Abstract
Every sickness is a musical problem, wrote the 19th-century romantic poet Novalis, every cure a musical solution.1Such a poetic statement does not lend itself to easy comprehension. It would have been better understood in centuries past, when the metaphors of the body as a harp and its functions as a part of cosmic harmony were meaningful, when Hippocrates conceived health as harmony of the four humors, and when, according to Francis Bacon in hisAdvancement of Learning(1606): The poets did well to conjoin music and medicine in Apollo, because the office of medicine is to tune this curious harp of man's body and to reduce it to harmony. Stopping short of identifying therapy with music, we must acknowledge a strong historical link between the two. In many primitive societies music has been, and continues to be, an integral part of the ritual of exorcism that is intended
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