Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability

by Joseph N. Straus

Overview

Preeminent music theorist and leader in the study of music and disability Joseph Straus presents a truly groundbreaking take on musical modernism--demonstrating in an expansive and vivid multimedia presentation that modernist music is inextricably entwined with attitudes toward disability. In Broken Beauty, Straus argues that the most characteristic features of musical modernism--fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others--can be understood as musical depictions of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Against the traditional medical model of disability, which sees it as a bodily defect requiring diagnosis and normalization or cure, this new sociocultural model of disability sees it as cultural artifact, something that is created by and creates culture. Straus places this revised model of disability against a wide range of canonical, high-art concert music from the first decades of the century through the 1950s. Broken Beauty illustrates how disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190871222
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Joseph N. Straus is Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the author of numerous books and articles. His previous book, Extraordinary Measures (Oxford UP, 2011) established him as the leading figure in the study of music in relationship to disability. He is a former president of the Society for Music Theory.

Table of Contents

Preface Chapter 1. Representing Disability Chapter 2. Narrating Disability Chapter 3. Stravinsky's Aesthetics of Disability Chapter 4. Madness Chapter 5. Idiocy Chapter 6. Autism Chapter 7. Therapeutic Music Theory and the Tyranny of the Normal Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

"Straus (Graduate Center, CUNY) offers an impressive synthesis of disability studies, musicology, and music theory in this fascinating monograph. His expertise in the concert repertoire from the modernist era, reenergized and reimagined through the lens of disability, illuminates the music with new meaning and resonance...A very helpful, well-produced companion website offers in-depth video analysis (captioned) of each musical example discussed in the book... Summing Up: Highly Recommended" — CHOICE

"Joe Straus's work in disability studies in music remains seminal, and this book certainly confirms that fact by breaking new terrain yet again."—Bruce W. Quaglia, Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Theory, University of Minnesota

"Joseph Straus makes a convincing argument for thinking of modernist musical works as relying on a disability aesthetic. Learned, comprehensive, and eclectic, this book makes a major contribution to music history and theory as well as to disability studies."— Lennard Davis, Distinguished Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Disability and Human Development, University of Illinois at Chicago

From the Publisher