Music, Disability, and Society

Music, Disability, and Society

Music, Disability, and Society

Alex Lubet

TEMPLE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS

Philadelphia

Alex Lubet is Morse Alumni/Graduate and Professional Distinguished Teaching Professor of Music, at the University of Minnesota, with additional appointments in Jewish Studies and American Studies. He is co-editor (with Matthew Bribitzer-Stull and Gottfried Wagner) of Richard Wagner for the New Millennium: Essays in Music and Culture.

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS Philadelphia, PA 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2011 by Temple University All rights reserved Published 2011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lubet, Alex, 1954Music, disability, and society / Alex Lubet. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4399-0025-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4399-0026-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4399-0027-7 (electronic) 1. Music—Performance—Physiological aspects. 2. Disabilities—Social aspects. 3. Musicians with disabilities. 4. Blind musicians. 5. Music— Religious aspects. 6. Disability studies. I. Title. ML3820.L83 2011 780.87—dc22 2010018211 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 2

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 Piano Men, or the Right Hand Doesn’t . . . No

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2 Let’s Face the Music and Dance: Jazz and Physical Disability

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3 Play Like an Egyptian: Music and Blind Culture

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4 Losing . . . My Religion: Music, Disability, Gender, and Jewish and Islamic Law

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5 Bringing It All Back Home, or Teach Your Children . . . Well?

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References

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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his project was possible only because of the advice, encouragement, and support of many people and institutions. I hope I have proved myself worthy of their confidence and included all who might wish to be mentioned. Thanks go first to my editor, Janet Francendese, and Temple University Press for their willingness to take such edgy and largely unprecedented work. My gratitude also goes to the University of Minnesota for having granted me a year’s sabbatical and other generous support. Many scholars and professionals shared their expertise with me. They include Judith Abrams, Mahassen Ali Mohamed Ali, Ron Amundson, Michael Bakan, Tammy Berberi, Hyman Berman, Immanuel Davis, Michael Dregni, Earl Hoffman, Judith Brin Ingber, Eric Janus, Christopher Johnstone, Arlene Kanter, Henry Kingsbury, Barbara Kudo, Steven Lubet, Peter Mercer-Taylor, M. Miles, Elissa Newport, Christina Petersen, Lewis Porter, Annett Richter, Na’ama Sheffi, Elaine Tarone, Shelly Tremain, and Robert Yawson. Others who shared their wisdom also provided me with platforms through which to present the ideas that eventually became this book. Among them are Andrew Azzopardi, Arthur Blaser, Steve Brown, Daniel Goodley, David Mitchell, Kristine Mulhorne, Leslie Roman, Lori

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Rowlett, Coleen Sheehy, Tobin Siebers, Sharon Snyder, Joseph Straus, the University of Texas–Medical Branch Visiting Scholars Program, and the Society for Disability Studies. My family—Iris, Alyssa, and Ben—provided not only the comforts of home and (to quote Bob Dylan) shelter from the storm, but also critically important feedback on many of the ideas in these pages. This book is dedicated to my mother, Doris Lubet, and to the memory of my father, Fred Lubet, who raised me in a home in which music and social justice were of paramount importance.

Introduction

Definitions and Directions

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his book chronicles a collection of “encounters” between disability and music. More precisely, it describes myriad ways in which disability identity is defined within musical institutions, whose often venerable and rigid attitudes, customs, and practices endow them with the status of largely autonomous cultural systems. Because music is so frequently deemed an extraordinary ability, its juxtapositions with disability are complex and reveal not only the ways in which disability is understood and treated across cultures but also the nature of both identity and social organization. The unifying theme that guides these encounters between music and disability is a theory of “social confluence.” This theory argues that in contemporary globalized society, in which the pace and density of human contact are increased by the profusion and power of information technology, the fundamental unit of identity is social confluence— that is, the role in which an individual finds herself at any given time. This role is subject to redefinition at a moment’s notice, as soon as one proceeds to the next encounter. The theory differs radically from those of other times and places in which the focal unit of social organization has been, variously, the nation-state, the ethnic group, the nuclear

2 \ Introduction

or extended family, or the individual, each regarded as a fundamentally stable category. My idea of social confluence arose from personal experience. In 2000, I had neurosurgery on my neck to alleviate extreme upper-body pain and restore function to my right arm and hand. In terms of physical recovery, the results were largely but by no means wholly successful. At the same time, the issues surrounding my return to work (as Professor of Music at the University of Minnesota, where I have taught since 1979) were complex, frustrating, and anxiety provoking. During this return to work, I learned that my disability status was defined in radically different ways depending on the social, cultural, and institutional context of the moment. The theory of social confluence was thus born on a day when my disability identity morphed several times over, depending on with whom I was interacting. What made this seem all the more remarkable was how little I actually had to travel to undergo these identity transformations. Every change in the way I was perceived took place within a single workplace, albeit a very large and complex one, whose various administrative units saw the same person from very different perspectives. On that day, I realized that my attorney took the view that, according to Minnesota Workers’ Compensation law, I was “permanently partially disabled” (a view ultimately vindicated after three-and-a-half years of litigation). In interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 (amended in 2008), the university’s Office of Disability Ser vices determined that I was not disabled in a manner that legally mandated workplace accommodations. However, for reasons that were never explained to me, Disability Ser vices nonetheless decided to provide me with a great deal of adaptive office equipment despite denying any obligation or the apparent need to do so. The task of refitting my office was then assigned to the Department of Environmental Health and Safety, which clearly seemed to trust its own expertise about my body over mine and provided me with equipment I mostly either abandoned eventually or never used at all. Health and Safety’s equipment prescriptions were quite different from those of my hand surgeon, an amateur musician and a physician of extraordinary empathy who would later operate on both my hands.

Introduction / 3

These health-and-disability professionals had widely divergent views of my disability status, ranging from able-bodied to moderately disabled— that is, fully able to return to work with relatively modest accommodations. The operative position of the university regarding my condition, as dictated by Disability Services, was that there was no obligation under the ADA to accommodate me, but that I would be accommodated nonetheless, a view that seemed at once perhaps enlightened but also unreassuring, lest I ever require additional “favors” that were neither my rights nor the university’s obligations. But the most extreme verdict on my body’s abilities came from the standards of my own field, music, and in particular classical music, the idiom that is pervasive in academia. This judgment was never explicitly rendered, but such a declaration was also unnecessary, the rules regulating classical music as a cultural system so well understood by those of us in its community that little if any enforcement is ever required. (Only relatively recently have many of these principles been articulated, by such scholars as Henry Kingsbury [1988], Bruno Nettl [1995], and Christopher Small [1996, 1998].) To perform classical music at a professional level requires physical technique that is at once highly developed and highly standardized. Through standardization, it is possible to compose, for example, a symphony, knowing that the training and acumen of every professional orchestra is so similar that the work can be confidently disseminated for performance to such ensembles worldwide because they are all capable of playing it. On a more intimate and human scale, to compose a work for the generic baritone voice is a very different matter from writing a  song for Bob Dylan. There are many skilled classical baritones who could reliably replicate a work composed for that generalized vocal quality, but there is only one Dylan, a singer exceptional in his abilities, limitations, and idiosyncrasies. Classical composers rarely, if ever, write to such individual specifications as might include not only a quirky voice but also a disabled body. The unhealed nerve damage in my right arm and hand rendered it unfit for professional classical music performance. From that standpoint— within the “social confluence” of classical music performance—I became totally disabled and in fact incapacitated. It was most fortunate that my work never actually demanded that sort of musical athleticism. As a

4 \ Introduction

classical musician, I was and remain primarily a composer. I do perform frequently, mainly on guitar and other fretted stringed instruments, but almost entirely my own works, whose technical demands I can obviously control, and in idioms that transcend classical conventions in many ways. I am able technically to do some things other players find utterly daunting (mostly featuring my highly developed left hand), while having great difficulty with certain technical “basics.” (I have this in common with jazz guitar legend Django Reinhardt, discussed in Chapter 2.) But my own good fortune to have escaped damage to my career through work-related injury did not keep me from being painfully aware that I had performing colleagues who had sustained illness and trauma that, though of minor consequence in other fields, were devastating in classical music. Medical Problems of Performing Artists, the journal of the Performing Arts Medicine Association, is replete with such cases. If my career was not so much a victim of the rules of classical technique as have been those of some of my friends, classical music is nonetheless my professional world and I am moved and angered by its harshness. The realization of this extreme appraisal of my disability status came to me on the same day as all the encounters and judgments I have just described. Through all of them, the theory of social confluence was born. Thus, like almost everyone in disability studies (DS), I became interested in the field through personal experience. I came to DS relatively late in my career via this work-related injury. This physical impairment, though painful and limiting, has proved to be less trouble than return-towork issues and litigation, the kinds of difficulties DS refers to as socially constructed disability. In short, through these experiences I learned DS’s social model of disability—that disability is a social construction roughly analogous to race or gender and that the root of disability oppression lies far more in its socialization than in embodied impairment—literally on the job. As a lifelong activist in a variety of causes, my experience with disability led me to shift emphasis. I found the work of DS scholars immediately engaging and have never looked back. I was the first, and for a long time the only, musical academic or professional musician in the Society for Disability Studies. Initially it was hard to imagine a field more difficult than music from which to contribute to this highly interdisciplinary enterprise. The new challenge of a tabula rasa was that of limiting my focus: the potential avenues of inves-

Introduction / 5

tigation were just too vast. Soon, though, it also became clear that “readyto-use” sources in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory were nearly nonexistent. I began exploring the literatures of many fields, including film, theater, literature, folklore, history, law, industrial relations, anthropology, medicine, and mass and online popular media. Because my primary professional training and much of my professional activity are in practical music making—composition and performance— and because I have long also been involved in ethnomusicology, my version of DS in music has concerned mostly the lived experience of musicians and their representation in media such as film, rather than in repertoire and other forms of musical text. Newer arrivals to the field are more repertoire oriented than I, but whatever becomes of music DS, my socially contexted work feels not only right for the moment, but as if I am doing good. I doubt I would get that feeling if I were to devote a monograph to seeking out the disabled voice in a canonic composer whose cultural system of conservatories and concert halls is largely inaccessible to those to whom this book is a tribute. As a field thoroughly wedded to activism, DS is also attached to personal narrative. At least for now, DS in music should be like DS in every discipline, deeply concerned with exposing the travails of disabled lives in the interest of advancing their betterment. One challenge in establishing the legitimacy of a new field such as DS in music is demonstrating its importance within and beyond its parent fields. The ubiquity of both music and disability generates such great potential influence for their intersection. Thus, this book considers not only the insights music and disability bring to each other but also the value of their mutual reflection for the illumination of larger cultural concerns. The intersection of music and disability demonstrates that not only culturally manifest disability but also embodied impairment are socially constructed. This shared quality of social construction, which departs from the “orthodox” social model of disability, has implications for related social model theories of race, gender, and sexuality. It leads to critiques of identity politics and area studies as well as their dependence on human characteristics that are generally recognized as essential and embodied. The foundation of this critique is a thought experiment testing the hypothesis that an affinity for music is as essential, embodied,

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and marginalized as those qualities that define “Otherness” as being both emblematic and mandatory for the “areas” that populate academic area studies. I cannot overemphasize that I mean no assault on social model theory or area studies, only a thickening or enrichment of their respective plots. I also make no claim of absolute innovation except for the new, helpful perspective of music and disability. One of the moral imperatives of DS is the lesson that dependence is not a defining element of disability status. Rather, interdependence is perhaps the defining feature of civilization. One of the most ennobling facets of DS is that this philosophy of interdependence is mirrored in the working methods of the field, which is so thoroughly interdisciplinary that the symbiosis of its scholars is a given and a must. Another virtue of DS is its devotion to pragmatism. As a music maker who only recently came also to pursue research intensely not so much by accident as by injury, I find in DS a potential antidote to the excesses of jargon and other conceits that limit the social effectiveness of much of cultural studies (if indeed social good is really the goal of such obtuse enterprises). As a working musician, I am often rankled by the many scholarly writings about music by nonmusicians. In much the same way, people with disabilities (PWDs) are angered by the considerable control that “ABs”—the (temporarily) able-bodied—exert on their destinies through domination of the discourse and material resources associated with disability. Nonmusician authors tend to write, literally, “about” music, in the sense that about means around. They write about music’s environment: lyrics, fashion, economies—things they likely understand better than they do aesthetically organized sound. Inspired by the slogan of DS and the disability rights movement, “Nothing about us without us,” I have come to appreciate how imperative it is that musicians, like PWDs (often one and the same, particularly, of course, in this book) control discourse that so largely controls their lives. It is also through DS that I have developed my theories of musicality—the affinity for music—as embodied. I am deeply grateful. The theoretical component of this book serves as preparation for several utterly pragmatic applications of disability theory to musical lives. I am frequently queried as to the nature of DS in music. Among

Introduction / 7

my colleagues in DS, the curiosity is more fascination and delight than skepticism. Among my colleagues in music, it is quite the opposite. For the benefit of my disciplinary colleagues, it is largely from the perspective of a practicing musician that I demonstrate the unique applicability of DS to practical problem solving in music and music education. The development of a theory of music and disability requires a good deal of exposition.

Methodological Forbears and Forebodings The largely medicalized literatures in music therapy and special education in music are well established. However, apart from my own publications and those of Joseph Straus (2006, 2008) and Neil Lerner and Straus (2006), there is little extant published music research that employs social model theory as its foundation. (There are also a considerable number of emerging scholars in this field, many of those whose work has been nurtured by Straus. I will briefly discuss a conference on this scholarship in Chapter 5.) This is not intended as a rebuke of music therapy, only a distinction. Rehabilitative and medical fields, for which problems are primarily pathological and solutions primarily treatment, are, as Simi Linton states, “not disability studies” (1998, 132–156). Few in DS would deny the value of—and indeed in many cases the need for—these fields, though many would hope for a reciprocal recognition of social model values. And Ju Gosling’s observation (Gosling and Hunter 2009) that both medical and social model thinking are found throughout society is of paramount importance. In particular, she stresses that those in the medical and rehabilitative fields can and, at times, do think and practice socially. This, I would add, must be encouraged, not dismissed, by DS scholars. I have found particularly valuable the writings of ethnomusicologists Bruno Nettl and Henry Kingsbury and music educator Christopher Small. All have studied organizational systems within Western classical music, including how they function not so much within culture but as culture—that is, as autonomies with their own hierarchies, rules, and rituals. For me, the value of their research is less that their topic is Western

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classical music per se than that what they say about musicians as communities is inescapably compelling because their subject is familiar rather than “exotic.” I have also benefited greatly from the work of ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin (1993), who writes about many kinds of music. His work often references globalization—specifically, the degree to which musical communities transcend spatial boundaries through travel, immigration, diasporic consciousness, mass communications, and the Internet. My theory of social confluence, for which I claim only an increment of credit, builds on the work of Slobin and his methodological forbears, notably anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996). It does so through my observation that the individual identities constituting such communities are capable of morphing almost instantaneously and that increasingly they are becoming the fundamental unit of social organization in globalized, technologized society through innovations like Facebook and Twitter. The intersection of music and disability is an excellent window through which to witness this phenomenon. What all the scholars referenced here share is a redefinition of communities and cultures in which physical and temporal proximity have only limited bearing. That Worlds of Music (Titon and Fujie 2005) is a prominent ethnomusicology textbook is hardly coincidence. This rethinking of musical community is an outgrowth of and wholly consistent with ethnomusicology’s parent discipline, cultural anthropology. For me, among the traditional academic music disciplines, ethnomusicology has by far provided the richest resources of both theory and documentation. (I differ in this from music theorist Straus and musicologist Lerner.) Because my interest is more in musicians, musical institutions, and musical human rights for PWDs, ethnomusicology is a more natural fit than more repertoire-based disciplines. But ethnomusicology cannot provide a theoretical or methodological platform for the study of disability issues in music. A major reason for this book and my other scholarship (Lubet 2009) is that DS is increasingly a field unto itself in which music plays a unique role. Despite serious introspection, efforts at course correction, and the handful of works in which Westerners investigate Western art music, ethnomusicology remains a field much characterized by its colonial

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legacy of power imbalance between relatively privileged scholar and disadvantaged “informants” (Jackson 2006; Wong 2006). Privilege accompanies the usual embodied demographics—white, male, and straight— though, as Wong says, being an ethnomusicologist can make one “the Other” in the larger context of musical academia. In a prominent book on “medical ethnomusicology” (Koen 2008) that in many ways is meritorious on its own terms, no form of disability appears in its index. At more than 550 pages, the book claims profound interdisciplinarity, including “historical musicology, ethnomusicology, medical, cognitive, and applied ethnomusicology, systematic musicology, music cognition, music therapy, music psychology, neuroscience of music, biomusicology, music education, music performance, and dance” (Koen, Barz, and Brummel-Smith 2008), but there is no mention of DS, musical or otherwise. Thus, to the aforementioned power imbalances must be added that of doctor and patient and even an implicit assertion that the medical ethnomusicologist must be exceptionally able-bodied. Working in Malaysia, Marina Roseman (2006, 37) reports that “of course, there are the ethnographer’s on-the-ground difficulties of trying to keep out of a tiger’s jaws.” Clearly, the field in fieldwork is no place for a disabled scholar to assume an authoritative voice. By contrast, Michael Bakan and his colleagues’ work on the ethnomusicology of autism (Bakan 2009; Bakan, Koen, Bakan et al. 2008; Bakan, Koen, Kobylarz et al. 2008) moves toward the liberatory goal of empowering the autistic subject. Though DS in music gains only oppositional energy from medical ethnomusicology, my theory of social confluence benefits greatly from more foundational ethnomusicological scholarship. From Nettl, Kingsbury, and Small, it derives its sense of musical institutions as cultural systems and, in particular, its critique of Western classical music. It builds on Slobin’s and Appadurai’s theories of group identity formation, to argue for an even more fragmented sense of being as the fundamental unit of social organization. Finally, it takes inspiration from ethnomusicologists of color such as Wong and Jackson, to critique not only musical academia in general (per Nettl, Kingsbury, and Small) but ethnomusicology in particular, finding that they fail to give authoritative voice to the underprivileged.

