Copyright by Kenneth Alewine 2017 MELANCHOLIA AND CONSCIOUSNESS IN MUSIC, ART AND LITERATURE by Kenneth Martin Alewine, BA, MS, MA Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas Medical Branch in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas Medical Branch May, 2017 Dedication For my mother Kathryn Rhea McElwaine, whose middle name means “bubbling spring,” and for my father, Murry Lee Alewine, who immersed me since I was a toddler in his electronic music studios at school. Acknowledgements It is my pleasure to acknowledge William J. Winslade for his pragmatic support of this work on melancholia and consciousness studies, and with gratitude to acknowledge Anne Hudson Jones for giving me a foundation in Leonardo studies and the unwitting introduction to the legendary Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). I especially would like to offer my thankfulness to Peter Ole Pedersen, from Aarhus University in Denmark, for his expert art historical analysis, for the various animated discussions we had about the images depicting melancholia in this work here and elsewhere in a sushi bar and in a museum in Ft. Worth, for the initial conversations with him about music in a Romanian bar in Cluj, psychedelia in general at the Original Mexican Café in Galveston, and of course Texas (perhaps his favorite subject). This work has also benefited from conversations over massively spilled coffee with Dr. Susan McCammon, a brilliant surgeon-musicologist, who talked with me about musical automata in general and about her work on the subject while she was a music student at Princeton. I also am glad for those conversations and emails with literary-mathematician Kurt Friedrich, from the University of Hamburg, on computational consciousness and complexity theory, whom I met in Virginia, where I gave my presentation on the melancholy of imaginary studios. Finally, I cannot forget the serendipitous reunion with the Schoenberg heirs—(Nuria, Larry, Anne and Barbara), most of whom I’ve known since the 1990s—while I was doing my research at the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna in December of 2014, and the archivists there at the center who pointed me to the work of Marie Pappenheim and the melancholy of Schoenberg’s iv early expressionist works, which eventually led me to the composer’s interest in the unconscious as a source of artistic inspiration. I also owe my thanks to the British Museum for releasing its images freely for use in this work, most of all Dürer’s Melencolia I, and I owe a special gratitude to Laura at the Courtauld Gallery in London, for approving my original photo of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear for inclusion in this work. I also express my thanks to Scala Firenze for licensing The Starry Night and to the National Gallery for the use of its images, including Goya’s The Sleep of Reason. Most of all I would like to thank my beloved mother for helping me get through the very rough times at the IMH, including one heart attack, two bouts of vertigo, and one minor depression, for which to God I am very thankful never grew back into the full- blown melancholia that nearly killed me in my mid-twenties. Thus, unwittingly following Leonardo’s method of observation, it is with experience that I began building this difficult work years ago. v Melancholia and Consciousness in Music, Art and Literature Publication No._____________ Kenneth Martin Alewine, Ph.D. The University of Texas Medical Branch, 2017 Supervisor: William J. Winslade Abstract: Melancholia and Consciousness in Music, Art and Literature is an interdisciplinary exploration of artists’ melancholia as a state of consciousness across the visual arts, music, and literature, from the times of the Hippocratic writers to the emergence of the unconscious as a source of artistic inspiration. The three major sections of the dissertation, Ancient Melancholies, Modern Melancholies, and Future Melancholies, are structured throughout by the interplay among three threads (or perspectives) in the history of artists’ melancholia: religious-philosophical, artistic, and medical. Each of the five chapters are Based on a certain theme, what I call a figure, which represents various conceptions of melancholia across the arts at different time periods. For example, Chapter 1 is titled “The Melancholics,” which is the figure the ancients used to understand melancholia and its relationship to the arts and creativity. The flow of the dissertation ultimately tracks the development of the artistic personality first as a melancholic figure emerging in ancient times, next as a visual polymath at the beginning of the Renaissance, then as a musical Faust during the Romantic period, next as a flâneur rising from the detritus of modernity, and finally as the melancholic automaton of the future. These figures are shaped By melancholic processes that are both constructive and destructive, and by the early twentieth century they follow the suBmersion of melancholia into the dark Freudian unconscious, where the symbolic life of dreams arose alongside an associative logic. Even though melancholia no longer held magisterial respect among physicians in the twentieth century, it did not leave the culture which it had shaped for over 2500 years. Psychiatric medicine nonetheless recast the artistic personality once again when it renamed melancholia as a disorder of mood called depression, a diagnosis that remains controversial in the twenty-first century. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations .....................................................................................................viii Introduction ................................................................................................................ix ANCIENT MELANCHOLIES .........................................................................................14 Chapter 1 The Melancholics ......................................................................................14 MODERN MELANCHOLIES .........................................................................................70 Chapter 2 The Polymaths ...........................................................................................70 Chapter 3 Musical Faust ............................................................................................143 Chapter 4 The Flâneur ...............................................................................................221 FUTURE MELANCHOLIES ...........................................................................................268 Chapter 5 The Automaton ..........................................................................................268 Coda ..........................................................................................................................310 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................316 Vita ..........................................................................................................................326 vii List of Illustrations Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514. Engraving, 23.9 x 18.5 cm. British Museum, London. .................................................................................................135 Vincent Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889. Oil on canvas, 73.7 x 92.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. ........................................................................136 Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason, 1799. Etching and Aquatint, 21.4 x 15.1 cm. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. ...........................137 William Blake. Illustrations of the Book of Job: Plate 1. ‘Thus did job Continually,’ 1828. Engraving on Paper, 19.8 x 16.4. Tate, London. ........................138 William Blake. Illustrations of the Book of Job: Plate 21. ‘So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning,’ 1825. Engraving on Paper, 19.6 x 14.9. Tate, London. (Photo by Kenneth Alewine) ...................139 Vincent Van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889. Oil on canvas, 60 x 49 cm. The Courtauld Gallery, London. (Photo by Kenneth Alewine) ...140 Albrecht Dürer, The Dream of the Doctor (Temptation of the Idler), 1498-1499. Engraving. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. .......................141 Vincent Van Gogh, Garden of the Asylum, 1889. Oil on canvas, 72 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. ...........................................................................142 viii Introduction Melancholia has resurged in the debates among researchers, physicians, historians, philosophers, artists, musicians, and writers over its nature, its drug-resistant incurability, and its poorly defined status in medicine after 2500 years of serving as a mainframe for medical and philosophical investigation of both disease and emergent human consciousness. Even after being re-classed as depression and almost forgotten, after the many electro-convulsive interventions to jumpstart the mind when talk therapies were ineffective, and after the countless medications have brought so little relief to so many who suffer from its lethal effects, the ancient problem of melancholia, even after its upgrade to depression, remains unconquered. Because the long history of melancholia and melancholy is over 2500 years, the two terms have been used interchangeably by researchers, philosophers, artists, poets, musicians and physicians, thus creating