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1 results

  • Chapter 7 - Played upon or Player? Musical Mediums and Creative Inspiration

  • from Part III
  • Melissa Dickson, University of Queensland
  • Book:
    Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science
    Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024, pp 149-164

  • Summary

    Chapter 7 interrogates the complex forms of spirit possession which emerged from the 1870s, as spiritualism moved away from incidences of materialization to delve instead into the inner workings of the psyche. In this context, this chapter demonstrates, music and literature were media not for self-expression but for accessing the transcendent. Accounts of mediumship from the spiritualist press, as well as the fictional musical medium in Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), demonstrate how the inner, spiritual ear was believed to pulsate in response to the flow of thoughts and impressions from the spiritual realm. This model of mediumship ultimately rejected any individual artistic agency by unequivocally locating the source of creative inspiration in the realm of the spirits, yet it still required intense physical labours and energy on the part of the medium to bring it to fruition in the material world.