Abstract
Recent books on music and medicine emphasise the intricate connection between music and the brain rather than music’s capacity to influence and interact with the body. Daniel Levitin, for example, acknowledges music’s bodily effects, yet he always grounds his discussion within the issue of music’s supposed close relationship with neural circuitry:
Through studies of people with brain damage, we’ve seen patients who have lost the ability to read a newspaper but can still read music, or individuals who can play the piano but lack the motor coordination to button their own sweater. Music listening, performance, and composition engage nearly every area of the brain that we have so far identified, and involve nearly every neural subsystem.1
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Notes
Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Penguin: Plume, 2006).
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan, 2007), xi.
Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan, 2007), xiii–xiv.
Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press 1999)
and Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), 187. Krailsheimer’s translations are primarily based on the text, Pascal, CEuvres completes, L’Intégrale, (Paris: Seuil, 1963).
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), 187.
Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 51.
See also the important work done by Veit Erlmann on these two figures in Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone, 2010).
Ingrid Sykes, ‘Music and the Commodification of Sound: Advertising Acoustics in France 1800–1830’, in Bruno Blondé, Eugénie Briot, Natacha Coquery and Laura Van Aert eds., Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe: England, France, Italy and the Low Countries (Tours, France: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2005), 125–138.
See Emma Spary, Utopia’s Garden: French Natural History from the Old Regime to the Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), 197–198.
See Ingrid Sykes, ‘Sounding the Citizen Patient: The Politics of Voice in Post-Revolutionary France’, Medical History 55.4 (2011), 479–502.
Sean Quinlan, ‘Physical and Moral Regeneration After the Terror: Medical Culture, Sensibility and Family Politics in France, 1794–1804’, Social History 29.2 (May 2004), 139–164.
Edwin Clarke and L.C. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley, 1987).
For a close reading of Bichat’s work, see Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1994).
The debate on sensualism is examined in Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA 2005).
Jacalyn Duffin, To See with a Better Eye: A Life of R.T.H. Laennec (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
‘Une grande nation qu’on veut régénérer est comme un orgue qu’on veut remonter. L’artiste ne brise pas chaque tuyau qui rend les sons faux ou discordants: il le met au ton qu’il désire, et, quand il touche le premier air, il enchante ses auditeurs’, Journal de Rouen, le 28 pluviose an IV in Michelle Biget, Musique et Révolution française (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1989), 221.
On the theory, ‘Sur la différence de masses dans les deux sexes,’ see Antide Magnin, Notions mathématiques de chimie et de médecine ou Théorie de feu (Paris: Fuchs, 1900), 195–199.
‘Maurice Krishaber, De la névropathie cérébro-cardiaque (Paris: Masson, 1873).
See James Kennaway’s work, in particular, his article, ‘Musical Hypnosis: Sound and Selfhood from Mesmerism to Brainwashing’, Social History of Medicine 25.2 (2012), 271–289.
Ingrid Sykes, ‘Music and the Commodification of Sound: Advertising Acoustics in France 1800–1830’, Bruno Blondé, Eugénie Briot, Natacha Coquery, and Laura Van Aert, eds., Retailers and Consumer Changes in Early Modern Europe: England, France, Italy and the Low Countries (Tours, France: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2005), 125–138.
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© 2014 Ingrid J. Sykes
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Sykes, I.J. (2014). Le corps sonore: Music and the Auditory Body in France 1780–1830. In: Kennaway, J. (eds) Music and the Nerves, 1700–1900. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339515_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339515_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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