Prescribing Sound: Willem Van de Wall and the Carceral Origins of American Music Therapy
J. Martin Vest
Prescribing Sound: Willem Van de Wall and the Carceral Origins of American Music Therapy - Volume 3 Issue 2-3
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A photo taken at New York's Bedford Hills Women's Reformatory in the early 1920s bears testimony to a strange scene (Figure 1). Sunlight pours into a tiled room through two windows, illuminating a group of women sitting in straight-backed wooden chairs. Their hair and clothing convey a sense of orderly uniformity—an impression heightened by the lack of faces: they sit with their backs to us. A single male figure stands before them attending to some kind of wooden cabinet and—if the smudged photographic record of his face is any indication—addresses his audience animatedly. A caption informs that these are members of the Reformatory's contingent of “extra-recalcitrant, psychopaths, and borderline criminal insane” and that “inmates of this type ordinarily need special guards, bolts on doors and bars before windows to prevent assaults, escapes, etc.” On this day, however, no such expedients are necessary. The women have gathered to listen to phonographic singing lessons, a ritual that had recently proven as efficacious in controlling their behavior as any drug or physical restraint.Footnote 1

The orchestrator of this strange exercise—and the man in the photograph—was Willem Van de Wall, a Dutch harpist who had performed for years with world-renowned orchestras, first in Europe and then in the United States. Van de Wall had only recently given up this life to pursue another passion: the scientific application of music to social and psychological dysfunctions. This mission took him far from his usual haunts at Carnegie Hall and the New York Metropolitan Opera House. With the aid of the Russell Sage Foundation and various state agencies in New York and Pennsylvania, Van de Wall spent the years from 1921 to 1936 refining the philosophy and practice of music therapy in the prisons and mental hospitals of his adopted country. By the time he moved on to other professional pursuits (including research in adult education and community music) in the late 1930s, he had penned two seminal monographs as well as a large number of articles on the topic of music therapy.

Van de Wall was not the first to practice or theorize music therapy. African, Asian, and American societies had long employed music for healing.Footnote 2 In the West, stories of music's effects on the mind and body had circulated since antiquity, and books and articles published on music and music therapy often recounted the musico-therapeutic achievements of Pythagoras, the Biblical David, or Thales of Sparta. More recently, musical performances had figured in the routines of American and European psychiatric hospitals, and neurologists and other specialists had begun to investigate the specific physiological effects of music listening on “normal” subjects by the end of the nineteenth century. The use of music in psychiatric institutions, however, had generally been episodic, producing little in the way of practical knowledge. Similarly, laboratory experimentation remained wedded to anthropometric methodologies, which offered very little insight into the possible psychological and sociological effects of music, producing instead reams of data on heart rates and other physiologically reductive measures of music's effects. Despite more than a century of music in modern institutions (and millennia of “common sense” regarding music's curative powers), very little of value could be said about music's effects on the criminal, the mad, or the ill. It was precisely this lacuna that Willem Van de Wall sought to address. Following World War II, a rapidly growing cohort of full-time music therapists drew on the work of Van de Wall and a handful of other pioneers to forge a new profession with its own values, theories, and practices.Footnote 3

Music therapy has attracted very little scholarly attention, a fact all the more surprising for the topic's relevance to several emerging and dynamic areas of inquiry.Footnote 4 Scholars working in the field of sound studies, for example, have detailed historical and contemporary sonic environments, or “soundscapes,” as well as the techniques and technologies used in apprehending and controlling them.Footnote 5 But the field has also charted shifting conceptions and representations of sound, sound's place in the elaboration of social order, and even its centrality to modernity and modern conceptions of the self.Footnote 6 The rise of modern music therapy represents a crucial strand of the larger history of sound's entanglements with self, society, and culture.

Music therapy's history also holds potential insights for historians of the emotions, who, since the early 2000s, have historicized the experience and expression of human emotional states. The emotions, it turns out, have been remarkably contingent and just as subject to the shaping influences of language, practice, and politics as all other aspects of human experience. To date, however, the role of music in shaping, modeling, propagating, and legitimating repertoires of emotionality has received little attention. Indeed, as practiced by Willem Van de Wall, music therapy in the prisons and psychiatric institutions of the United States aimed explicitly at the disciplining of inmates’ affective states as well as their outward behaviors.Footnote 7

This article examines Willem Van de Wall's career as a crucial moment in the origins of modern music therapy. The music-therapeutic techniques forged by Van de Wall in his work in prisons and psychiatric institutions relied on an explicitly coercive understanding of therapy—one aimed at the control of interned populations. Van de Wall also exercised an outsized (though under-recognized) influence on the field of music therapy in the postwar period. This influence extended through one of Van de Wall's favorite methods of musical social control, a technique called the “ISO Principle” by later music therapists. Though stripped of Van de Wall's language of social control, the ISO Principle has persisted into the twentieth century as a crucial piece of the musico-therapeutic toolkit. In at least one instance it has even escaped into the broader sphere of American life through the culture of self-help.

The following examination of Willem Van de Wall, music therapy, and the ISO Principle represents just one exploration of a broader current within the history of twentieth-century psychiatry and popular culture—one that also saw drama, dance, literature, painting, and drawing utilized for therapeutic ends. If the following analysis is any indication, these arts therapies have been more central to twentieth-century social control than previously imagined. Because of their continuity with quotidian forms of recreation and self-cultivation, arts therapy practices honed within the asylum and the prison have been able to slip their restraints and walk right out the front gate, whistling innocently as they pass cross-armed orderlies and guards. What follows is an analysis of just one such escape narrative. But it is one that gestures toward a larger story of how the logics of institutional control were made “safe” for the broader society.