“Comfortable… in Sicknes and in Health”
“Comfortable… in Sicknes and in Health”
Music to Temper Self and Surroundings
Chapter Five considers the therapeutic benefits of music and musical performance as preventive medicine, cure for a range of mental and physical ailments, and means to influence the human organism from insubstantial interior faculties to specific bodily organs and systems. It establishes the changing place of music in medical thought and practice from the Classical heritage through new programs of healing and anatomical knowledge in the seventeenth century. It also takes up the issue of music in human ecology, as a means to achieve and maintain equilibrium not only within the self, but also natural and social surroundings. Music worked in conjunction with other salutary practices such as nutrition and physical exercise, and was used slightly differently by women and men of the same social status. Music had an especially remarked place in humoral medicine, particularly for melancholy, and was connected most closely to the passions of joy and sorrow. The same slipperiness that enabled music to signify other things also meant that, in spite of some accord about the affective connotations of certain musical structures, choice of music for personal maintenance, restoration, and to accompany routine salutary practices remained highly individual.
Keywords: affect, emotion, healing powers of music, humors, melancholy, music and mental health, music as exercise, music as medicine, passions, sadness
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