Madness, Music and Modernity: Studying Structural Oppression Through Musicology

The title of this post is distinctly ideological and, I believe, holds implications for a discussion of the medicalization of madness and mental illness. In my work as a PhD student in Musicology and Cultural Studies, I have seen similarities in how madness was depicted in the arts and medical texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This similarity centers on the characteristics of disruption and dissonance. So far I have seen these properties associated with weakness, failure, degene...