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pheloniusfriarI recently uncovered an old report that I had written in the summer of 2010 about the musical project I composed (click the link to play the MP3) for the Feminist Disability Studies class I took that year (more info and background on this is here). That course remains probably one of the most influential things I've experienced in a long time and has changed the path of my university education (well, expanded it at least, my general path is still somewhat where I aimed to walk). I remain fascinated by this subject and hope to continue to learn more about it and to ultimately contribute to the field more than a couple of undergraduate essays and a song or two. Please keep in mind while reading this, that I was still in my first year of university and this was probably about the third real essay I'd ever written and didn't know how to do citations properly (does anyone, really?) or structure things well or avoid hyperbole, etc...
It's been a crazy couple of months and this is really the first time I've come up for air. So much to talk about, so much accomplished, so much failed, so much excitement past, present, and future (they all blur together for me these days... although one could argue it's been like that my entire life). Sadly, it's time for bed (I've spent the last couple of hours catching up on reading my friends' blogs and a few other blogs I follow... e.g. Ellen Reid's delightful and über entertaining "My Complete Lack of Boundaries" blog), and I will have to provide a real update at some point in the future. Hopefully a not quite so distant future at that.
Exploring Feminist Disability Themes Through Music
One of the cornerstones of modern feminist studies is the notion that personal narratives of women or other marginalized groups provide a standpoint from which their sociocultural experiences can be analyzed, especially in contrast to the dominant experience. When standpoint theory is particularized to those who have “a body that materializes at the ends of the curve of human variation”, an epistemology of the lived experience of disability emerges – called sitpoint theory or sitpoint epistemology – as a means of universalizing feminist standpoint epistemology away from its prejudicially ableist roots (Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory”). Since art often presages the emergence or some new aspect of a culture, and a healthy culture will produce a vibrant and multitudinous artistic expression of its identity through narratives both personal and constructed, art comprises a primary expression of cultural epistemology. Within the world of art itself, music can be a valuable tool for embodying that which is often inexpressible in words or images, and therefore struck me as being a potentially powerful method of conveying the academic themes we have explored in this introduction to feminist disability studies, as well as giving new voice to the nature of the personal stories we have heard. Such an effort can also be seen as part of the emergence of a broader artistic expression and a tool for the popularization of the formative culture based on the integrative work of feminist disability studies itself.
When I began this project, it was with an intuitive belief from my own life experience of having listened to vast amounts of music in innumerable genres, that since there was so much music informed by disability, that there would be a large body of academic work that I would be able to draw upon and integrate to realize my particular composition goals. Instead, what I learned is that “the initial entrance of disability studies into musical scholarship came about at the 2004 conference of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory in Seattle” at a panel discussion titled “Disability Studies in Music”. That panel discussion then purportedly provided the impetus for a collection of academic essays, in 2006, titled Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music which represented “the first published efforts to theorize disability in relationship to music, and visa versa” (Lerner and Straus).
In my searches through the various catalogues and online databases of social studies publications, and through a more general search of the Internet for less academic works or clues about the whereabouts of academic efforts, there is most assuredly a paucity of scholarly research in this field, much less any attempts to deliberately create music based on the study of disability in music (or visa versa). There were a number of excellent, but isolated, essays and articles; the essay collection already discussed; and one attempt by The Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal (Vol. 4) in 2008 to feature a broad array of music related essays over two issues. In terms of music as it related to feminist disability studies or visa versa – academic discussion or practical embodiment – I could not find a single trace. In short, to the best of my research abilities (which are admittedly not exhaustive), what I was about to attempt seemed as though it was breaking new ground in a nascent field, and I was for all practical purposes “on my own”.
