Composers with Disabilities
Composers and other musicians, like any group of people, have been challenged by disabilities, physical and mental, and they have battled incurable diseases, disorders, and depression. Ludwig van Beethoven famously grew deaf throughout his career, adapting his approach to composition and limiting his performances as pianist to accommodate for these circumstances. Contemporary composer Gabriela Lena Frank has also contended with hearing loss as has percussionist Evelyn Glennie. Numerous composers have been blind, including Joaquín Rodrigo and the organists Landini, Schlick, Cabezón, and Langlais. Meanwhile, Robert Schumann and Maurice Ravel endured depression, while Franz Schubert and Scott Joplin each battled the crippling effects of syphilis. Traditional narratives have depicted the suffering artist who heroically overcomes these ailments (or fails to), while the contemporary composer Tobias Picker, for example, has embraced his Tourette's syndrome and sees it informing his creation of operas. The pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I, commissioned a new repertoire for left hand alone, including concertos by Ravel, Prokofiev, Hindemith, and Korngold.
NOTE: For additional resources, see the page Music in Special Education at the Music Education Research Guide. Also find the Physical Health and Mental Health pages at the Music Performance Guide.
Recommended Books
Hearing Beethoven: A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery by
We're all familiar with the image of a fierce and scowling Beethoven, struggling doggedly to overcome his rapidly progressing deafness. That Beethoven continued to play and compose for more than a decade after he lost his hearing is often seen as an act of superhuman heroism. But the truth is that Beethoven's response to his deafness was entirely human. And by demystifying what he did, we can learn a great deal about Beethoven's music. Wallace shows that, rather than heroically overcoming his deafness, Beethoven accomplished something even more challenging: he adapted to his hearing loss and changed the way he interacted with music, revealing important aspects of its very nature in the process. The resulting insights make Beethoven and his music more accessible and help us see how a disability can enhance human wholeness and flourishing.
Call Number: ML410.B4 W27 2018Publication Date: 2018
Hand in Hand with Joaquín Rodrigo: My Life at the Maestro's Side by
Composer Joaquín Rodrigo's music is an homage to the rich and varied cultures of Spain, from the ancient Roman conquerors of Iberia to modern Spanish poets and writers. The blind composer was assisted and inspired by his talented wife, pianist Victoria Kamhi, who shares their story in this charming memoir. She tells of the unique life they shared together and the influence music had on them as well as the struggles and joys of their personal lives that were inevitably written back into the music itself.
Call Number: ML410.R6318 K313 1992Publication Date: 1992
Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius by
Schumann's disturbed life has always fascinated biographers, but here for the first time is a full-length biography written from the viewpoint and scholarly expertise of the specialist. After obtaining access to long sought-after archival material about the final years of Robert Schumann, Lise Deschamps Ostwald, the author's widow, is finally able to detail the composer's last years at the mental institution in Endenich, fulfilling her husband's original intent.
Call Number: ML410.S4 O87 2010Publication Date: 2010
Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould by
Glenn Gould was not, as has previously been suggested, an isolated and self-taught eccentric who burst out of nowhere onto the international musical scene in the mid-1950s. He was, says Kevin Bazzana in this fascinating new full-scale biography, very much a product of his time and place – and his entire life and diverse work reflect his Canadian heritage. Bazanna also reveals new information on Gould’s famous eccentricities, his sometimes bizarre stage manner, his highly selective repertoire, his control mania, his private and sexual life, his hypochondria, his romanticism, and his abrupt retirement from concert performance to communicate solely through electronic and print media. And finally, he takes a detailed look at the extraordinary phenomenon of the posthumous "life" that Gould and his work have enjoyed.
Call Number: ML417.G68 B393 2005Publication Date: 2005
Deaf Side Story: Deaf Sharks, Hearing Jets, and a Classic American Musical by
he 1957 classic American musical West Side Story has been staged by countless community and school theater groups, but none more ambitious than the 2000 production by MacMurray College, a small school in Jacksonville, Illinois. Diane Brewer, the new drama head at the college, determined to add an extra element to the usual demands of putting on a show by having deaf students perform half of the parts. Deaf Side Story presents a fascinating narrative of Brewer and the cast's efforts to mount this challenging play. Author Mark Rigney portrays superbly the progress of the production, including the frustrations and triumphs of the leads, the labyrinthine campus and community politics, and the inevitable clashes between the deaf high school cast members and their hearing college counterparts.
Call Number: ML2054 .R54 2003Publication Date: 2003
Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (Print and eBook) by
Approaching disability as a cultural construction rather than a medical pathology, this book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. For composers with disabilities--like Beethoven, Delius, and Schumann--awareness of the disability sharply inflects critical reception. For performers with disabilities--such as Itzhak Perlman and Evelyn Glennie--the performance of disability and the performance of music are deeply intertwined. For listeners with disabilities, extraordinary bodies and minds may give rise to new ways of making sense of music. In the stories that people tell about music, and in the stories that music itself tells, disability has long played a central but unrecognized role. Some of these stories are narratives of overcoming-the triumph of the human spirit over adversity-but others are more nuanced tales of accommodation and acceptance of life with a non-normative body or mind. In all of these ways, music both reflects and constructs disability.
