Montaigne's Father Kept a Musician on Staff to Wake the Boy. Did He Have a Point?

Michel de Montaigne, writing in the sixteenth century, looked back on a childhood in which the first sound of the day was an instrument. His father, he reports, “caused me to be wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that purpose.” That is an early record of a household with a staff position dedicated to gentle waking, and it arrives in the middle of an essay on how to raise a child.

The short answer to whether the father had a point: possibly, though the modern evidence is thin. One 50-person survey links melodic wake-up sounds to less self-reported grogginess, and nothing in it shows that a harsh alarm harms anyone’s brain.

The passage itself

The text is in “Of the Education of Children,” Book I, Chapter XXV in Cotton’s numbering (in modern editions it is I.26, “De l’institution des enfans”). Here is the full sentence, in Charles Cotton’s translation as edited by W. C. Hazlitt and hosted by Project Gutenberg:

“…some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them violently—and over-hastily from sleep (wherein they are much more profoundly involved than we), he caused me to be wakened by the sound of some musical instrument…”

The phrasing is “some being of opinion.” Montaigne’s father was following a theory he had heard, and Montaigne reports it without vouching for it.

The anecdote also comes with a punchline at the author’s own expense. Montaigne says that despite the exquisite care, he was “so heavy, idle, and indisposed” that no one could rouse him from his sloth, not even to go out and play. A man whose father hired a musician and who still could not get out of bed is a figure many readers will recognize.

What sleep-inertia research says about sound

Sleep inertia is the groggy, impaired stretch right after waking, covered in the explainer on sleep inertia. The best-known test of the sound question is McFarlane, Garcia, Verhagen and Dyer (2020), “Alarm tones, music and their elements,” in PLOS ONE 15(1): e0215788. Their online questionnaire kept 50 respondents out of an initial 83.

The findings are narrower than the usual summary. The authors report no significant association between sleep inertia and the broad type of waking sound. What did show up: sounds the respondents rated as melodic were linked to lower reported sleep inertia, and sounds rated as neither melodic nor unmelodic were linked to higher. The post on alarm sound science covers how to apply that.

The limits are the authors’ own. Grogginess was self-rated, respondents could fill in the form up to four hours after waking, hours slept were not collected, and the authors call the melody result preliminary. A survey also cannot say whether melody caused anything. Nobody has shown that a father with a lute does better than a father with a bell.

Suddenness versus sound

Montaigne’s father worried about suddenness, while the McFarlane survey is about sound quality. These are different questions, and the second is the one with data. How long grogginess lasts once you are up is a separate matter, and a 30-day reaction-time experiment on sleep inertia shows how variable it is from one morning to the next.

A gentle sound may be easier to sleep through, whereas a household musician at least was a person who would not leave. Knocker-ups filled that role later with a pole and a fee.

What a modern sleeper can take from a 16th-century father

Three things hold up. Pick a wake-up sound you find tolerable and tuneful, since the one weak signal in the research points that way. Treat it as a mild bet and not a cure. And keep the real work for the thing Montaigne’s father never solved, which was getting the boy to actually stand up.