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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: Music, Sound, and Medicalized Trauma in Global and Historical Contexts Saturday, 08/Nov/2025: Time: 4:00pm - 5:30pm Location: Great Lakes A Chair(s): Erin Johnson-Williams (University of Southhampton), Michelle Meinhart (Trinity Laban) Organized by the AMS Music, Sound, and Trauma Study Group. Trauma and medicine have long been intertwined. Victorian surgeons speculated on links between psychological trauma and “railway spine,” while Jean-Martin Charcot and other nineteenth-century neurologists made pivotal contributions to emerging conceptions of trauma via their work at Paris’s Hôpital Salpêtrière. Researchers in medical fields have investigated physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of suffering, and contributed to practices for treating trauma. Yet medical practitioners and institutions have often produced or exacerbated trauma as well, from pathologizing discourse to medical trauma itself. Within these connected histories of trauma and medicine, music and sound play crucial roles. Charcot and other doctors at the Salpêtrière used tuning forks and other sonic devices in their experiments, while the emerging field of music therapy experimented with different methods of addressing trauma beginning in the mid-twentieth century. And scholars such as Michelle Meinhart and Ailsa Lipscombe have analyzed music and sound’s connections with trauma, medical institutions, and medicalized apparatuses in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Building on these observations, this Music, Sound, and Trauma Study Group session confronts the topic of medicalized trauma. How have music and sound been weaponized within medical spaces? How have medical practitioners or people with trauma employed or resisted the use of music and sound as healing? How have spaces beyond hospitals, clinics, and medical research institutions become medicalized through trauma discourse and/or music-making? How have medical establishments been represented in media, and how have music and sound played roles in these representations? How have inequities in global and historical healthcare systems been shaped, represented, exacerbated, or addressed through music and sound? This 90-minute session, chaired by Erin Johnson-Williams, will feature five lightning talks that address these questions, followed by discussion between panelists and audience members. The Socio-Cultural and Liturgical Response to the English Sweats or Sudor Anglicus, 1485-1551 Samantha Bassler New York University and Rutgers University at Newark In 1485, two important events shook England. Henry Tudor established his reign after defeating the Plantagenets in the War of the Roses, and the first outbreak of the ‘Sweating Sickness’, the ‘Sweats’ or, in Latin, Sudor Anglicus occurred. While the official cause of the sweating sickness is unknown, some epidemiologists speculate that the War of the Roses contributed to it, since the first outbreak in August 1485 followed the battle. Still other scientists suggest that the hantavirus is the culprit, a virus from rats. The following chapter will investigate the liturgical and, subsequently, musical response to the sweating sickness. The pandemic began at a tumultuous time in England’s history, and continued throughout an even more significant period: the English Reformation, when English worship and liturgical practice was changing drastically and its people were adjusting to not only a deadly virus with a mortality rate of 30-50%, but also the destruction of their places of worship and other familiar cultural landmarks. While there has been musicological research on the bubonic plague, this is the first research that examines sweating sickness from the specific point of view of musicology. Sonic Healing and Resistance: Music and Sound in Asian Healthcare Contexts Sonic Healing and Resistance: Music and Sound in Asian Healthcare Contexts Hippocrates Cheng Binghamton University This proposal investigates how medical practitioners and individuals experiencing trauma in Asia have employed or resisted music and sound as tools for healing. Across diverse Asian healthcare traditions, sound has played a pivotal role in mediating physical and psychological suffering. From the use of Tibetan singing bowls in Himalayan healing practices to the incorporation of Gamelan music in Indonesian therapeutic rituals, sound is deeply embedded in cultural approaches to wellness. Yet, the introduction of Western medical models has often marginalized these practices, leading to both adaptation and resistance. This talk explores how traditional sound-based healing practices, such as mantras in Ayurveda or qigong sound therapy in China, have been integrated into or excluded from modern healthcare systems. It also examines how individuals and communities have resisted the medicalization of trauma by reclaiming sonic practices as acts of cultural preservation and empowerment. Case studies include the use of music therapy in Japanese palliative care and the resurgence of indigenous sound healing in post-colonial contexts. By analyzing these dynamics, this presentation highlights the tensions and synergies between traditional and modern approaches to trauma and healing in Asia. It underscores the transformative potential of music and sound as both tools of care and sites of resistance within global healthcare systems. Charting Trauma’s Embodied Imprints: The Endemic Era and its Sonic Cartographies of Medicalization Ailsa Lipscombe University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—and since its evolution into what Monica Ghandi has called the “endemic era” (2023)—sound and music have played a significant role in both identifying and experiencing a changed world (Guzy 2020; Chiu 2020). From once busy streets suddenly rendered silent to neighborhood musicking across balconies and hospital wards filled with the hiss and release of ventilators, the COVID-19 pandemic reorchestrated familiar environments into sites of discomfort and dis-ease. Underpinning many of these acoustemological transformations is a phenomenon I have elsewhere called “the medicalization of the everyday” (Lipscombe 2025), where the sights, sounds, and behaviors most readily associated with “traditional” medical facilities saturated quotidian spaces and altered quotidian experiences. In this lightning talk, I introduce one facet of this phenomenon by focusing on the ways trauma prompts medicalized reinterpretation of sound in the everyday. Building on conversations with my research interlocutors, and in dialogue with somatic theories of trauma’s embodied imprints (Menakem 2017; Rothschild 2000, 2021; Van Der Kolk 2014), I contend that familiar sounds become triggers of traumatic stress when heard within these newly-medicalized frames. In doing so, I reveal sound as critically implicated within processes of “associative interference” that have flourished in the endemic era (Laufer 2020), whereby existing meanings have been rewritten in the face of overwhelming, medicalized contexts—where trauma is experienced, and then re-experienced, through its sensory echoes. A Match Made in Medical Doubt: WWI Musico-Therapy and Shell Shock Briana Nave University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Shell shock, the neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion) diagnosis of World War I, was the first great test for musico-therapy, as the early field was then called. For scientific medicine, shell shock was a dubious condition, and musico-therapy a dubious treatment. Doctors initially believed that shell shock resulted from brain injuries incurred from exploding shells. That organic basis became increasingly doubtful when medical examination did not reveal brain or nerve lesions. Medical humanists have argued that medicine expects symptoms—bodily signs—to signify identifiable medical conditions (Zilcosky 2021, Belling 2012). Neurasthenic patients frustrated that expectation by presenting with medical symptoms—tremors, palpitations, insomnia, memory loss—for which no organic source could be found. This frustration of bodily semiotics made physicians uncertain whether the symptoms they observed were fundamentally physical or psychological. They faced a similar uncertainty regarding musico-therapy. While the therapists insisted their treatment physically soothed shellshocked nerves, physicians wondered if it was mostly a “mental salve.” I draw on William Davis’s (1987, 1993) and Annegret Fauser’s (2013) work on early twentieth century musico-therapy, the published work of musico-therapists such as Eva Augusta Vescelius, and WWI-era news reports of musical treatment to reveal musico-therapy’s neurological strategies of self-validation. I argue that shell shock and musico-therapy legitimized one another within a scientific-medical establishment that doubted whether the condition or its treatment warranted medical attention. My work contributes to medical humanities by offering WWI musico-therapy as a case of musical negotiation between patients and scientific medicine in the mind-body borderlands where traumatic conditions reside. Collective Isolation and the Sonic Environment: Headphones at Waverly Tuberculosis Sanatorium Kristen Strandberg University of Evansville Waverly Sanatorium, a now-abandoned tuberculosis hospital on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, housed and treated patients from the 1920s to the 1960s. Thanks to a wealth of firsthand patient accounts written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, we can learn a great deal about the patient experience including the sonic environment. The hospital, built in 1926, boasted all the latest innovations in medical treatments and patient amenities. Incredibly, headphones were installed next to each bed that connected patients to the radio as well as in-house guest speakers and, by the mid-1930s, even adult education courses sponsored by the Works Progress Association. The selection of radio station or programming was controlled by a central office so that all patients heard the same broadcasts simultaneously. Based on primary source materials including firsthand patient accounts, I argue that the bedside headphones provided a sense of normalcy for patients, while also highlighting their isolation. On the one hand, headphones allowed them to escape the sounds of medical equipment and other patients’ suffering and established a connection to the outside world; patients discuss keeping up with current events and listening to baseball games and music. At the same time, this connection to the outside world showed them exactly what they were missing. Further, although the patients who listened most were in isolation, the radio connected them to each other as a common experience. 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.
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