|
The Music and Disability Study Group is proud to announce our second Community of Practice session, which will be on October 17th, 2025 at 10:00am PST/1:00pm EST via Zoom. This session will feature graduate students Robert Gross and Eric Whitmer.
Please register to the session using the following link: https://utexas.zoom.us/meeting/register/jwOKndp3Q3aQbyE1IRcrXQ Abstracts: Disability Rhetoric in Molly Joyce’s “Cure” “Cure” is a movement from disabled composer Molly Joyce’s 2022 multi-movement album Perspective, which integrates the voices of many disabled people speaking on various disability topics (e.g., cure, isolation, darkness, access, care, control, etc.) accompanied by Joyce’s music. “Cure” is the longest movement on the album, clocking in at 4 minutes and 50 seconds, and perhaps entails the broadest lack of consensus on a given topic in the represented voices of speaking disabled people that we hear on the Perspective album. There is considerable disagreement on the recording of “Cure” on what the concept of “cure” means (reflecting, perhaps, wider disagreement in the disability community), and for that reason, “Cure” is a particularly intriguing and interesting movement for study and comment. This talk examines the multivalent voices expressed in “Cure,” ranging from cure- positive attitudes, cure-ambivalent attitudes, and cure-negative attitudes. The implications of these disparate positions will be discussed as well. Alison Kafer, in her 2013 book Feminist, Queer, Crip, states that she “recognizes the possibility of simultaneously desiring to be cured of chronic pain and to be identified and allied with disabled people.” However, as Eli Clare writes in his 2017 book Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, “cure is slippery.” This slipperiness of the concept of “cure” will also be examined and discussed. Finally, the implications of Joyce’s musical framings of each commentary will be considered. Hearing the Sa(l)vage: Music & Autistic Children in Mid-Century America Throughout the disciplines of music therapy and autism research, claims that musical practices can lead to elimination and curement of autistic behaviors abound. This presentation traces practitioners across the fields of music therapy and autistic research in the 1950’s and 60’ as researchers in rapidly developing fields claim that musical practices can eliminate autistic behaviors and potentially “cure” autism. As Remi Yergeau theorized in Authoring Autism, autism can be observed as a rhetorical condition that narrates the bodymind and precludes an individual from exercising free will. Autistic music making follows a similar path to the rhetorical devices Yergeau identifies, where researchers claim that music making is a signal of a normative being entrapped by an autistic cage. This rhetorical strategy is what Yergeau terms a “shitty narrative,” or a rhetorical strategy that prevents an autistic person from being perceived as being fully human. In locating the entanglement of music therapy and autism research, I argue these “shitty” musical narratives limit any musicking done by an autistic person to a sounding of their pathologized bodyminds. Therefore any kind of anti-ableist musical praxis is predicated on dismantling the claim that music therapy can treat autism (something the American Music Therapy Association continues to espouse to this day). To do so, I engage in the time-honored tradition of autistic activism through satire by presenting musical works I have composed to cure “allism” and “allistic” behaviors. By the end, I endeavor to rid the world of the evils of allism and liberate the neurodivergent person inside all of us through the universal power of music. Bios: Robert Gross holds a DMA in music composition from University of Southern California, and is currently a PhD student in music theory at University of Maryland. He is also a Board-Certified Music Therapist. Eric Whitmer is an interdisciplinary musician, artist, and scholar interested in the intersections of music, community, and morality. They are a PhD Pre-Candidate in musicology with historical emphasis at the University of Michigan. Their musicological work focuses on American musical cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries, particularly on the role of music in education, philanthropy, and social uplift.
0 Comments
Below are presentations and sessions that involve disability topics at the American Musicological Society / Society for Music Theory joint meeting in Minneapolis on November 6-9, 2025.
