Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music

Neil Lerner, Joseph Straus, Neil Lerner, Joseph Straus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135864378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Disability, understood as culturally stigmatized bodily difference (including physical and mental impairments of all kinds), is a pervasive and permanent aspect of the human condition. While the biology of bodily difference is the proper study for science and medicine, the meaning that we attach to bodily difference is the proper study of humanists. The interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies has recently emerged to theorize social and cultural constructions of the meaning of disability.

Although there has been an astonishing outpouring of humanistic work in Disability Studies in the past ten years, there has been virtually no echo in musicology or music theory. Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music is the first book-length work to focus on the historical and theoretical issues of music as it relates to disability. It shows that music, like literature and the other arts, simultaneously reflects and constructs cultural attitudes toward disability.

Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music promises to be a landmark study for scholars and students of music, disability, and culture.

1

Introduction: Theorizing Disability in Music

NEIL LERNER AND JOSEPH N STRAUS

Just as race, class, and gender have slowly entered the horizon within music scholarship, the lens of disability has now arrived. Te lens metaphor brings some attention to the ways cultural constructions of disability—and language’s complicity within those constructions—recur and inscribe understandings of the world. A lens, after all, can serve to focus light into patterns that are clearer and more easily perceived; eyeglasses are some of the simplest and most familiar technologies used to accommodate visual impairments. The verbal language musicians use also says much about their assumptions. For example, sight singing constitutes a basic element in music education. To perform music within the cultivated tradition, musicians are expected to read musical notation, and so the study of sight singing cultivates the skill of translating printed musical notation into performed sound. Yet the implication behind the phrase sight singing assumes something more: that one must have sight to read music. Actually, one does not have to have sight to read music, as revealed through a number of sight-singing books that have been translated into braille—without any apparent irony over the paradox in the words.

The primary goal of blending music and disability studies is not, however, to set out new rules for policing language. Rather, attention to disability and impairment brings greater attention to music as a manifestation of our embodiment, whether that be as listeners, composers, or performers. Te history of European and American music features a remarkably rich cast of characters whose bodies, both physically and musically, are marked by their impairments, whether they be medieval monks (e.g., Hermannus contractus—in English, Herman the Hunchback; Notker Balbulus, the “stammerer”), trecento organfists (e.g., Francesco Landini, blinded as a child by smallpox), baroque church musicians (e.g., J. S. Bach, who lost his sight late in life), or Viennese symphonfists (e.g., Ludwig van Beethoven). Indeed, once one starts to think about music through the lens of disability, disability suddenly appears everywhere—in the bodies and minds of composers and performers, in the reception histories of musical works, and even in the works themselves, embedded there in the form of persistent narratives. As a paradigmatic example, Beethoven’s deafness,which has played such an important part in the reception of his music, has given rise to what disability scholars call the overcoming narrative: fie central part of the mythology around Beethoven involves his decision to grab fate by the throat and—instead of killing himself over the loss of his hearing—to continue to compose. fie person with a disability, in this case the increasingly deaf composer, overcomes the impairment, as perceived by people without disabilities, to relieve them of their own anxieties about experiencing similar fates.

Disability is generally understood in this volume, following what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls cultural disability studies (see Foreword), as a cultural and social phenomenon rather than a medical one. This intellectual project questions the familiar process by which bodies and minds are compared to a prevailing normative standard and by which deviant bodies or minds are defined as disabled. fie essays in this book chart the cultural and social construction of disability in relation to many different kinds of nonnormative bodies and minds. Paul Attinello’s subject is HIV/AIDS and the music that has emerged in response to it. Maria Cizmic discusses cancer as experienced by the protagonist in the drama W;t, particularly as that experience is inflected by the music accompanying the drama. Both Attinello and Cizmic consider the general question of the relationship between illness and disability.

Neil Lerner discusses dismemberment in the form of the one-handed pianism of his title. Blindness is the subject of Adam Ockelford’s essay, a case study of a talented young girl’s music making, and Jennifer Iverson’s essay, which critiques the familiar conflation of physical and moral blindness in the film Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier, 2000). Blindness is also one topic of Stephanie Jensen-Moulton’s essay on the wildly popular nineteenth-century musician known as “Blind Tom,” but her essay focuses more explicitly on her subject’s cognitive impairments, which she identifies as characteristic of autism. Her interest in autism is shared by other essays: those of Timothy Maloney, who interprets the life and artistry of pianist Glenn Gould in relation to his asserted autism, and Dave Headlam, who argues for a distinctive way of making music autistically as a reflection of a characteristically autistic way of being in the world.