As I pondered seriously whether to abandon the attempt altogether for having been a quixotic vision, my situation continually brought to mind the old saying “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (author unknown)... and how writing about disability in music with academic rigour compounds the seeming intractability of the task. Basing an actual musical composition, in whatever form, purely on the academics of feminist disability studies started to seem like more than I had the capability to even contemplate based on my amateur musical skills and even further underdeveloped expertise with a subject that I’d just been introduced to the formalism of. Even Rosemarie Garland-Thomson wrote in her foreword to the essay collection, “In promoting an integrative model of demagogy and scholarship, I am forever asserting that disability can be incorporated into any humanities discipline. I have done it myself, along with many colleagues, in literary studies. I have witnessed it, as well as edged there somewhat myself, in critical studies of art and performance. In spite of my ardent promotion of these research and teaching initiatives, I have always secretly doubted that disability could be represented in musical form.” (Garland-Thomson, “Foreword”) And yet, I knew from my own experiences, music is a unique means to bring manifest the embodiment of disability in a way that no conversation or text is able. Conduct even the most cursory examination of classical, film, or popular music and “once one starts to think about music through the lens of disability, disability suddenly appears everywhere” (Lerner and Straus). Ultimately, Garland-Thomson admits “What I did not understand until I read the essays in this volume is that I and my colleagues are indeed correct: Disability is everywhere in culture once you know how to look for it”, and more specifically of importance to me that the essays address questions like “how do musical compositions and performance narrativize disability?” (Garland-Thomson, “Foreword”).
In the end, I had to accept my own feelings that there was something in what I had learned from feminist disability studies that could and should be expressed in musical form, and that I had already heard music that evoked some of the core concepts from it. In particular, I felt that music was a particularly strong medium for conveying the personal narratives of disability. Consider Björk's score for the film Dancer in the Dark, a film that, on the surface, reflects the sociohistorical formula that the physically disabled and emotionally disfigured must be removed from able-bodied society. However, “As the film places Selma at the center of the narrative, the soundtrack asks us to identify with her. The aural realm is the space where we fully experience the world from Selma's perspective. Though we cannot see through her eyes, we nevertheless hear through her ears. The soundtrack defines, as it were, how Selma's blindness sounds [...] Through the soundtrack, the audience learns how Selma copes as a blind woman in a society that is unwilling to accommodate her” (Iverson). Consider the pianist Glenn Gould as a performer (Maloney), the physical degeneration of Beethoven (Quaglia), the deliberate exploration of disability by Shostakovich (Cizmic) or Neil Young (Stein) or Kate Bush (for example, her masterpiece of psychotic dysfunction “Get Out of My House” or her whimsical exploration of ADHD in “Sat In Your Lap”, both off her album The Dreaming), and I challenge anyone not to be moved by Sinéad O'Connor's rendition of Phil Coulter's “Scorn Not His Simplicity” that he wrote about his son born with Down's Syndrome. All of these artists and works meet the criteria of using music as a means of exploring the epistemology of disability.
Outside of popular music’s portrayal of disability through lyrics, whether positive or negative, two broad forms of contemporary music have managed to consistently capture the “otherness” theme that is widely explored in gender, race, and disability studies: so called “industrial” and “goth” music. These two musical genres can be considered to be “two sides to the same coin – the yin and yang, the male and female” (Smith). Both forms of art express the disability imposed upon the individuals who, for whatever reason – be it physical, mental, emotional, or social impairment – find themselves outside of the normalized expressions imposed by society. Many individuals within these cultures transcend their disabilities through a post-modernist understanding of society and outward expression conveyed through the music and fashion (Woods), and thus choose to live on the fringes on society in a culture created by and for themselves.
In composing this piece, I turned to industrial and goth music as starting points for musical expression. Both are what I have increasingly come to believe are inherently music of disability, a post-modernist voice for that which cannot be spoken. My composition is deliberately narrative for clarity and explores the comforting dissonance of hope and birth and then builds the trope of the able-bodied family. This construct quickly falls apart with onset of sudden and catastrophic disability, specifically, as I have envisioned it for comparative purposes: the disability of fraternal twins, one male and one female. The musical theme of gender plays itself out over and over as the melodic elements draw the strands together... the mother, the able-bodied sister, even the disabled twin out of necessity when things don't work out. The myth of “employment” is also explored near the end of the story when the twins are all who are left for themselves, but it is ultimately shown to be futile and meaningless. A means to justify a means. In the end, the lives of my subjects go nowhere and end with a whimper, leaving little trace of their passage; however, this is not simply a commentary about the disabled in our society, it is a statement on the overall failure of our disassociated and dysfunctional culture where this is the fate of almost all who pass through it, but is a phenomenon amplified by the disabled. I deliberately avoid the use of the “social model” to explore the unfolding nature of the events and instead try to convey the interdependent personal experiences of the siblings, and so I called my piece “Sitpoint Epistemology”.
