Music and the Nerves, 1700-1900

J. Kennaway, J. Kennaway, J. Kennaway

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137339515
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

The relationship between music and the nervous system is now the subject of intense interest for scientists and people in the humanities, but this is by no means a new phenomenon. This volume sets out the history of the relationship between neurology and music, putting the advances of our era into context.

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Introduction: The Long History of Neurology and Music

James Kennaway

We live in an age in which interest in the embodied character of aesthetic experience has come to take on enormous significance in both science and cultural studies. Neuroscience is systematically examining aesthetic issues and the humanities seem to be in the grip of a neuroscientific turn. Indeed, several authors have argued recently that the urge to find neurological explanations may have been pushed too far, perhaps amounting to ‘neuromania’.¹ In particular, music, with its seemingly direct effect on the nervous system, has been the focus of intense interest among cognitive neuroscientists over the past few decades. Huge strides forward have been made in our understanding of how the brain reacts to music, and representations of music’s effects in the humanities and in media reports increasingly reflect the prestige of neurology. Along with the interest in embodiment in the so-called New Musicology, neurological insights into music appear to be at the heart of a new framework for thinking about music well beyond clinical and scientific circles, and some now consider neurology to have the potential to provide a future paradigm for musical aesthetics.

Much of the discussion of the subject seems to assume that recent developments have marked the belated overcoming by science of an unbroken speculative, indeed superstitious, aesthetic tradition of thinking about music. It is no coincidence that many books on music and neurology, when surveying the history of musical aesthetics, tend to cite Plato and Eduard Hanslick, both of whom were generally hostile to the physical aspect of music. However, as this book will demonstrate, far from being a new phenomenon, essentially medical neurological understandings of the body have long played a powerful role in thinking on music, its effects and its aesthetics. Especially since the seventeenth century, natural philosophers and music theorists have often prefigured much of the contemporary debate about music and the nervous system, as neurology in a sense replaced cosmology as the basis for thinking about music and the body. Musical aesthetics has at times rebelled against this materialist approach and asserted a transcendental view of music’s effects, but even here the influence of medical thinking can sometimes be seen. By examining crucial episodes in the history of the relationship between neurology and music, and outlining the previous occasions in which science has affected aesthetics, this volume aims to put both the potential and limitations of contemporary neurological approaches to music in context.

Although important questions about some of the claims of the neurological approach to music have been raised, there is no doubt that extraordinary advances in knowledge about the brain and music have been achieved by cognitive neuroscience in the last 30 years. When Macdonald Critchley and R.A. Henson published Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of Music in 1977 it was a rather isolated contribution to the subject. Since then scientists such as Isabelle Peretz, Robert Zatorre, Aniruddh Patel, Lauren Stewart and Tim Griffiths, to name just a few, have provided remarkable insights.² Fascinating work is also being conducted to find practical uses for this knowledge, for example, for patients suffering from aphasia. Another leading figure in the neuroscience of music, Stefan Koelsch, has gone as far as to suggest that the complexity of neurological responses to music and its interaction with social and emotional states means that music psychology is ‘the fundamental discipline of psychology’.³ On a more popular level, books such as Oliver Sacks’ superb Musicophilia, Robert Jourdain’s Music, the Brain and Ecstasy and Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music have demonstrated that there is a remarkable public appetite for scientific insights into music’s effects.⁴ Other scientists, notably Semir Zeki and Vilayanur Ramachandran, have directly approached issues in aesthetics from a neurological point of view.⁵

To some extent, this is just part of a broader wave of neuro-enthusiasm, but the particular focus on sound is also perhaps a response to a crisis in older paradigms for thinking on music. In a striking parallel with the emphasis on the embodied character of music in a neuroscience context, the so-called New Musicology has also rediscovered the body.⁶ In doing so, it has challenged the Idealist positions developed in the early nineteenth century that formed the basis of much subsequent discourse on music. A rejection of music’s physicality was a crucial part of what would later be called ‘Absolute Music’, with its emphasis on the disinterested appreciation of form, interiority, ‘structural listening’, the cult of the genius, the aesthetic of the sublime and the ideal of the ‘autonomous’ work.⁷ This ideology, which has formed the basis of so much of the culture of ‘Classical music’, seems to have been in a little intellectual trouble for some time, undermined by anti-hierarchical attitudes, anthropology, feminism, the decline of the positivist predisposition of the post-war generation of musicologists and, most importantly, by enormous social and cultural change.

