'The Expressive Organ Within Us:' Ether, Ethereality, And
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CARMEL RAZ Music and the Nerves “The Expressive Organ within Us”: Ether, Ethereality, and Early Romantic Ideas about Music and the Nerves CARMEL RAZ In Honoré de Balzac’s novel Le Lys dans la sounds without melody, and cries that are lost in Vallée (1835), Felix de Vandenesse courts solitude.1 Henriette de Mortsauf by implying that their souls have a sympathetic connection. Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s translation ren- ders “un orgue expressif doué de mouvement” We belong to the small number of human beings as “the organ within us endowed with expres- born to the highest joys and the deepest sorrows; sion and motion.” This word choice omits the whose feeling qualities vibrate in unison and echo author’s pun on the expressive organ, here serv- each other inwardly; whose sensitive natures are in ing as both a metaphor for the brain and a harmony with the principle of things. Put such be- reference to the recently invented harmonium ings among surroundings where all is discord and instrument of the same name, the orgue they suffer horribly. The organ within us en- expressif.2 Balzac’s wordplay on the expressive dowed with expression and motion is exercised in a organ represents an unexpected convergence of void, expends its passion without an object, utters music, organology, natural science, and spiri- tualism. A variety of other harmoniums popu- I would like to thank Patrick McCreless, Brian Kane, Paola Bertucci, Anna Zayaruznaya, Courtney Thompson, Jenni- 1Honoré de Balzac, The Lily of the Valley, trans. Katharine fer Chu, Allie Kieffer, Valerie Saugera, Nori Jacoby, and P. Wormeley (Boston: Hardy, Pratt & Co., 1900), 69. two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on 2I use “harmonium,” a name patented in 1840 by the in- earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank strument manufacturer Alexandre Debain, to refer to the Suzanne Eggleston Lovejoy for her invaluable assistance vastly popular family of free-reed instruments both pre- in locating original sources in the Yale library. and postdating Debain’s patent. 19th-Century Music, vol. 38, no. 2, pp. 115–144 ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2014 by the Regents of 115 the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions Web site, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ncm.2014.38.2.115. 19TH late his stories and novels, including the the ethereal timbres and swelling sounds of a CENTURY MUSIC physharmonica (“Le Dôme des Invalides,” number of newly popular musical instruments, 1832), the panharmonicon (“Gambara,” 1837) including the glass harmonica, the Aeolian harp, and the accordéon (L’Envers de l’Histoire and the Jew’s harp. Relatively recent additions contemporaine, 1848). In all these cases, the to the soundscape of the eighteenth century, sounds of the instrument are used to illustrate all three instruments were described by unusual mental states ranging from hallucina- Athanasius Kircher in Musurgia Universalis tion to hysteria, with an emphasis on interper- (1650) but only came into widespread use sonal sympathetic vibration. Indeed, Balzac’s around 1750.5 musical fantasies were rooted in contempora- Heather Hadlock and James Kennaway have neous medical practice: between 1820 and 1850, shown how the glass harmonica became indel- the harmonium was regularly used in the treat- ibly linked to morbid effects on the nerves, ment of nervous disorders. particularly those of young women.6 The The harmonium is a keyboard instrument Aeolian harp had a very different reception, with a rank or ranks of free reeds, which pro- evoking distinct neurophysiological theories of duces sound as air generated by manually oper- interpersonal sympathy while simultaneously ated bellows flowing past a reed enclosed in a serving as a central symbol of Romantic sub- pipe, causing the reed to vibrate. This allows the jectivity in poetry, literature, and philosophy.7 performer exceptional control over crescendo The Jew’s harp had a more limited sphere of and diminuendo. As wind-operated instruments influence; the only reported medical use of the featuring the new technology of vibrating free instrument I have found involved staging an reeds, harmoniums were specifically designed to simulate the ethereal sounds and expressive properties of the Aeolian harp. These intentions can be discerned in the names of early har- monium models; as George Dodd would later 5Thus Benjamin Franklin’s invention of the treadle-oper- swoon, “Aeolophon, Aeolodicon, Aeolharmo- ated armonica in 1761 enabled the glass harmonica to be- nica, Melodium, Melodion, Aeolomusicon; what come an instrument upon which one might play music Doctor 3 with artistic aspirations. See