Composing the Crisis: From Mesmer's Harmonica to Charcot's Tam-tam

Abstract

Hypnosis used sound and musico-dramatic methods to effect previously unanticipated kinds of changes in body and psyche, showing a ‘sonic turn’ in this new kind of medicine. For Franz Anton Mesmer, musical techniques and instruments were essential elements of his theory and practice, not merely adjuncts, as previous research has tended to assume. The musical structures of the Classical style provided Mesmer with patterns for artificially inducing and regulating his patients’ crises, whose periodicity medicine previously considered fixed and unchangeable. Mesmer executed these therapeutic strategies using the recently invented glass harmonica. From the Marquis de Puységur to Jean-Martin Charcot, Mesmer's successors turned their attention to somnambulism and catalepsy, sleep-like states often induced by the sound of a tam-tam, an Asian gong new to Western music. The contrast between harmonica and tam-tam reflects the passage in musical techniques from modulating dramatic crises to obliterating consciousness itself. Even considered as suggestion, hypnosis followed processes of intensification and dramatization characteristic of Classical and Romantic music.

The Cataleptic Novel: Living on with George Sand

“…The Schreckenstein is a space explicitly linked with artistic creation, as the hidden caves are lined with books and old Slavic music scores, and it is here that Consuelo hears Albert play the violin 'so perfectly' 13 ['si parfait'] (Sand, 2004a(Sand, [1842: I, 318). On the one hand, Albert's talent offers a manifestation of the cataleptic genius but, on the other, it also reminds us of the connection between catalepsy and music: Mesmer employed music in his treatment, but it was also used by neurologist and professor of anatomical pathology Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-93) to induce cataleptic states in his patients (see Pesic, 2020). Following Albert's death at the end of the second volume, Consuelo follows yet another series of trials in the sequel, La Comtesse de Rudolstadt.…”