In this talk, Dr. Rogers takes pianist Misia Sert's account of the fighter pilot Roland Garros lying under her piano during World War I as a starting point for investigating how music and certain kinds of sounds came to be understood as potentially healing in World War I-era France. Through examination of scientific, medical, psychology, and musical texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries, she demonstrates that part of the appeal of music making for French modernist musicians who lived through the war resided in its status as an embodied, therapeutic practice that operated specifically through sonic vibrations.

Dr. Jillian Rogers is Lecturer in Music at University College Cork. Her research focuses on relationships between sound, music, and trauma, and she is currently writing a book for Oxford University Press that examines how these relationships played out for musicians active in interwar France.