Stay tuned for other initiatives that our DisMus Study Group and affiliated Community of Practice will be supporting and collaborating with! Session: Disability in Musical Topics and Form Time: Thursday, 06/Nov/2025: 2:15pm - 3:45pm Session Chair: Shersten Johnson, University of St. Thomas Location: Greenway Ballroom E-F “Silent Hearing” in Marc Applebaum’s Darmstadt Kindergarten Drake Edward Eshleman Indiana University Marc Applebaum’s 2015 piece for string quartet, Darmstadt Kindergarten, disrupts visual performance standards through its use of non-instrumental, choreographed hand gestures. In this paper, I employ Joseph Straus’s notion of “deaf hearing” – particularly its constituent domains of “seeing” and “silent,” or “inner” hearing – to argue that Darmstadt Kindergarten welcomes its listeners to, per the composer, “‘hear’ the instrumental material when later voiced by choreographed action,” even when entirely silent. (Straus 2011, 167–170; Applebaum 2015). In Darmstadt Kindergarten, after each repetition of a seventeen-measure theme, one of the four performers rises from their chair, sets their instrument down, and performs the next repetition choreographically – through carefully-synchronized hand gestures rather than instrumental sounds – such that the final repetition of the theme is entirely choreographic and ostensibly silent. In my analysis, I outline the relationship between the piece's instrumental and choreographic versions. To do so, I divide the score into ten “gestural groups,” each of which possesses a distinct character; these groups serve as the basic formal units of the piece. This division allows for the comparison between instrumental and choreographic material, both within one performer’s part and across the ensemble. Finally, I consider how the piece’s macrostructure complicates the listener/viewer’s ability to comprehend the piece and requires them to engage in “silent hearing.” Following this analysis, I consider how the piece’s optional introduction – which consists of a repetition of the theme played on instruments, but with the cellist silently miming its instrumental part – engages with scholarship on mimetic comprehension, bodily hearing, and motor theories of perception (Cox 2016; Mead 1999; Godøy 2019). I also discuss the relationship and difference between Applebaum’s choreographic gesture and practices of musical signing in Deaf music. I argue that, although Applebaum’s means for invoking his audience’s “aural imagination” are distinct from Deaf musical practices, they encourage audiences to reconsider what it means to “hear” and challenge established standardized listening practices. Finally, I encourage further scholarship on music and performance which, through their structure, framing, or presentation, encourages audiences to partake in disablist or otherwise non-normative modes of hearing. How Sign Language Analyzes Musical Form Anabel Maler University of British Columbia In this talk, I reframe sign language cover songs as music analysis, arguing that Deaf listeners are expert formal analysts who use sign language to convey analytical insights into the form of existing pieces of popular music through the medium of sign language cover songs. Sign language cover songs are placed on a continuum from literal to free translations, and from descriptive to suggestive analysis. I elaborate on three analytical parameters: movement type, space, and nonmanual markers. As I have argued, these elements are some of the fundamental building blocks of musicality in sign language (2024, 10). I demonstrate how each parameter can be used to articulate aspects of musical form. I argue that sign language covers create analytical commentary on the music that should not be ignored. Reframing sign language covers as music analysis highlights the wealth of music-analytical information emerging from Deaf cultures. Dissonant Depictions: Topics and the Troping of Autism Tiffany Ta University of California, Santa Barbara Fictional depictions of autistic characters in film and television often misrepresent the realities of autism, leading to harmful stereotypes. These portrayals may frame autistic individuals as savant geniuses or as emotionally cold, dangerous figures, which generate unrealistic expectations and fuel societal misunderstandings. Additionally, autistic characters are frequently infantilized, undermining their autonomy and making it more difficult for them to be taken seriously in both professional and personal contexts. These skewed portrayals contribute to a lack of appropriate support and accommodations, as society either assumes that autistic individuals do not need assistance or are too difficult to engage with. As a result, autistic people often face challenges in accessing necessary services, employment opportunities, and social acceptance. This paper uses topic theory (Ratner 1980) and the Congruence-Associationist Model (CAM) (Cohen 2013) to analyze how music and visual editing amplify these misrepresentations. For example, I examine the portrayal of Woo Young-Woo, the protagonist of the Netflix series Extraordinary Attorney Woo (2022), a 27-year-old lawyer who is also autistic. The character’s musical theme, “Woo Young-Woo, the Same Backwards and Forwards” (WYW), reinforces her infantilized depiction, with the music evoking the childhood topic through musical features and socio-cultural associations (Bourne 2024). Despite Woo’s adult status, the