Conference Agenda

Though he has received almost no attention from music scholars, Canadian composer and psychoanalyst Emmanuel Ghent was a key figure in computer music circles from the 1960s to the 1980s. Based in New York City, he lived for a time in the same Prince Street apartment building as Ornette Coleman and played live electronics in jam sessions—and, once, on record—with Coleman, but he is best known for developing a device for synchronizing performers playing complex polyrhythms. Later in his career, he developed an interest in algorithmic composition, and Max Mathews once described his method of working with the GROOVE system at Bell Labs as a form of computer improvisation.

Ghent also published extensively on psychoanalytic theory, and his writings played a role in consolidating what came to be known as the relational turn in American psychoanalysis. Though for many years he split his time evenly between his work as a clinician and as a composer of computer music, he left behind few explicit clues to the relation between these two major threads. This paper reads Ghent’s musical practice alongside his psychoanalytic writings, focusing on the ways his later computer music experiments embody psychoanalytic ideas about the structure of the self. In particular, Ghent theorizes a psychoanalytic sense of "surrender" as a sort of psychic obverse of Freud's "resistance" that can be understood to reframe not only certain kinds of interaction between analysts and analysands (or human beings more generally) but also between humans and computers.

Reading Ghent's musical and psychoanalytic work together also points towards a historically situated understanding of computer "improvisation" from an era before the advent of computers powerful enough to perform with humans in real time, as in the work of improvisers like George Lewis (2000). In its psychoanalytic orientation, this paper thus develops both a temporal and conceptual extension of Lewis's influential argument that computer improvisation is most productively understood as an exploration of human priorities and aesthetics rather than as an attempt to develop autonomous computational agents for their own sake.

German neurologist, music critic, and conductor Kurt Singer combined his medical and musical expertise when he published the treatise Diseases of the Musical Profession in 1926. His work was a later installment into the medical research on neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion, that had proceeded from George Beard’s American Nervousness in 1881. Beard theorized that modern industrial American life overloaded sensitive people’s nervous networks, leading to a rise of suspected neuroses. By the time Singer’s treatise was translated and published in the United States in 1932, German and American neurologists had written a robust library on neurasthenia. Historians have revealed that this field and surrounding discourse relied on a trans-Atlantic exchange of ideas that specifically theorized the two nations as scions of modern progress, and consequently, victims of progress’s side effects (Rosenberg 1972, Cowan 2008). The effect of sound on nerves was an undercurrent throughout this discourse, as Beard wrote, “Highly sensitive natures respond to good as well as evil factors in their environment…their delicately strung nerves make music to the slightest breeze.” Singer’s book on the medical treatment of ailing musicians made the connection explicit, and the work was warmly received in the United States.

The neurasthenic musician became a modern rebranding of the romantic musical genius. News articles from the period suggest that the stereotype of the neurasthenic musician was widespread, offering descriptions of musicians who were inebriated, irritable, or irascible. With the exception of obvious musculoskeletal injury, Singer’s work impressed that all musicians’ complaints were either neurological or psychological in nature. In this paper, I use Singer’s treatise as an entrance into a twentieth century discourse that afforded scientific legitimacy to a cultural assumption that musical people were biologically eccentric, owing to their particularly sensitive nervous systems that were understood as the source of their musical powers, foul moods, and medical complaints. Reading across turn of the century medical literature on neurasthenia, I argue that the American model of neurasthenia was adapted in Germany to modernize and medicalize the romantic idea of musical genius, later to receive a US homecoming as the enduring stereotype of the nervous musician.

The tintinnabuli music by Arvo Pärt is extraordinary in its universal appeal. This essay advocates for its use to enhance the therapeutic experience, helping individuals navigate their grief journey by offering a nurturing environment for healing.

Taking a mixed methods approach (including methodologies from phenomenology and musopathy), this paper seeks to demystify how this distinctive music works to more accurately promote it as an intervention. Assisted by studies that endorse the use of music as an antidote to the issues of complex grief (Kelly et al. (2022), and Sekeles (2007)), it explores the unique medicinal benefits of tintinnabulation. Empirical data is supplied by analyzing not only the phenomena of the music itself, but also the vast number of comments on social media where people post deeply personal responses to Pärt’s music.

Devised in the mid-1970s, the musical attributes of tintinnabulation are exactly those that are known to have calming effects on the mind and body, such as slow tempi, single keys, and minimal aural distractions. In Pärt’s music, the result is more than the sum of its parts and it is uniquely able to transcend cultural and ideological difference. It is a serene and meditative music, a panacea which opens fresh space that can help individuals access and express their emotions, providing a safe space for grief to unfold. Used as intervention, patients can either immerse themselves in this space unaided or utilize a systematic customized guide to process various aspects of grief (as described, for example, by Hollinger (2022)).

It concludes that the richness of this emerging field can successfully incorporate music to encourage positive health outcomes because of the “awareness that nuances of the bereavement experience must be captured in order to explain medical outcomes,” and that ultimately, “the study of grief in psychosomatic medicine has a bright and growing future.” (O’Connor, 2019). Finally, it prescribes a playlist of works which have proven results that broadly match what patients and therapists might need for personal processing of grief and trauma, presenting an opportunity to utilize music that provides sonic space for reflection, consolation, memorialization, and healing.

For the German Romantics, a melancholy disposition was the price of creative genius. This trope, present in philosophical discourse since antiquity and resurging during the Renaissance, became a defining feature of German Romantic expression. Yet over the course of the nineteenth century, developments in medical knowledge and the rise of the psychiatric profession led to a broadening definition of melancholy that increasingly foregrounded the idea of melancholy as a physiological condition. In other words, melancholy came to mean not only the trademark of artistic inspiration but also the symptom of diagnosable mental illness.

This paper examines the uneasy relationship between these two understandings of melancholy—the medical-diagnostic and the intellectual-artistic—at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. It takes as a case study a remarkable document that has been hitherto understudied: German psychiatrist Franz Richarz’s 1858 autopsy report for his most famous patient, the composer Robert Schumann. Richarz’s account of Schumann’s institutionalization and death in an asylum reveals a surprising fusion of medical and musical discourse, with Richarz pointing to melancholy as both catalyst and cataclysm for Schumann’s creative faculties. In a close reading of this document, enriched through comparison to influential psychiatric texts of the time, I call attention to the central role that the concept of melancholy played in negotiating fraught tensions in nineteenth-century German society: tensions between art and science, body and soul, and illness and genius.