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Music, Disability, and Social Organization Simply rendered, the theory of social confluence states that modern society does not consist of stable, intact units of identity known as individual human beings but rather of people whose identities morph constantly with changing circumstances or contexts. Such change and the demand for flexibility it requires for both material and psychological survival are much in evidence in the lives of musicians. As only one example of the very different conditions of musical and extramusical cultural systems that might exist side by side and affect the life of a single individual in various ways even during the course of a single day, consider that Western classical musicians—particularly orchestral players—expect, even demand, an autocratic conductor and a similarly authoritative musical score, the latter regarded as the definitive texted representation of the composer’s intentions. These same musicians who insist on a professional environment of musical totalitarianism typically find similarly dictatorial conditions in other realms of their lives—even in relations between orchestral management and members—as intolerable as would anyone who enjoys the rights and privileges of representative government. Thus, these musicians’ daily existence involves enormous feats of “culture switching” that are internalized to be utterly spontaneous, natural and intuitive. This is an idée fixe for ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl. Music’s sense of community can certainly loom large for its practitioners, in no small part because we often claim the identity of musician when quite young. (Kingsbury uses the anthropological term cultural system instead of music.) Community, however, does not necessarily always imply hospitability or warmth, particularly in the competitive environments music often fosters.

How to Read This Book This book was written with two audiences in mind. Obviously it is directed to readers interested in disability and music. To the best of my ability, I have kept it a jargon-free zone, eschewing the idiosyncratic language of music theory and leaving out examples in musical notation. I am, of course, knowledgeable in these, but I refuse to permit the occult lore of my field to serve as a barrier to matters I can illuminate

Introduction / 11

for a broad audience, including those many PWDs whom music education has shunned. I also hope that those who might otherwise find my topic obscure will concur that the intersection of music and disability yields something provocative and valuable in the theory of social confluence. The theory of social confluence begot this project. Convinced by my own experience that the intersection of music and disability was an extraordinary site from which to observe radical transformations of identity, I compiled five “encounters,” each with something unique to contribute to both the theory of social confluence and to our understanding of music and disability. I hope both to contribute to DS and to demonstrate DS’s value to large conversations about identity and culture. As examples and tests of the theory of social confluence, the chapters increase in difficulty. To facilitate understanding, they are previewed together here. Chapter 1 deals with one-handed classical pianism, arguably the most familiar instance of physical disability in music. My concern is less with amputee pianism (Lerner 2006, 75– 89; Sacks 2008, 284–287) than with hand-injured pianists (Sacks 2008, 289–300), whose disability status is more fluid. Several such artists are discussed, but the nature of classical music as a cultural system renders their situation essentially generic. Such a pianist is placed in a wide variety of social confluences, where his (they are all male) disability status is shown to vary radically. Like Lerner, I demonstrate that, in classical music, institutionalized one-handed pianism matters more than individual onehanded pianists. Chapter 2 discusses physical disability and jazz, in particular those impairments that actually influence the artist’s performance style. Particular attention is paid to guitarist Django Reinhardt, pianist Horace Parlan, and vocalist “Little” Jimmy Scott. The nature of jazz, African American, and improvisatory performance traditions is compared to that of Western classical music, as discussed in Chapter 1. The protocols of the former are shown to accommodate individual impairments far better, even allowing for unique approaches to virtuosity, thus providing an apt model for full participation of musicians with disabilities. In Chapter 3, the question is asked whether a largely autonomous “Blind Culture” analogous to Deaf Culture can or does exist. The

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principal example is the all-female, mostly Muslim Blind Orchestra of Cairo. The question is complex, the answer a provisional yes. Questions of whether such a culture intersects with gender and religion receive focused attention for the first time. Western classical music is shown, in this context, to have a liberatory impact on these disabled women’s lives, quite different from that shown in Chapter 1. Chapter 4’s theme is religious law, both Islamic and Jewish. For each legal system, a different question is asked, each of which presents a more challenging test to the theory of social confluence. With regard to Islamic Sharia law, specifically its practice under the Afghan Taliban as a government and later an insurgency that spread to Pakistan, I demonstrate how musicality, generally regarded as a talent or hyperability—and which I argue is as innate as gender identity or sexuality—became a disability. The section on Jewish law (Halacha) concerns kol isha, the doctrine that forbids an adult male from listening to the singing of any adult female other than his own wife. I argue that the law disables women by preventing them from singing in many circumstances, but that the impaired parties are the men, sexual predators regarded by some scholars as the reason for this and other limitations on women’s activities. Chapter 5 addresses the “language disability” of international (mostly Asian and female) music students in the United States. The unique intricacy of this example owes to what the field of neurolinguistics recognizes as the near impossibility for adults to acquire fluency in a foreign language. The fact that this difficulty is embodied and universal calls into question its status as an impairment, even though it is considered a disability in the unsympathetic environs of American higher music education. In this context, disability is enmeshed with gender, race, language difference, and diaspora, an intersection whose navigation makes for an appropriate conclusion to a book about complex encounters. That disability can be so wholly a matter of social perception and prejudice should be proof positive that DS and disability rights should be everyone’s concern. It is conventional wisdom in our field that anyone who lives long enough will eventually become disabled. However, as I hope you will learn in these pages, neither a long life nor an impairment is necessarily a prerequisite to acquiring disability status. And depending on the social confluence of the moment, that attribution might change completely in the blink of a blind eye.

Introduction / 13

In 2008, during the writing of this book, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was amended. I was thus faced with determining how to treat the many references to the original ADA that had already been written. Rather than simply revising these passages to reflect the changes in the amended statute, I decided that it was better to supplement them with information about the new law. The original ADA was landmark legislation, not only for the United States, but also for the world. Its history, however, was largely that of having its effectiveness much attenuated by the rulings of the appellate and Supreme Courts. This rolling back of gains in disability rights by conservative courts is what inspired the passage of the amendments. Though there is much enthusiasm for the improvements in the law, as I write this in late 2009 it is simply too early to tell how the amended act will be enforced and whether new rulings by the high courts will impede its effectiveness. In that context, it seemed best to treat the ADA both before and after amendment.

1 / Piano Men, or the Right Hand Doesn’t . . . No

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e begin with what is arguably the best-known encounter between physical disability and music, one-handed classical pianism. This requires both a repertoire, mostly composed for the left hand, and artists to perform it. While these pieces can be and are performed by two-handed pianists, the significant onehanded works were written for disabled musicians. Though some were amputees, two of the most prominent, Gary Graffman (1928– ) and Leon Fleisher (1928–) , have right hands afflicted with a condition that largely (Garrett 2005), or in Graffman’s case only, affects their playing (Sacks 2008, 289–300). Their situation is a paradigm example of identities transformed by social confluence, as they are two-handed people in nearly all aspects of their lives, but one-handed pianists, in the calling that may matter most. Other famous one-handed pianists include Paul Wittgenstein (1887– 1961) and Robert Schumann (1810–1856). Of this quartet, only Wittgenstein, brother of philosopher Ludwig, was actually an amputee, a combat-wounded World War I veteran. Famed composer Schumann was in a sense the odd man out in that his right-hand injury led him to stop concertizing altogether, though he continued playing the piano in private all his life (Neumayr 1994).

Piano Men / 15

Graffman, Fleisher, and possibly Schumann owed their difficulties to focal dystonia. The illustrious neurologist and author Oliver Sacks refers to it as musician’s dystonia. Known among musicians since at least the 1830s, the condition is likely to be brought on by an activity that requires fast movement. Its manifestation—the inability to control the affected body part—often surfaces only when that activity is attempted, as is the case with Graffman. Unlike other studies of one-handed pianism that focus on amputees (Kingsbury 2008; Lerner 2006), my concern is primarily with dystonic pianists such as Graffman and Fleisher, the fluidity of whose disability status facilitates a voyage through a variety of social confluences of law, policy, and culture, quite extended but not unlike my own. These pianists’ hypothetical experiences might be thought of as exemplary of the manner in which the profession of Western classical music regards its disabled members, as the situations of performers in other idioms will be described along the way.

Musicians and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) As a medical matter, the etiology of Robert Schumann’s injuries is inherently beyond the purview of DS, though a historiography of contemporaneous and posthumous accounts of Schumann’s injuries and illnesses that chronicles their social construction could be a DS project par excellence. It suffices here simply to proceed from what little truly reliable information exists about the composer’s condition: that he thought he had—and may indeed have had—a hand trauma, and that it rendered a performing career as a pianist impossible without incapacitating his right hand entirely. There is only limited evidence that Schumann’s hand trauma significantly limited other life activities or even rendered impossible the composer’s functional pianism, such as composition and teaching. Thus it is fair to suggest that, beyond activities such as music, where such fine motor skills are essential, his injury today largely would be regarded as a minor impairment by extramusical standards. This would have been even more the case in the nineteenth century, Schumann’s own time, when “everyone had scars, bad teeth, a

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unique gait, or some other mark of physical diversity” (Ott 2002, 152). The world of classical music, then as now, defines hand impairment more severely than most of the society around it. By deciding what is or is not a damaged body or mind, it is impairment, rather than disability, that is socially constructed. It is in a social confluence’s regulation of what that injured body may or may not do and how its owner is to be regarded—for example, as unemployable or ugly—that impairment, as well as disability, is socially constructed. Schumann’s injury would almost certainly not qualify him as a person with a disability (PWD) under the ADA of 1990 (Americans with Disabilities Act home page n.d.), which requires that a condition impede “major life activities,” a classification that in practice refers not to any particular individual’s activities but to those of an imagined norm. This norm would most certainly be neither a concert pianist nor anyone with—or needing—remarkable manual skills of any kind. The Supreme Court has ruled that, under the ADA, a hand injury would have to be hugely incapacitating in order for it to mandate disability accommodations, far worse than I believe most people would imagine. In Toyota Motor Mfg, Ky., Inc. v. Williams, a case argued by current Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, the court (with retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor writing for the majority) ruled that “medical conditions that caused . . . plaintiff Ella Williams . . . to avoid sweeping, to quit dancing, to occasionally seek help dressing, and to reduce how often she plays with her children, gardens, and drives long distances . . . did not amount to such severe restrictions in the activities that are of central importance to most people’s daily lives that they establish a manual-task disability as a matter of law” (Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute 2002). Though Williams incurred her injuries while working at Toyota, “the [District] court . . . should not have considered respondent’s [Williams’] inability to do such manual work in her specialized assembly line job as sufficient proof that she was substantially limited in performing manual tasks.” In other words, under the ADA, upper-limb impairments that inhibited Williams’ ability to dress herself or to perform what was in truth not particularly “specialized” manual labor did not qualify as a disability adequate to require her employer to accommodate her (even though Toyota was responsible for her

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injury). The ADA Amendments Act of 2008 mentions the narrowing of coverage in the original ADA by Toyota v. Williams as one reason it was needed as a remedy for the failures of the original statute. It remains to be seen whether the expanded coverage of the new law will be broad enough to assist work-injured musicians. The same “not impaired” verdict suffered by Ms. Williams under the original ADA would surely also characterize the focal dystonia that afflicts famous contemporary left-hand- only pianists Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher, though not, of course, the artist who commissioned most of the important left-hand- only concert repertoire, Paul Wittgenstein. (Lerner reports that there were both one-handed compositions and amputee concert pianists before Wittgenstein; that avocational one-handed compositions were also composed, especially in the periods following wars (particularly the American Civil War); and that some etude-like and virtuosic compositions may not have been intended for injured pianists at all (2006, 75–76). Within a vital confluence in Robert Schumann’s life, his association with the Western classical music community—the condition that forced him to abandon his aspirations to the concert stage—was undeniably and negatively life altering, his subsequent reinvention of himself as a major composer and critic notwithstanding. Graffman and Fleisher have also expanded their musical activities to include such pursuits as conducting, teaching, and educational administration. Beyond this affinity group of music professionals and their admirers, these pianists’ manual limitations would be regarded nearly everywhere as less significant, perhaps even trivial. (Sacks’ 2008 essay on dystonia suggests that Fleisher’s affliction is more general, while affirming that Graffman’s is purely piano-related.) Within the world of classical musicians, though, these injuries are the stuff of high drama, potentially the kind of tragic– triumphant narrative that the DS community loves to hate. Emotionality aside, such injuries are far from trivial for musicians, for whom, obviously, playing an instrument extremely well is certainly a “major life activity,” even the defining facet of “musical life.” That these pianist’s injuries are impairments rather than disabilities is clear, regardless of the verdict on their seriousness: they are embodied, manifest within these musicians’ persons, not their environments. That these pianists’

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impairments are not only embodied but also socially constructed owes to the manner in which their confluence, the musical world that so shapes their identities, defines life’s major activities. In a society without pianos, or at least without the requirement that pianos be played with great technical prowess, these pianists’ impairments might not be noticed. Notice or acknowledgement is a requirement for an impairment’s existence. Regardless of whether these pianists’ hand injuries are disabilities, impairments, or both—a distinction central to DS but one that both the original and the amended ADA make only implicitly— the classical music cultural system finds a wide range of hand trauma to be a major defect that impedes essential performance of one of its “major life activities.” A virtuoso concert pianist such as Fleisher or Graffman, whose hand impairment would be regarded elsewhere as minor but that renders that hand incapable of utterly flawless execution of challenging repertoire, would be regarded as totally incapacitated or useless, at least in performing the two-hand— that is, almost the entire—repertoire. While the community around classical music is certainly far smaller in numbers than even the disabled population of the United States, classical music is also a vastly international phenomenon whose history far predates the American nation-state. It is also often and in many places associated with social prestige and the powerful classes. It is the dominant influence on music education curricula not only in the West but also in much of Asia. The importance of the classical music community and other affinity groups may have immense standing both within and even beyond their stakeholders. The influence of such a confluence on an individual’s sense of identity and quality of life, including her sense of impairment and disability, may be greater than that of larger, more conventionally acknowledged cultural systems such as family, ethnicity, or nation. The manner by which classical music defines disability and impairment may have more effect on the lives of those who identify with the genre as part of its confluence than does federal law such as the ADA. This may apply to other mainstream institutions concerned with impairment or disability as well. I am also asserting that such confluences can teach us much about the fluidity of disability identity in particular and even identity in general.

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That impairment is socially constructed owes to varying and contingent demands made upon our bodily capacities, a category in which I also include cognitive or affective abilities. The demands of classical music performance are very different from those of “major life activities” as understood according to interpretations of the ADA. It may be inevitable that social divisions of such contrasting size and demographics—classical musicians versus the entire American public—would differ radically in their audits of human capacities. In the interest of comparison, it will be instructive to contemplate the social construction of disability or impairment from yet another relatively small and entirely different confluence, one whose influence has long dwarfed its size, that of Jewish civilization.

If I Forget You, O Jerusalem, Let My Right Hand Wither (Psalm 137:5, JPS 1985)

As Judaism and Jewish culture have evolved, their perceptions of disability and impairment have adjusted under the influence of both supracultural perceptions and advances in knowledge, including but not limited to medical knowledge (Abrams 1998). To make a long and complex story short and relatively simple, the pre-Rabbinic Judaism of the first nation of Israel, with its priestly Temple cult, demanded of its idealized priests (and also of the animals it sacrificed in the Temple rite) a state of being free of physical blemishes that, while obviously not precisely synonymous with the enormous technical demands placed on a professional, highest- echelon concert pianist, is most certainly analogous in its fetishization of a socially constructed standard of perfection. The ancient Temple cult and the world of classical music—the latter especially in the contemporary era, when musical aesthetics have fallen largely under the spell of the facade of technical flawlessness possible in digitally edited recordings—might well empathize with each other’s aesthetic priorities and extreme professional pressures. With the advent of the Rabbinic diaspora Judaism of the Common Era—during which the stateless Jewish people came to regard their landless condition as one of collective, metaphorical impairment (Abrams 1998, 77–78)—Judaism was transformed correspondingly into what might be

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regarded as an unembodied, or at least less embodied, mode. Though the physically perfect priest retained his role in historical and theological memory (a significant aspect of Judaism), the new emphasis was the idealization of the intellectual: the study of Scripture, Torah, and Talmud under a new form of clerical leadership, the rabbinate. With the direction of Rabbinic Judaism so thoroughly intellectual in its priorities, the Talmud came to deemphasize physical perfection, except in memorialization of the priesthood and Temple Judaism. It also correspondingly regarded cognitive and communication impairments, whose distinction was poorly understood at the time and perhaps is only somewhat better understood today, as the most disabling. These were subsumed under the category cheresh, shoteh v’katan: deaf-mute, mentally ill–mentally disabled, and children (Abrams 1998). The inclusion of children in this impaired class along with the nearly complete exclusion of references to blindness and mobility impairments in Talmudic case law are strikingly different from any other construction of disability and impairment of which I am aware. Yet, given the statelessness and thus the vulnerability of the Jewish people during the era in which the Talmud was compiled, it makes complete sense that the priorities of human performance would become so different from the contemporaneous norms of other, landed peoples, and that an intellectual, nonmaterial ideal would be chosen over one of demonstrated physical prowess. The instance of Rabbinic diaspora Judaism shows how definitions of disability and impairment can vary drastically, sometimes surprisingly, according to cultural priorities. The example is apt in this book because, from Rabbinic times forward, the Jewish people, like classical musicians, have been foremost a community of praxis rather than one based on such familiar markers as common site of residence (at least until the founding of modern Israel) or body type (Lubet 2006a).