Call Number: ML3800 .S885 2011 and Oxford Scholarship OnlinePublication Date: 2011
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by
Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people—from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome, who are hypermusical from birth; from people with "amusia," to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds—for everything but music. Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.
Call Number: ML3830 .S13 2007Publication Date: 2007
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies by
The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies represents a comprehensive state of current research for the field of Disability Studies and Music. Disability is a broad, heterogeneous, and porous identity, and that diversity is reflected in the variety of bodily conditions under discussion here, including autism and intellectual disability, deafness, blindness, mobility impairment often coupled with bodily difference, and cognitive and intellectual impairments. Amid this diversity of time, place, style, medium, and topic, the chapters share two core commitments. First, they are united in their theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction. Disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture. Second, these essays individually and collectively make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity.
Call Number: ML3916 .O96 2016Publication Date: 2016
Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability (eBook) by
Preeminent music theorist and leader in the study of music and disability Joseph Straus presents a truly groundbreaking take on musical modernism, demonstrating in an expansive and vivid multimedia presentation that modernist music is inextricably entwined with attitudes toward disability. In Broken Beauty, Straus argues that the most characteristic features of musical modernism - fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others - can be understood as musical depictions of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Against the traditional medical model of disability, which sees it as a bodily defect requiring diagnosis and normalization or cure, this new sociocultural model of disability sees it as cultural artifact, something that is created by and creates culture. Straus places this revised model of disability against a wide range of canonical, high-art concert music from the first decades of the century through the 1950s. Broken Beauty illustrates how disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about.
Call Number: ProQuest Ebook Central and Oxford Scholarship OnlinePublication Date: 2018
Disability and Music Performance (eBook) by
Disability and Music Performance examines discriminatory social practices in music conservatoria, orchestras, music festivals and music competitions, which limit disabled people's access to music performance at a professional level. Of particular interest are the disabling barriers that musicians with an intellectual, physical, sensory or neurological disability--or an acquired brain injury--encounter in the world of Western classical music, both as students and as professional performers. This publication offers performers, teachers and researchers new perspectives for exploring some of the most common social dynamics in encounters between normative audiences, musicians and music critics, and musicians with disabilities. It invites the reader to recognize disability as a rightful identity category in music performance and to dismantle the disabling barriers that limit the participation of disabled people in music-making.
Call Number: ProQuest Ebook CentralPublication Date: 2018
Improvising Across Abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (eBook) by
This book brings together scholars, musicians, and family members of people with disabilities to collectively recount years of personal experiences, research, and perspectives on the societal and community impact of inclusive musical improvisation. One of the lesser-known projects of composer, improviser, and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), the AUMI was designed as a liberating and affordable alternative to the constraints of instruments created only for normative bodies, thus opening a doorway for people of all ages, genders, abilities, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds to access artistic practice with others. More than a book about AUMI, this book is an invitation to readers to use AUMI in their own communities.
Call Number: ProQuest Ebook Central and JSTOR BooksPublication Date: 2024
Speaking for Ourselves: Conversations on Life, Music, and Autism (eBook) by
From the advent of autism as a diagnosed disorder in the 1940s to the present day, the musical talents and affinities of autistic people have been widely recognized. It is surprising, nevertheless, how little effort has been made to ask autistic people themselves about how they make and experience music, and why it matters to them that they do. In Speaking for Ourselves, renowned ethnomusicologist Michael Bakan does just that. These conversations offer profound insights into the intricacies and intersections of music, autism, neurodiversity, and life in general, not from an autistic point of view, but rather from many different autistic points of view. They invite readers to partake of a rich tapestry of words, ideas, and musical sounds that speak to both the diversity of autistic experience and the common humanity we all share.
Call Number: ProQuest Ebook Central and Oxford Scholarship OnlinePublication Date: 2018
That Jealous Demon, My Wretched Health: Disease, Death, and Composers (eBook) by
Despite much triumph in adversity, illness fueling composition is a misconception. The health - and especially deaths - of composers excite controversy. Was Mozart really poisoned? Did Tchaikovsky commit suicide? How did Beethoven lose his hearing? Much good previous scholarship has been sullied by unsubstantiated views, and many composers' reputations have been unfairly tarnished by scandalous commentary, often involving alcoholism or syphilis. This book, by a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, charts the disturbed physical and mental health of 70 great composers. It attempts to unpick the evidence forensically and to define the cause of death based on the legal paradigm of a balance of probabilities. The author reviews where the composer was when the final illness or death overtook him and considers how many of them would have fared with modern treatment.
Call Number: ProQuest Ebook CentralPublication Date: 2018
Interlibrary Loan
Users are encouraged to search for items beyond University Libraries' catalog via RILM Abstracts of Music Literature and WorldCat. Materials not available in print or online may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Please allow up to seven days for electronic delivery and up to fourteen days for delivery of physical items.