... is in fact less far-fetched than it seems. J. G. Kastner's music theory, taking its cue from the sound of the Aeolian harp, serves as a test case here: the Aeolian harp, played by wind directly, had long served as a Romantic image of the superhuman forces of nature, but Kastner argues that the Aeolian...

...” to communicate across distance. Works by Berlioz and Georges Kastner reveal how the telegraph fed into conceptions of musical transcendence via Spiritualists and the Aeolian harp. The attendant emphasis on mind over body was extended through the employment by conductors of telegraph technology to control...

..., including the glass harmonica, the Aeolian harp, and the Jew's harp, were conflated with ideas about a vibratory nervous system and an ethereal world spirit. Both ideas were essential to the formation of the culturally determined ideal of ethereality in the eighteenth century. Closely linked...