Music and madness: from divine lyre to indeterminism

Abstract

The idea of musical inspiration, understood as a kind of madness –divine and human–, had a long tradition in the West, starting with the Greek mysteries under the mythological notion of enthusiasm, mania or divine furor (present from Homer to Plato), then transformed into "inspiratio" during Late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, with religious or theological meaning (as revelation or demonic possession), through the baroque notion of ingenuity in the seventeenth century, the natural-illustrated and the pathologicromantic genius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to the twentieth century avant-garde, where the idea of inspiration becomes increasingly blurred and confused. We try to understand this idea by mapping its genealogy and analyzing its historical development.