Taking the (Impaired) Hand into His Own Laws A question asked too rarely within DS and perhaps other area studies as well is this: by whom are identities socially constructed? While this question can be neither easily nor briefly answered, we might begin by

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observing that, for someone who claims as one identity that of classical pianist, his (our examples are all male) impairment and disability will be constructed differently according to varying circumstances of place, time, activity, and encounter—that is, his participation in a variety of confluences. These include several institutions and systems whose purpose is to address the effects of his injury. The ADA is but one. I rarely have the opportunity to present my research to musicians. I speculate this is at least partly because their fear of performance injury is so great that the topic is too painful for them to confront. Sacks confirms this to be the case in focal dystonia (2008, 292–293). Still, musicians’ characteristic interest in the pragmatics of our craft mandates that I focus on the topic of the constantly morphing disability status of their injuries and the availability of assistance within the plural American systems of health care and disability accommodation. Famous onehanded pianists serve as my primary examples, with the lives and careers of additional “supercrip” classical musicians with disabilities— like Itzhak Perlman (Lubet 2004b)—who have enjoyed major professional success and serve as important points of comparison. (The remarkable accomplishments of congenital amputee violinist Adrian Anantawan, whose photo graces the cover of this book and whose instrumental technique is unimpaired by his reliance on a prosthetic, will doubtless enrich these conversations.) Graffman and Fleisher have been, simultaneously, PWDs within their chosen profession, or confluence, of concert pianist and ABs (people who are able-bodied), according to normative interpretations of the ADA. But the reverse is true for famed violinist Itzhak Perlman, a polio survivor who walks with crutches to ascend the stage and uses a scooter offstage (Amigo Mobility International 2009), but whose upper limbs— and thus of course his playing—are utterly unimpaired. Perlman is anything but an impaired concert soloist, though his inability to walk “normally” is perhaps the archetypal disability according to the ADA, which specifically lists walking as a “major life activity.” Among the handimpaired classical pianists in this analysis, only the war-wounded Paul Wittgenstein, who was truly one-handed (and one-armed) would be regarded as impaired by any standard I know. Robert Schumann’s righthand injury apparently was comparable to Graffman’s and Fleisher’s in the limits it imposed, but the hand possessed continued limited utility

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throughout his life for activities beyond pianism, such as writing and conducting, both of which he apparently did badly. It was the composer’s lifelong mental illness (Neumayr 1994) that seriously impeded his major life activities in a manner that any interpretation of the ADA would characterize as disabling. Neumayr’s medical biography of Schumann reports that his variously diagnosed mental illnesses frequently were entirely incapacitating and rendered impossible any form of work whatever, the Draconian criterion for accommodation via the ADA, confirmed by the Supreme Court decision Toyota v. Williams. However, his difficulties were episodic and alternated with periods of extraordinary creativity. The amended ADA of 2008 states explicitly that episodic disabilities are considered permanent and thus require accommodation. Though theoretical matters may seem removed from the concerns of everyday life, in the deliberations of the U.S. Supreme Court, the practical implications of seemingly philosophical abstractions soon become utterly clear. The court has revisited the ADA numerous times with considerable affect (National Council on Disability 2002), including for musicians. The differing ways societies parse their populaces matter enormously to their legal systems. We live in an era in which the ontologies of family and marriage are hotly debated. Some societies have regarded themselves variously as primarily nation- centric (Nazi Germany), others as a network of associations such as families and corporations that attract and demand intense loyalty (Japan throughout much of its history), and yet others have undergone existential struggles over theocratic, regional, and ethnic or linguistic identities (post-Saddam Iraq). Still another, the United States, privileges the autonomy and rights of the individual above all. These varying concepts of identity will affect a nation’s respective social orders under the law in myriad manners. We musicians interface with medical and legal systems more often than we like, though perhaps less often than we should. Performing any kind of music seriously is potentially far more hazardous to our health than we care to admit. For certain kinds of trauma, evidence points to Western classical music, perhaps surprisingly, as most dangerous of all. Large studies of professional orchestral players in Hong Kong, the United

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States, and internationally agree that a majority have upper limb injuries (Fishbein et al. 1988; James 2000; Yeung et al. 1999). That an injured musician—one whose livelihood, health, and wellbeing are at risk—should have access to appropriate medical treatment is beyond doubt. One would only hope, often unrealistically, that appropriately knowledgeable specialists were available and that one’s musical employers would provide the necessary benefits. The evidence cited above indicates unambiguously that working conditions in professional symphonies are such that most of their members do indeed play hurt. The prestige and compensation of positions in major symphonies may thus in certain important ways be more apparent than real, given the very real risk of painful injury and a trauma-shortened professional life. The blue- collar, craftsmanly aspects of orchestral careers are made abundantly clear in the work of Christopher Small (1998) and Warren Brodsky (2006). And the ADA appears to have been nearly useless regarding musician’s injuries, defining disability according to a standard that excludes musicians, most of the time even referring to what DS would call impairment instead. Legal, institutional, and technical definitions of disability are anything but consistent. One of the ADA’s criteria for mandating accommodations is that disability be permanent, as best as can be ascertained. This criterion is precisely the opposite of that used in the “disabled list” of American professional sports. The players on any professional sport’s disabled list would never qualify for accommodations under the ADA. Not only are their impairments generally regarded as being less than significant enough to impede “major life activities,” but the conditions that would qualify an athlete for the “disabled list” are by definition temporary, as players too seriously injured to return in a reasonable time to active play are dropped from the roster entirely so that a team’s quota may be filled with replacements. Within the confluence of professional sports, the permanently impaired athlete is less a person with a disability than a nonentity, except perhaps as one whose retirement from the sport yields a status somewhere between pensioner and elder statesman. The value of comparing an example from professional sports to one in classical music arises from these fields’ self-regulatory powers; the relative vitality and success of their labor organizations; their communities’

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configuration of performer, management, and audience; and, most important, their emphasis on highly physical, injury-prone performance. The last of these is a far larger element of musical life than is often acknowledged, especially for classical and particularly orchestral music. The term disabled list is not used in music. Neither is there a strong argument for the existence of an analogous status for players who are temporarily sidelined and anticipate a return to activity. Unlike most professional sports, relatively few professional musicians, classical or otherwise, are contract workers with a team to which they could return after recovery from an injury. Further, both the nature and etiology of musicians’ and athletes’ injuries are quite different. Typically, the injuries that take an athlete off the field are traumatic. Those that musicians incur are from repetitive motion (Sacks [2008] reports that this is particularly true of focal dystonia) or, in the case of hearing loss, constant exposure. Martin Fishbein et al. (1988) report that “76 percent [of over 2,200 active professional orchestral players in forty-seven of the fortyeight top U.S. orchestras surveyed] listed at least one problem as severe in terms of its effects on performance,” with “musicians between 35 and 45 . . . most likely to report at least one problem (86 percent).” This appears to indicate that orchestral musicians simply go on playing, having no access to a “disabled list” comparable to that of professional sports. That Fishbein et al. speculate that the lower percentage (71 percent) of their “over 45” cohort is due to players leaving the orchestra indicates that playing hurt and not playing at all are the only realistic choices. Playing while impaired is not only a fact of physical life for orchestral musicians but also a constant fear. In Brodsky’s (2006) study of the attitudes of fifty-four British professional orchestra musicians (including forty-four contract players) toward their occupation, concern that the physical stressors of performance might bring a premature end to their careers was a recurrent theme. The study included eight one-hour interviews per subject and was conducted under extraordinary conditions of confidentiality. Beyond the customary assurances, taping was prohibited at the insistence of the four participating orchestras, with the substitution of written transcriptions acknowledged by the author as a design flaw but a necessary compromise. This would appear to indicate the same concern for disclosure of individual identities of the players as noted by Sacks (2008). If this is the case, then it might indicate differences in

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the manners in which classical musicians report their injuries, according to the prestige of their positions. Though the subjects of Brodsky’s study are British orchestral musicians, he is interested in the entire classical music profession. He specifically notes the benefits that one-handed pianists Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman received for opening up to the public about their painful career-wrecking hand injuries and the treatments they underwent, while also observing that “there may still be taboos that such frankness could subsequently damage [classical musicians’] image or influence how their performances are judged by the public, orchestral management and arts councils.” I am, however, aware of a single instance of temporarily disabled status existing in a professional orchestra whose union contract required it. This was a player with a prominent chair in a major American symphony, whose debilitating and lingering, but non-work-related, illness indicated almost no possibility of a return to performing. Because of a  strong union contract, the musician could not be replaced permanently for several years, during which time the orchestra relied on substitutes, the premise being that the musician eventually might be able to return to performing. While this contractual arrangement may seem appropriately, if also exceptionally, humane to some readers and a counterproductive abuse of union power to others, I reference it as well for the incorporation of a presumption of temporary status into one definition of disability in labor relations in music in at least this single case. (That the presumed disability turned out to be permanent and a return to work impossible does not negate the presumption inherent in the policy.) Though full disclosure of data mandates the reporting of this exceptional case (as well as the benefits Fleisher and Graffman received for publicizing their difficulties), a prominent chair in a major U.S. symphony with a strong union contract is in a position of exceptional privilege. That the disability in this case was non-work-related may also distinguish this musician’s humane treatment from that of run- of-the-mill players in lesser orchestras or in countries where the musician’s union is less powerful. At most a probability, at worst a logical fallacy, permanence is nonetheless generally a defining standard in disability policy. The case of Leon Fleisher, who has regained much of the use of his right hand for pianism after nearly thirty years of misdiagnosis and ineffective treatment,

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certainly calls the notion of permanent impairment into question. If Fleisher’s recovery seems unique and heroic, the fact that a condition that had long been disabling can be effectively treated is far from remarkable when one considers, for example, low vision, diabetes, asthma, and major depression. (I have lived with the last two of these conditions most of my life.) If musicians’ injuries are virtually never disabilities that mandate the benefits of the ADA, they most certainly may often qualify as disabilities under another U.S. legal framework, Workers’ Compensation. Musicians, myself included, do sometimes benefit from Workers’ Compensation (Lubet 2002), though apparently only rarely and meagerly. One goal of Workers’ Compensation is to address employees’ on-the-job injuries in a less litigious environment. However, several circumstances militate against the widespread use of Workers’ Compensation statutes by musicians. The transient, freelance nature of so much musical employment will make the verification of the site or sites where a musician’s injury occurred difficult to impossible. As has been noted, performers often have an all-too-realistic fear of admitting their infirmity before colleagues and rivals, contractors, and conductors, as this disclosure might lead to subsequent denial of employment. According to Graffman who, along with Schumann and Fleisher (but not combat vet Wittgenstein), would appear to meet the injured-on-the-job criterion for eligibility for Workers’ Compensation, “Nobody wants a wounded pianist. There is an oversupply of healthy ones. Admitting difficulties is like jumping, bleeding, into piranha-filled waters.” And according to the National Symphony’s principal trombonist Milt Stevens, “Musicians keep their ailments under wraps for fear of losing their jobs” (Mencimer 2003). Most important to the present discussion is that Workers’ Compensation law is different from and more generous than the ADA in its willingness to call a condition a disability, though less generous in applying its largesse only to those who have been injured on the job. The ADA’s criterion of ability versus inability to perform quite narrowly defined major life activities differs greatly from the standards for receiving benefits, accommodations, or both under Workers’ Compensation, the latter based on fine gradations of the degree of the injury or illness’s severity and analogous magnitudes of intensity of medical treatment.

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I speak here from personal experience. My own disability status has sometimes morphed several times in the course of a single day, as I went from musical to ADA-related to Workers’ Compensation and other appointments. Part of my fascination with DS owes to the complexities and the liminal quality of my own disability status. Workers’ Compensation and the ADA both regard the injured party as generic and normed, rather than as an individual the particulars of whose life and work are germane to adjudication of accommodations and benefits. For example, Robert Schumann would collect no more benefits for the work-related hand trauma that preempted his career as a piano virtuoso—an exceptional skill that largely defined him as both a professional and a person—than would any other worker for whom a return to work in her previous job or a comparable position was less affected by her injury or less important to her identity, self-esteem, or reputation than music was to Schumann. Neither Schumann’s particular pain and suffering in relation to his musical calling, nor any other exceptional gift or skill finely honed by years of work and training, are considerations germane to either the ADA or Workers’ Compensation. Under either regime, the deficit associated with impairment is measured against a hypothetical “normal” person—a construct that, on even a little reflection, boggles the mind—rather than the individual subject. As Lennard Davis argues, normal—a concept and indeed an English word less than 160 years old—is an outgrowth of the development of statistics (2002, 105). A “norm” is a statistical midpoint rather than anyone in particular. Indeed, if a norm is a conglomeration of attributes, such as those constituting an able body, it may fit no one at all precisely. Regardless of the idiosyncrasies of lives spent in music, professional musicians are in real and important ways much like others who are more customarily regarded as workers. As exalted and prestigious as some feel a musical calling to be, a more comprehensive understanding of musicians’ social positions, including our law and policy status, would benefit us greatly. While Workers’ Compensation may sometimes serve as a modest form of redress for an injured musician, it also renders the employer immune from potentially far more remunerative and, in my opinion, more just and equitable personal-injury law. Workers’ Compensation reduces drastically the fixed monetary award an employer must pay

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an injured or ill worker, in contrast with payments that might result from a personal-injury law suit, while purportedly benefiting the employee by requiring no demonstration of employer wrongdoing and thus avoiding most litigation. (My Workers’ Compensation case lasted three-and-a-half years. At that time, between 2001 and 2004, a judgment of 100 percent permanent disability would have resulted in an award of $70,000. An out-of-court settlement determined—by the use of attorneys rather than disability, rehabilitation, or health care professionals—that I am “13 percent permanently partially disabled.”) However, under tort law, assuming provable liability through employer negligence or other harm done, an injured Schumann, Graffman, or Fleisher might truly be compensated justly for his loss. All of their injuries resulted from pianism (unlike Wittgenstein’s), and their compensation would be for both pain and suffering and economic loss. Under current tort law, “economic damages are unlimited in virtually every state, while ‘pain and suffering’ is capped (usually at $250,000 or $500,000) in some states. There are no federal limitations on damages” (S. Lubet, personal communications, September 13, 2005 and September 24, 2009). Workers’ Compensation, like no-fault divorce and no-fault auto insurance, may provide easier access to benefits for the injured than the tort system while potentially averting years of litigation. For the defendant, there is the assurance that payments to the injured party will be kept far lower. In at least one situation, a personal-injury lawsuit loomed large in the recovery and rehabilitation of a prominent classical musician. One of the most famously large personal-injury settlements of all time occurred in the case of concert violinist Rachel Barton Pine. Barton Pine’s injuries in a railway accident took her left leg above the knee and part of her right foot; they were neither on-the-job injuries nor ultimately an impediment to her playing, though her mobility has been affected, a concern in negotiating backstage and performance spaces. After first playing while using a wheelchair, she now uses prosthetic devices, requires ongoing physical therapy, and continues to endure “considerable pain” (Manheim n.d.; Valente 2008). Her injury, hospitalization, and mobility impairment have surely complicated aspects of her career (Bentley 1999; Lubet 2004b; Renn 1999), but the impact certainly has been

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less than it would have been if the likewise mobility-impaired violinist Itzhak Perlman before her, by virtue of his enormous reputation, had not compelled concert halls to reimagine and refit their disability access both backstage and elsewhere (Brandfonbrener 2000). While the accommodation of Perlman’s impairment has both preceded and (because his career is international) transcended the ADA, his is a situation in which this frequently ineffective legislation (Center for an Accessible Society 2002; Personnel Policy Ser vice 2004) might actually have resulted in appropriate accommodations, because walking is regarded by the ADA as a “major life activity.” That the universal symbol for “handicapped” access is a simple graphic of a man using a wheelchair indicates that mobility impairment is the archetypal disability. Surely Rachel Barton Pine is not the only musician besides Itzhak Perlman to benefit from such design modifications. Even if only a few additional major classical performers have similar ambulatory impairments—they include conductors James DePriest and Jeffrey Tate—demographics indicate that classical music’s audience is graying and that such enhancements are becoming necessary for other sectors of the classical music community. Accessibility is increasingly important in performance facilities and is more than a hypothetical or legal necessity. Disability insurance may offer a realistic option for musicians to protect themselves amply in case of disabling injury (Bannister 2003). It is a benefit often offered by professional orchestras and, though expensive, can also be purchased privately or through the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) (American Federation of Musicians 2010), which includes Canada as well as the United States. It gives musicians the opportunity to insure for compensatory value against the loss of their professional abilities. The insurance industry thus acknowledges the high value professional musicians rightly place on their magnificently tuned bodies, in a way that American jurisprudence (the ADA  and Workers’ Compensation) does not and perhaps cannot and should not. Actuaries and underwriters determine the cost of insurance coverage using formulae related to the insured’s demographics and literally put premiums upon them. In doing so, they are discriminating in ways that in most other institutions would be frowned on or even illegal, charging different prices for similar compensation depending on the insured’s

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body type and other factors. Different occupations are determined to carry different levels of risk. According to actuary Earl Hoffman (personal interview, March 22, 2009), “Legally permissible risk selection is necessary to keep private insurance risk pools financially viable.” The American AFM’s Disability Income Insurance Plan also uses individual factors of age and health to set rates and, in the case of health, even to determine eligibility. Given that the overwhelming majority of professional orchestral players have significant health problems (Fishbein et al. 1988), affordable coverage hardly seems assured. And the coverage, in the case of total disability, is for a maximum of five years for a “covered accident” or one year for a “covered illness.” While these are reasonable limitations by insurance industry standards, the lifelong and intense dedication of professional musicians to their trade makes the benefits available seem inadequate. By contrast, Hoffman notes that surgeons often carry disability policies that provide the fullest available coverage throughout a normal working life, whether or not it is possible for the policyholder to resume other well-paying employment, such as a different kind of medical practice. Such protection is understandably expensive but affordable to many surgeons, though only few musicians. Musicians with impairments, including the vast majority of American professional orchestral players (Fishbein et al. 1988), have limited access to unions, insurers, and the courts for help in maintaining a decent quality of life. Few musicians can afford the means through which they might seek redress, such as attorneys. Thus, their well-being is in large part their own responsibility. What disables musicians comes not only from large external social forces such as the legal and insurance systems, but also from within music cultures themselves, which we will examine further, particularly in Chapters 3 and 5, which deal with institutions of Western classical music. None of the above specifically references pianists, though it seems reasonable to assume that, had Paul Wittgenstein lost his arm in circumstances similar to those in which Rachel Barton Pine lost portions of both legs, his personal-injury settlement might have been even greater. What is less clear is the degree to which the size of the settlement would have hinged on the loss of livelihood. In none of these instruments of redress is there a straightforward connection between an

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on-the-job musician’s injury such as that endured by Schumann, Graffman, and Fleisher and compensation for its impact on the artist’s musical career.

