He’s recounted to more than one interviewer how “unnerving” it was to sit next to Morricone in the viewing theater: it seems that he laughed at everything, roaring and sniggering through gunfights, love scenes, and location shots
October 9, 2013 § Leave a comment
For the tarantula bite, music’s curative powers depended on the effects of its vibration of the air when transferred to the body via the ear. Physician Walter Charleton described the venom as conveyed by a ‘thin, acrimonious and pricking Humor’. The harmonious movement of air caused by the music was received by ears, transported by the spirits until it agitated the humour carrying the venom. This made parts of the body itch, causing the victim to dance and the ‘pricking Humour’ to be sweated out (Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or, A Fabrick of Science Natural, 1654).
Not only did this story about physical disease (a tarantula bite) serve as a metaphor for a mental affliction (lovesickness), but it also become a favourite of religious writers concerned with music’s ability to cure diseases of the soul. The anonymous ‘University Pen’ who wrote The Spiritual Bee (1662) interpreted dancing as an immoral symptom of the bite rather than the cure. This was typical of how the tarantula became a symbol for various kinds of earthly transgressions, including drunkenness and frivolity. Furthermore the author considered the case of the tarantula victims who die laughing if not cured by music to be ‘much the same who are bitten by that Infernal Serpent; All whose years are spent in mirth, and their days in laughter, but in a moment they goe down unto the grave’. This comparison of tarantulas with Satan was helped along by a certain amount of confusion in England over precisely what kind of a creature the tarantula actually was. As well as a spider it was variously described as a lizard, a fly, an eft (a small lizard-like creature), and a serpent. The last of these offered obvious comparisons with the serpent of the Garden of Eden and by extension with the Devil himself. The musical cure was paralleled in The Spiritual Bee with the harmonious voice of God (‘that wise Charmer’) who can cure the ‘exorbitances and profusenesse of our spirits in wordly delights’, in effect rebalancing the temperament of the soul.
The story of the tarantula bite and its musical cure was received unquestioningly in England until the investigations of the Royal Society in the 1670s. read more
ART: Corinne Vionnet
my nerves are bad to-night 
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