One of the distinguishing features of this collection of essays is its focus on mental, cognitive, and developmental disability, in contrast to the more typical focus within disability studies on physical impairments, particularly deafness, blindness, mobility impairments, and body dismorphisms. Not only are three of the essays about autism, but four more also treat other nonnormative mental conditions. Poundie Burstein reevaluates the music and career of the nineteenth-century French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan. Alkan’s music is unusual in many respects, and there has been a strong tendency among critics to ascribe the eccentricity of the music to the alleged madness of the composer. Burstein suggests that this may have more to do with the persistence of the myth of the mad genius than with the lived reality of Alkan’s life. KellyGross’s essay focuses on the mental trauma and dislocation experienced by the protagonist of the movie Three Colors: Blue (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1993), with the film score as the principal bearer and expression of her interior mental life. Stephen Rodgers’ essay on Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, a work that has long been recognized as formally and harmonically deviant within the conventional world of the nineteenth-century symphony, explores the forms of madness experienced in the composer’s life and expressed within the musical work, relating them to then-contemporary diagnostic categories such as melancholy and erotic monomania. As both Gross and Rodgers show, music has the capacity to reflect inner emotional and mental states perhaps better than art forms freighted with the baggage of language. this may account for the disproportionate interest in these essays on mental and emotional rather than physical disabilities.

Another group of essays in this collection deals with forms of vocal pathology or disfluency. As Laurie Stras observes in her essay on rough, hoarse voices in the performance of popular music, “The disrupted voice conveys meaning even before it conveys language; in Western cultures we hear disruption as pathology, in both the current and obsolete meanings of the word: It is indicative of passions, suffering, disease, malfunction, abnormality.” Among these abnormalities of vocal production is one with particular resonance in the history of music: stuttering. Andrew Oster’s essay describes a long tradition of stuttering characters in early opera, including particularly the character Demo in an opera by the seventeenth-century Italian composer Francesco Cavalli. These stuttering characters provide comic relief: “On the whole, the trope of stuttering remains a persistent vocal marker that distinguishes his and other stuttering characters’ discourse from that of their fellow characters. Singing, represented on the opera stage as aria, fails to destigmatize this fundamental vocal difference.” Within an entirely different musical tradition, Daniel Goldmark identifies a group of stuttering songs from Tin Pan Alley, including the famous “K-K-K-Katy.” Goldmark observes that these songs reinscribe the most prevalent stereotypes about stuttering and thus may have more to reveal about contemporary anxieties about disability than about their ostensible subjects.

Just as the range of disabilities explored in these essays is large, with a perhaps understandable emphasis on mental and emotional impairments and vocal pathologies, the repertoire of music discussed is correspondingly large. Within the Western classical tradition, composers discussed in this collection of essays cover a wide range of historical periods and musical styles from seventeenth-century Italian opera (Cavalli, discussed by Oster) through eighteenth-century classicism (Joseph Haydn, discussed by Marianne Kielian-Gilbert), nineteenth-century romanticism (Alkan, Berlioz, and Johannes Brahms, discussed by Burstein, Rodgers, and Neil Lerner, respectively), early twentieth-century modernism (Arnold Schoenberg and AntonWebern, discussed by Kielian-Gilbert and Joseph Straus), and a variety of more recent music in the classical tradition, including Henryk Górecki, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Arvo Pärt (Cizmic), as well as Shulamit Ran (Kielian-Gilbert). It is interesting to note that none of these composers is disabled in any evident way, but their music can nonetheless be understood to be about disability in some way, either by compositional design or by virtue of the dramatic context in which the music is heard.

Beyond the Western classical tradition, the essays in this collection deal with music in a variety of vernacular or popular traditions, including the songs of Tin Pan Alley (Goldmark), popular songs of a later generation (Stras), and the music of the popular singer Björk, as well as the musical The Sound of Music (Iverson). In addition, a number of the essays consider the role of music in film, video, or drama, including the music of one of the preeminent composers of film music, Max Steiner (Lerner).