theme is employed during key moments of her introduction, further associating her with childlike qualities. The paper explores how the theme embeds the childhood topic with features like major mode, high instrumentation, and syncopation. Visuals further support these associations, including Woo’s whimsical, childlike surroundings and actions. These audiovisual cues conspire to reinforce the infantilization of autistic adults, perpetuating stereotypes that affect public perceptions of autism. By revealing these problematic portrayals, the paper argues for more accurate and nuanced depictions of autism that will foster greater understanding, promote societal acceptance, and ensure autistic individuals receive the respect and support they deserve. Session: Sounding Disability Time: Friday, 07/Nov/2025: 9:00am - 10:30am Session Chair: Fred Maus Discussant: David VanderHamm, Johnson County Community College Location: Lakeshore B Music and visual disability in the early modern Hispanic world: The tradition of blind organists Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita Universidad de Granada The association between music and visual disability has been a constant throughout history in a variety of cultures. From the Greco-Roman period, visual disability has been associated with special musical and mnemotechnic abilities, and music has customarily represented a professional path for people with visual disability. It was usual that blind children were taught how to play a musical instrument to earn a living, which is reflected in the early modern tradition of blind oracioneros, who recited and sang prayers and songs accompanying themselves with plucked or bowed string instruments in return for alms, representing a fundamental element of the soundscape of numerous urban centers in countries such as Italy and Spain. Likewise, although music notation for blind people and music teaching institutions for them emerged in the eighteenth century, in Spain, as in other European countries, there was a substantial presence of organists who reached recognition and prestige before the eighteenth century and worked at the royal court, universities or ecclesiastical institutions, such as Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566), Francisco Salinas (1513-1590), Pablo Bruna (1611-1679) or Pablo Nassarre (1650-1730). This paper aims to rethink, from the perspective of disability, the career and historiographical position of early modern Hispanic organists with visual disability, in order to assess how this affected their creative process, their careers, the written transmission of their works, and the reception of their music output by audiences and historians. In the early modern Hispanic context, the Christian association between blindness and devotion influenced the perception of this disability, so blind musicians were considered to have a profound spiritual capacity to affect the deepest emotions of people through music. This notion of compensation and the binarism between physical disability and intellectual and spiritual overcapacity remained in historiography. Through an analysis of archival documents, testimonies of their contemporaries, and the studies on these musicians published from the nineteenth century onwards, this paper argues that disability not only functioned as a sign of identity for these organists during their careers, but was also used by music historiography to glorify them as emblems of the so-called Spanish musical mysticism. Rendering Disability: Experiencing the Sonically Disabled Film Body Andrew Tubbs Washington University in St. Louis, Since the phenomenological turn of the 1990s, scholars have explicated how Hollywood filmmakers harness image and sound to develop a material connection between the perceiver’s body and the bodies on screen. Phrases such as the film body, the cinematic body, body genres, and the skin of the film aggressively announced the importance of embodiment. As Jonathan Sterne claims, despite this refocused attention, phenomenological arguments frequently ignored impairment and disability by centering a bodymind with full command of its faculties (2021). This study strives to crip our theories of cinematic sound by reimagining phenomenological film theory, specifically the groundbreaking work of Vivian Sobchack (1992), to contend that if films have bodies, then those bodies can be rendered sonically disabled. Inspired by Michel Chion (1994), this project introduces the concept of rendering disability as a framework to describe how films utilize sound design and the musical score to sonically simulate, stand in for, approximate, and flesh out the phantasmatic disabled figure. The filmic apparatus typically approximates a normative, yet hyper-capable, bodily experience that, in Sobchack’s words, “signifies possibilities and liberation from the disfigured bodies some of us presently live” (163). However, when the disabled bodymind enters frame, filmmakers often choose to aurally reproduce the character’s impaired phenomenology. This sonically disabled body offers presumedly able-bodied audience members a novel, yet disconcerting, proprioceptive episode. According to Arnie Cox’s “mimetic hypothesis,” perceivers, to various levels of consciousness, interpret musical stimuli by imitating the sound within their bodies (2016). Internalizing the character’s musical impairment activates an intense kinesthetic awareness of the stark