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  Salomon Henschen and the Search for a Brain Center for Singing

  Amy B. Graziano, Erik C. Born, and Julene K. Johnson

  The capacity to sing, including singing in the context of aphasia (language impairment due to brain damage), has been discussed since at least the late 18th century. Numerous case reports document patients with aphasia who could sing words despite difficulty speaking. This inspired decades of research to understand how the brain supports the capacity to sing. Swedish neurologist Salomon Henschen (1847–1930) was among the first to search for a brain center for singing. In 1920, he reviewed 206 cases that involved singing. This chapter highlights Henschen’s work to frame historical studies about the brain and the capacity to sing.

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  Introduction to The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical

  Jessica Sternfeld and Elizabeth L. Wollman

  The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical’s evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society.

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  Cameron Mackintosh: Modern Global Impresario

  Jessica Sternfeld

  Details the work of Cameron Mackintosh, producer of many successful "megamusicals" such as Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, and more.

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  Ready for His Close-Up: From Horror to Romance in The Phantom of the Opera

  Jessica Sternfeld

  "Thus this chapter will explore how the film reimagines the stage version in four significant ways. First, the Phantom's drastically different face renders him a potentially viable love interest for Christine, but eliminates the only justification for his evil deeds: that society would so obviously shun him. This change of the Phantom from horrifying creature to insecure loner led to three other changes: the complete erasure of all of the Phantom's magical unexplained powers and feats; the addition of a significant back story meant to create sympathy and justification for the Phantom's murders and isolation; and the steep lowering of the main characters' ages to render the story more of a youthful awakening than an adult love triangle. We will see that by making the Phantom more handsome, more human, and more sympathetic, the message that Christine could never choose him over Raoul is meant to be more romantic and heartbreaking, but becomes instead a harsh indictment of our own social expectations and stigmas about disability."

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  Music, Neurology, and Psychology in the Nineteenth Century

  Amy B. Graziano and Julene K. Johnson

  This chapter examines connections between research in music, neurology, and psychology during the late-nineteenth century. Researchers in all three disciplines investigated how music is processed by the brain. Psychologists and comparative musicologists, such as Carl Stumpf, thought in terms of multiple levels of sensory processing and mental representation. Early thinking about music processing can be linked to the start of Gestalt psychology. Neurologists such as August Knoblauch also discussed multiple levels of music processing, basing speculation on ideas about language processing. Knoblauch and others attempted to localize music function in the brain. Other neurologists, such as John Hughlings Jackson, discussed a dissociation between music as an emotional system and language as an intellectual system. Richard Wallaschek seems to have been the only one from the late-nineteenth century to synthesize ideas from musicology, psychology, and neurology. He used ideas from psychology to explain music processing and audience reactions and also used case studies from neurology to support arguments about the nature of music. Understanding the history of this research sheds light on the development of all three disciplines—musicology, neurology, and psychology.

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  "Pitiful Creature of Darkness": The Subhuman and the Superhuman in The Phantom of the Opera

  Jessica Sternfeld

  "This chapter focuses on The Phantom of the Opera, the megamusical that perhaps most boldly faces the idea of disability head-on, as it stars a character whose face, as one journalist described it, looks 'like melted cheese' (Smith, 1995). The musical's approach to the Phantom's disability is remarkably layered and inconsistent; the Phantom is portrayed in numerous ways (monster, criminal, genius, god, ghost) and his physical disability blurs regularly with his 'soul;' which is where numerous characters locate the origin of his problems. His face and its famous mask covering are both feared and thrilled over, but with a reassuring dose of pity that allows the audience to feel comfortable leaning forward to catch a glimpse. How, in the supposedly more enlightened culture of the 1980s (and today, as the show continues to thrive), can we justify what is, at base, a modern version of a circus freak show? And how does the musical shield the audience from feeling that it is? The musical's atmosphere, style, music, and lyrics create such a seductive sense of romance and tragic inevitability-cushioned with an extra layer of 'historical' distance-that the discomfort we should feel is swept away by megamusical momentum."

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  Music as a Tool in the Development of Nineteenth-Century Neurology

  Amy B. Graziano and Julene K. Johnson

  This chapter looks at the connection between music and higher brain cognitive functions.

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  Historical Perspectives on the Study of Music in Neurology

  Julene K. Johnson, Amy B. Graziano, and Jacky Hayward

  The evolution of our knowledge about how the brain processes music holds an important place in the history of neurology. An examination of early neurology literature reveals that music abilities were occasionally examined in an attempt to better understand brain function; in particular, music was used as a tool to assess patients with aphasia. Early neurologists were fascinated by the observation that some patients with severe expressive aphasia were able to sing the texts of songs. This observation became a theme in nineteenth-century neurology literature that was discussed by some of the most prominent neurologists at the time, including John Hughlings Jackson and Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud.

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  An Historical Perspective on the Study of Music Perception

  Amy B. Graziano

  "Music has played a role in human culture since before recorded history, serving ritual, functional, and entertainment purposes. But music can also be studied as a product of human perception and cognition. It is considered both perceptual and cognitive because it involves sensory processing on two levels: the progress of sound through our auditory physiological system (perception), and the processing of that sound into higher-order conceptual thinking about music (cognition). The study of music perception and cognition is traced from its roots in the 17th c., through late–19th-c. work in physiology, psychology and neurology, and into the 20th c. During the late 20th c. the study of music sensation and cognition developed into a fairly unified field of intellectual inquiry, one in which psychologists, neuroscientists, music theorists, and musicologists participate. This field is generally referred to as 'music perception' and today is part of mainstream scholarly and educational institutions, with a large and growing literature of scientific research."