Anatomy of a Musician: The Medicalization of Musical Ability in the Modernizing United States, 1890–1932

This dissertation examines the ways that scientists, medical professionals, and music scholars medicalized the concept of musical talent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century United States. The biological and medical revelations that came with the adoption of scientific medicine in the late nineteenth century coincided with rapid technological modernization and social change in the country. While new science enabled medical investigations into the human body’s musical abilities, new technology and a variety of new people changing American culture motivated scientists to categorize and hierarchize musical abilities along lines of nation, race, class, and gender. I argue that the medical study of musical ability became a proxy for scientists to approach bodily interiority, allowing biomedical stratification that resulted in labeling some people more “talented” and able than others. I suggest how the medicalization of musical ability has made biomedical presumptions of talent an unquestioned common sense. Furthermore, I reveal how this common sense has been central to justifications for uneven institutional investment in musical opportunities for different groups of people. I engage the history of science, the health humanities, and disability studies to interrogate how this medicalization manifested across three disciplines: psychology, neurology, and musicology. My first chapter focuses on psychological investigations into talent, revealing that while biodeterministic investigations of musicality took place on both sides of World War I, the positivist bent of psychology of music after the war served social structuring initiatives while moving psychology closer to the realm of medicine. My second chapter focuses on neurologists’ investigations into musical sensitivity, including the use of music therapy to treat shell shock during and after WWI. This chapter also explores how modern science validated older “genius” stereotypes by supporting the idea that people with high musical ability had sensitive nervous systems. Finally, in Chapter 3, I focus on musicology during this period, studying the ways that this young field legitimized itself by adopting biomedical understandings of music making, debated in the pages of the Musical Quarterly. I conclude by suggesting how music scholarship and education in the present day might intervene in longstanding biomedical logics of musicality.