Madness
The sorts of mental or affective states that are understood as madness (or medicalized as “mental illness”) vary with time and place. As with other culturally stigmatized bodily differences (i.e., disabilities), madness has been understood in three ways. First, madness has been understood in religious terms, as a mark of divine punishment or transcendent vision. Second, there is the medical model, which constitutes madness as “mental illness.” Third, in line with the sociocultural model of disability, madness is seen as a (potentially valuable) human difference rather than a deficit, pathology, or disease. Musical modernism represents madness in its divided consciousness (stratification into conflicting layers) and its hearing of voices (quotation of stylistically incongruous music).