Stanley Finger, liquid sweetness of names!” The nineteenth- Franklin’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl- century instrument builder Johann Andreas vania Press, 2006). Likewise, it was only with the publica- Gleichmann explicitly traces the origin of the tion of James Thomson’s poems “The Castle of Indolence” and “Ode to an Aeolian Harp,” the footnote of which ref- harmonium to the dream of disciplining the erenced an Aeolian harp builder in London, that the in- Aeolian harp by bringing it “under the sway of strument began to appear regularly in musical practice. the tempered scale and the power of the fingers.”4 6Heather Hadlock, “Sonorous Bodies: Women and the Glass Harmonica,” Journal of the American Musicological Soci- Although the association of the harmonium ety 53:3 (2000): 507–42; James G. Kennaway, Bad Vibra- with nervous effects evokes ancient tropes link- tions: The History of the Idea of Music as Cause of Dis- ing music and the body, the presumption of a ease (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). 7Shelley Trower has traced the remarkable specificity ac- specific neurophysiological response to the companying the deployment of the Aeolian harp within instrument’s qualities of timbre and expres- early Romantic poetry and literature, concentrating in par- sion has a more recent history. The reception ticular on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reception of David Hartley’s associationist psychology and vibratory neuro- of the harmonium in the early nineteenth cen- physiology. See Trower’s analysis of Coleridge’s Aeolian tury is a continuation of an auditory culture harps in “The Eolian Harp” (1795) and “Dejection: an Ode” that formed over half a century earlier around (1802) in Shelley Trower, Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound (New York: Continuum, 2012), 13–36. See also Mark Asquith, “Philosophy, Meta- physics and Music in Hardy’s Cosmic Vision,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy, ed. Rosemarie Morgan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 181–98; Caroline Welsh, “Nerven, Saiten, Stimmung: Zum Wandel 3George Dodd, “The Harmonious Blacksmith,” Household einer Denkfigur zwischen Musik und Wissenschaft 1750– Words 8, no. 196 (24 Dec. 1853): 402. 1850,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 31, no. 2 4Johann Andreas Gleichmann, “Ueber die Erfindung der (2008): 113–29. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp Aeoline oder des Aeolodikon,” Allgemeine musikalische (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953) remains relevant Zeitung 22, no. 30 (July 1820): 508. to any discussion of the Aeolian harp in literature. 116 imitation of an Aeolian harp at a patient’s hos- tin Heinrich Knecht, Anton Reicha, and Hec- CARMEL 8 RAZ pital bed. tor Berlioz. Music and The nearly exclusive association of musi- Aside from some organological accounts, in- the Nerves cally generated nervous effects with Franz vestigation of the harmonium has been rela- Anton Mesmer’s employment of the glass har- tively limited.10 In what follows, I first trace monica has overshadowed the importance of the history of the harmonium and then exam- other instruments, most notably the Aeolian ine the specific neurophysiological discourse harp, in shaping the specific sonic aesthetics of around the instrument in a number of works early Romantic ethereal music. Rather than by Balzac, as well as in medical case studies continuing the glass harmonica tradition, medi- reported from America, England, Germany, cal uses of the harmonium appear to align more France, and Italy. Extending Emily Dolan’s closely with the qualities and reception of the theory of ethereal sounds back to Newton and Aeolian harp, not least in the instrument’s gen- forward to the mid-nineteenth-century har- erally positive therapeutic associations. This monium, I propose that studying the discourse article aims to recover the importance of both around ethereal mediums can help illuminate the Aeolian harp and the harmonium within the emergence of the attitude that certain types nineteenth-century musical discourse by link- of sounds had privileged access to the nerves.11 ing their acoustic properties to specific ideas about physiology and nervous transmission. The Invention of Free Reeds The Aeolian harp has long been familiar as a recurring trope within art song texts,9 but the The German physiologist Christian Gottlieb musical ramifications of the instrument’s close Kratzenstein (1723–95) is remembered today as ties to contemporaneous ideas about neuro- an innovator in the fields of electricity and its science have not yet received much consider- medical applications. A lesser-known aspect of ation. These ties would literally have been au- his work was his pioneering research in speech dible, because