Some have raised high hopes that neuroscience might offer a way out of a sense of impasse, providing a new sense of objectivity for musical aesthetics. In a chapter in the recent edited volume tellingly entitled Bridging the Humanities-Neuroscience Divide: A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field, David Michael Bashwiner argues that ‘Musical aesthetics is poised for its Kuhnian revolution.’⁸ This revolution, he suggests, holds out hope that neuroscience will allow musicologists and aestheticians to break out of the tradition of mentalism inherited from the great nineteenth-century critic and aesthetician Eduard Hanslick, who was explicitly against any approach that emphasised its physicality or the role of emotions. While it is perhaps likely that neurology will influence future thinking on music, it is worth remembering that both Hanslickian aesthetics and neurological approaches can, in an extreme form, be flawed by a view of music that eschews cultural and social context and meaning in favour of the disinterested appreciation of form or neurological ‘reward circuits’ respectively.

The neuroaesthetics of music have been challenged in other ways, too. As Bevil R. Conway and Alexander Rehding have argued, neuroaesthetics can appear to fall between two stools, so to speak, looking for either neurological correlations to an ill-defined and hard to defend universal and objective idea of beauty, or for a subjective view of aesthetic experience that runs the risk of being indistinguishable from other pleasures such as sex or eating cake.⁹ More broadly, critics of neuromania such as Raymond Tallis, William Uttal, Paolo Legrenzi and Carlo Umilta have raised questions about the technical and epistemological limitations of fMRI scans, on which much of the research on the topic rests. Matthew Crawford, for instance, has called the scans a ‘fast-acting solvent of critical faculties’.¹⁰ One problem with this whole issue is that it is hard to avoid falling into the interminable mind– body debate.¹¹ It certainly appears that many defenders of an essentially neurological understanding of music suspect that their opponents’ real target is mind–brain identity theory, that they reject the idea that mental states are reducible to brain function. Since this is a theoretical cornerstone for many neuroscientists, the stakes go beyond issues related to music.

Whatever the result of academic debates on neuroaesthetics, there is an imperative to challenge some of the wilder unsupported claims made for a neurological approach. The popular neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer suggested in his bestselling 2007 book Proust was a Neuroscientist that the famous riot at the 1913 Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring was caused by the neurological effect of unfamiliar sounds on the brain. One does not want to add to the problems of a man who later lost his job at The New Yorker for making up quotations and self-plagiarism, but it must be said that his comments on music and neurology are a clear example of some of the neuro-boosterism that needs to be questioned. For all the world like the nineteenth-century physicians who fretted about the nervous strain caused by music, Lehrer sets up a model of musical stimulation leading directly to madness. ‘The premiere of The Rite, with its methodical dismantling of the audience’s musical expectations, literally stimulated madness. By subverting the listeners’ dopamine neurons, it also subverted their sanity.’¹² Like his nineteenth-century positivist predecessors, he ignores all social and cultural context to come up with a more ‘scientific’ explanation. Worse, he gets his facts wrong.

The idea that the music of The Rite of Spring started a riot in 1913 has been shown to be largely a myth. Truman Bullard’s dissertation in 1971 methodically examined all the eye-witness reports of the performance and it is clear that the trouble that occurred could scarcely be called a riot, and that it was principally a response to Nijinsky’s choreography, indeed to the choreography for previous pieces.¹³ It seems that little of the music was heard at all. In Lehrer’s book the facts of the case and the very specific social and cultural context are ignored in favour of an entirely speculative neurological theory. No evidence was provided whatsoever. Alas, this view has been endlessly repeated and quoted in the name of interdisciplinarity and an otherwise laudable attempt to integrate scientific knowledge into understandings of culture.