differences and troubling similarities between the disabled and non-disabled form. To demonstrate, this paper conducts a close reading of the score for I Am Sam (2001). John Powell’s intricately layered electronic ostinatos render several stereotypes of a neurodivergent symptomology. The music’s hyperactive temporalities place perceivers in a brain undergoing sensory overload. This musical stimming may be affectively exhilarating, but it represents a potential to undermine the audience’s capacitated, able-bodied subject position. To resolve this tension, director Jessie Nelson juxtaposed Powell’s score with covers of Beatles tunes to depict the character’s childlike, nonthreatening nature. Traces of d/Deaf History: Listening to Henri Gaillard's 1918 Laboratoire de la Parole Recording Sarah Fuchs Royal College of Music, London On 26 August 1918, the renowned deaf author and activist Henri Gaillard (1866–1939) returned to the specialist school he had attended, the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets de Paris, in which a state-of-the-art ‘speech laboratory’ had recently been installed. Inaugurated in 1912, the Laboratoire de la Parole had come to play an important part in the Institution’s pedagogical practices, just as it was beginning to in therapeutic musical practices: it was there that the deaf and the otherwise vocally disenfranchised came for analysis of their spoken and sung French, for the Laboratoire’s director Hector Marichelle to examine them with the help of his many scientific instruments. One of most significant of these instruments—as Gaillard reported in La Gazette des Sourds-Muets—was a specially designed phonograph system that could transcribe pupils’ wax cylinder recordings onto paper, thus allowing them to see their own vocal traces and compare them with those of their hearing professors. Over the course of his visit, Gaillard—who sometimes described himself as ‘sourd-parlant’ (‘deaf-speaking’)—made a recording, repeating the words ‘toujours mieux’ (‘ever better’) after Marichelle. In the transcription he saw the effects of his early-in-life hearing loss: a lack of tonal variation. The transcription of Gaillard’s recording has been lost, but the recording itself survives, one of 228 wax cylinders preserved by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The larger project from which this paper is drawn examines the history of this collection, investigating how it found its way to the BNF and what has happened to it since being digitised and catalogued alongside more straightforward items in the BNF's care. Gaillard’s cylinder, for example, is described as an interaction between professor and pupil rather than two equals, one hearing, the other not—an easy mistake to make, as it follows the same pattern of other sessions featuring ‘impaired’ students and ailing singers and their teachers/therapists, yet one that tells us something striking about the cataloguer’s expectations of what expertise could or should sound like (Holmes 2017). Contextualising Gaillard’s recording in his time and also in ours, this paper considers how d/Deaf histories have been—are still—told through their traces, ‘parlant’ and otherwise. SMT Committee on Disability and Accessibility Brown Bag Lunch Time: Friday, 07/Nov/2025: 12:30pm - 2:00pm Location: Lake Nokomis Session: Musicking in Disabled Community: Access Intimacy and Cultural Activism. Time: Saturday, 08/Nov/2025: 12:30pm - 2:00pm Location: Lake Minnetonka Musicking in Disabled Community: Access Intimacy and Cultural Activism. Chair(s): Rena Roussin (Western University), Sarah Miller (UC Davis), Tekla Babyak (Disabled Independent Scholar), Andrew Dell'Antonio (Round Rock, TX) Organized by the AMS Music and Disability Study Group. The Music and Disability Study Group of the AMS hosts three presentations and a conversation on the theme “Musicking in Disabled Community: Access Intimacy and Cultural Activism.” We have chosen three presentations that:
The presentations will be followed by general conversation on the themes above. All are welcome! Access Culture at the Cedar Elizabeth McLain Virginia Tech My presentation will focus on my recent work with the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis, which bills itself as "Minnesota's premiere venue for global music and dance" and "The only all-ages venue of its kind in the Midwest." The Cedar states that its "mission is to promote intercultural appreciation and understanding through the presentation of global music and dance," and that it is "committed to artistic excellence and integrity, diversity of programming, support for emerging artists, and community outreach". I have been collaborating with the Cedar on systematic approaches to access and accessibility that move beyond mere legal compliance into cultural praxis. I will summarize our work so far and reflect on what I've learned from this public musicology (community musicology?) collaboration. ArtsAbly and Disability Culture Diane Kolin York University, Toronto, Canada In his article “What Is Disability Culture?” (2002), Steve Brown explores the different representations and possible definitions of this concept, driven by the diversity of intersectionalities of the field of Disability Studies with other underrepresented communities. Brown reminds that public education is the key to a better understanding of Disability Culture. How to educate society to show the strengths of Disability as a diversity