Melvyn J. Willin, Music and the Paranormal: An Encyclopedic Dictionary, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2022
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Melvyn J. Willin has two doctorates in paramusicology, a field he seems to have created, in which music and the paranormal mix.So he'd seem to be the perfect author for this book, which (as its subtitle says) is a dictionary and encyclopedia, an alphabetical listing and discussion of people, places, and phenomena in which music and the paranormal might seem to mix.And, to judge from a bio on his website, Willin is a lively soul -a guitarist, a witch, an archivist of unpublished poltergeist events, and also a Morris dancer and a practitioner of martial arts.The book did bring me one delight, which I'll save for the end of the review.Note, though, that what delighted me is something Willin mentions, without (or so it seems) understanding how important it is.And because of this and other lapses, the book is disappointing.Almost right from the start, there are problems.The second entry is for Arthur M. Abell, an American writer active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and best known for a book of interviews with great classical composers, whom he quotes as saying that their music was inspired by God or by other forces larger than themselves.But these interviews, published 50 years after Abell says they were done, aren't thought to be genuine.Even Willin's quotes from them are suspect.Brahms is quoted gushing about his inspiration from above, while everywhere else he's been described (both in his time and ours) as reticent about himself and skeptical about religion.The leading English-language Brahms biography doesn't mention Abell or include his quotes.Willin also gives us nonsense about Debussy -that the great French composer may have been a "Grand Master" of a "mysterious esoteric society," the Priory of Sion.But the Priory never existed; the book that first described it, and mentioned Debussy, is known to be a hoax.Here are some further errors about musical things.They might seem esoteric in an age when not so many people know classical music.But to assess Willin's work, I need to note them, since classical music (to judge from the book) is his musical home turf.• The American composer Gian-Carlo Menotti gets an entry, because -this is all the entry says -he wrote an opera about a fraudulent medium.But he's far more famous for another opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, with a far more paranormal theme -it's about a boy whose disabled leg is miraculously cured.Plus, Menotti himself, as a child, reportedly had his own miraculous cure of his own disabled leg.(Or so says the one published Menotti biography, which gives no source for the story.
DOI: 10.31275/20253785
Author: Greg Sandow
Language: English
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4415195958
FWCI:
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