MUSIC 3251

Music and Madness

Course Description

Course information provided by the Courses of Study 2024-2025. Courses of Study 2024-2025 is scheduled to publish mid-June.

This course offers historical, critical, and cross-cultural perspectives on music as a cause, a symptom, and a treatment of madness. Why are there so many reports of uncontrollable singing and/or dancing from medieval Europe? Why, around 1800, were women regarded as particularly susceptible to the sounds of the glass harmonica? Did certain kinds of music really cause members of the Issawa brotherhood to burn themselves with red-hot coals? In each class meeting we will investigate a number of approaches to a given mental state in the light of readings by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, historians, disability studies, scholars and medico-scientific researchers.

When Offered Fall.

Distribution Category (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)
Course Subfield (HC)

Comments No musical background or skills are necessary to participate.

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