Community of Practice, October 17th, 2025

The Music and Disability Study Group is proud to announce our second Community of Practice session, on October 17th, 2025 at 10:00am PST/1:00pm EST via Zoom. This session featured graduate students Robert Gross and Eric Whitmer. 

Recording below the abstracts and bios.


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.