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Music and madness: from Kontakte to The Cure

2015; Elsevier BV; Volume: 2; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/s2215-0366(15)00187-x

2215-0374

Conor Farrington,

Music Therapy and Health

In a collection of short stories entitled Kontakte (after the Karlheinz Stockhausen composition of the same name), the writer and academic Jonathan Taylor explores the links between music and mental illness. The most haunting narrative is one in which almost nothing happens. An Australian mother dominates her UK-dwelling adult son, Derek, from afar; he breaks off his relationship with a girl on his mother's instructions; he sits in his flat listening to a Stockhausen cassette tape on repeat; and that is all. Yet this elliptical story conveys with great acuity a stultifying atmosphere that might easily be associated with stereotypical images of mental illness: repetitive, pointless actions; an isolated lifestyle in a cold, dark apartment; a blurring of reality and unreality. Throughout the text, Stockhausen's iconoclastic music is a focal point. Things “lunge out of the music” at Derek: cars, ducks, lorries, white noise, “whispers from hell”. Music and madness, the story seems to imply, are close bedfellows. Of course, this entanglement is hardly new. For instance, therapeutic applications of music have a long and distinguished history. In ancient Greece, Apollo was the god of both music and medicine; Pythagoras believed that daily singing and playing enabled emotional catharsis; and Hippocrates ordered music to be played for mentally ill patients. Following the Greeks, the Roman encyclopaedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus also advocated music therapy for mental illness: “The sorrowful thoughts of others must be dispelled: for which purpose concerts of music, and cymbals and noise are useful.” These ideas were subsequently rediscovered in the Renaissance, with humanist scholars like Robert Burton asserting in his celebrated 1621 work The Anatomy of Melancholy that music “is one, and not the least powerful, of those many means which philosophers and physicians have prescribed to exhilarate a sorrowful heart.” More recently, the great Romantic composer and pianist Franz Liszt visited asylums in Paris, France, in the 1830s. A striking account exists of one particular visit he made to a 60-year old female resident in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, who was incapable of understanding or doing anything except singing melodies back to attendants. But as soon as Liszt's fingers touched the keyboard, her eyes were fixed on them; a particular passage he played exerted an electrifying effect on her, and did so despite more than 20 repetitions; and she ignored her favourite food, apricots, for as long (and only as long) as Liszt played: La tentation était forte; la musique le fut advantage [“The temptation was strong; the music was stronger still”]. Yet Liszt's oeuvre illustrates that music ranges far wider and deeper than might be implied by a simplistic interpretation of music therapy as “relaxing”. Liszt wrote many beautiful compositions, but a substantial number of his works attest to a profound engagement with darker-hued domains. In perhaps the greatest of these, his magisterial Eine Faust-Symphonie, Liszt foregrounds the Unheimliche and the demonic in a glittering portrayal of Mephistopheles' malevolence—a third m-word to embroil with music and madness—which distorts and develops Faust's own themes in a parodic portrayal of evil. This portrayal, moreover, is arguably more compelling than that of Faust himself; the devil has the best tunes, after all. Familiar yet incongruous, attractive yet repellent, diabolus in musica has long been a siren song to composers, and listeners, of many stamps. As Goethe's devilish Erlking sings to the (hallucinating?) boy in the Schubert song, Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir! [“I will play beautiful games with you!”]. The aesthetic fascination with music, mental illness, and malevolence is further developed in Thomas Mann's 1947 novel Doktor Faustus, which chronicles the career of the fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn. Amidst the looming spectres of Nazi Germany, Leverkühn, acting under the impulse of a complex web of motivations reaching back to his childhood, knowingly contracts syphilis in order to augment his aesthetic capacities, freeing himself from intellectual inhibition and regaining vitality of inspiration. This first bargain is paralleled by a second: Leverkühn contracts with the devil, who promises him 24 years of genius in return for his soul. His art, modelled in reality upon that of Arnold Schoenberg, reaches hitherto unknown heights before his pact overtakes him and he falls into a terminal paralysis. In a novel dominated by ambiguity and richness of allusion, we are left unsure as to whether the biomedical or the spiritual explanation of Leverkühn's fate is the more fundamental. And in an important sense it doesn't matter: life itself is ambivalent and complex, Mann seems to suggest; why not music and madness—and malevolence—also? As literary critic Michael Beddow comments, Mann tended to view music in a systematically negative way, as a “subverter of order, social and moral, a sensuously alluring embodiment of the blandishments of decay and death.” Nevertheless, despite Leverkühn's youthful dabbling in theology as an undergraduate, it is through his engagements with music that he is able to explore, work out, and therapeutically, if temporarily, extend the contours of his tortured psyche—something also true in varying degrees of numerous actual composers, most famously Robert Schumann. Many other composers also experienced complex intertwinings of mental illness and musical inspiration, including Hector Berlioz, Hugo Wolf, Sergei Rachmaninov, and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who once declared, “Without music I would go insane”. The once-ebullient Liszt, too, expressed the melancholy and desolation of his twilight years through his sparse and tonally ambiguous late compositions, remarking “I carry with me a deep sadness of the heart which must now and then break out in sound.” Music, for these artists, may not exorcise their devils so much as allow for engagement