Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King
David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental
and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that
time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong
kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading
to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been
successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical
nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll.
It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric
rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the
persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the
1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that
"musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves
and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the
prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the
so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad
for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the
development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment
until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history
of medicine, music and the body.
