The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies

by Blake Howe (Editor), Stephanie Jensen-Moulton (Editor), Neil Lerner (Editor), Joseph Straus (Editor)

Overview

The Oxford Handbook of Disability Studies represents a comprehensive state of current research for the field of Disability Studies and Music. The forty-two chapters in the book span a wide chronological and geographical range, from the biblical, the medieval, and the Elizabethan, through the canonical classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to modernist styles and contemporary musical theater and popular genres, with stops along the way in post-Civil War America, Ghana and the South Pacific, and many other interesting times and places. Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability, deafness, blindness, mobility impairment often coupled with bodily difference, and cognitive and intellectual impairments. Amid this diversity of time, place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core commitments. First, they are united in their theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction. Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199331444
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/12/2015
Series:	Oxford Handbooks
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	952
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.90(h) x 2.40(d)

About the Author

Blake Howe is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Louisiana State University.

Stephanie Jensen-Moulton is Associate Professor of Musicology at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.

Neil Lerner is E. Craig Wall, Jr. Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Music at Davidson College.

Joseph Straus is Distinguished Professor of Music at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Disability Studies in Music; Music in Disability Studies
Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner, Joseph Straus

Part 1. Disability Communities
1. Toward an Ethnographic Model of Disability in the Ethnomusicology of Autism
Michael B. Bakan
2. Music, Intellectual Disability, and Human Flourishing
Licia Carlson
3. Imagined Hearing: Music-Making in Deaf Culture
Jeannette DiBernardo Jones
4. Musical Expression among Deaf and Hearing Song Signers
Anabel Maler
5. The Politics of Sound: Music and Blindness in France, 1750-1830
Ingrid Sykes
6. "They Say We Exchanged Our Eyes for the Xylophone": Resisting Tropes of Disability as Spiritual Deviance in Birifor Music
Brian Hogan
7. Understanding is Seeing: Music Analysis and Blindness
Shersten Johnson

Part 2. Performing Disability
8. Mechanized Bodies: Technology and Supplements in Björk's Electronica
Jennifer Iverson
9. Subhuman or Superhuman? (Musical) Assistive Technology, Performance Enhancement, and the Aesthetic/Moral Debate
Laurie Stras
10. Disabling Music Performance
Blake Howe
11. Music and Bodily Difference in Cirque du Soleil
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton
12. Punk Rock and Disability: Cripping Subculture
George McKay
13. Moving Experiences: Blindness and the Performing Self in Imré Ungár's Chopin
Stefan Sunandan Honisch
14. Stevie Wonder's Tactile Keyboard Mediation, Black Key Compositional Development, and the Quest for Creative Autonomy
Will Fulton
15. Oh, the Stories We Tell! Performer-Audience-Disability
Michael Beckerman
16. The Dancing Ground: Embodied Knowledge, Disability, and Visibility in New Orleans Second Lines
Daniella Santoro

Part 3. Race, Gender, Sexuality
17. A Cannon-Shaped Man with an Amphibian Voice: Castrato and Disability in Eighteenth-Century France
Hedy Law
18. Sexuality, Trauma, and Dissociated Expression
Fred Everett Maus
19. That "Weird and Wonderful Posture": Jump "Jim Crow" and the Performance of Disability
Sean Murray
20. Disabled Moves: Multi-dimensional Music Listening, Disturbing/Activating Differences of Identity
Marianne Kielian-Gilbert

Part 4. War and Trauma
21. Disabled Union Veterans and the Performance of Martial Begging
Michael Accinno
22. "Goodbye, Old Arm": The Domestication of Veterans' Disabilities in Civil War-Era Popular Songs
Devin Burke
23. "The Absurd Disordering of Notes": Dysfunctional Memory in the Post-Traumatic Music of Ivor Gurney
Beth Keyes
24. Vocal Ability and Musical Performances of Nuclear Damages in the Marshall Islands
Jessica Schwartz

Part 5. Premodern Conceptions
25. Lyrical Humor(s) in the 'Fumeur' Songs
Julie Singer
26. Difference, Disability, and Composition in the Late Middle Ages:
Of Antonio "Zachara" da Teramo and Francesco "Il Cieco" da Firenze
Michael Scott Cuthbert
27. Madness and Music as (Dis)ability in Early Modern England
Samantha Bassler
28. Saul, David, and Music's Ideal Body
Blake Howe

Part 6. The Classical Tradition
29. Narratives of Affliction and Recovery in Haydn
Floyd Grave
30. Music and the Labyrinth of Melancholy
Elaine Sisman
31. Musical Prosthesis: Form, Expression, and Narrative Structure in Beethoven's Sonata Movements
Bruce Quaglia
32. Sounds of Mind: Musicians and Madness in the Popular Imagination
James Deaville

Part 7. Modernism and After
33. Modernist Opera's Stigmatized Subjects
Sherry Lee
34. Autism and Postwar Serialism as Neurodiverse Forms of Cultural Modernism
Joseph Straus
35. Broken Facture: Representations of Disability in the Music of Allan Pettersson
Allen Gimbel
36. Musical Modernism's Aesthetics of Disability
Joseph Straus
37. "Defamiliarizing the Familiar": Michael Nyman, Narrative Medicine, and the Composition of Mental Blindness
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton

Part 8. Film and Musical Theater
38. Scene in a New Light: Monstrous Mothers, Disabled Daughters, and the Performance of Feminism and Disability in The Light in the Piazza (2005) and Next to Normal (2008)
Ann M. Fox
39. "Pitiful Creature of Darkness": The Subhuman and the Superhuman in The Phantom of the Opera
Jessica Sternfeld
40. "Waitin' for the Light to Shine": Musicals and Disability
Raymond Knapp
41. Music for Richard III: Cinematic Scoring for the Early Modern Monstrous
Kendra Preston Leonard
42. Hearing a Site of Masculinity in Franz Waxman's Score for Pride of the Marines (1945)
Neil Lerner

Editorial Reviews

"The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies is a ground-breaking contribution to the field of cultural disability studies and to the recent arrival of musicology within this field of study. This publication is a must for anyone seeking a greater understanding of the representation of disability in music. Readers interested in the participation of disabled people in music-making (rather than in cultural representations of impairments) will find a valuable number of essays. And, finally, those interested in the perspectives that impaired musicians can offer about their embodiments, and in research that promotes their inclusion in musicmaking, will also find valuable contributions." —Context

"[T]he Handbook encompasses an impressive assemblage of historical and current musical contexts, artists, and audiences. It is a breakthrough endeavor and opens the door, certainly, for the many scholars now beginning this work. As its editors suggest, it should encourage music scholars to consider cultural concepts of disability, and disability studies scholars to remember the significance of music in experiences of disability. We all have much to teach each other." —Disability Studies Quarterly

"Academics, students, and interested parties in both music and disability studies will find valuable information here; several of the essays may also interest historians in related fields or teachers seeking to help disabled students participate fully in music or discover a creative and communicative outlet. Its timely contribution to both fields cannot go overlooked." —Journal of Musicological Research

From the Publisher