Whether or not there is any particular merit to “Sitpoint Epistemology” as a piece of music independent of context, it does represent possibly one of the first attempts, if not the first attempt, to explore key themes from the field of feminist disability studies exclusively through music composed for that deliberate purpose. Based on feedback from its inaugural performance within the classroom environment, subsequent feedback from friends and acquaintances on their impressions and feelings about the piece, my own repeated listenings and self-criticism, and judged against the context of the amateur nature of my musical abilities, in integrating the specific commentary received, I have come to the personal conclusion that I was ultimately successful in my attempt. Of particular note is several of those who listened to it without context picked up on the rhythmic and emotional themes I deliberately attempted to use to capture the narrative of disability. Through this, and I’m sure, subsequent explorations by those more competent than I at achieving complex expression through music, the culture of feminist disability studies will become part of a growing dialogue in popular culture and academia.
References
Cizmic, Maria. “Of Bodies and Narratives: Musical Representation of Pain and Illness in HBO's W;t.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. 23-40. Print.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Foreword.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. xiii-xv. Print.
---. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” Gendering disability. New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 73-103. Print.
Iverson, Jennifer. “Dancing out of the Dark: How Music Refutes Disability Stereotypes in Dancer in the Dark.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. 57-74. Print.
Lerner, Neil, and Joseph N. Straus. “Introduction: Theorizing Disability in Music.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. 1-10. Print.
Maloney, Neil. “Glenn Gould, Autistic Savant.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. 121-136. Print.
Quaglia, Bruce. “Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata, First Movement, and the Normal Body:
The Idea of Formal Prosthesis.” 30 Mar. 2007: n. pag. Print.
Smith, Alicia Porter. “Description of Relevant Music”. A Study of Gothic Subculture: an Inside Look for Outsiders. Web. 25 May 2010. <http://www.gothicsubculture.com/music-description.php>.
Stein, Isaac. “Transformer Man: An Exploration of Disability in Neil Young’s Life and Music.” The Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 4.2 (2008): 3-10. Print. https://www.rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/260
Woods, Bret D. “Industrial Music for Industrial People: The History and Development of An Underground Genre.” Summer 2007. Web. 25 May 2010. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/14341478/industrial-music>
It's been a crazy couple of months and this is really the first time I've come up for air. So much to talk about, so much accomplished, so much failed, so much excitement past, present, and future (they all blur together for me these days... although one could argue it's been like that my entire life). Sadly, it's time for bed (I've spent the last couple of hours catching up on reading my friends' blogs and a few other blogs I follow... e.g. Ellen Reid's delightful and über entertaining "My Complete Lack of Boundaries" blog), and I will have to provide a real update at some point in the future. Hopefully a not quite so distant future at that.
One of the cornerstones of modern feminist studies is the notion that personal narratives of women or other marginalized groups provide a standpoint from which their sociocultural experiences can be analyzed, especially in contrast to the dominant experience. When standpoint theory is particularized to those who have “a body that materializes at the ends of the curve of human variation”, an epistemology of the lived experience of disability emerges – called sitpoint theory or sitpoint epistemology – as a means of universalizing feminist standpoint epistemology away from its prejudicially ableist roots (Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory”). Since art often presages the emergence or some new aspect of a culture, and a healthy culture will produce a vibrant and multitudinous artistic expression of its identity through narratives both personal and constructed, art comprises a primary expression of cultural epistemology. Within the world of art itself, music can be a valuable tool for embodying that which is often inexpressible in words or images, and therefore struck me as being a potentially powerful method of conveying the academic themes we have explored in this introduction to feminist disability studies, as well as giving new voice to the nature of the personal stories we have heard. Such an effort can also be seen as part of the emergence of a broader artistic expression and a tool for the popularization of the formative culture based on the integrative work of feminist disability studies itself.