(Breaking the) Sound Barriers While scholars in DS tend to avoid taxonomies of impairments, preferring to focus on disability as an overarching political category, I must address them here, pinpointing sources of discrimination and other social disadvantage. I am not concerned with etiology, but with the impact of impairment on musical performance. Using this criterion, I delineate three categories of impairment. The first typology includes impairments that have no impact on musical sound production or, in the case of stage works such as opera, artistic movement as well. It is not that musicians do not endure the prejudices of the larger society or that musical institutions are never culpable of discrimination that does not directly involve music making. But certain forms of discrimination against musicians must be termed extramusical. Professional musicians in this category include Itzhak Perlman, Rachel Barton Pine, and German baritone Thomas Quasthoff. Their impairments are in essence extramusical, extraneous to their own music making, though Quasthoff was denied admission to a major German conservatory for his inability to play the piano (Gleick 1997). Their battles against discrimination have been mostly for justice and respect from society at large rather than from musical society (Lubet 2004b). For Perlman and Barton Pine, this has meant insisting that audiences look at a disabled body, such as was masked by camera work in Perlman’s youthful debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. The mobility needs of Perlman and Barton Pine, as well as conductors Tate and DePriest, have also mandated accessible performance spaces. Baritone Quasthoff, a thalidomide survivor long denied operatic roles because of his appearance, has successfully demanded that opera expand its tradition of suspension of disbelief—ignoring age, race, and girth in favor of casting by voice type and vocal ability—to include visible impairment also. While one might argue that the discrimination against Quasthoff derives from operatic praxis, his marginalization in musical theater is precisely the

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sort of “lookism”—discrimination on the basis of physical appearance— that similarly impaired individuals endure throughout their lives, rather than a phenomenon intrinsic to musical culture. In the other two categories of adaptive responses to disability in music, impairments affect the performer’s own music making. One response is largely individualized: several important musicians have created uniquely virtuosic idioms that incorporate their impairments into the means by which they produce their sound. This phenomenon, prominent in jazz among musicians with physical and systemic impairments, is the focus of Chapter 2. In a collective response, numerous PWDs acting in concert (pun intended) for mutual benefit have formed organizations, even autonomous musical cultures, sometimes with the encouragement of the greater society. These have formed on every continent, particularly among blind musicians (Lubet 2006b, c). Chapter 3 considers the question of whether there exists Blind Culture analogous to Deaf Culture, in which music and musical institutions of and for the blind play a prominent role. The social models of disability notwithstanding, there are, of course, certain activities that are impeded and even utterly curtailed by certain impairments. These include various types of musical performance. One such barrier occurs when the community around a particular musical repertoire rigidly imposes normative expectations for performance and is intolerant of variants, such as might be mandated by an impairment. Western classical music is the paradigm example of this kind of restriction. This is because of the importance of very precisely notated versions of canonic works for which large variations in rendition are regarded as unacceptable. Here it is social forces within rather than beyond the music community that are disabling. It is important here to recall that Christopher Small regards everyone concerned with the music-making process—performers, composers, management, staff, and audiences—as being engaged in “musicking.” That audiences share with musicians the expectation that a pianist be able to play with both hands (Lerner 2006, 75) does not mean that an extramusical force is imposing a requirement that disables the one-armed pianist, only that that standard is imposed from more than one contingent of stakeholders within that community.

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I have already referenced such one-handed pianists: Schumann, Wittgenstein, Graffman, and Fleisher. Post-injury, all but Schumann eventually resumed concertizing left-handed, playing mostly the repertoire Wittgenstein commissioned for himself (Kingsbury 2008; Sacks 2008, 298), plus additional works commissioned by Graffman and Fleisher, including composer William Bolcolm’s 1996 Gaea for Two Pianos Left Hand, and Orchestra, written for them to play together (Bolcom n.d.). All of these artists expanded their professional portfolios to include such activities as composition, conducting, teaching, and conservatory administration. That some of the roughly twenty works commissioned by Wittgenstein have become standard repertoire for both left- and twohanded pianists is a fortunate, though apparently unanticipated, benefit of what had originally been one pianist’s development of adaptive technology expressly for his own use. (The Prokofiev and Ravel concertos are the best known of the Wittgenstein commissions. The pianist did not care for the Prokofiev and refused to perform it, but both concertos are standard repertoire for left- and two-handed pianists alike.) Unlike Wittgenstein, Schumann, Graffman and Fleisher seem to have sustained their injuries on the job through excessive and arguably faulty practice and performance routines. In Schumann’s case, he overpracticed, at times with a device that restrained certain fingers in order to strengthen the entire right hand, causing nerve and tendon damage, though Sacks (2008) also suspects focal dystonia (Neumayr 1994, 262). (Neumayr also believes that Schumann’s temperament was ill-suited to and disinclined toward performance.) Such performance injuries may be on the increase with the growing pressure for artists to give technically flawless performances, a demand that is doubtless largely inspired by “perfect” digitally edited recordings. Obviously, I am unfavorably impressed with classical music’s approach to disability accommodation. It is a rigid, ungenerous cultural system. The impact of its unyielding nature on its participants is deconstructed in various ways, though only occasionally with regard to disability, by aforementioned ethnomusicologists Bruno Nettl, Henry Kingsbury, and Christopher Small. This by no means impugns one-handed classical pianism or the artists, management, or audiences that have nurtured it. Providing a comparatively miniscule repertoire for those pianists

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whose impairments prohibit playing anything else is the best a cultural system can do when it is so rooted in a fixed set of canonic texts regarded as virtually unamendable in performance. The most notable and interesting exception is Johannes Brahms’s very faithful arrangement for piano, left-hand, of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne in D Minor for Violin, an instrument that can play chords of no more than four notes (the typical limit of what one hand plays on the piano). This is the piece that the monster, a disembodied hand, plays in the 1946 horror film The Beast with Five Fingers, the focus of Neil Lerner’s essay “The Horrors of One-Handed Pianism” (2006). Because of the piano’s peculiar nature and the accompanying idea that “half as much music” can be played by a single noninterdependent hand, the instrument’s small folio of accommodative works is unique within Western classical music. No similarly adaptive repertoire has been created or, it seems, could or would be created for any other instrument or voice within the protocols of Western classical music. This near-total demand for performance not only by, but also in praise of, able bodies is not limited to the notes; it has a visual component as well. Thomas Quasthoff is not the only singer whose operatic career has been impeded in a vocal and theatrical genre that appears to be almost infinitely able to accept any idiosyncrasy of personal appearance except visible impairment (Brandfonbrener 2000).

Status . . . Cymbals There may be no better example with which to demonstrate the theory of social confluence, at least within music, than that of hand-injured classical pianists. Their disability status, and doubtless that of many other keyboardists, morphs constantly as the men present themselves to numerous institutions that in various ways audit their manual functioning. The most interesting contrasts in the assessment of their disability status come from where they are considered most versus least special, the concert world, as opposed to the United States as represented by the ADA. What I find most striking is that, while these systems regard disability so very differently, neither is less cruel than the other, at least psychologically. The following paragraphs concern only the pianists’ hand

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injuries and not their mental states. Fleisher, like Schumann, has had thoughts of suicide ideation (Reed 1996). Regarding the ADA, I recognize that I am skating on thin ice. With good reason, disability activists view its original passage as the movement’s landmark achievement of civil rights legislation. But its palpable achievements must be weighed against its obvious disappointments, just as with analogous legislation intended to level the playing fields of race, sex, and sexuality. Its primary benefits appear to have thus far been in the realm of public accommodations such as architecture. These are not only cost efficient, but obviously cost efficient, in their ser vice rendered to both large numbers of PWDs and, with adaptations like ramps and elevators, many others as well. For individuals in sites such as workplaces and schools, accommodations also are likely to always be cost efficient, especially compared to the expense of denying a PWD a lifetime of productivity. This may not always seem to be the case, especially in the short term. Toyota v. Williams offers evidence of why ADA litigation before the amendments of 2008 was almost never successful for the PWD seeking redress, frequently failing in appellate court after initially finding for the plaintiff. Williams, impaired at Toyota and eventually fired rather than accommodated by that employer, certainly revealed the original ADA to be far less than a panacea. Increasingly narrow interpretations of the statute’s language by conservative appellate and Supreme Court judges in Title I (employment) cases had been cited as the greatest challenge to the original ADA’s effectiveness (Colker 2001). Justice O’Connor’s interpretation of the key phrase major life activities was shockingly narrow. Ironically, in his last months, the late (and very conservative) Chief Justice William Rehnquist, an ADA opponent, was permitted to work from home and was thus accommodated far more generously and appropriately than Williams. At least one other item of ADA language, in the amendments of 2008 as well, seriously deflates its potential utility. The requirement for disability accommodations mandates that they need only be “reasonable.” Apart from the obvious problem of determining what reasonable accommodations are, there is the discomfiting but indisputable corollary that some accommodations are unreasonable and thus, that some degree of discrimination—that is, nonaccommodation—is

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indeed reasonable. In the new millennium it is hard to imagine inscribing into law an analogous quantum of “reasonable discrimination” on the basis of race. (Some legalized prejudice, reasonable or not, does remain on the bases of both sex and sexuality.) The world of classical music virtuosi is certainly of a different order and nature than that of the ADA, but nonetheless it has been effectively demonstrated to have remarkable cultural autonomy in maintaining unique institutions and protocols. While Nettl, Kingsbury, and Small have identified unique cultural systems within, respectively, the university school of music, the conservatory, and the symphony orchestra, these all serve a larger community. For those invested in these institutions’ values and engaged in their protocols—and surely this includes concert virtuosi—the community and its standards of human capacities matter much if not more than their country of residence and its measures of human valuation. Musical “diplomacy” between the United States and the former Soviet Union was far warmer than state-to-state relations during the Cold War, as evidenced in the Tchaikovsky and Cliburn competitions. My feeling of “home” while working in music schools in Poland, China, Taiwan, and Bolivia bore this out for me personally. No concert pianist ever began a career playing one-handed, and certainly no person with two exceptionally able hands has ever specialized in the left-hand repertoire by choice. Performing left-handed has always been an accommodation for artists injured off or, more typically, on the job. While the seminal left-handed pianist Paul Wittgenstein had an illustrious and extensive career and remains primarily responsible for the invention of the genre through his many commissions, even he also taught (Reich 2002). Fleisher and Graffman have augmented their musicking as pedagogues and in other ways as well, their concertizing significantly marginalized by injuries that are regarded within this social confluence as a major disability. It is significant that the most important one-handed repertoire consists of concertos with orchestra, carrying the tacit implications that a disabled pianist requires the support of an orchestra and— since concerto soloists nearly always appear only once in an orchestral concert—is incapable of playing a full recital by himself. Graffman plays one-handed solo recitals “every once in a while” (Child 2009). Now that Fleisher has recovered some use of his right hand, he plays recitals

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that include both left- and two-handed repertoire. He has been known to abort a two-handed performance in progress out of need, and substitute a left-handed work, after having informed the audience of the situation (Pisetsky 2008). Might we regard Schumann, Graffman, and Fleisher, all hurt on the job, as the Ella Williams (as in Toyota v. Williams) of concert pianism? This analogy may seem a stretch, implying that members of an elite and rewarding profession such as classical music need to shift and broaden their specializations within their field in response to their workrelated injuries and attain some degree of success doing so. I implore the reader to bear with this comparison, nonetheless. In an era in which “oppression studies” occupy so much of the liberal arts, it is easy, perhaps even encouraged, to disregard the physical and emotional pain of those who lie demographically beyond the clearly marked realms of the subaltern. The need for broader empathy is grounded in more reasons than are within the purview of this project. Prominent among them, though, is that one idée fixe of DS is that anyone’s disability status can be, and likely at some time will be, transformed, nearly always from ablebodied to disabled, sometimes even instantaneously. (I believe that all socially constructed markers—race, gender, and sexuality—are more mutable than is generally thought, though making that case here would be distracting. But I also support the DS position that both disability and impairment are particularly, and to a unique degree, subject to change.) The culture of classical music does much to treat those pianists with sidelined right hands as an Other. Lerner (2006, 75) begins his important essay by saying “Pianists must have two hands. . . . With only one functioning hand, someone who wishes to play the piano becomes not a pianist but a one-handed pianist.” Lerner continues by observing that piano compositions for two hands are the default option and never so labeled, whereas the Otherness of onehanded works is always affixed to their titles. But even before its beginning, Lerner titles his essay “The Horrors of One-Handed Pianism.” Though its subtitle is “Music and Disability in The Beast with Five Fingers” and much of the essay deals with the stock figure of the amputee-asmonster, it is clear that the author believes that that perception is by no means confined to horror films. And though it is almost surely not Oliver Sacks’ intention to reinforce that image (2008, 284–288), his essay on

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Wittgenstein’s gone-but-not-forgotten limb is entitled “Phantom Fingers: The Case of the One-Armed Pianist.” Among one-handed pianists, it seems Leon Fleisher has endured the greatest angst as a result of this marginalization, as evidenced in his resultant “period of deep depression and despair” (Sacks 2008, 289–300) and even suicide ideation (Reed 1996). Sacks’ account of Fleisher’s struggles indicates that no pianist felt a greater sense of loss, tried harder to accept his fate (by delving into the one-handed repertoire, especially the Wittgenstein commissions), or clung harder to the dream that he might someday recover the ability to play two-handed. “Every morning for thirty- odd years, he tested his hand, always hoping.” That he has succeeded within limits has resulted not from prayer but from a combination of Rolfing Structural Integration and Botox treatments. Whatever else classical music may be, serious classical musicians have an admirable work ethic. The sense of loss that accompanies a permanent, performance-related injury is enormous and worthy of empathy— doubly so if, as many musicians believe, musicality is a deeply embodied capacity, something we will ponder further in Chapter 3. I make this observation having identified strongly as a musician since my youth and having endured multiple injuries, countless hours of chronic pain, endless rehabilitative therapies, and several surgeries. Fleisher’s emotional tumult neither shocks nor surprises me and would, I think, seem utterly natural to the musicians who make up the cultural air I breathe every day. It is little wonder to me that so many of us endure vast amounts of pain and even die young.

Hands Down As always with impairment and disability, there is a considerable distance between the inherent difficulties of an atypical body and the burdens of its socially constructed disability. It is in the manner in which the classical music cultural system constructs these hand injuries, many of which would be regarded in other realms as relatively minor, that a sense of psychological cruelty surfaces. Here, it is not Temple Judaism but the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:30 (New King James Version) that is telling: “And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off

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and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.” The Gospel of Matthew describes in more than merely metaphorical terms the fate of the classical pianist’s injured right hand. A hand that is incapable of flawless technique—an unpardonable sin in the world of virtuosi—is, in terms of its role in that world, “cut off and cast away.” The hand is regarded as so entirely useless that it may as well be amputated. As a piece of professional “equipment,” it is. It is important here to remember that Jesus was a product of the Jewish tradition that demanded an absence of all blemishes in both its priests and sacrificial animals, neither expected to perform his sacred duties if less than perfect. That the culture of classical music, its schools in particular, is “a kind of religious system,” populated with its own deities and functionaries, is evident in Bruno Nettl’s ethnography of “Heartland U” (a composite of several Midwestern institutions where he has taught), in which he speaks of the “great composers” as “deities beyond criticism,” “The Pantheon” and “A Roundtable of Deities,” honored with “special acts of worship,” served by “a priesthood of performers and musicologists” (Nettl 1995, 12–22). In the context of such a cult of perfection, it is no wonder that an injured hand is no hand at all. But the figurative, confluential amputation that I describe within the world of piano virtuosi is regarded as routine, necessary, and inevitable. Never is a role for the impaired hand even contemplated. The refusal to play at all with an injured hand calls into question the purpose and value of music, at least with the Western classical music cultural system. Should classical performance be understood as a sort of extreme performance akin to high-level able-bodied athletics? Or is it discursive, expressive? If it is the latter and the injured hand still might have “something to say,” why has it been confluentially and cruelly amputated? The answer lies in the current quasi-Biblical, fundamentalist, literal social construction of the canonic literature of Western classical music. An injured hand cannot play the notes precisely as written. This demand for rigorous fidelity to source text is unmatched elsewhere in Western culture other than perhaps religion or Constitutional law. The era of canon formation in Western classical music largely coincided with the emergence of theories of race, social Darwinism, and

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ideologies of eugenics. Before the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the repertoire that would be canonized (symphonies and operas) was primarily known through “errant” arrangements for piano and small groups. In addition, until about the time of Ludwig van Beethoven’s death in 1827 and composer Felix Mendelssohn’s Bach revival, improvisation flourished among instrumentalists and even opera singers. Improvisation, like arrangement—a potential source of disability accommodation—is antithetical to the canonization of “inerrant” texts and has all but disappeared from Western classical tradition except at the margins. It was not Beethoven’s death but his deafness that contributed to the demise of improvisation. Because he was unable to play or conduct, he became a composer only. Robert Schumann, whose injury ended his concert career before it started, nonetheless loved to improvise in private (Neumayr 1994, 338). But, as Nettl argues (1995, 83), performance of canonic musical texts cannot risk improvisation or any other interpretive latitude, potentially accommodative or not. In characterizing the realization of the classical composer’s intentions as a “purification ritual,” he unambiguously forges a link between music’s cult of perfection and both the priestly cult of the ancient Hebrews and the hand amputation prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount. If the sense of sacred moral imperative associated with protecting the pristine quality of canonic (piano) repertoire, including prohibiting its approach by impaired right hands, seems hyperbolic, what Nettl and I observe is surely familiar and even mundane to anyone with a conservatory or university education in classical music. I embellish only in identifying the social construction—actually, the social amputation—of injured piano hands within this unique confluence. The classical music cultural system has left little room for injured pianists and even less for instrumentalists who must always play twohanded. As Fishbein et al. have shown, it is a dangerous occupation, and revelation of one’s injuries adds to the sense of risk. There seems to be little room for people with obvious physical disabilities anywhere but at the absolute top, where the heroism of their “supercrip” stories trumps the appearance of imperfection or asymmetry that they might lend to the orchestral rank and file (Lubet 2004b). I perceive a particular kind of psychological cruelty as indigenous to the Western classical music cultural system: that disabilities might be

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heard, in the form of injured orchestral players, but rarely seen. It is by no means the only psychological cruelty associated with a musical praxis, especially in relation to impairment. It is an unnecessary harshness representing but the tip of a musical iceberg that freezes out of participation all but a handful of hearty and fortunate musicians with disabilities, not only professionally, but even at the pedagogical and amateur levels (Lubet 2004b). The sadness of this situation is clear: there is little doubt that today an increasingly rich participatory engagement with Western classical music is possible through extant technologies, even for people with the most significant impairments (Lubet 2004b, especially 145–156), as well as for those wounded players who have developed lowtech alternatives to two-handed pianism. But even better, in my opinion, than technological accommodations that permit access by people with disabilities to a tradition that is otherwise so hostile to inclusion are those instances when musicians have been able to craft a praxis around their impairments, to actually perform their impairments in a manner that yields something musically unique. The impairment either inspires a music that would simply never occur to an able-bodied performer or the impairment enables music that would be impossible for a more typically abled artist. Both of these scenarios have framed the careers of important jazz musicians. In doing so, they posit a different and, I believe, far better outlook for the place of disability in music than that just chronicled in Western classical music. The careers of three such artists are the subject of Chapter 2.