with them. And this conversation may be more positive, more empowering, than one might expect. As Mann's devil remarks to Leverkühn, “We create nothing new…We simply unbind and set free.” As for composers, so for the rest of us; it is not just those who write music, but also those who bring it to life through performance and who encounter it through the act of hearing, who may experience the multiple intersections between music and mental health—or illness. The complexities involved in singing and in playing instruments mean that we truly embody the music we are playing, incorporating it, however fleetingly, into the repertoire of mental and physical actions that collectively constitute our performances of ourselves. It is not so much a matter of playing music as of music playing us. Concentrated listening, moreover, is a less passive activity than is often supposed, involving a range of sensations from restlessness to exaltation to synaesthesia (but rarely indifference). Music's inherently temporal nature—always coming into existence, always disappearing—demands attentiveness, mindfulness, presence; thus, whatever music we choose to perform, listen to, and write involves us completely, including our mental states and their subtle relationships with our environments. Music is not external to us, but an extension of us in all our complexity—a complexity that not only extends inwards, in terms of our varying self-perceptions over time, but also outwards, in terms of the idiosyncrasies that lead some people to love Joseph Haydn and others to love hip-hop. For this latter reason in particular, I believe that mental wellness demands the widest possible range of musical experience be available within any given society. Compared with the 19th century, in which Liszt's piano paraphrases of well known operas and orchestral works might well have been the only way for many people to encounter them, today there is an incredible weight of music that is readily accessible even to those with scanty resources. If we are our own music therapists, we all have incredibly well stocked libraries. However, there is an important distinction between availability and uptake. There are of course many who do access a wide range of music in Britain, but for the most part they do so by swimming against the current of a society that increasingly emphasises a constrained and limited musical culture. So-called popular music—the music that tends to make up the Top 40—has become steadily less complex in terms of harmonic complexity and timbral diversity since the late 1950s and 1960s, seen by many as its creative heyday. Talent shows like The X Factor are not merely a cause, but are also a symptom, of the narrowing of musical culture and the ever-more exclusive interpretation of musical performance as singing (with auto-tune and microphone), dancing in choreographed routines, and, possibly, playing a few simple chords on the guitar or piano. Moroever, contemporary popular music focuses, with rare exceptions, on the romantic aspirations of teenagers and twenty-somethings, resonating with a wider culture of youth that emphasises vitality and perpetual wellness within a consumerist, materialist framework. In arenas such as The X Factor or Britain's Got Talent, classical music—which embraces the entirety of human experience from black desolation to shining exaltation—is inevitably dismissed as irrelevant, out-of-date, boring. Other kinds of music, including jazz, alternative rock, indie, folk, country, and world, fare somewhat better in Britain's harsh mass-media environment, and tend to be more accessible and relatable than classical music while also evincing greater thematic and musical complexity than most Top 40 music. Alternative artists such as The Smiths, David Bowie, Lou Reed, The Cure, and Portishead, among many others, frequently foreground issues relevant to mental health such as distress, altered mental states, addiction, and suicide. While such music is often commercially successful, it remains at one remove from the glossy, photoshopped mainstream. If, as Eric G Wilson warns, contemporary societies are particularly at risk of “annihilating melancholia”, we need alternative music—and classical music—more than ever. The point is not that we should proscribe Rihanna and prescribe Rachmaninov. It is musical diversity, rather than complexity and sophistication per se, that should be our overarching aim. The ideal, that is, is not to churn out individuals who will instinctively embrace Liszt or Lou Reed rather than Lady Gaga, but rather to ensure that as many people as possible are familiar with the enormous range of musical experience that is now available, and that as many people as possible are encouraged to engage with different kinds of music, including through performance, as a means to work through whatever mental challenges they might be experiencing. In part, this means better curation of the musical resources we already possess. Public broadcasting has an important role in this context, and there is also enormous scope for smarter and deeper incorporation of varied musical genres into public spaces such as museums and concourses. We also need to invest more in musical education. At present, long-term musical education in the UK and elsewhere is still a privilege largely enjoyed by children of wealthier families, while cuts to local education services threaten to derail the significant progress that had been made over the past two decades. But the issues at stake here extend beyond digital radio channels, pop-up musical performances, and the availability or otherwise of violin lessons. To return to Kontakte: I presented Taylor's story as a seemingly bleak narrative of isolation and Stockhausen, of boredom and uncertainty. Yet another reading is also possible—a reading in which Derek listens to the “pings, crunches and strangely comic doings” of Stockhausen's music not because, newly single, he has nothing better to do, but because the music helps him to engage with the darkness he experiences in his life. Derek may well hear “whispers from hell” in the music, but perhaps, like Leverkühn, conversing with his demons through music unbinds him and sets him free. Perhaps, for Derek, Stockhausen is as important as cognitive behavioural therapy and lithium. That means it should be for us, too.