When I began this project, it was with an intuitive belief from my own life experience of having listened to vast amounts of music in innumerable genres, that since there was so much music informed by disability, that there would be a large body of academic work that I would be able to draw upon and integrate to realize my particular composition goals. Instead, what I learned is that “the initial entrance of disability studies into musical scholarship came about at the 2004 conference of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory in Seattle” at a panel discussion titled “Disability Studies in Music”. That panel discussion then purportedly provided the impetus for a collection of academic essays, in 2006, titled Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music which represented “the first published efforts to theorize disability in relationship to music, and visa versa” (Lerner and Straus).
In my searches through the various catalogues and online databases of social studies publications, and through a more general search of the Internet for less academic works or clues about the whereabouts of academic efforts, there is most assuredly a paucity of scholarly research in this field, much less any attempts to deliberately create music based on the study of disability in music (or visa versa). There were a number of excellent, but isolated, essays and articles; the essay collection already discussed; and one attempt by The Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal (Vol. 4) in 2008 to feature a broad array of music related essays over two issues. In terms of music as it related to feminist disability studies or visa versa – academic discussion or practical embodiment – I could not find a single trace. In short, to the best of my research abilities (which are admittedly not exhaustive), what I was about to attempt seemed as though it was breaking new ground in a nascent field, and I was for all practical purposes “on my own”.
As I pondered seriously whether to abandon the attempt altogether for having been a quixotic vision, my situation continually brought to mind the old saying “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” (author unknown)... and how writing about disability in music with academic rigour compounds the seeming intractability of the task. Basing an actual musical composition, in whatever form, purely on the academics of feminist disability studies started to seem like more than I had the capability to even contemplate based on my amateur musical skills and even further underdeveloped expertise with a subject that I’d just been introduced to the formalism of. Even Rosemarie Garland-Thomson wrote in her foreword to the essay collection, “In promoting an integrative model of demagogy and scholarship, I am forever asserting that disability can be incorporated into any humanities discipline. I have done it myself, along with many colleagues, in literary studies. I have witnessed it, as well as edged there somewhat myself, in critical studies of art and performance. In spite of my ardent promotion of these research and teaching initiatives, I have always secretly doubted that disability could be represented in musical form.” (Garland-Thomson, “Foreword”) And yet, I knew from my own experiences, music is a unique means to bring manifest the embodiment of disability in a way that no conversation or text is able. Conduct even the most cursory examination of classical, film, or popular music and “once one starts to think about music through the lens of disability, disability suddenly appears everywhere” (Lerner and Straus). Ultimately, Garland-Thomson admits “What I did not understand until I read the essays in this volume is that I and my colleagues are indeed correct: Disability is everywhere in culture once you know how to look for it”, and more specifically of importance to me that the essays address questions like “how do musical compositions and performance narrativize disability?” (Garland-Thomson, “Foreword”).
In the end, I had to accept my own feelings that there was something in what I had learned from feminist disability studies that could and should be expressed in musical form, and that I had already heard music that evoked some of the core concepts from it. In particular, I felt that music was a particularly strong medium for conveying the personal narratives of disability. Consider Björk's score for the film Dancer in the Dark, a film that, on the surface, reflects the sociohistorical formula that the physically disabled and emotionally disfigured must be removed from able-bodied society. However, “As the film places Selma at the center of the narrative, the soundtrack asks us to identify with her. The aural realm is the space where we fully experience the world from Selma's perspective. Though we cannot see through her eyes, we nevertheless hear through her ears. The soundtrack defines, as it were, how Selma's blindness sounds [...] Through the soundtrack, the audience learns how Selma copes as a blind woman in a society that is unwilling to accommodate her” (Iverson). Consider the pianist Glenn Gould as a performer (Maloney), the physical degeneration of Beethoven (Quaglia), the deliberate exploration of disability by Shostakovich (Cizmic) or Neil Young (Stein) or Kate Bush (for example, her masterpiece of psychotic dysfunction “Get Out of My House” or her whimsical exploration of ADHD in “Sat In Your Lap”, both off her album The Dreaming), and I challenge anyone not to be moved by Sinéad O'Connor's rendition of Phil Coulter's “Scorn Not His Simplicity” that he wrote about his son born with Down's Syndrome. All of these artists and works meet the criteria of using music as a means of exploring the epistemology of disability.