2 / Let’s Face the Music and Dance Jazz and Physical Disability

I

n Chapter 1, I proposed that, as a cultural system, jazz offers openings to the expression of impairment that have yet to exist in Western classical music. By this I mean that the protocols of jazz provide better opportunities for musicians with disabilities not only to perform, but to perform in ways that are actually expressions of lives with disabilities. What I am suggesting is subtle and complex. I am not suggesting that jazz as a cultural system is some sort of Eden for people with disabilities (PWDs) or anyone else. The difficulties of lives in jazz are many and storied. Once known for soloing contests known as “cutting sessions,” jazz is fiercely competitive. Further, the social stigma long associated with jazz by its many opponents is part of my contemplation of musicality itself as impairment in Chapter 4. The comparison I draw here is only between the psychological cruelty in Western classical music’s negotiation of physical injuries, discussed in Chapter 1, and the more humane negotiation that has occurred in jazz. My thesis concerns only physical conditions that affect the body’s sound-producing apparatus. I do not consider physical and systemic impairments that are unrelated to an individual’s performance. Neither do I contemplate sensory impairments or those cognitive, mental,

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or behavioral atypicalities often characterized as disabilities. Singer Ella Fitzgerald’s double amputation from diabetes late in life and pianist Michel Petrucciani’s osteogenesis imperfecta (“glass bone disease”) were surely among the most significant physical impairments any professional performing artist has ever had, but these, with the exception of an adaptive technology to enable three-foot-tall Petrucciani to reach his instrument’s pedals, seem to have had no impact on either one’s performance. Perhaps even more important, my thesis does not concern blindness, the impairment most identified with musicians in general and African American musicians in particular. Blindness, of course, is unrelated to the mechanisms of sound production and thus irrelevant. Further, in music that cleaves more to orality than written notation and does not rely extensively on conductors, including the vast majority of African American music, blindness is largely a nonissue. Ray Charles and multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk both performed and recorded with large ensembles without needing to reference their conductors. Blindness may not be an impairment at all when the musician is most intensely engaging in this particular confluence—that is, when he or she is actually making music. (The idea of blindness as nonimpairment in musical situations is pursued further in Chapter 3.) My final qualification of this stance is that I take no position here on whether there is greater participation of PWDs in jazz or classical music. It is not that I lack an opinion or even some preliminary data, only that neither matters to my thesis. Based on a lifetime of observation of numerous genres of music, I am confident that, at least proportionately, there are more jazz than classical musicians with disabilities, particularly professionals. But this would be difficult or impossible to prove conclusively. It would be even harder to demonstrate causation or to control for demographics such as race and geographic distribution that might skew the data. But a head count is not germane to my thesis. While matters of race will inevitably emerge in any study that compares classical music and jazz, such considerations must be kept in perspective. Though the roots of jazz are undeniably African American and jazz’s African retentions and their New World transformations

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contribute much to that music’s appeal, jazz is performed and enjoyed worldwide. But the question I contemplate here regarding the impact of physical impairment on jazz performance is not in essence related to racial identity. Still, there are exceptions, instances of important racial differences in the manner in which an individual’s disability and the response to his impairment-related style is socially constructed, in particular its reception by a variety of audiences, each with different expectations and values. Such is the example of African American vocalist Jimmy Scott, who will be discussed later in this chapter. Of the three major examples that follow, certainly the most famous is French Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. The aforementioned pianist Michel Petrucciani was French and white. Prominent among the many blind white jazz musicians have been British pianist George Shearing, American saxophonists Lennie Tristano and Eric Kloss, and American vocalist-pianist Diane Schuur. All have benefited professionally in a manner similar to their black colleagues, both blind and with other impairments: both from the jazz cultural system’s largesse toward variance and from its strongly African-rooted orality, an ethos beneficial to musicians with disabilities. We often fail to distinguish between culture and race. We have here a paradigm in which this difference matters greatly. Jazz is a cultural system with predominantly black roots, but it has long incorporated important non-African American participation, including that of prominent nonblack artists with disabilities. This study of jazz musicians with performance-impacting physical disabilities focuses on three musicians. They are French Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, African American Danish expatriate pianist Horace Parlan, and African American vocalist Jimmy Scott. That only one of this trio is a pianist, like the subjects of Chapter 1, is significant. It is unlikely that Django Reinhardt would have had a post-impairment musical career at all had he been a classical guitarist. Jimmy Scott’s fate as a classical singer is perhaps a more complex question, but it is a safe conjecture that a typical male vocalist’s career in opera and art song would have been out of the question. A comparison between the careers of pianist Horace Parlan and his classical co-instrumentalists, the only classical musicians for whom a uniquely “impairment-friendly” repertoire exists, may be the most interesting and certainly reveals the differences in these two music cultural systems with regard to disability.

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Django Reinhardt The most illustrious and celebrated example of a jazz musician “playing through” his impairment was Django Reinhardt. Had I wished to invent a perfect case study of adaptive virtuosity, I could have done no better than the legendary Gypsy guitarist. Reinhardt (1910–1953) was the first great jazz guitar soloist and one of the finest soloists on any instrument active before World War II (Givan 2003, 19). He was the first great European jazz musician, arguably the first major, truly original contributor to the genre who was not African American. The instrumentation of Reinhardt’s best-known ensemble, the famed Quintet of the Hot Club of France, which he led with renowned violinist Stephane Grappelli—violin, three guitars, and bass without piano or drums— introduced to the world “Gypsy jazz” (Givan 2003, 20), arguably the first great frequent collaborator with touring and expatriate African American musicians as early as 1935, Reinhardt was brought to the United States for his only American tour by Duke Ellington. Reinhardt’s legendary status owes foremost, of course, to his musical prowess. It is doubtless bolstered by his unusual and oft-exoticized ethnic heritage (Dregni 2004). But much of Reinhardt’s reputation also owes to his impairment, the extremely limited use of his third and fourth (ring and pinky) left-hand fingers, the result of a fire in 1928 when he was eighteen years old and already recording and playing professionally (Givan 2003, 20). Reinhardt’s impairment was precisely the sort that would be deemed insignificant by the ADA standards, though it would be devastating to any guitarist. Much of Reinhardt’s celebrity owes to his selfrehabilitation. Anyone knowledgeable about jazz knows the story, though the precise nature and extent of the impairment generally is not well understood and its severity typically somewhat exaggerated. Fortunately, however, Reinhardt’s limited use of his left hand is the subject of a thoughtful and meticulous study by Benjamin Givan. In addition, an ambitious volume of solo transcriptions by Stan Ayeroff (2002) includes analysis and fingerings that, though speculative, are feasible for Reinhardt’s injured left hand. Givan and Ayeroff provide invaluable information about Reinhardt that is not only interesting but potentially valuable for hand-injured guitarists. They offer insight into how Reinhardt’s impairment led him

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to make certain musical choices that were elements of one of the most individual styles in jazz history. I suspect Benjamin Givan might disagree, at least in part, with my last statement. He provides evidence of how Reinhardt’s impairment rendered impossible many chords that are easy for unremarkable but able-bodied guitarists. But Givan states that as a soloist, using only his two “healthy” fingers to play mostly single-string melodies rather than chords, Reinhardt’s “disability seems in theory to have been of enormous significance, yet in practice to have been spectacularly irrelevant” (Givan 2003, 39). If Givan means only that Reinhardt played with great vitality, invention, and especially velocity, he is certainly correct. One could “hear” Reinhardt’s impairment only by listening for what he did not, and presumably could not, play. Such a feat is not only presumptuous, but also flirts with the logical fallacy of being able to hear that which is not being played. While there is speculation that Reinhardt used his impaired third finger to his advantage in chording (Schmitz and Maier 1985, 57, cited in Givan 2003, 26), the technical edge this would provide is slight indeed and no able-bodied guitarist would ever be deterred from executing similar passages. But Reinhardt’s “able-bodied-sounding” technique may be less important than his determination to reinvent his technique in order to keep playing professionally. Though inspiration is a controversial matter in DS and disability activism, it is not only the notes Reinhardt played at lightning speed, but the effort, ingenuity, and passion for music through which he attained them, that fuel his legend. (To the extent that acknowledging these attributes contributes to the toppling of the ugly stereotypes that coupled Roma people with Jews as targets of Hitler’s genocide and is a continuing source of their oppression, especially in Europe, that is all to the good.) That Reinhardt remains, by any standard, among jazz’s greats may be what Givan means by “spectacularly irrelevant” (emphasis mine). But Stan Ayeroff’s transcription project illustrates the relevance of Reinhardt’s impairment to his playing. It illustrates what should be utterly obvious about the guitarist’s artistry: that the notes Reinhardt chose to play, which were idiomatic to his two “solo fingers,” and the manner in which he played with them, including such techniques as sliding a

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finger up or down a string where an able-bodied player would have used several digits, were intimately related to his impairment. Simply put— and evident, once one allows it to be—Reinhardt played only what his impaired left hand would permit and particularly what must have felt natural. (His chording, for which he employed his two impaired fingers, is more obviously idiosyncratic.) On one level, it is possible to claim that Reinhardt as soloist sounded like an able-bodied guitarist, as he was a stunning virtuoso by any standard. However, insofar as guitarists as diverse as Willie Nelson, B. B. King, Jerry Garcia, Wes Montgomery, John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, Vernon Reid, Chet Atkins, and Les Paul all cite Reinhardt as an influence (Ayeroff 2002, 4; Givan 2003, 20), it would be more accurate to state that for decades important players have attempted to incorporate embodied stylistic idiosyncrasies of a legendary left-hand-impaired guitarist. As recent Reinhardt biographer Michael Dregni told me (private conversation, December 4, 2004) and as I have witnessed in concert, some of Reinhardt’s legion of admirers who cleave very closely to his style and often perform in “Hot Club” ensembles that borrow the instrumentation of the guitarist’s most famous group (Dregni 2004, 268–278) go so far in their mimesis as to play their solos with two fingers only, apparently as both an act of reverence and an attempt to approximate their idol’s sound. In that context, strange as it may seem, one might more accurately state that many able-bodied guitarists cite as an influence and even attempt to sound just like the most famous handimpaired guitarist of all time than that Reinhardt, as Givan strongly implies, sounds like an able-bodied guitarist. Two of the Reinhardt acolytes just mentioned were also upperlimb-injured, though to the more easily adaptable right rather than left. Following a 1946 auto accident, celebrated guitarist-inventor Les Paul had his right arm set permanently in playing position. While this is a significant impairment in many ways, it did not affect his playing. Jerry Garcia lost his right-hand middle finger to a childhood accident. When playing lead guitar with the Grateful Dead, Garcia used a pick, such that the missing middle finger would be of little or no consequence, but he also finger-picked guitar and banjo, for which the missing finger presented a major challenge. In addition, the right thumb and first and second fingers of session guitarist Bruce Langhorne, who appears on some

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of Bob Dylan’s most important recordings, are “stumps” (Richard and Mimi Fariña Fan Site 2008), to no obvious audible effect. DS has identified several prototypical disability images in popular culture, particularly as applied to celebrities and prominent fictional characters. Reinhardt might be regarded as a “supercrip,” a person who through hard work and tenacity alone “overcame” his disability, and who, in doing so, serves as a role model for us all. While his impairment seems only to have bolstered the guitarist’s reputation, I do not mean to imply that Reinhardt’s legendary impairment is unaccompanied by a back story of socially constructed disability. Social constructions, by definition, affect entire social categories. An important tenet of DS identifies social barriers and not individual, medicalized defects as the primary obstacles to a decent quality of life for PWDs. The supercrip image is a variation on the “model minority” construction most often associated in the United States with Asian Americans. This construction is used to demonstrate that the only, or primary, thing standing in the way of success for a member of the minority is not institutionalized oppression but, as with anyone else, a failure of will and tenacity, and that socially imposed limitations are ultimately irrelevant. It seems unlikely that the mythology surrounding Reinhardt’s achievements in particular has been applied as a cultural tool in the oppression of PWDs, Roma, or anyone else—I know of no such instances—but it is certainly part of a larger conventional wisdom that ascribes to members of disadvantaged groups full responsibility for their failures to overcome adversity. This is in direct contrast with the supposedly more gifted, persistent, hard-working, and thus successful members of their cohorts. On the other hand, there is no denying that, as a Gypsy in Europe, Reinhardt endured prejudice all his life, as well as the threat of extermination during World War II. Remarkably, Reinhardt’s great celebrity in France—the one place the Nazis tolerated jazz and other distinctly unAryan amusements as escape valves in the self-imposed rigidity of their culture, especially for their own troops—seems to have saved him from death, though not from the fear of it in the event that racial attitudes and policies might change with the vicissitudes of war (Dregni 2004, 154–187). Reinhardt, who died in 1953, lived his life almost entirely in Europe and spent his career mostly in jazz while also playing and recording

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Gypsy and other styles of music. He might have fared differently as a professional musician in other circumstances, both those that defined the careers of the classical pianists discussed in Chapter 1 and those affecting a twenty-first- century person whose injury, were he living in the United States, would bring him into contact with a wide variety of institutions and policies regarding disability and impairment. The keyboard instruments that were the focus in Chapter 1 are nearly unique insofar as they can be played with either hand or both (and some, like the organ, with pedal keyboards as well). No other instrument that regularly appears in classical music could permit comparably adapted performance by means of an analogous special repertoire. Significant progress has been made in prosthetics and adaptive instruments (Living My Song n.d.). For example, Adrian Anantawan, a Canadian violinist born without a right hand and using a prosthetic device to which he straps his bow, has studied on full scholarship at the prestigious Curtis Institute and at Yale University, performed at the White House and Kennedy Center, and soloed with the Toronto and Vancouver Symphonies. Technician Jeff Stelling, has started the UNK OneHanded Woodwinds Program at the University of Nebraska–Kearney to invent and manufacture woodwinds for players with disabilities (VSA Arts 2004, 7– 8). But no prosthetic to date has come remotely close to approximating the fine motor functions necessary for the left hand of a guitarist. Even had he been able to switch to left-handed play (as one guitarist I know who switched to right-handed play after losing a left-hand finger has done), Reinhardt would not have been able to perform classical repertoire, which requires an able ring finger. His injury would thus almost surely have ended a classical guitar career. The extant classical guitar repertoire would have been inaccessible, and commissions of new works would have been unlikely, given that in comparable circumstances no composer has yet written a work tailor-made to a pianist’s impaired right hand, choosing instead always to avoid using that less-than-flawless appendage entirely. Reinhardt’s hand injury is also a paradigm of the sort that, though it would have ended many careers, would fail to qualify him as a PWD according to the ADA, original or (as I read it) amended. His burns were over much of his body as well as his hand, and were quite serious. His

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physicians even contemplated amputating his right leg (Dregni 2004, 46). But the burns seemed to have healed to the point of causing no permanent limitation of function. Had Reinhardt been burned on the job (the fire was in the trailer in which he lived), his injuries would likely have qualified him for Workers’ Compensation. Had he been interested and able to afford it, he could also have insured his hands for a princely sum or collected handsomely were he successful in personal injury litigation. That Reinhardt continued to play at all, let alone brilliantly, was a testament to his enormous dedication and superior musical intellect. Both of these qualities fly in the face of Roma stereotypes, which plague even an important, thorough, and admiring biography such as Michael Dregni’s. Reinhardt self-accommodated to an injury that was certainly a major impairment within his field. I suspect many or most guitarists working in vernacular idioms would have quit under the circumstances, as would be absolutely required of classical players, rather than spending years, as Reinhardt did, reinventing his technique. The interpretive latitudes of jazz—to arrange, improvise, and compose one’s own parts— enabled a technical and stylistic transformation that gave Reinhardt access to the entire repertoire, played in his unique and idiosyncratic style. This kind of transformation was unavailable to the one-handed classical pianists of Chapter 1, the protocols of whose musical confluence left them with a miniscule number of pieces to play and the need to supplement their careers with other sorts of musicking such as teaching, administration, and conducting. Having played through all of Ayeroff’s transcriptions of Reinhardt solos, I know that there is much about his choices of scales, chords, textures, and even special effects that flows directly from his uniquely configured left hand. To be sure, two of his fingers were severely limited in functionality, but the technique of the other two as well as the thumb, which typically is used sparingly and with which he would reach around the neck to play bass notes on the low strings (Givan 2003, 28), was utterly extraordinary. While the disability rights movement and the field of DS both tend to shy away from inspirational stories of individual initiative and grit, in large part because such legends are so often used to deny the necessity for social reform, I find it impossible not to be in awe of Reinhardt’s accomplishments. That arguably the single most impor-

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tant jazz guitarist of all time and the first great jazz innovator from beyond African American roots developed both a technique and style that emanated from a seriously impaired fretting hand must stand as a remarkable testament to both his tenacity and his musical genius. At the same time, Reinhardt was not simply some sort of disabled guitar supercrip, but like everyone in modern society, a member of various social confluences. It is always necessary to acknowledge the social environment in which a PWD succeeds or does not. Here, the theory of social confluence is particularly interesting. Within the musical circles where Reinhardt worked, the condition of his left hand would be regarded as a major impairment, likely far more than in any other community in which he participated, though his injury did exempt him from military ser vice (Dregni 2004, 47). (Robert Schumann’s hand injury exempted him from the military as well [Neumayr 1994, 261–262].) The musical confluence that provided Reinhardt’s livelihood and that therefore must have ranked among the most important in his life—the world of jazz and other vernacular music of France—must also have been the environment in which his impairment presented itself most strongly. At the same time, the French vernacular music cultural system, especially jazz, was able to accommodate an impaired musician to the extent that he required no “special” repertoire and was able to excel into the highest echelons of virtuosity. It did this by virtue of its flexibilities of interpretation and oral tradition, in marked contrast to the canonic orthodoxies of notated Western classical music. The vicissitudes of Reinhardt’s personal life aside, there is no reason to believe that the socially constructed musical world in which he functioned disabled—that is, limited—him in any way. This is in stark opposition to the existential crisis of classical pianist Leon Fleisher. Rather than losing his fretting hand to the musical facet of his life, and thus ending his musical life altogether, Reinhardt learned to use it in new and vastly influential ways.