culture? I believe in the power of educating and learning, for both children and adults. I also believe in storytelling and conversations. I founded ArtsAbly in February 2024, with the aim to emphasize the role of artists or arts professionals with disabilities. Through its website, free resources such as books and movies about arts and disability can be found. The workshops organized by ArtsAbly allow music schools students to engage in multiple ways of playing instruments, singing, and reading music, from sign language performances to Braille scores reading and playing instruments with different parts of the body or without touch. Its podcast, “ArtsAbly in Conversation,” highlights the life and career of artists with disabilities across the globe. Following principles of the social model of disability, ArtsAbly defends Disability Culture via these intimate conversations by and with people with disabilities working in the arts. Crip Sonorities Molly Joyce University of Virginia I will present on a forthcoming project titled Crip Sonorities, commissioned by the Manchester International Festival for 2027. This work connects Mia Mingus’s concept of “access intimacy” with acoustics and disability history—focusing on Manchester, UK. The project highlights the resonances of spaces central to Manchester’s disability history, particularly physical and digital environments shaped by and for disabled people: hallways, ramps, elevators, Zoom hangouts, access checks, and more. While such access features are often considered visually, their sonic dimensions are rarely explored. Crip Sonorities addresses this gap by recording and composing with the acoustics of these spaces to foreground their aural textures. This builds on earlier community-based work, such as Perspective, an ongoing interview project with disabled participants, and early sound experiments sampling ADA-compliant hallways at the University of Virginia. The final outcome will include a musical composition and a downloadable reverb pack derived from these site-specific recordings. Inspired by Mingus’s framing of access intimacy as “that elusive, hard-to-describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs,” the project seeks to cultivate a kind of acoustic intimacy.By capturing the literal resonances of meaningful disability spaces, the project invites listeners to connect with access on a sonic level. The presentation will share early sound experiments, research, and conceptual framing as the project begins identifying key Manchester sites—both physical and virtual—for sonic exploration and public engagement. Session: Opera and Disability Studies Time: Sunday, 09/Nov/2025: 9:00am - 10:30am Location: Lakeshore C Silent Sirens, Singing Signs: Music’s Gestures in Unsuk Chin’s Le Silence des Sirènes and Christine Sun Kim’s Face Opera II Samantha Kim Heinle San Francisco Conservatory of Music “The Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song: their silence.” The silent siren imagined by Franz Kafka in an eponymous parable raises a seeming paradox. The siren, mythologized for the sound of her voice, is more powerful when she chooses to remain silent. For musicologists, Kafka’s paradox confronts us with a challenge: how might we reorient our study to think about the aspects of music-making that are inaudible? As the field of musicology endeavors to include ever more musics, methodologies, and voices, the silent siren invites us to reharmonize to a more expansive aural paradigm—one in which we might tune in to music beyond its sounding. This paper explores the possibilities posed by such a siren in two relatively recent works. Unsuk Chin’s 2014 composition for soprano and orchestra, Le Silence des Sirènes, takes its central concept (and title) from Kafka’s parable. As the siren struggles to entrance her audience through song, her voice fades away until only her gestures remain. Yet these gestures continue to entwine her with the music, even more intensely than her song. The classical Homeric siren is rendered mute, supplanted by a modernist siren empowered by silence. In the silence of the siren, Chin invites us to reconsider what it means to “make music.” Christine Sun Kim’s 2015 performance artwork, Face Opera II, takes Chin’s turn from aurality to physicality to an extreme, demonstrating what it might mean for music to draw power from silence. Nine Deaf performers respond to an ASL gloss displayed on a screen, but without using their hands. Instead, they rely solely on facial gestures and body movements to convey “tone.” Kim’s piece divorces musicality from sonic—and lexical—index, suggesting song that might exist without vocalization. In her gestural, inaudible opera, Kim proposes that ASL creates a kind of silent music. These compositions ask what it might mean for music’s silence to pierce as keenly as its sound. As we rewire one of the major senses—the aural—we follow Kafka towards a minor listening practice that no longer remains unheard. Shadows and Schmerzenskind: In/Fertility in Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Die Frau ohne Schatten Madison Schindele The Graduate Center, CUNY From mad divas wielding daggers to sopranos coughing blood, performances of disabled women pervade opera repertoire. Among discourse at the intersection of opera, gender, and disability, scholars largely agree that representations of disabled women in opera mirror lived experiences of marginalization, vulnerability, and