Outside of popular music’s portrayal of disability through lyrics, whether positive or negative, two broad forms of contemporary music have managed to consistently capture the “otherness” theme that is widely explored in gender, race, and disability studies: so called “industrial” and “goth” music. These two musical genres can be considered to be “two sides to the same coin – the yin and yang, the male and female” (Smith). Both forms of art express the disability imposed upon the individuals who, for whatever reason – be it physical, mental, emotional, or social impairment – find themselves outside of the normalized expressions imposed by society. Many individuals within these cultures transcend their disabilities through a post-modernist understanding of society and outward expression conveyed through the music and fashion (Woods), and thus choose to live on the fringes on society in a culture created by and for themselves.
In composing this piece, I turned to industrial and goth music as starting points for musical expression. Both are what I have increasingly come to believe are inherently music of disability, a post-modernist voice for that which cannot be spoken. My composition is deliberately narrative for clarity and explores the comforting dissonance of hope and birth and then builds the trope of the able-bodied family. This construct quickly falls apart with onset of sudden and catastrophic disability, specifically, as I have envisioned it for comparative purposes: the disability of fraternal twins, one male and one female. The musical theme of gender plays itself out over and over as the melodic elements draw the strands together... the mother, the able-bodied sister, even the disabled twin out of necessity when things don't work out. The myth of “employment” is also explored near the end of the story when the twins are all who are left for themselves, but it is ultimately shown to be futile and meaningless. A means to justify a means. In the end, the lives of my subjects go nowhere and end with a whimper, leaving little trace of their passage; however, this is not simply a commentary about the disabled in our society, it is a statement on the overall failure of our disassociated and dysfunctional culture where this is the fate of almost all who pass through it, but is a phenomenon amplified by the disabled. I deliberately avoid the use of the “social model” to explore the unfolding nature of the events and instead try to convey the interdependent personal experiences of the siblings, and so I called my piece “Sitpoint Epistemology”.
Whether or not there is any particular merit to “Sitpoint Epistemology” as a piece of music independent of context, it does represent possibly one of the first attempts, if not the first attempt, to explore key themes from the field of feminist disability studies exclusively through music composed for that deliberate purpose. Based on feedback from its inaugural performance within the classroom environment, subsequent feedback from friends and acquaintances on their impressions and feelings about the piece, my own repeated listenings and self-criticism, and judged against the context of the amateur nature of my musical abilities, in integrating the specific commentary received, I have come to the personal conclusion that I was ultimately successful in my attempt. Of particular note is several of those who listened to it without context picked up on the rhythmic and emotional themes I deliberately attempted to use to capture the narrative of disability. Through this, and I’m sure, subsequent explorations by those more competent than I at achieving complex expression through music, the culture of feminist disability studies will become part of a growing dialogue in popular culture and academia.
References
Cizmic, Maria. “Of Bodies and Narratives: Musical Representation of Pain and Illness in HBO's W;t.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. 23-40. Print.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Foreword.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. xiii-xv. Print.
---. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” Gendering disability. New Brunswick N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 73-103. Print.
Iverson, Jennifer. “Dancing out of the Dark: How Music Refutes Disability Stereotypes in Dancer in the Dark.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. 57-74. Print.
Lerner, Neil, and Joseph N. Straus. “Introduction: Theorizing Disability in Music.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. 1-10. Print.
Maloney, Neil. “Glenn Gould, Autistic Savant.” Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music. New York: Routledge, 2006. 121-136. Print.
Quaglia, Bruce. “Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata, First Movement, and the Normal Body:
The Idea of Formal Prosthesis.” 30 Mar. 2007: n. pag. Print.
Smith, Alicia Porter. “Description of Relevant Music”. A Study of Gothic Subculture: an Inside Look for Outsiders. Web. 25 May 2010. <http://www.gothicsubculture.com/music-description.php>.
Stein, Isaac. “Transformer Man: An Exploration of Disability in Neil Young’s Life and Music.” The Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 4.2 (2008): 3-10. Print. https://www.rdsjournal.org/index.php/journal/article/view/260
Woods, Bret D. “Industrial Music for Industrial People: The History and Development of An Underground Genre.” Summer 2007. Web. 25 May 2010. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/14341478/industrial-music>