Horace Parlan The career and musical style of jazz pianist Horace Parlan (1931–) differ from those of guitarist Django Reinhardt in interesting and enlightening ways. A familiar though not legendary figure among jazz aficionados,

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Parlan is likely best known for his work as a sideman with such luminaries as Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Dexter Gordon, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Stanley Turrentine, and Lou Donaldson. Parlan has made a respectable number of recordings as a small-group leader as well (Fujiwara 2000; Pribek n.d.; Wimmer n.d.). Parlan is a polio survivor. The facility of his right hand, while awkward to compare to that of a guitarist because of the independence of the hands in the former versus interdependence in the latter, is significantly less than Reinhardt’s left. Reinhardt’s impaired hand had two fully functional playing fingers, the index and middle, which are the strongest and most important on any guitarist’s hand; limited use of the other fingers; and a fully functional thumb (which any guitarist uses only rarely to fret the strings but is required to increase the pressure the fingers apply to the strings). By contrast, Parlan has only quite limited use of two fingers on his right hand, typically the melody hand, the index and pinky. In a video of his performance, the 2002 DVD Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan, these appear to be largely immobile, but positioned such that Parlan can maneuver them like xylophone mallets, by changing his arm position. His hands are quite large, such that he is able to play all-important octaves (as well as smaller spans) with these right-hand fingers. His unimpaired left hand is exceptionally facile (Feather 1960). Much of the time he uses his left hand to play chords in the lower register in rapid alternation with melodies in midrange, adding additional harmonic voices in the right hand, which at times also contributes slower, more lyrical melodies, often in octaves. This melody-in-the-middle style is unique in jazz, though Parlan’s left-hand technique has precedents in the styles of Fats Waller, Earl Hines, Art Tatum (like Parlan a PWD, he was nearly blind), and Teddy Wilson. This sound is obviously attainable by a pianist with a fully able right hand, but it has clearly never been so cultivated. Thus, necessity has been the mother of Parlan’s stylistic invention. In contrast to Benjamin Givan’s remark that Django Reinhardt’s hand impairment was “spectacularly irrelevant,” there is no mistaking that Parlan’s polio has had an impact on his style, which appears to attract the notice of every critic. The observations of Chris Fujiwara of the Boston Phoenix are interesting: “Parlan’s surprising voicings and his tendency to work with short melodic units reflect his incorporation of his physical disability (crippled with polio at age five, he lacked [sic; Parlan

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is, as of 2009, very much alive] the use of the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand).” The power and unusual utilizations of Parlan’s left hand, including an exceptional role in melody, usually a right-hand function, especially in jazz, are also frequently noted. What is interesting, though, as well as cause for concern about the quality of jazz criticism, is that, while Fujiwara provides what would be an almost accurate description of Django Reinhardt’s left-hand impairment (fingers 4 and 5 on the piano are 3 and 4 on the guitar’s left hand), he describes Parlan’s right hand as being far more and quite differently able than it actually is. In all fairness, Fujiwara is not alone in his “observation.” No less a jazz critic and musician than Leonard Feather made the same characterization in his liner notes to Parlan’s first Blue Note album (Wimmer n.d.). It seems quite plausible that critics after Feather, one of the giants of jazz criticism, are replicating his error rather than closely studying Parlan’s playing themselves. What are we to make of this inaccuracy? If my concern for the precise functioning of Parlan’s impaired right hand seems overly physiological for a DS context, I assure you it is not. It has everything to do with an important facet of piano technique and of Parlan’s disability and impairment status. It says much about the manner in which his playing is heard, particularly in comparison to Reinhardt’s, as a player whose impairment, unlike the guitarist’s, is indeed unambiguously relevant. Further, it tells us much about the process of listening in general, in which our ears are merely portals through which musical (and other sonic) information is processed in a variety of ways and through a variety of sociocultural filters. Finally, the difference between older criticism and mine may tell us something about the nature of historiography and the use of available information technology. Central to normative piano technique, particularly to playing melody, is the use of the thumb. In jazz especially, melody is usually a function of the right hand. The older appraisals of Parlan’s right-hand technique just cited clearly imply either a fully functional (Fujiwara 2000) or semifunctional (Feather 1960) right thumb. Were this the case, Parlan would have a considerable ability to play right-hand melody at any tempo, in a manner typical of jazz pianists. Based only on his hand impairment, the difference between Parlan’s right-hand technique, as

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seen in the DVD Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan (Parlan et al. 2002) and the previously mentioned accounts, would be (if he lived in the United States instead of Denmark) the difference between his qualifying or not qualifying as a PWD under either version of the ADA. This is a major measure of who is or is not a person with a disability under U.S. federal law. (Parlan’s impairment affects much of his right side. By 2002, Parlan was also diabetic and nearly blind, without, however, any apparent impact on his playing [Lazarus 2003].) Because of their impaired right hands, pianists Graffman and Fleisher have been unable to play the standard classics and thus required a special, miniscule, “adaptive” left-handed repertoire, including prominently those works commissioned by one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein. (Wittgenstein also commissioned and made his own left-handonly transcriptions of older works [Reich 2002].) That there has been very little for them to play and that what there is needed to be freshly commissioned—that is, purchased—from willing composers owes to the protocols of classical music, whose emphasis has long and increasingly been on a canonized repertoire of fixed, inflexibly notated versions of works. For piano, of course, these overwhelmingly require two, fully, often fabulously, able hands. In contrast, the foundation of jazz performance practice is its emphasis on highly original interpretation, largely through improvisation but also through composition, arrangement, and lavishly imaginative phrasing. Thus, musicians like Parlan and Reinhardt have had available to them the entire repertoire to play in their own deeply and idiosyncratically embodied styles. What is interesting about Parlan is that he was encouraged to undertake piano study precisely because of his polio, at the suggestion of his physician, as a form of rehabilitation, a means of maximizing the abilities of his affected right side, and that his unique musical conception is in no small part an embodied response to the idiosyncrasies of his impaired right hand (Parlan et al. 2002). Parlan’s right-hand impairment, intrinsic to his unique style, appears more significant than that of Graffman or Fleisher, who do not (or, in Fleisher’s case, did not, as he is once again playing two-handed) use the right hand at all. According to Oliver Sacks (2008, 289–300), Graffman and Fleisher’s hand impairments are task-specific to the piano, clearly not the case with Parlan.

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Classical music, because of a mostly canonic repertoire that is resistant to much modification and severely restricted in interpretation, has responded to those pianists’ impairments with only a few works that avoid use of the right hand entirely. While the works were commissioned by impaired pianists, they were in no way composed specifically for the individuals who requested them in the manner that Parlan’s pianistic interpretations, in which he makes maximum use of his impaired right hand, are precisely suited to his abilities. Not only would such a task—composing a work perfectly suited to a pianist’s impaired hand or hands—undertaken by a composer other than the performer be difficult. For the composer it would also be inefficient, since commissioned works, like all works, are intended eventually to be played by many artists. Further, classical pieces are rarely, if ever, so composed. Though composers sometimes claim otherwise, pieces are not really written for particular pianists and their technical, interpretive, and stylistic idiosyncrasies, but for piano, the machine they operate. The technique required to perform a work may indeed be formidable, but it is generic, tailored to an institutionalized, universalized training with limited variation. The working assumption is that repertoire—canonic works are often referred to as “standard repertoire”—will be performed by many essentially interchangeable pianists with approximately the same technique. (Christopher Small’s [1998] observations regarding the similarities between factories and symphony orchestras are relevant here.) In Chapter 1, I observed Western classical music’s growing aesthetic prioritization of technical perfection, lately much under the influence of the illusion of flawless performance obtainable through microrecorded and microedited digital technology. It is hardly surprising that such a cultural system’s response to an impaired hand is to hide it, and thus to silence it entirely, subjecting it to virtual amputation (as far as the world of classical music performance is concerned) rather than celebrating the uniqueness that emanates from Horace Parlan’s artistry and attitude toward impairment and performance. Parlan has demonstrated throughout his professional life that an injured hand may not be lost to music. Critics do not characterize Parlan as a supercrip, as they do Reinhardt, nor does he fit any familiar disability stereotype. As with Reinhardt, critics reference Parlan’s impairment constantly. As opposed to with Reinhardt’s injured hand, critics tend to say that Parlan’s impairment is audible. They

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emphasize the strength of his unimpaired left, evoking the conventional wisdom of compensation for disability (Lazarus 2003). Consistent praise for Parlan’s accompanying skills is wholly justified, without implying that he is a long-suffering “cripple” worthy of empathy. Acknowledgement of Parlan’s creativity, incorporating rather than shunning his impairment, is refreshingly and appropriately respectful of the pianist’s significant accomplishments. Parlan has long resided in Denmark and tours little, so American critics appear to have often needed to draw conclusions about technical aspects of his playing from older accounts like Feather’s and from what they can presume from listening to audio recordings. His 2002 selfportrait DVD, leavened with autobiography and historical montage, sets the record straight. The video portrays Parlan’s beautiful music as part and parcel of a remarkable attitude and a life well-lived among supportive communities. It shows both a personal life, where, against customary oppression, he was encouraged to make music, and a professional life within the jazz (and African American musical) cultural system that, if no utopia, provides expressive latitudes sufficient to accommodate the embodied variations of technique and style that have flowed from Parlan’s and Reinhardt’s impaired hands.

Jimmy Scott The career of vocalist “Little” Jimmy Scott (1925–) presents a different, complex perspective on impairment, disability, and jazz, with implications for gender and sexuality studies. Like Reinhardt, Scott is a legend, “perhaps the most unjustly ignored American singer of the 20th century,” whose admirers and collaborators include musicians Madonna, Lou Reed, Yoko Ono, and John Lennon and directors David Lynch and Ethan Hawke. Scott even performed at President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural ball (Hooper 2000). Like many of his male relatives, Scott has Kallmann’s (or Kallmann) Syndrome, a hereditary condition “which [among its most common and significant symptoms] disrupts and distorts sexual maturation” (Ritz 2002, cover). Scott is a heterosexual male with sexually and even age-ambiguous features and a striking voice that

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listeners find androgynous if not feminine. He was married in 2003 for the fifth time. Scott’s condition and its ramifications for his reception both as a performer and beyond pose questions for DS that test in very interesting ways the theories I have articulated here. What might those in DS learn from Scott’s story? Is his condition an impairment? Have his life and career been affected by disability, and if so, how? What do his life and career tell us about the relationship between disability and sexuality? This and all examples in this book must consider both supercultural—nation-state, ethnic, or both—and emic musical criteria. The music relevant to Scott’s career is somewhat different from other music examined here. Reinhardt and Parlan are unambiguously jazzmen, though both, like most working musicians, crossed genres occasionally. But even his remarkable list of collaborators indicates that Scott’s artistry and image have been appropriated by other musical and filmic genres, perhaps even as something more, or other, than as an artist. Though they are by definition embodied, impairments truly exist only when they are identified. Thus, impairments are as socially constructed as disabilities. There is, though, likely no supercultural standard, no cultural context, by which Kallmann’s Syndrome would not be regarded as an impairment. Its symptoms are numerous, though certainly not uniform, and not exclusively sexual (Tritos 2007). Some symptoms would certainly be regarded by ADA standards as potential impediments to major life activities, though, in his eighties and enjoying the peak of his career, Scott has lived a long and very productive life. As a musician, Scott’s impairment or disability status is a more complex matter than those previously considered. Heretofore, a musician’s impairment or disability status has been considered in the contexts of the ADA and other supercultural standards, by the criteria of the artist’s own musical community, and comparatively, between jazz and classical music. However, Scott’s particular—even iconic—celebrity status far beyond jazz signifies that his impairment must be assessed according to the standards of more than one musical confluence. Initially considering only Scott’s impairment and not his disability requires not only Scott’s ADA status and position as a jazz artist—the idiom that best characterizes his work—but also his cult status as a fi gure

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who has gained notoriety among popular culture luminaries in music, television, and film. Scott’s impairment status focuses on his anatomical voice as opposed to his singing style. (He is famous for singing far behind the beat.) Scott is a visual as well as a musical performer, and Kallmann’s Syndrome has a pronounced effect on his appearance, which I will shortly explain is an issue of disability, not impairment. In his major life activities, Scott speaks of himself as having a “physical disability” (Independent.co.uk 2003). His family refers to Kallmann’s Syndrome as “the Deficiency” (Ritz 2002, 15). Still, his anatomical voice splendidly meets every technical expectation of a jazz singer, albeit in a pitch range characteristic of female vocalists. While idiosyncratic in its tone color, Scott’s voice has none of the technical limitations of Reinhardt or Parlan’s hands. That it is in a range that confounds expectations based on his biological sex and gender presentation makes the timbre of his “instrument” far more distinctive than Reinhardt’s or Parlan’s, while its ability to function within the world of jazz is anything but impaired. High male voices are valued in classical music, particularly early music. For centuries, these were often obtained through the impairment of castration, a practice that continued into the nineteenth century. To this day, boy sopranos, as well as noncastrated male altos and countertenors, are much appreciated. The practice of using high male voices originated in large part in old Christian social mores that disapproved of public performance by women, though the unique high male timbre is also valued. There is also a sense that the high male voice is more pure and innocent than a woman’s. Ancient Voices of Children, a 1970 composition by George Crumb (on poems of Garcia Lorca) is thus particularly notable for its use of both adult female and boy sopranos. Within jazz, one can distinguish between Scott’s vocal instrument per se, which is a manifestation of Kallmann’s Syndrome (his impairment), and the public reception of his singing (the manner in which he is disabled by his audience and critics). Scott is also a popular culture icon. In popular music, the range of vocal ability is great and utterly unstable, subject to styles and trends. Technical expectations do not apply. Some pop styles, such as punk, even take pride in technical ineptitude; this is never the case with jazz, which has always coded technical virtuosity as signification. Scott’s cult status, as opposed to his recognition

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within jazz, resides in the lavish pronouncements of his nonjazz, celebrity admirers. For example, Lou Reed’s proclamation that Scott is the world’s greatest jazz singer headlines the back cover of David Ritz’s biography of Scott, Faith in Time. However one regards Reed’s rock artistry, his protopunk aesthetic—with its virulent rejection of virtuosity—is the opposite of jazz’s forthright sophistication. His praise of Scott was clearly sought by virtue of his celebrity and potential to attract readers from beyond the jazz world, akin to George Harrison’s imprimatur on Indian classical music in general and Ravi Shankar in particular. Scott puts it best, describing his supporting role in a European tour with Reed: “It was a helluva introduction to Europe—not through jazz but this far- out rock-and-roll poetry. That’s the only way I could have developed a young audience—through Lou. The kids got to know me, and little by little, Europe started opening up to my music” (Ritz 2002, 210). Cult status is, of course, received rather than embodied. If Scott’s biography is to be believed, notoriety, in jazz or beyond, was never sought. Given the decades in which Scott languished in near-total obscurity, he seems never to have devoted much energy or calculation to polishing his image, quirky or otherwise. And there is an important distinction to be made between the appraisal of Scott’s vocal facility by his jazz colleagues and the embrace of image- conscious figures such as Reed, Madonna, David Lynch, and Yoko Ono. What is Scott’s impairment status within (nonjazz) popular culture? That impairments are embodied make them neither objective nor independent of reception. One clue to the perception of Scott as a person with an impairment is that he has always been widely known as Little Jimmy Scott, a diminutive that likely refers at least as much to his high voice as to his youthful androgynous countenance and small stature. The same and similar sobriquets in association with high male voices are applied to such African American male singers as Little Richard, Little Anthony (and the Imperials) and, less directly, Frankie Lymon and the (not fully grown) Teenagers. (“Boy wonder” Lymon is an interesting example, recording his biggest hit, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” as a thirteen-year- old male soprano, whose career declined precipitously when his voice matured at fifteen. He was eventually replaced in the Teenagers by a woman [Larkin 2006].) Early in his career, Stevie Wonder

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was “Little” as well. Wonder, who began recording at twelve, may have owed his “Little” to being a child prodigy and perhaps also to being blind, and thus perceived as helpless and infantilized. (Interestingly, height seems to be a minor factor in whether a black male singer is “Little.” Stevie Wonder is six feet tall [CelebHeight.com 2008], Little Richard five feet ten inches [Celebrina.com 2008], and Little Anthony five feet eight-and-a-half inches [CelebHeights.com 2007].) After 1950, Scott’s jazz recordings eschewed the nickname “Little Jimmy.” But the New York Times observes that this octogenarian elder statesman of jazz “has never completely shed the moniker Little Jimmy Scott” (Hooper 2000). The Times, however, is not simply an unbiased observer of what might be seen as condescension, but also its perpetrator. Hooper’s article is titled “The Ballad of Little Jimmy Scott.” Much of it deals with Scott’s cult status in popular culture. Among those celebrities cited, only Yoko Ono, apparently quoting her late husband John Lennon, actually calls Scott “Little.” But Twin Peaks’ director David Lynch says it visually, through his having used the singer in that show’s final episode in a “dream sequence [that includes] Scott warbling, a midget dancing” (Hooper 2000). Hooper’s characterization of Scott’s reception in the comeback phase of his career is distressing: But the appeal of the man David Lynch featured in the final episode of “Twin Peaks” is also about something else [besides great jazz vocal art]. At worst, Scott’s newer fans are drawn to a superficial freakishness, the voice that is pitched well up in the conventionally female range and the hairless face, for decades perpetually boyish, that in recent years has taken on the noble, withered aspect of a tortoise. At best, one could imagine certain show-business types, aware of the smoke and mirrors that go into their own celebrityhood, simply wanting to be in the presence of the real thing. Hooper’s description of Scott’s cameo as freakery is an understatement, particularly in regard to his disability. When Scott (who appears last among the opening performers’ credits as “James V. Scott”) is first heard before

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his video entrance, it is with a replica of the famously armless—that is, disabled—Venus de Milo, who, later in the scene, is relocated and inexplicably sprouts arms that appear to be moving. (A frame-by-frame analysis seems to indicate that this is a function of intricate lighting, including an extremely disturbing strobe effect.) The “dancing midget,” the scene’s third disabled “freak,” is awkward rather than artful and clad in a red leisure suit, the apotheosis of fashion backward. It is hardly surprising that both Hooper and Ritz include references to Michael Jackson in their commentary on Scott’s mediated image. Scott seems to have tolerated this sort of display for the obvious reason: that one does what one must to get ahead in a tough business, especially if one is a racial, gender, and disability minority with an odd appearance. In Scott’s words, Lynch “told me . . . that he liked my aura and had to have me on the show. Naturally I agreed. I wasn’t too familiar with the program, but someone said that millions of young people watched it, so I was grateful for the shot. I didn’t quite understand the story line. David had me wearing a bow tie and singing to a dwarf” (Hooper 2002, 200). If Reinhardt is a supercrip within the lexicon of pop culture disability prototypes, some, perhaps many, of Scott’s admirers see him as what Hooper posits: a freak. It is not the first time Scott has been called that; rhythm-and-blues great Ruth Brown, a longtime friend of Scott, recalls hearing it in the early 1950s (Ritz 2002, 70). The crucial difference, however, is that freakishness is differently regarded since the counterculture of the 1960s appropriated the term as a badge of honor, though not without ambivalence. Back in the day, one might proudly have proclaimed oneself a “freak” and characterized a bad experience, especially with psychedelic drugs, as a “freak out.” As Hooper observes, show-business figures often exploit people with unusual appearances or demeanors. In a manner that Scott, whose life and personal statements exude many traditional values, is unlikely to appreciate, they covet his embodied difference. Think of the circus “freak show” as the paradigm of the Other as amusement and it becomes apparent that popular culture has labeled and displayed Scott as a freak in a less-than-flattering sense. It has thus impaired him, labeling his embodied difference as a defect.