alienation (Lee 2015), their scholarship working to imagine new aesthetic and representational worlds on the opera stage (Armstrong 2019). While scholarship at this intersection has addressed a variety of disability topics, the common opera narrative and lived experience of in/fertility has not yet been considered. Informed by the social model of disability, in/fertility emerges as a construction of deviance; where reproduction functions as central to cultural conceptions of womanhood, in/fertility disables women from fulfilling this gendered expectation. I address this gap by investigating the representation of in/fertility in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), revealing how narrative and dramaturgical representations of in/fertility align with social contexts of reproduction. Die Frau ohne Schatten centers on a barren Empress who must venture into the human world to purchase a shadow (Hofmannsthal’s metaphor for fertility), or her husband will turn to stone. Therefore, the Empress’ in/fertility is positioned as narrative prosthesis, or the dependency upon disability as a metaphorical crutch, and a problem the plot aims to solve (Mitchell/Snyder, 2006). My paper first identities in/fertility symbols in Hofmannsthal’s libretto, connecting them to broader social contexts of reproduction during the opera’s conception, before surveying the onslaught of recent productions, such as that by the Metropolitan Opera (Nov-Dec. 2024), Deutsche Oper Berlin (Jan. 2025), Staatsoper Berlin (Oct.-Nov. 2024), and Neukölln Oper (June-July 2024) for their dramaturgical representations of in/fertility. Throughout my investigation, I maintain that the opera’s in/fertility narrative reflects the social and political logics of reproduction at the time of its conception, and that such logics are either replicated or challenged in productions today. In doing so, I consider the responsibility that opera companies wield when producing operas blatantly about women’s reproductive responsibility. As reproductive rights are continually threatened, we must challenge how those marginalized for their reproductive ability are portrayed on stage. Disability as Narrative Prosthesis in Seventeenth-Century Venetian Opera Júlia Coelho University of North Texas Representations of disabilities have long been present in various artistic fields, particularly in contexts where audiences harbor an interest in spectacularizing individuals with different abilities and medical conditions. As the success of seventeenth-century Venetian opera was tied to its commercial outcome, thus depending upon the approval of opera goers, composers and librettists wrote in ways to appeal to them, often reflecting contemporary socio-cultural values. The portrayals of disability in Venetian opera therefore reflect historical understandings of this concept, both in its physiological, embodied forms, as well as its social constructions (Howe/Strauss 2016). This paper brings an interdisciplinary approach to early opera, drawing on literary studies and disability history to investigate how disability was represented in this context (Davis 2016/Schianchi 2012). I analyze contemporaneous literary and medical sources to demonstrate how these informed dramaturgical and musical interpretations of disability in Venetian operas. One of the most valuable literary genres to understand disability from a social perspective is novels from intellectual academies, such as Cento Novelle (1651). As for physiological standpoints, the descriptions of various conditions in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century medical compendia and teratological treatises offer a crucial insight, particularly those written by physicians associated to Padova and Venice, namely Mercuriale, Santorio, and Capivaccio. Several Italian librettists and composers, such as Cavalli, Pagliardi, and Sartorio, interpreted and portrayed various disabilities in their operas, showing a clear connection to these contemporaneous sources. I present two specific examples – blindness and kyphosis (symptomatized by a rounded back, often manifested with dwarfism) – to demonstrate a methodological approach for analyzing various representations of disability. By re-evaluating the textual and musical gestures in Venetian opera through this lens, I argue that these characters functioned as a crutch or “narrative prosthesis” (Mitchell/Snyder 2014) to index a stocked characterization, comic relief, or a problem to be overcome. This analysis will help demonstrating how certain disability tropes were reinforced in public opera, contextualizing the public discourse through art. By emphasizing the undesirability and alterity of disability, these representations not only reflect the societal treatment at the time, but also provide an insight on disability tropes still persisting today. Congratulations to our own Tekla Babyak for her appointment as Director-at-Large on the AMS Board of Directors! Babyak has long been an advocate for access and accommodations in higher education, and she presently serves as Alternate Officer for the AMS Music and Disability Study Group. We are so grateful for all of her work in the DisMus community, and we excitedly celebrate this incredible honor alongside her.
Read more: https://www.amsmusicology.org/babyak-appointed-director-at-large/
Please see the previous blog post for details on our Community of Practice Colloquium Series launch!
