Jesse Shepard’s sensational musical séances: psychical waves, hypnotic timbres, and the Spiritualist sensorium

Abstract

One of the newly emerging areas of study in nineteenth-century Spiritualism centers on music and the sensory experiences generated by spirit-played instruments and attendee singing during séances (Ostrowski 2019; Raz 2021; Spinner 2021). Undoubtedly, the most remarkable of all musical Spiritualists was the enigmatic and sensational pianist/ vocalist christened Benjamin Henry Jesse Francis Shepard (1848–1927), known most famously as either Jesse Shepard or Francis Grierson, the latter bearing his mother’s maiden name which he assumed when undertaking a literary career in 1897. Shepard performed widely throughout Europe, America, and Australia in a period running from the late 1860s to his final return to the United States in 1913. The most thorough account of Shepard’s worldly excursions, the mansion built for him by Spiritualists in San Diego, and the favors he received from European royalty can be found in various works of the late Harold P. Simonson (1926–2011), the foremost Shepardian scholar (Simonson 1958, 1960, 1966). Though relatively forgotten today, Shepard was well known in his time as an astonishing pianist who allegedly played and sang through the psychical inspiration of deceased composers and operatic singers. Whether in Europe or America, Shepard stunned the small audiences that he preferred to perform before with musicales (i.e. musical performances generally held at private residences) never before witnessed, producing through a vocal range of high soprano to deep bass an eerie room-filling choral assemblage generating intensely vivid sensory impressions while his handsome features, curly locks, and long slender hands caused much comment and cross-gender admiration. David Howes and Constance Classen, among a number of scholars engaged in sensory studies, have explored the nature of sensation and the ways it relates to individual lives, social groups, and the wider culture through a probing analysis centered on the sensorium (Howes and Classen 2014). The sensorium can be understood as an assemblage of humans, non-humans, things, and atmospheres – a series of interconnected interior/ exterior, subjective/objective, intersensory stimuli affecting embodied humans either in solitary or collective settings. Viewed in this sense as a holistic system of synaesthetic perception, David Howes considers the sensorium to be a conceivably larger formulation than the mere sum of the five senses while others further indicate that spiritual and intuitive senses must be considered when exploring cultures of Spiritualist artistic sensoriums (Howes 2017, 165; 2019, 20; Fisher and 2006; McDaniel 2011; Fritz 2012). With the