Music

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. Critical response to music by composers with disabilities has tracked changing conceptualizations of disability, as divine affliction, divine afflatus, medical pathology, and affirmative identity. The same is true for performers with disabilities: disability, like music, is something they learn to perform, and they do so in accordance with well established cultural scripts. Music itself may convey narratives about disability, including a familiar narrative of disability heroically and inspirationally overcome. The language that music theorists have traditionally used to describe music is pervaded by metaphors of disability and traditional music theory is essentially a normalizing enterprise. Finally, listeners with disabilities may find that their ways of listening are inflected by their nonnormative embodiment, resulting in various forms of disablist hearing.

This book presents a case for teaching the arts to all children. It argues that, far from a luxury, the arts are a vitally important part of our society and our schools. Highlighting the crucial effect of the arts on learning, this volume shows how the arts can enliven and extend the entire school curriculum by integrating different subjects in innovative interdisciplinary ways. These eighteen chapters are a clarion call to action for any teacher, parent, policy maker, or citizen concerned about the fate of the arts in American society and schools.

In the last decades most cultural critics have come to agree that the division between “high” and “low” art is an artificial one, that Beethoven's Ninth and Blue Suede Shoes are equally valuable as cultural texts. This book challenges these dominant assumptions about the relativism of cultural judgements. The book maintains that music is more than just “a matter of taste”: while some music provides entertainment, or serves as background noise, other music functions as art. This book considers the value of classical music in contemporary society, arguing that it remains distinctive because it works in quite different ways to most of the other music that surrounds us. This long book aims to restore classical music's intrinsic aesthetic value and to rescue it from a designation as mere signifier of elitism or refinement.