Music and madness: from Kontakte to The Cure

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 fl at 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 Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, who was incapable of understanding or doing anything except singing melodies back to attendants. But as soon as Liszt’s fi ngers touched the keyboard, her eyes were fi xed on them; a particular passage he played exerted an electrifying eff ect 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 etait forte; la musique le fut advantage [“The temptation was strong; the music was stronger still”].