summed it up well in The Wagner Case: “Is Wagner actually a man? Is he not rather a disease?” (p. 73).
You could not make it up. And, in this scholarly, well-written, absorbing monograph, James Kennaway has no need to make anything up even if he had ever felt like doing so. The pathological effects attributed to music in the eighteenth to late twentieth centuries—the subject of his book—exceed the wildest imaginings. Although his title (presumably) derives from a song by The Beach Boys, Wagner’s music is the book’s centerpiece. A substantial chapter on him is flanked on each side by two others.
The first, introductory, chapter looks briefly at music as therapy, and asks the interesting question of whether pathological music, the very special case of musicogenic epilepsy apart, really exists. The main story begins, however, with the Enlightenment. Anecdotes about music as a threat to political order and about its supposed capacity to drive players or performers mad began in Greco-Roman antiquity, but, Kennaway shows, their background was cosmological or ethical, not medical. A specifically medical view of music as pathogenic did not emerge until the later eighteenth century, in the notion that illness could be caused by overexcitation of the nerves. Music joined tea, coffee, and tobacco as stimulants from which the refined sensibility needed protection. As later, women were deemed especially at risk, not least from ethereal sounds of the glass harmonica.
After the Wagner centerpiece, the next chapter traces the entry of race into an already toxic blend of ideas about degenerate music. Kennaway fascinatingly juxtaposes the two earlier twentieth-century societies in which race was a dominant political theme: Nazi Germany and the United States. “Does Jazz put the Sin into Syncopation?” asked Anne Shaw Faulkner in 1921 (p. 121). Yet it is an image that really epitomizes this transnational chapter: a poster for the 1938 Nazi Degenerate Music exhibition which shows a black saxophonist wearing a Star of David on his lapel.
A final chapter examines developments since 1945. Beyond intensified concern with long-standing musical issues surrounding race, gender, and modern [End Page 607] technology, it finds two novel ingredients: first, music as a supposed means of brainwashing and, second, music as a form of torture. It thus ranges across the Cold War, Beatlemania, Apocalypse Now (Wagner again of course), the conversion to Satanism supposedly induced by heavy metal, and the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of Guantánamo.
This is a relatively short book, with an even shorter text, so ample are the footnotes. It encompasses a vast range of material—medical, psychiatric, and neurological works, but also music criticism and aesthetics and journalism, art and literature—mostly Anglophone, German, and French. There are excursuses into the Soviet world and into contemporary Islamist views on music.
I have just two criticisms. One is that, although vivid particulars are quoted on almost every page, the author writes under the sign...