A wide range of musical performers also comes under scrutiny in these essays, including a group of popular vocalists—Bing Crosby, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, Connie Boswell, and Julie Andrews—discussed by Stras because of their particular means of vocal production, which are understood as deviant or unhealthy. Within the classical tradition, Maloney explicates the famous performance and lifestyle eccentricities of Glenn Gould in terms of his autism. Jensen-Moulton shows that the autism of Blind Tom can be seen in both his famous, popular, and widely documented performances and in his fascinating, but much less widely studied, compositions.

According to the authors of these essays, music has a variety of stories to tell about disability, many of which are familiar from the extensive literature on the history and culture of disability. In some cases, music can tell, or can be enlisted in telling, a familiar story of disability overcome—of the abnormal normalized. According to Gross, “the narrative trajectory of the film Blue can be read as a typical normalcy narrative … that seeks to rehabilitate and repair deviance or to obliterate difference through a cure.” Part of the cure in this case involves the protagonist of the film asserting her own creative powers through musical composition. In the genre of the horror film, as discussed by Lerner, the narrative trajectory involves normalizing a monstrous deviance of some kind: “Finally the film reveals that the presumed monstrosity of the disembodied hand was nothing more than a hallucination, removing even the possibility of the one-handed pianist and his ostensibly horrific threat to the normal body, as well as the presumably horrific threat to the symbolic body of classical music and its implicit messages of perfect form and perfect execution.”

In his analysis of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Rodgers describes a musical narrative of bodily difference with its own means of representation distinct from those of language. Rodgers pursues this primarily in the formal domain, in terms of formal deformations. He shows that Berlioz’s deviations from standard forms can be understood as one means by which he expressesa notion of mental deviance or abnormality. A similar narrative, in similar musical terms, is the focus of Straus’s discussion of short works by Schoenberg and Webern. A central musical issue in these pieces is that of inversional symmetry, a sense that notes may balance each other around some central axis: “In all of the literature on musical symmetry, there is an emphasis on balance, on the physical sense of symmetrical balance around a fulcrum, of a body in a physically balanced state. In this context, deviations from inversional symmetry are felt as physical disruptions that unbalance the musical body, that create the threat or the reality of a disability, with which the music must then deal in some way. Inversional symmetry and symmetrical balance thus create the possibility for musical narratives that depend on a contrast of normative and nonnormative bodily states.”

A related narrative trajectory involves the marginalization and expulsion from the human community of a disabled character. This is the trajectory traced by Iverson in her discussion of the film Dancer in the Dark: “Expelling Selma [the film’s blind protagonist] from rational, safe society is justified not only by the plot line, then, but also by her irreversible blindness. The plot thus reflects the sociohistorical formula that the physically disabled and emotionally disfigured must be removed from able-bodied society.” Iverson goes on to argue that the film’s soundtrack offers a counternarrative, one in which the protagonist’s disability may be understood in a sympathetic light: “Cutting the other way, it is indeed the soundtrack that offers the opportunity to read a sympathetic representation of disability against the ableist ideology of the narrative.”

In addition to narratives of overcoming, cure, normalization, or expulsion, music has other stories to tell. For example, as a temporal art often concerned with deploying a goal-oriented musical language toward some predetermined end, music is well suited to speaking of a passage toward death. Indeed, as Attinello shows, music may be better at depicting death than at conveying the daily routine of living with an illness: “Much music about AIDS avoids the realities of illness or incapacity … I suggest that a larger teleology is guiding the musical rhetoric, pushing it to ignore the immediacy of daily illness in favor of what comes after. … These songs seem almost eschatological, not experiential—they always seem to outline inevitable and terrible futures, the kinds of futures that a dreaded progressive disease apparently must, by definition, reach. … Though it may be unsurprising, it is also exasperating that so much music about AIDS, even when it foregrounds a variety of experiences or emotions, then allows its temporal universe to collapse into a foreshortened waiting for death.”

