ABSTRACT
Neither musicology nor medical historiography has, until recent decades, adopted the broad cultural remit which would allow such a seemingly peripheral topic more than a brief airing. There is, however, another reason that goes deeper. It is that the very terms of reference of a history of music therapy in the modern period are uncertain, the contours of the subject are fundamentally obscure. Romanticism is exceedingly hard to characterize, in music or any other domain, and virtually impossible to characterize briefly. In many asylums music apparently became, if not a regular feature, then at least a surprisingly common one from the last decades of the eighteenth century onwards. There is a chapter to be written on the USA to set alongside the European material that has dominated the historiography of music therapy. Magnetism runs through nineteenth-century esotericism like the powerful unifying force it was claimed to be. Steinerian practice overlaps with the modern Western music therapy.
