The project aims to make a long-overdue cultural-historical contribution to understanding the significance of music in medicine and psychiatric institutions in Vienna in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Considering international trends (such as psychiatric reforms in France, Germany, and England) and national developments (e.g. the establishment of so-called lunatic asylums in the Habsburg/Austrian Empire), the project focuses in particular on those psychiatric institutions where music was used as treatment—among them the Viennese Imperial and Royal Lunatic Asylum (“Narrenturm”) and Dr. Goergen's Private Asylum for Mental Illnesses. Literary primary sources are supplemented by research in, among other places, the Vienna City and State Archive and the archival holdings of the Josephinum.

The project provides a synopsis of the cultural, socio-political, medical, and psychiatric conditions that significantly influenced ideas around the “therapeutic” use of music in Vienna: neo-humanistic ideals, Enlightenment principles, the reforms of Joseph II, the beginning of “modern” psychiatry, medical-historical theories on “mental, emotional, and nervous illnesses,” as well as explanatory models on music’s effects on the body and on the “soul” and “spirit,” among others. In this context, the ranges of meaning of the following terms are explored within the history of thought and music: “resonance” (as both “acoustic resonance” and “emotional movement”), “mood” (as musical tuning and “emotional state”), and “sympathy” (as “resonance” and “empathy”). Based on historical musicology, these terms are further related to aesthetic discourse.