Another such example of the pitfalls of popularising the neurology of music relates to the famous Mozart Effect, which suggests that listening to that particular composer’s music can have a significant impact on cognitive ability. This notion seems to have started with the work of Alfred Tomatis in Paris in the 1960s, but it was really with the publication in Nature in 1993 of a paper by Frances Rauscher et al. that reported results that appeared to show that listening to Mozart’s Piano Sonata for Two Pianos K488 had a noticeable effect on spatial task performance.¹⁴ Although the study was conducted on adults, the implications for the development of children and especially of foetuses in utero came to be the main focus in the media. The widespread consensus today appears to be that the results observed in fact related to issues of mood and temporary arousal rather than to any quasimagical impact of the music. Stronger evidence seems to have been found to show that playing rather than merely listening to music can improve cognitive ability, but even there the results are ‘far from conclusive’.¹⁵

The way that the Mozart Effect was quickly taken up by the press and gained international attention surely reflects broader assumptions about music associated with the European middle class, and more specifically, about the myth of Mozart as divine child genius. The weakness of certain scientists and, more particularly, certain pop-science writers for this kind of pathos is striking. Don Campbell’s The Mozart Effect for Children (2000) is typical in the way it assumes that music can ‘stimulate brain growth in the womb’, even giving selections of Mozart pieces that suit each period of gestation.¹⁶ Campbell’s principal source appears to be Tomatis, whom he approvingly quotes on the supposed extraordinary and universal power of Mozart: ‘Whether in France, America, Germany, Alaska, Amazonia, or among the Bantus,’ he reported, ‘Mozart’s music indisputably achieves the best results. Obviously, there are other musicians of value, such as Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, and many more. But Mozart’s music has an impact far greater than Bach’s. Exception among exceptions . . . Mozart has a liberating, curative, even healing power. With him, we become what we are.’¹⁷

Similarly, Nancy C. Andreasen’s 2005 book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius argues that learning music is ‘good for the brain’. It is perhaps a bad sign that terms like ‘genius’ and ‘Classical music’ are bandied about as if they were scientific categories, much as Tomatis and Campbell use Mozart. Andreasen argues that Classical music is beneficial because ‘it contains complex musical forms and themes that children may perceive intuitively long before they can understand them analytically’.¹⁸ The entirely spurious idea that ‘Classical’ music (which remains undefined) is always more complex than all other forms of music and that it has essentially magical properties for brain development is never defended and always assumed. A sense of what music is meant by ‘Classical’ can be found in the choices made when Governor Zell Miller of Georgia made an agreement with Sony in 1998 by which 100,000 CDs were made available for hospitals to give to mothers of newborns. The CDs included Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Für Elise, The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba, Ronda alla Turca, the Trout Quintet, Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, Pachabel’s Canon, Air on a G-String and Sheep May Safely Graze – that is to say, music written between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth century, the part of the Western canon perhaps least likely to offend or challenge casual listeners.

There is no doubt that this music represents a great accomplishment that means an enormous amount to many people, but the argument that it has special powers to improve children’s cognitive abilities is essentially bogus, albeit perhaps generally harmless. Even more depressing is the philistinism that sees music principally as a path to higher exam results and a more secure place in the social order. In the long run such a crudely utilitarian approach is surely not in the interests of music, musicians or audiences. Corporations have not been slow to try to take advantage of the impression that Classical music is a tool to create clever babies. Uterine music, from the Prenatal University of the 1970s and the Pregaphone of the 1980s to today’s Bellybuds, special speakers for the womb, is a rather dispiriting phenomenon. While many of these products are circumspect about their claims relating to brain development, Disney’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: The Long History of Neurology and Music
• 2. (Nervously) Grappling with (Musical) ‘Pictures in the Mind’: A Personal Account
• 3. Music and the Nervous System in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought
• 4. Le corps sonore: Music and the Auditory Body in France 1780–1830
• 5. Music Therapy in Eighteenth-Century Spain: Perspectives and Critiques
• 6. ‘Subsiding Passions’ and the Polite Arts of Healing: Music and Images of the Medical Profession in ‘Moderate Enlightenment’
• 7. Music as a Tool in the Development of Nineteenth-Century Neurology
• 8. Origin Stories of Listening, Melody and Survival at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• 9. Physical Distortion, Emotion and Subjectivity: Musical Virtuosity and Body Anxiety
• Works Cited
• Index