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Disability status, by contrast, is unembodied, a matter of reception and response. Scott’s physical appearance as small, unusually proportioned, and sexually ambiguous Other has affected both his everyday life and his work. Beyond the worlds of music, Scott has encountered the kinds of disability discrimination one might anticipate. He has been refused military enlistment, denied employment, and intimidated and threatened by bigger men, to the point of carrying a firearm for his own protection for a time (Ritz 2002, 53). Within jazz, the question of Scott’s disability is complex. He has been regarded as a boy, a woman, a “fag,” and even, jokingly, a lesbian. Often this occurred in musical contexts on the road, onstage, and in response to his recordings. Obviously, his singing has sometimes been the cause for such attributions, whether mean-spirited, honestly mistaken (easy to do on recordings), humorous, or voyeuristic. Scott biographer David Ritz suggests that the “macho” of jazz culture may have been partly responsible for Scott’s difficulties, though whatever kind of sexual phobias have hurt Scott are also found in many other cultural situations. That jazz is an extraordinary site of machismo is disputed by bell hooks (1994). Despite a now famously checkered career, including nearly three decades of almost complete retirement from music, menial jobs, and exploitation by the recording industry that was extreme even for an African American artist in the notorious 1950s, Scott has no reservations about attributing much of his professional success to a voice whose unique qualities are largely the result of “the Deficiency,” common in Scott family males. His mother refused experimental treatment for Kallmann’s Syndrome for both Scott and his brother in their youth (Ritz 2002, 17). In his thirties, he refused an operation, partly for fear of changing his voice (Ritz 2002, 120). Scott was an early, influential progenitor of a tradition of high-voiced male singing in American, and especially African American, popular music. Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson may be added to those African American singers previously mentioned, Little Anthony, Frankie Lymon, (Little) Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson. Among white singers, Scott’s followers include his self-identified imitator Johnny Ray, who was very popular in the 1950s. Frankie Valli of the Four Seasons and

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former-singer-now-actor Joe Pesci were personally mentored by Scott (Ritz 2002, 108–110). This vocal tradition and the success of Scott and others indicate a wider acceptance of diverse conceptions of masculinity in the African American community than the machismo associated with gangsta rap and professional sports. Scott has repeatedly referenced both the large difficulties and the great blessings of being who he is and sounding as he does. This turbulent opposed binary of gender perspectives and levels of acceptance is well illustrated by a story Scott tells of a 1947 New York club date: “When one audience member said, ‘Is he a girl? He looks like a girl.’ The words wounded me, but I acted like I didn’t hear. . . . That same voice yelled out, ‘Well, is he a girl?’ [Italics in original.] ‘Whatever he is,’ someone else screamed, ‘the motherfucker can sing!’ With that, the room exploded with applause. I stayed there a month” (Ritz 2002, 50). On another level, Scott’s sexual Otherness did most certainly disable his career. Scott’s first real professional break and first and only hit recording was “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” (covered by Connie Francis), with Lionel Hampton’s big band. Hampton did not credit vocalists on the band’s recordings. This lack of billing was detrimental to any singer’s career, but far more for Scott, a man whose voice was so frequently mistaken for a woman’s. His record label would leave pictures of Scott off his album covers, at least off the front, using either an attractive female model or a couple. On the never-released 1969 Atlantic LP The Source, the label insisted on a black model with a huge Afro. According to Scott’s producer at Atlantic Records, the legendary Joel Dorn, this was both an insult to Scott and a source of “mind-bending confusion,” implying that the cover model was “a woman with a man’s name” (Ritz 2002, 137–138). Scott’s life and career are reminders that “Othering” of all kinds is foremost an act of labeling the different as defective, an act of disabling. Distinctions between ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability can sometimes be important and useful, but a single process of discrimination haunts them all. And some distinctions are difficult as well as perhaps unnecessary. Jewish Scripture’s characterization of one category of sexual difference, intersexuality, as a physical impairment has disabling ramifications in Jewish culture (Abrams 1998, 59, 60). Kallmann’s Syndrome,

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similarly an impairment with manifestations of sexual ambiguity, has had a major impact on Scott and other members of his family. Scott’s story provides evidence that DS has a role to play in discussions of sexual difference.

Final Chorus As noted often herein, this book’s master narrative argues that the fundamental unit of human identity is more fragmentary than even the individual self. The social confluence is the site of one’s participation at any given moment in a globalized, information-intensive world where identities are constantly redefined, even in the course of a single day, in site-specific ways. The intersection of music and disability is a particularly useful and interesting vantage point from which to observe these identity transformations. Through tableaus of music and disability, we witness how an individual’s disability status, something generally regarded as utterly stable, is in fact remarkably fluid. Embodied states of being that might at first seem unambiguously disabling (such as blindness) or uncomplicatedly able (such as left-handedness) turn out otherwise in certain circumstances. Jazz as a musical cultural system includes protocols that have facilitated major careers for some musicians with physical disabilities who likely would have had few if any such opportunities within the forms and norms of Western classical music. Jazz is manifestly a virtuoso’s art. The careers of three important jazzmen—guitarist Django Reinhardt, pianist Horace Parlan, and vocalist Jimmy Scott—demonstrate how these musicians have crafted unique and audible virtuosities around their impairments. These artists’ recorded legacy is all that is required to demonstrate that virtuosities of impairment are eminently possible in jazz. Notated transcriptions and per formance video bolster the argument that unique style features do indeed result from their idiosyncratically embodied instrumental or vocal techniques. Scholarship on music by nonmusicians—common these days, particularly on vernacular culture—can never unearth many important aspects of music culture, such as the impact of disability and impairment on per formance.

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The virtual exclusion of PWDs from music education has surely impeded such research. Jazz has provided comparatively unremarkable careers for these three remarkable-bodied musicians, at least insofar as none have required a special repertoire or accommodations other than their own reimagined techniques, sounds, and styles. This fortunate circumstance owes to jazz per formance practice, whose essence is the embrace of difference—that is, one’s mettle is measured far less by the basis of efficient fidelity to canonic orthodoxy than by imagination, mostly through improvisation but also through creative phrasing, arrangement, and original composition. The examples of these three musicians have served to illustrate a relatively high level of acceptance of musicians with physical impairments within jazz, though Jimmy Scott’s story in particular portrays a far-less-than-utopian cultural system. It is worth revisiting their individual cases now for the purpose of further ascertaining precisely how fluid disability identities can be. Of the three musicians, Reinhardt’s impairment is least audible in those idioms, mostly jazz, in which he chose to work. While his jazz soloing style emanates in part from his use of only two fingers, the playing of such able-bodied musicians as Wes Montgomery and Larry Coryell is also highly idiosyncratic. That Reinhardt’s groups mostly employed the “Hot Club” instrumentation he invented along with violinist Stephane Grappelli, utilizing two rhythm guitars in addition to Reinhardt as sole guitar soloist, may say something about some resistance on his part to playing chords. Reinhardt could never have played classical guitar and likely would have been unable to perform folk and other styles that are dependent on full chords. While a classical vocalist with Jimmy Scott’s “deficiency” might find work, it would be on the margins of the field, primarily in early music in castrato, countertenor or male alto, boys,’ and perhaps even traditionally female parts such as the famous “pants role” (in which a woman portrays a man) of Octavian in Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier. Total relegation to such roles might be viewed as an atypically-gendered career. Jazz has no such repertoire explicitly designated “female,” though there are surely songs in it and many other styles with gendered lyrics

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and different male and female versions. Classical music, like jazz and African American music in general, has a place for high-voiced male singing, though, unlike jazz, one that is unambiguously female-gendered territory. Horace Parlan comes last because I regard his story as most important. He has been less a star and more an everyman than Reinhardt or Scott, whose celebrity status may obfuscate the realities of a typical disabled life in jazz. Because Parlan’s life story and his image have been far less exoticized by race or gender, and because the conventional, extramusical, supercultural view is that he is or was, perhaps by far, the most significantly impaired, his case may be the exemplar. Surely Parlan has the technique required to perform left-hand- only classical repertoire. On the DVD Horace Parlan by Horace Parlan, he waxes eloquent about his early musical epiphany in which seeing pianist Vladimir Horowitz in concert spurred him on to a musical career, an indication that he might once have contemplated becoming a classical performer. That would have been a great loss to music, both because of Parlan’s exquisite playing and for the example that he—and jazz as a cultural system—have set. His story has yet to become the stuff of legends, but it is a tale worthy of greater recognition. Like Reinhardt, Parlan has refused to sonically, performatively amputate a less-than-perfect limb. It is hard to underestimate the value of his unique choice to play with his impaired right hand. He is no supercrip. He testifies on his DVD to the importance of having had an exceptional physician, a remarkable piano teacher, and an extremely supportive adoptive family. However, what is most impressive about Parlan’s network of supports throughout his life has been the many first-echelon bandleaders—arguably bassist- composer Charles Mingus the most important among them—who have employed him, when his playing is indeed noticeably different from that of able-bodied pianists and when, elsewhere in the musical world, it is easy to imagine a comparably impaired pianist having been given no professional or even student opportunities to play at all. (In almost forty years as a student and professor in higher education, I have never had a similarly impaired colleague or even a student majoring or even minoring in music.) In the arts and elsewhere, room is sometimes made at the top for those Others, including PWDs, who are anointed as truly gifted, while

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the “merely excellent” and those with more pedestrian skills are excluded. To be broadly inclusive would imply the necessity for social transformation and, in the case of PWDs, for accommodation or redesign on the part of institutions and facilities. By contrast, reinforcing the star system with an occasional magnificent crip simply bolsters the grand cultural narrative of self-reliance and individual accomplishment. Thus, classical music is able to glory in and congratulate itself for the accomplishments of violinist and polio survivor Itzhak Perlman while doing nothing to enable other impaired musicians to perform in the ranks of symphony orchestras at any level, from school to community to professional. Analogously, the careers of jazzmen with disabilities of genuinely iconic status such as Reinhardt and Scott are at once more predictable and less transgressive than the long and journeyman-like career, mostly as a sideman, of a beautiful if less flamboyant player such as Parlan. The willingness of numerous important bandleaders to engage him and to reap the obvious rewards of his musicality in the context of his audibly impaired virtuosity is a story that cries out for further recognition, particularly given recent reports that Parlan, like many aging jazzmen, is hurting for work (Lazarus 2003). Jazz’s legendary, fiercely competitive “cutting sessions” and other macho posturing such as the difficulties and discouragements encountered by female instrumentalists and the gendered intimidation endured by Jimmy Scott are neither the whole story nor, as some choose to believe, idiosyncratically African American. The question then arises as to whether black music’s power to accommodate impairments is indicative of a coalition of the oppressed. The answer is complex. The improvisation and other interpretive latitudes of jazz and other black music certainly provide opportunities for musicians whose impairments result in nonstandard performance technique, but similar creative freedoms are found in Hindustani classical music, an elite genre, and are not associated in India with a historically oppressed racial minority. Some of these features that give jazz its flexibility have African roots that transcend the long history of discrimination against American blacks. And in its current status as an international music with indelible African American roots, jazz has transcended its origins, offering its

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potential to accommodate impairments worldwide. Both Reinhardt and Parlan, working mostly in Europe, have benefited. Still, some of what jazz has to offer impaired performers seems likely to have emanated from the difficult circumstances of its African American creators. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, impairment (which the census calls “disability”) in the United States is linked to poverty, low wages, underemployment, and unemployment. The impaired population is also disproportionately Southern (U.S. Census Bureau 2005), while blacks are tied with American Indians and Alaskan Natives for the highest rate of disability (U.S. Census Bureau 2003). In the circumstances, an empathetic and accommodating response to impairment would seem natural as well as, at least in part, a response to the vicissitudes of all Southern life. Country music has also produced its share of impaired performers, including Hank Williams (spina bifida), Mel Tillis (speech dysfluency, or stuttering), and Vic Chesnutt (paraplegia, from an auto accident). There are other, perhaps better lessons to be learned, of empathy, community and cultures of flexibility and accommodation. While the far better-known situation of blind musicians within and beyond jazz is external to the case of physical rather than sensory impairments, it is precisely this situation within a variety of cultures—specifically the possibility of relatively autonomous cultural systems of blind musicians, at least partially analogous to the more familiar and widely acknowledged existence of largely autonomous Deaf Cultures—that will be explored in the next chapter.

3 / Play Like an Egyptian Music and Blind Culture

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hile Chapter 1 argues that classical music is an unforgiving social confluence because of the limits it imposes on musicians with impairments, Chapter 3 ultimately focuses on an extraordinary exception in extraordinary circumstances. The Al-Nour wal Amal (“Light and Hope”) Orchestra (sometimes referred to as the “Blind Orchestra”) of Cairo offers an example of the liberatory impact of a foreign music in transcending social norms, in this case for an ensemble of vision-impaired Egyptian women, almost all of whom are Muslim. While their repertoire and sound are mostly Western, it could be argued that their performance practice and perhaps also their geographic distance place them in a cultural system different from that of every other symphony in the world, or at least at the margins of orchestral praxis. The larger question asked here is whether there is a Blind Culture analogous to the widely acknowledged Deaf Culture. I conclude this chapter by answering with a nuanced and provisional “yes.” The preceding discussion of jazz was concerned with physical disability and with mobility and systemic impairments, and referenced only in passing the impairment most associated with musicians, blindness. Scholars have long regarded blind musicians as an important affinity group. Compared to other disability topics, there has been a relative abundance

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of research into organizations of blind musicians. This even includes a brief discussion of blind musicians as a specific category of analysis that transcends boundaries of place and period in ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam’s canonic The Anthropology of Music (1964, 132). However, my brief global survey of music and blindness is the only one I know of (Lubet 2006c). Chapter 2 referenced, but did not discuss, such outstanding blind musicians as Art Tatum (1909–1956), Ray Charles (1930–2004), Diana Schuur (1953–), George Shearing (1919–), and Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935– 1977), because blindness seems to have had no noticeable impact on their approaches to musical technique or style, though, to the extent that jazz is notated and eye contact useful, some of their musical tasks have obviously and necessarily been transformed. There is substantial information on both individual blind musicians and on blind musicians’ organizations, the latter formed both for and, significantly, by blind musicians (Lubet 2006c). Complex power relations between these blind musicians and those who have attempted to be their handlers and helpers are common. The situation of blind musicians is of particular value for understanding my theory of confluent cultures. By the nineteenth century, it became apparent that Western culture privileges and values vision above all other senses (Ott 2002). I suspect also, though, the inverse of this privilege: an exceptional fear of blindness and the consequent application of blindness as metaphor, which is in turn part and parcel of a larger, more generalized fear of impairment, enshrined in many more metaphors. Blindness as an intense but multivalent metaphor is at least as old as the Oedipus legend and as ubiquitous as “Amazing Grace” (“was blind, but now I see.”). Though disputed, it is also widely believed that, like other disabilities, blindness has, or leads to, “compensations.” One such compensation is wisdom. In Judaism, for example, Rabbi Judith Abrams notes a special regard held for the opinions of blind Talmudic sages (1998, 111, 193–196). Blind people’s capacity for special insight—no pun intended—has been a Japanese belief as well, an attribute that contributed to the power and influence of that country’s biwa hoshi, blind, mendicant lutenist-priests (Matisoff 1978; Miles 2000). (The biwa is the lute these men played.) The biwa hoshi were not only seers but also, of course, musicians.

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The presumed exceptional musicality of blind people was further premised on exceptional hearing as one more compensation for blindness. One obvious major ramification of this thinking resulted in blind people being placed in or selecting musical occupations. While the idea of compensation rankles many people with disabilities (PWDs), Oliver Sacks offers evidence from research studies that about 50 percent of children born blind or blinded in infancy have absolute (or perfect) pitch, whereas the figure is .01 percent in the general population (2008, 135). He also states that other extraordinary musical ability may result from blindness through, for example, reallocation of the visual cortex to hearing (Sacks 2008, 175). There are many centuries of abundant evidence of this social praxis of blind musicianship from every continent (Lubet 2006c). While the histories of blind musicians as individuals and within organizations have been documented amply in other, excellent sources, there is also a largely untapped potential for this legacy to provide larger theoretical insights both within and beyond DS. Within many of the worlds of music, blindness is barely or not at all an impairment. This is true predominantly in music from oral traditions that rely little, if at all, on reading print notation or on maintaining eye contact for such tasks as following a conductor. In the United States, the acoustic blues of African Americans may be the most familiar example. The word blind has always been a common handle for acoustic bluesmen (blind blues singers were nearly always men), artists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893–1929), Blind (or Reverend) Gary Davis (1896–1972), and Blind Willie McTell (1898–1959). Sacks refers to blind as “almost an honorific” and draws parallels with Gaelic musical culture (2008, 172–173). Among prominent blind bluesmen, Sonny Terry (1911–1986) is the only one rarely if ever called “Blind,” though Gary Davis (more a “guitar evangelist” than a bluesman) is also referred to as “Reverend.” Blind bluesmen have been much less common in electric Chicago blues, a difference whose causes bear investigation. One exceptional blind electric bluesman was vocalist and keyboardist “Lazy” Bill Lucas (1918–1982) from Minneapolis. Never a prominent artist, Lucas’s claim to fame is the account of his life, career, and views in Jeff Todd Titon and Linda Fujie’s popular textbook, Worlds of Music (2005).

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Better known are New Orleans electric guitarist Snooks Eaglin (1936– 2009) and white Canadian blues-rocker Jeff Healey (1966–2008). For Japan’s pre-Meiji-era biwa hoshi and pre-Stalinist Ukraine’s blind minstrels (like the biwa hoshi, mostly lutenists), blindness was an essential qualification for a valued occupation, albeit one whose economic institutionalization was constructed as begging or perhaps busking. These lent the occupation an ambiguous social status, one mitigated by the recognition that these men were indeed performing an appreciated function for which they were appropriately remunerated. In Gaelic culture, where blind harpers and pipers have played a significant role, there was no such ambiguity with regard the dignity of their status (Sacks 2008, 172).

