![]() ![]() Hypnotic Music, Automatic Response and the Self Finally, I will consider more sceptical views of musical trance that might provide a better basis for an understanding of modern musical hypnosis than the reductive neurological approach adopted by many of those who have warned of music's mesmeric dangers. After that I will examine the way that this Cold War debate in turn became the basis for the debate on music and ‘backmasking’ in the so-called Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, which expressed concerns about hypnotic media and social control in the context not of Communism but of the contemporary American ‘Culture Wars’. This discourse drew on the Pavlovian theory of conditioned reflexes to create a scientific and popular discourse about the supposed threat to political and sexual self-control in the Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s. ![]() 6 The next section will consider twentieth-century debates on the concept of musical brainwashing, especially in the United States. For many observers, the idea of musical hypnosis became the basis of a critique of music's dangers that had considerable resonance with wider concerns about the fragility of social and sexual discipline in a rapidly urbanising society. The first section of this paper will examine the role of music in Mesmerism and the experimental hypnotism of the nineteenth century, and its echoes in literature and music criticism. 5 In this context, music was seen as a potential threat to a self that was susceptible to external stimuli and therefore as a danger to the self-control that was the basis of sanity for the individual and of order for society.Īs this article will show, this scientific debate about the power of music to overwhelm self-control and leave the listener open to the sinister designs of the hypnotizing musician has proved highly influential in culture, literature and politics in a number of very different contexts. 4 From the gongs and tuning forks used by Jean-Martin Charcot to induce hypnotic trances to Ivan Pavlov's use of bells to create conditioned reflexes, the idea of automatic responses to sound, physiologically determined and bypassing the conscious mind, have dominated the debate on musical hypnosis. Crucially, hypnotism and hypnotic music came to play an important part in the emergence of a ‘physiological psychology’ that regarded the hypnotic state as an ‘automatic’ phenomenon akin to a physical reflex. These associations with sensuality and a loss of self were to become constant themes in the debate on hypnotic music even as hypnotism emerged as a more mainstream part of science in the mid-nineteenth century. 3 By 1800 the combination of the development of Mesmer's theory of ‘animal magnetism’, new conceptions of the self, and the Romantic aesthetics of music created a discourse that portrayed musical mesmeric trances as a threat to the self and to sexual self-control. The modern (mostly) non-supernatural discussion of music as a hypnotic force goes back to the late eighteenth century, when the context shifted, in Henri Ellenberger's words, from possession and exorcism to dynamic psychiatry. 1 Although most observers now follow French anthropologist Gilbert Rouget's view that the relationship between music and hypnosis and trance is psycho-social rather than physiologically deterministic, over the past 200 years the idea of musical hypnosis has been the basis of a variety of discourses about music leading to involuntary hypnosis, robbing listeners of autonomy and making them sexually vulnerable. Many physicians, psychologists and critics have wondered whether its effects can go beyond the powerful group dynamics and behavioural changes related to music in the context of religious ritual and warfare and actually ‘hypnotise’ or ‘brainwash’ an audience. The feeling of ‘losing one's self’ that is central to musical ecstasy (ἔκστασις-to stand outside oneself) can be an exhilarating escape from the confines of the ego, but can also be very disturbing, raising complex questions about the porous boundaries of the self and the ability of others to manipulate it. ![]() Because of the direct physical character of hearing and the fact that one cannot close one's ears, music has long provoked anxieties about personal autonomy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |