‘A roaring-meg against melancholy’: Musical responses to pandemic

The author of this blog is Dr Naomi Barker, Senior Lecturer in Music at The Open University; the blog was published on 15 June, 2020.

Singing and music-making in response to the Coronavirus has increased exponentially as communities around the world have gone into lockdown. In countries as distant as Italy and South Africa, music is the ‘go to’ resource for crossing physical boundaries and helping people deal with both isolation and wider community issues. The rapid dissemination through social media of video footage of singing communities is a modern phenomenon, but communities turning to music as a response to a health crisis is not new.

Tommaso del Garbo, a fourteenth-century doctor writing following the outbreak of the plague in Florence in 1347-48 instructed ‘Do not occupy your mind with death, passion, or anything likely to sadden or grieve you, but give your thoughts over to delightful and pleasing things…And make use of songs and minstrelsy and other pleasurable tales without tiring yourselves out, and all the desirable things that bring anyone comfort’. It is exactly this advice that is followed by the protagonists of Boccaccio’s Decameron (c.1350), who, having fled the plague-ridden city for a county estate, call for instruments and enjoy singing and dancing to fill their time.  Modern paraphrases of del Garbo’s advice are common in popular online channels advising those in isolation in the Covid-19 crisis to keep cheerful and to occupy oneself with pleasant things.

In 1575 folk in Milan and other Italian cities were told to stay in their homes during another outbreak of plague.  At that time, religious worship was seen to be a part of the fight against disease, and religious processions as an expression of communal prayer were part of normal life. However, by this date doctors were becoming aware of person to person contagion even if they didn’t understand it. In response, Cardinal Borromeo issued a pamphlet instructing the faithful how to sing the psalms, litanies and responses from the doorways and windows of their homes. Paulo Bisciola, a chronicler of the time, reported that ‘in walking around Milan, one heard nothing but song, veneration of God and supplication to the saints such that one almost wished for the tribulations to last longer’.  Bisciola’s description has remarkable resonances with the communal singing we have witnessed during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Early modern medical thought held that the humours of the body had to be kept in balance to maintain good health. The six so-called ‘non-naturals’ - the passions of the soul, air, food and drink, exercise, excretion and sleeping and waking were understood as the key factors in ensuring no critical imbalance of the humours occurred, thus causing illness. The passions could be manipulated as a means of restoring a heathy balance through activities such as gazing on pictures, beautiful scenery, and above all, music.  Marsilio Ficino’s De vita libri tres (1480-89) underlined the importance of music to maintain ‘allegrezza’ or cheerfulness which in turn, kept the correct balance of humours within the body. Burton, in his Anatomy of melancholy (1621) describes music as ‘a roaring-meg against melancholy, to rear and revive the languishing soul’.

Music was not just a therapy for communities dealing with the plague. In the Ospedale di Santo Spirito in Rome, a remarkable institution that was founded in the twelfth century providing both medical and social care, music was important enough that an organ was built in the hospital ward (see photos 1 and 2 - right). Its neighbouring collegiate church (see photo 3 - below) had a lively musical scene, but music was evidently also a tool in the armory of physicians working with the sick.  Every Saturday, musicians were paid for singing the litanies. It is of course almost impossible to reconstruct just what would have been sung or played other than the plainchant of the Litany itself. One could imagine though, that the repetitive nature of the litanies would have a calming effect on the patients.

John Evelyn visited the hospital on his tour of Rome in 1645 and noted that ‘The Organs are very fine, & frequently play’d on to recreate the people in Paine’. Domenico Borgarucci, the secretary of the Order of Santo Spirito in the 1620s left a remarkable account of the running of the hospital in which he noted that the organ was played at meal times to cheer the sick (Relatione del modo che si tiene da Religione di S. Spirito… 1623 Wellcome library EPB / B Shelfmark: 46633/B). Borgarucci’s account is evidence that the advice of physicians to stay cheerful to fend off and alleviate illness was taken seriously by those running a healthcare organisation.   

In this pandemic, music is emerging as a ‘go-to’ way of coping just as much as it did 500 years ago. Perhaps this catastrophe underlines for all of us just how much humanity needs the arts to nurture families, communities and nations. Science may eventually find a physical cure, but until it does music will continue its crucial role.