Transcript available here If you want to be on our email notification list for future events, please send a message to [email protected] and provide your email address. Thanks! The AMS Music and Disability Study Group proudly launches its Community of Practice colloquium series on Sunday, April 20th, 4:00pm EST/1:00pm PST via Zoom! RECORDING NOW AVAILABLE! CART will be provided - please let us know when registering if you need other accommodations to participate ![[ALT TEXT: The AMS Music and Disability Study Group Presents, Community of Practice, Sunday, April 20th, 4:00pm EST/1:00pm PST. The flyer calls upon various iconography associated with Disability Pride, including the sunflower, butterfly, and Disability Pride Flag rainbow. A hand-drawn white picket fence is adorned with large sunflowers, bursting with vibrant yellows and golds. As an invitation of community, the gate of the fence stands open. A small pink butterfly flutters around the flowers. The Disability Pride rainbow arcs above the image.]Picture](/uploads/6/7/6/5/67651803/community-of-practice-1_orig.jpg) [IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The AMS Music and Disability Study Group Presents, Community of Practice, Sunday, April 20th, 4:00pm EST/1:00pm PST. The flyer calls upon various iconography associated with Disability Pride, including the sunflower, butterfly, and Disability Pride Flag rainbow. A hand-drawn white picket fence is adorned with large sunflowers, bursting with vibrant yellows and golds. As an invitation of community, the gate of the fence stands open. A small pink butterfly flutters around the flowers. The Disability Pride rainbow arcs above the image.] We kick off the series with Professor Adeline Mueller, who presents on the many factors involved in coordinating an accessible academic conference. Adeline Mueller is Associate Professor of Music at Mount Holyoke College. She specializes in opera and art song by Mozart and his contemporaries, particularly in German-speaking Europe, with additional research interests in music and childhood, marginalized composers, and silent film music. Her book Mozart and the Mediation of Childhood was published in 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. She has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Music (2013) and Opera Quarterly (2012 and 2013), and contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to The Magic Flute (2023), Mozart in Context (Cambridge, 2018), and Wagner and Cinema (Indiana, 2010). Last fall she co-organized a symposium entitled Reframing the Gaze: Maria Theresia Paradis, Blind Musicians, and Musical Culture Before and After Braille, and she has recently organized and performed in a book event and concert on the trailblazing songwriter Connie Converse (Mount Holyoke College class of 1946). The conference will conclude with a brief community discussion on the future of the Community of Practice series. DisMus offers this series as an opportunity to re-define accessibility in higher education and to reconsider the manner in which music academics share knowledge and engage in community building. We invite you to consider participating in this series through a variety of presentation styles from traditional papers to collaborative and performance-based presentations or workshops. Please register for the upcoming colloquium using the following link: CART will be provided - please let us know when registering if you need other accommodations to participate. https://utexas.zoom.us/meeting/register/mr8XDCRvT1Oj5CrAuFbnSw We hope to see you there! The Music and Disability Study Group of the AMS announces a call for presentations at our sponsored session at the national AMS Meeting in Minneapolis, MN on November 6-9, 2025.
The general theme for our call is “Musicking in Disabled Community: Access Intimacy and Cultural Activism.” We especially welcome proposals for presentations about projects and studies that:
The session will feature a series of 10-minute talks. Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to [email protected]. The submission deadline is Monday, April 7, 2025. Acceptance notifications will be communicated by the end of April. This Call for Presentations is part of a broader Call for Participation in conversations related to these topics, co-sponsored by our Music and Disability Community of Practice and others, that will take place in person and online; synchronously and asynchronously; before, during, and after the AMS-Minneapolis meeting. More details on that Call for Participation are forthcoming. While membership in AMS and registration for the Minneapolis conference are required for presentation at the Study Group session itself because of AMS policy, we are eager for those who want to contribute to our conversations to submit their proposals regardless of affiliation or intention to attend the Minneapolis meeting, and are determined to include as many voices as possible in the Community of Practice events. Dear Music and Disability Study Group and Friends,
The AMS Music and Disability Study Group (DisMus) is in the process of launching a Community of Practice that will host both a colloquium series and a community care circle. Our primary goal in launching this Community of Practice is to prioritize accessibility and the building of community, support, and solidarity among our membership. We believe it is the responsibility of the AMS to accommodate the access needs of all participating members; therefore, DisMus offers this series as an opportunity to re-define accessibility in higher education and to reconsider the manner in which music academics share knowledge and engage in community building. We invite you to consider participating in this series through a variety of presentation styles from traditional papers to collaborative and performance-based presentations or workshops. We also invite you to fill out the following survey, which will help us inform the events our community is most interested in, and what steps we can take to ensure we are meeting everyone’s access needs. http://bit.ly/DisMusSurvey2025 We are excited to receive your honest