In tracing these narratives, the authors in this collection have drawn on the insights of disability studies. Four lessons in particular seem to have been well learned. fie first lesson is that disability is better understood as a cultural and social construction than as a pathology of individual bodies. A critique of the dominant medical model of disability is at work, either explicitly or implicitly,in most of the essays in this collection. For example, in her analysis of the drama W;t, Cizmic observes that “by expressing and performing aspects of [the protagonist] Vivian’s physical sensations of illness, the film’s music functions as a critique of the medical master narrative and aids Vivian’s narrating voice to shape the representation of her own body.” By amplifying her voice, music thus assists the dramatic character in articulating a nonmedical counternarrative. Similarly, Headlam’s essay argues that autism is understood better as a culture than as a curable pathology: “Autism may be regarded as an alternate form of consciousness and a distinct worldview.” Headlam goes on to adduce a distinctive style of autistic music-making as evidence of that consciousness and worldview.

In their essays, both Jensen-Moulton and Maloney engage in the potentially problematic practice of posthumous diagnosis. In what may initially appear as an embrace of the medical model, Jensen-Moulton analyzes the stage behavior and musical compositions of Blind Tom as symptoms of his autism, and Maloney does the same for Gould’s famous eccentricities of demeanor and performance, complete with citations of the relevant diagonistic criteria drawn from medical manuals. But in both essays, the medical approach to disability is only the starting point for an effort to come to terms with two poorly understood musicians in a humanistic and holistic way: In both cases, autism is not the end of the story; rather, it is the starting point for a sympathetic account in which the life and artistry of these two musicians are understood, for the first time, in a persuasively integrated way. This kind of sympathetic identification also underpins Ockelford’s case study of a vocal improvisation by a sight-impaired young girl whose music-making is shaped in interesting ways by her disability.

The cultural construction of disability, rather than its more familiar medicalization, is also a theme in Burstein’s essay on Alkan. Burstein shows that Alkan has been constructed as mad by critics and audiences in thrall to the cultural trope of the mad artistic genius. But what has been constructed can be deconstructed, and Burstein shows that “it might well be that Alkan did not put his life into his music but rather that the public has put his music into his life.”

A second lesson that the authors of these essays have taken from disability studies is the insight that disability is contextual—defined by local society and culture rather than an immutable and inherent quality of individual minds or bodies. Stras’s essay, for example, shows that a certain kind of damage to the vocal chords may be disqualifying in one domain (e.g., classical performance, daily speech) and enabling in another (e.g., certain popular singing traditions): “This essay begins an examination of why and how damage signifies in the singing voice, how it is valued or not, and how a marker of corporeal impairment, normally a site of cultural anxiety, might also act as a catalyst for anxiety’s release. Singers engaged in popular music might suggest that vocal damage has acquired the status of a culturally inscribed desirable mutilation.”

Similarly, Lerner explores the ways one-handedness is disabling in a particular context, namely with respect to playing the piano—“the constructed monstrosity of the solitary hand.” In this context, the significant number of works written for the left hand alone function as a way of accommodating a disability. This kind of physical accommodation of disability is becoming more common in our daily lives, but remains a striking phenomenon in works of art.

Like one-handedness with respect to piano playing, stuttering is a disability that is problematic in life, and even more so with respect to musical performance. As Oster observes, “Perhaps the most debilitating of vocal disabilities is stuttering, the spasmodic repetition or prolongation of certain syllables of speech.” Vocal damage, one-handedness, and stuttering are thus impairments that may become disabling in particular musical contexts, and permissible or even desirable in others.

A third lesson the authors of this collection have learned from disability studies is that disability is extraordinarily pervasive as a dramatic element in works of art, where it is often “prostheticized” by the artistic narrative, which seeks to disguise or obliterate it (Mitchell and Snyder 2000, 9). According to Cizmic, for example, music functions prosthetically for Vivian, the protagonist of W;t. It reinforces her antimedical counternarrative and helps her communicate when language fails. Music is thus a supplement or prosthesis to compensate for the failure of language. Similarly, Lerner argues that the musical score for The Beast with Five Fingers (Robert Florey, 1946) functions prosthetically with respect to the apparent deficiencies of a one-handed pianist. Steiner’s elaborate music functions as a “musical prosthesis, audibly giving us much more sound than one hand alone could produce. … [It] substitutes a greater pianistic sound than the pianist pictured on the screen could have actually produced by himself.”

In Björk’s music...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributing Authors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Theorizing Disability in Music
• Part I Narrating Disability Musically
• Part II Performing Disability Musically
• Part III Composing Disability Musically
• References
• Index