feedback! Andrew Dell’Antonio, Co-Officer Sarah Miller, Co-Officer Rena Roussin, Co-Officer Joint session, AMS Music and Disability Study Group and Pedagogy Study Group Within higher education, the terms “accessibility” and “accommodation” are often presented within a narrow framework that mandates institutional compliance to legal statutes such as the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008 (ADAAA), and Section 504 and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It is no wonder, then, that many of the people teaching and studying in higher education have a limited understanding of what constitutes accessibility and accommodation. While this could be said of most academic fields, it is especially pertinent to musicology, a discipline that has historically privileged hearing-centric engagement with sound and has centered the white, middle-class, Euro-American, heterosexual, able-bodied, able-minded, and cis-male experience as normative. Thus we would maintain that music studies count among the most fraught among the fields of humanities in terms of disability because of inherent expectations of fully abled bodyminds, coupled with a historically ableist culture that equates accessibility with compliance. Within and across institutions of higher learning, disability is often relegated to a narrow concern with compliance-based “access” to buildings, dorms, resources, and to learning resources and classrooms. While these are valuable aspects of creating inclusive spaces, they are limited in scope. We define accessibility as the ability for all people to engage with spaces, technologies, services, devices, or environments regardless of race, class, disability, gender identity, or sexuality. It is important to note that many factors can limit one’s access to learning resources, spaces, and opportunities, which the study of music can exacerbate. In addition to physical barriers, students may face financial obstacles to educational opportunities and additional burdens of working and caring for a family. Instructors, including graduate TAs, guest lecturers, and contingent faculty, may have access needs that are not fully met by institutional support systems. These barriers and concerns can be further compounded by intersectional experiences of marginalization. Through this panel, we intend to address colleagues in the AMS about the barriers and obstacles faced in teaching music and to offer them alternatives through disability-informed pedagogy. Building on Jay T. Dolmage’s generative formulation “academic ableism,” we will propose “musical ableism”/”musical ableisms” as a conceptual space within which to come to grips with assumptions expressed through music. Critical pedagogy ordinarily assumes language to be the necessary communicative medium for analyzing how education–embedded in systems of power, privilege, and oppression–perpetuates restrictive notions about whose knowledge is worthy. But what if critical pedagogy takes place, instead, through music as a communicative and educative medium? What kinds of interventions and analyses of “musical ableisms” would make such a pedagogical framework not only possible, but more importantly, critical? The panelists aim to provide strategies for implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and other disability-oriented approaches in musicological curricula and course design in terms of course overview, learning outcomes, listening examples, classroom challenges, and accessibility support for accommodations. UDL is intended to provide a more equitable environment for all students and instructors by offering a holistic approach to cultivating diverse pedagogical practices that take all of these factors into account. Ultimately, we argue that instructors play a valuable role in expanding accessibility measures by engendering inclusion as an essential facet of classroom culture rather than mere adherence to institutional policy. Our panel will present contributions from music(ology) instructors who wish to challenge the narratives that mandate adherence to established normativity and who intend to create accessible environments in their music classrooms. The session will feature a series of 10-minute talks. Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to [email protected]. The submission deadline is Tuesday, April 30, 2024. Acceptance notifications will be communicated by May 15. Panelists will be expected to participate in person at the AMS Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois (November 14-17, 2024).
We were delighted to host six panelists for our session on Disability Identity in Music Scholarship at AMS/SMT-Denver (Friday, November 10, 2023 - 8:00pm–10:00pm Mountain Time (10 PM Eastern, 9 PM Central, 7 PM Pacific, 3 AM GMT).
In advance of our panel we provided recorded, captioned presentations by our participants, embedded below. We sincerely encourage you to watch those presentations before watching the recording of the panel, at bottom. During the panel time, our participants provided brief summaries of their presentations, after which we opened to Q&A / conversation between those in attendance. CART captioning was provided, and the live captioning has been corrected in the recording below, which integrates one of the brief summaries that could not be provided at the session itself. Please don't hesitate to ask questions or comment on the presentations in the blog comments! Comments will be moderated to avoid spam or similar malicious intervention.
All videos below have closed captions. The Kolin video also has open captions.  (This post is available in document form.)
The following is a collection of music and disability-related sessions at the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society of Music Theory, taking place in Denver, CO from November 9–12, 2023. Included are sessions directly sponsored by the study group, independently-organized sessions, and sessions from both societies. We hope to see you there! |
AuthorWe are scholars with interdisciplinary interests in music and disability studies. Archives
September 2025
Categories |
RSS Feed