Culture Clubs: Deaf and Blind Within numerous worlds of music, blindness—so often the stuff of much grim metaphor—is little or no impairment, no impediment to function. By contrast, as we have seen, impairments that would be deemed relatively minor in everyday life, such as certain hand injuries and even left-handedness, can be of major consequence in music (Lubet 2004b). Beyond providing evidence of constructions of impairment and disability that differ widely according to cultural confluence, the example of blind musicians lends support for an important but incipient notion, the existence of distinct (that is, relatively autonomous) and distinctive Blind Culture. I am here appropriating the use of capitalization for Blind Culture from Deaf Culture, a practice and concept that is not universally accepted. The subject has been debated on at least one popular blind online discussion group (Newman 2005). Deaf Culture is a well known, venerable group identity that many claim as a major affinity based on, among other praxes, manual sign languages, social protocols, artistic media, and such institutions as Deaf schools and clubs. (The capitalized Deaf used here is preferred by those who claim a Deaf Culture identity.) An important distinction must be made between the impairment of deafness and Deaf Culture, in which hearing people fluent in sign languages, especially those from Deaf families, are sometimes accepted. Deaf Culture—or perhaps, given the many

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sign languages throughout the world, Deaf Cultures—have been acknowledged as “real” languages by some in the hearing world, at least implicitly, for centuries and are certainly even older. Claiming a Deaf cultural identity often carries with it the corollary that deafness is thus neither a disability nor an impairment but instead membership in a linguistic community. For deaf people this complex identity stance is more ambiguous than ambivalent. Regardless of their sense of Deaf cultural identity, deaf people frequently must avail themselves of disability services, including sign language interpreters and Real Time Captioning (RTC). While Deafness and Deaf Culture have been embraced by DS, the field acknowledges Deaf cultural distinctiveness as well as an autonomous, if related, Deaf Studies (Corker 2000). There is at least a solid provisional case for analogous Blind Culture. While some of that evidence is extramusical, including similarly segregated blind schools, I will make the case for Blind Culture on musical grounds. If Deaf Cultures are, like all cultures, largely grounded in language, it requires sites in which those languages are used. For deaf people, these have historically included Deaf schools and their adjacent communities, where graduates often, understandably, choose to live, and Deaf clubs. Blind languages have only rarely emerged, there being no reason for their development, though the aforementioned blind Ukrainian minstrels developed a language for exclusive use within their guild (Kononenko 1998, 9). More prominent, though, are language technologies. Most familiar is Braille, the tactile writing named for its nineteenth- century French inventor Louis Braille, himself blind. Louis Braille was also one in a long tradition of accomplished blind French organists and developed a tactile system of musical notation in addition to his system for verbal text. Both are used, with only limited modifications, to this day. There are also Blind social protocols, such as introducing oneself as blind in social situations where this is relevant and warranted. A most compelling element of the case for Blind Culture consists of those musical institutions that have nurtured Blind solidarity. The Ukrainian minstrels’ guild had the same regulatory authority as, or more than,

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comparable trade organizations. It provided its members more interesting, less menial work, and in many ways a materially better standard of living than their sighted socioeconomic peers (Kononenko 1998). In Japan, the Todoza, or Proper Path Guild, which included the biwa hoshi and the members of all traditional blind professions such as massage, became a regulatory agency beyond direct governmental control, with the authority of “a country of the blind” (Miles 2000, 612). This was remarkable for its time and place and especially for the impairment status of its members, who might elsewhere be regarded as vulnerable or defective and less worthy of such rights. If other blind musical organizations around the world have been smaller, less comprehensive, or less autonomous, they have nonetheless been “blind-centric” instruments, at least potentially and theoretically, for Blind empowerment. The heart of Deaf Culture is its manual languages. More than communication systems, these have generated poetry, theater, and even visual “songs,” as well as unique perspectives on etiquette and social relations, the latter including, for example, attitudes distinctive from hearing communities regarding physical contact and affection (Holcomb, Mindess, and Veltri 2001). Geographically, Deaf Culture is centered in institutional enclaves within the superculture, primarily schools. It asserts Deaf identity on the basis of culture, a largely linguistic community, rather than on impairment or disability status. With those criteria as benchmarks, an analogous if not precisely parallel case may be made through music for Blind Culture. Music is widely understood in many places as linguistic, discursive, or at least expressive. Without these characteristics, it would be difficult to account for music’s ubiquity. Also important is Christopher Small’s insistence that “musicking” (1998), the process of engaging in music, rather than musical repertoire, is music’s essential nature—and that music is active, manifest in active doing rather than manifest in static being. Unique musical repertoires of the blind have included those of minstrels belonging to the powerful and highly regulated guilds that once flourished in Japan and Ukraine. Blind acoustic bluesmen were so prominent before World War II that a case might also be made that they were substantial “shareholders,” though not “monopoly” owners of the genre. Blind ownership refers here to musicians rather than listeners, in con-

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trast to Deaf Culture’s unique aesthetic forms, whose artists and audiences are both primarily deaf. It is difficult to imagine musical features that would be directed specifically to blind audiences.

Blind Justice: A Blind Women’s Orchestra in Cairo In addition to musical repertoires of the blind, there have also been blind ways of musicking. Braille musical notation is certainly best known. It may be used most remarkably, at least in terms of its multivalently transgressive and emancipatory nature, by the all-female, mostly Muslim Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra of Cairo. This group has developed protocols for performing Western symphonic classics at a high level, arguably the most “sighted” musical repertoire the world has ever known, the per formance of which typically depends on sight-reading print notation and visual attention to the conductor, concertmaster (leader of the first violins), and other players. Though the repertoire is made up of conventional Western classics, similar works by Egyptian composers, and orchestral versions of traditional Egyptian music (Schuyler 1996), the orchestra’s musicking—that is, protocols of learning, rehearsal, and performance—is uniquely “Blind.” If the orchestra’s discourse, its repertoire, is hardly unique, its discursive method, the strategies by which they create performances, surely is, in ways that have transformed these women’s lives. Through musicking, a discursive or at least expressive, if not precisely linguistic, argument can be made for Blind Culture. There is no other symphony orchestra of this kind in the world. The players rehearse with a music director, who coaches their ensemble cohesion and interpretation verbally, in a manner more customarily used for much smaller chamber ensembles. (The founding maestro, the late Abu el-Aid, was sighted, though there appears to be no reason this would be a requirement of the position, as the orchestra continues to flourish and even tour internationally since his death in 2006.) They perform exclusively from memory, a requirement of Braille notation. While Al-Nour wal Amal is hardly the only orchestra in the world that has ever performed without a conductor—New York’s Orpheus Chamber Orchestra may

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currently be best known—it is unique in its exclusive reliance on listening to maintain musical rapport without reference to visual clues. On the basis of their unique performance protocols, this group’s success surely supports the case for Blind Culture. A second criterion for a Blind Culture analogous to Deaf Culture is the existence of Blind institutional outposts within a non-Blind superculture. Such facilities and organizations are well known and, like Deaf institutions, some have started in or remained parts of schools. Among these, musical organizations of, and, or for the blind have existed on every continent (Lubet 2006c). Vulnerable as blind and deaf people historically have been, members of both groups often isolated from others who share their impairment, a case might be made for saying that such institutions necessarily, even prominently, serve as instruments of minority acculturation along with their other activities. In that sense, all these sites function as schools. The Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra is such an organization. Based in an institution that bears the same name and was founded in 1954 (the orchestra was established a few years later), what began as a school for Egyptian blind girls and women has transformed into a “conglomerate” that also includes occupational training, a workplace, and a residence that is both a dormitory for many of its young students and a lifelong home, in effect a residential assisted living center, for those many women who do not marry and leave (Schuyler 1996). Perhaps the most significant point of comparison between Deaf and Blind Cultures as regards the Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra is that, to whatever extent blindness is a disability in nonblind situations as represented paradigmatically by a typical sighted symphony orchestra (Lubet 2004b), within this blind orchestra that musical disability and perhaps also extramusical disabilities cease to exist. The protocols of the Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra may be compared within limits to the manner in which the Deaf claim a linguistic rather than a disability identity, when the difficulties associated with deafness cease to exist in environments where manual communication is a lingua franca, as was long the case on Martha’s Vineyard (Groce 1985). The disabling nature of symphonic praxis everywhere else has been circumvented, replaced by methods that are, if not inaccessible to sighted people, uniquely suited to this blind community. Certain prac-

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tices are quite simply admirable, even exemplary, regardless of the musicians’ vision status. The advantages of memorized repertoire and cueing through careful listening are obvious. That the Al-Nour wal Amal ensemble is a Western-style symphony orchestra is significant in a way that cannot be underestimated, not only because of the “sightedness” of standard orchestral praxis, but for the prestige of the symphony as Western classical music’s archetype. The orchestra epitomizes the values of a Western art music tradition that Christopher Small emphasizes has spread globally, yet with little local variation, even to the Arab nation of Oman (1998, 37). Though Small claims his book Musicking is nonjudgmental, he hardly shies from outing his view of the symphony orchestra concert’s Eurocentrism, androcentrism, totalitarian structure, and exemplification of the industrial capitalist factory model of production. Like Small, Bruno Nettl, in Heartland Excursions, his ethnography of Midwestern university schools of music, only occasionally makes direct reference to disability. Small cites extensive use of beta-blockers and alcohol to combat performance anxiety, as well as widespread hearing loss among orchestra members (1998, 70). Nettl notes that the mythology surrounding Beethoven’s negotiation of his deafness symbolizes “towering achievements carried out against insuperable odds” (1995, 12). And yet, as historian Douglas Baynton reminds us, disability is everywhere once one starts looking (2001, 52). These ethnomusicological critiques of Western classical music are a reminder of disability manifested primarily in its conspicuous absence. These scholars’ portrayals of Western art music institutions, and Small’s study of the orchestra in particular, are depictions of shrines to social—or sociomusical—Darwinism, sonic Spartas that eliminate those young who are too weak to effectively wage musical culture war on the side of the imperial West. My nearly four decades as a student and professor in such nearly “crip-free” institutions indicate that visibly obvious PWDs are routinely given musical 4F draft status. This characterization of professional schools of music as having practically no students with disabilities contains the caveat that I necessarily refer only to visible disabilities and the rare student brave enough to reveal an invisible impairment. I suspect, but cannot prove, that invisible impairments are common, given those students who have either

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told me of their clinical depression or whom I, having lived with that condition throughout most of my career, have suspected of being depressed. Regarding orchestras and other matters, I doubt Small would deny that he often generalizes in ways that are correct only overall but that are often fascinating and revelatory. I would, however, offer a friendly amendment to his observation of the globalized conformity of orchestral praxis, such that he claims that symphony concerts in places like East Asia and Oman differ little from those in the West. The reception of Western orchestral praxis is inevitably radically transformed according to the particular, localized supercultural context in which the music is presented. Surely, celebrating the West takes on different meanings in Oman than it does in Omaha. It could hardly be otherwise. Certainly Small understands this, as his discussion of the formation of the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra, heralded by the London Daily Telegraph as “A Musical Oasis in the Desert,” illustrates (Campbell 1989, cited in Small 1998, 223). If particularization of individual cases such as Oman is not Small’s mission, it is mine. If an all-male, sighted symphony in one Arab Muslim country is remarkable for its resemblance to almost every other orchestra in the world, the same cannot be said of an all-female, blind orchestra elsewhere in the Arab or Islamic world. The Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra is actually part of an orchestral program consisting of two ensembles. The younger group is a training orchestra, though it does concertize in Egypt. The older, advanced ensemble has toured the world. The 2002 documentary The Blind Orchestra has been shown in Canada and Europe, providing further exposure. One press release for The Blind Orchestra calls the ensemble “the most extraordinary group of musicians ever assembled” (Fifth Thessaloniki Documentary Festival 2003). A strong statement, to be sure, but, as the world’s only symphony orchestra that can see neither its music nor its music director, it is certainly unique in its forthright defiance of Western classical music’s convention that, while orchestral performance has sound as its product, it is a deeply visual act, and one that Small unhesitatingly deems and describes at book length, in Musicking, as a ritual. Unlike, for example, the well-known Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Al-Nour wal Amal is not, strictly speaking, a conductorless orchestra. Their late, sighted, male music director led rehearsals. Institute staff tran-

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scribes the players’ individual parts into Braille music notation, which all orchestra members memorize. (Attempts to ascertain who currently leads rehearsals have not produced an answer. Neither the group’s press coverage nor its own publicity mention a new director, which leads me to believe current leadership is collective within the players themselves.) The group’s late music director, Ahmed Abu el-Aid, was adamant that blindness is not compensated for by exceptional musicality, though some orchestra members disagree (Schuyler 1996). Contemporary neuroscience may be on their side (Sacks 2008, 171–176; Small 1998, 131). As impressed as he was with the achievements of his orchestra, el-Aid saw as its principal difference from sighted ensembles the challenges posed by the lack of eye contact with its conductor. There may be, however, another important difference that puts Al-Nour wal Amal’s players at an advantage over sighted musicians. The blind Japanese historian Kojiro Hirose (2003), whose subjects include the biwa hoshi and other blind Japanese musicians and professionals, believes that the blind live in a “special world” and are capable of things the sighted cannot do, and that a proclivity for memory is a component of that exceptional repertoire of skills. (Neither an American nor a native English speaker, Hirose does not appear to regard the term special—as in special education—as offensive, as is common in U.S. disability circles.) Though Western classical music emphasizes sight in an extraordinary manner among musical praxes, it also privileges memory. Many soloists and some conductors perform without written music, a gesture that may in part be theatrical, a daring feat of memory. But it is safe to assume that few sighted orchestra members, who always use written music and are never expected to memorize, know their parts as well as the players of the Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra. There has always been some resistance to female membership in professional orchestras, most notoriously the Vienna Philharmonic, whose first female permanent full member was admitted only in 2003 (Burgermeister 2003). The Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra’s implicit statement about the ability of blind people to participate in symphonic life is clearly perceived as “most extraordinary.” That its membership consists of girls and women in a mostly Muslim Arab country—where there is considerable circumspection regarding music, women in public life (Sabri 1995), and Western culture, and where blind girls typically

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are afforded so few opportunities for educational, professional, and social growth that they become “socially retarded”—the almost halfcentury flourishing of this ensemble is all the more transgressive and liberatory (Schuyler 1996). The orchestra and the school as a whole are certainly in some senses patriarchal, as, for example, the role of their sighted male music director may indicate: “The conductor, Maestro Abu el-Aid, as he is lovingly called by “his girls,” rules supreme over the orchestra, choosing the music, the instruments and the players” (Blind Orchestra 2002). Such autocracy predominates in orchestras everywhere. On film, el-Aid appears as a kind, gentle man, passionately dedicated to his ensemble and its uniqueness, hardly a despot by the standards of symphony orchestra conductors. There is also evidence that the positive outcomes of orchestra participation include not only education and career success, public exposure, and opportunities for travel, but also feminist and disability pride. According to one review of The Blind Orchestra, The ambition and the tenacity of these musicians is not overcome by the difficulty of learning and memorizing entire compositions from Braille and playing in harmony with the rest of the all-blind orchestra, nor does it curb their desire to prove their worth to society. Most of the women perceive their blindness as a liberating experience that enables a discovery of new worlds they would never have been exposed to otherwise. (Christlou 2003) Or, in the words of orchestra bassist Iman Fawz, “We prove ourselves as Egyptians, as blind people, and as women. We show the world what we can do” (Schuyler 1996). What they can do is described by Samha el-Kholy, the program’s founder and one-time director of the Cairo Conservatoire: People are so kind. . . . They think, “Oh, these girls are blind, it’s very nice that they can play at all.” But this is exactly what we are trying to avoid. Blindness should not be an excuse for mediocrity, but now I’m very sure that we have passed this

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phase. They have a special sound, they understand what [current music director] Abu el-Aid wants them to do, and they play very well together. The crescendos and the diminuendos! And the ritardandos, oh my goodness, they do that so well! Sometimes I have my mouth open. How do they do it! (Schuyler 1996) “How they do it” is a question that requires a coldly realistic answer. This group does not perform at the technical level of a professional Western orchestra (though bassoonist Hana Shaban, who was a student at the Cairo Conservatoire at the time the film was made, plays quite beautifully), particularly in terms of tone color and intonation. Their ensemble cohesion, however, is everything that founder Samha el-Kholy says. Thus, their limitations do not seem to be a function of their blindness, but may be attributed to factors including restraints on individual practice time, inferior instruments, minimal private instruction, and limited occasion to hear professional ensembles. Their favorable reception, including the chance to tour abroad, surely does owe much to their accomplishment in light of their challenges and unique background. It needs also be said that, while they have enjoyed opportunities—such as travel, education, gainful employment, and public artistic performance—that are not given to many sighted Egyptian women, they have neither obtained, nor possibly may even covet, lifestyles that would be regarded as feminist in Western terms. Twice in 2006, I was able to speak to Ms. Mahassen Ali Mohamed Ali, a graduate student at Syracuse University who, though not a member of the orchestra, had been a student at Al-Nour wal Amal and was good friends with many of the women in the film, which I screened for her privately. (I own the only copy in the United States, the only audiodescribed copy in the world, and have permission from the producers to screen it in small, academic settings.) Both a DS scholar and a close acquaintance of many orchestra members, Ms. Ali spoke exclusively in glowing terms about her school, the orchestra, and their late Maestro. (It was Ms. Ali who informed me of his passing.) Writing about Balinese women’s gamelan beleganjur, a genre of percussion music that was, until the mid-1990s, exclusively performed by men and noted for being “masculine” and “martial,” Michael Bakan

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thoroughly investigates the implications of this gender-transgressive development (Bakan 1998). Ultimately, he concludes that this new idiom has had a positive impact on gender relations because the women who perform it feel empowered. The situation of the orchestra of Al-Nour wal Amal is not a perfect parallel. The symphony is neither exclusively male, nor does it occupy the stature in Egyptian, Arab, or Muslim culture held by gamelan in Bali (and throughout Indonesia). But the women of Cairo appear to have benefited in even more ways than those in Bali, not only in enhanced confidence but also in quality of life.

West/Transgressed The Braille Monitor observes that, because of its mostly Western repertoire, the orchestra has been partly shielded from conservative Muslim critics, who associate music with immoral thought and behavior. It is difficult to discern precisely what that means or why it would be, given the depth of anti-Western sentiment in Egypt. Islamic attitudes toward music have been a concern for orchestra members as well, who sought the views of an imam before deciding to participate. Players perform wearing modest but elegant Muslim headscarves, a striking, cognitively dissonant sight. Press releases for The Blind Orchestra refer to the difficulties orchestra members encounter as blind women and because of the circumspection of Muslim society toward music in general and likely also toward women’s participation in music and public life. The public path these blind women tread between the West and the Islamic world says something about symbols of Otherness—in this case, the Western musical Other within the Arab Muslim world—and resistance: “This foreign music has become the passion and the source of inspiration for the women. At the same time, it is a harsh confrontation with reality, because outside the orchestra they have trouble gaining the respect they deserve” (Blind Orchestra 2002). The Blind Orchestra provides evidence that these women continue to embrace Egypt as a beloved home and, but for a few Christian members, Islam as their religion. But they also recognize in a Western musical praxis an opportunity for personal and collective advancement. From Christopher Small’s perspective, this praxis can be read as Eurocentric,

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androcentric, autocratically capitalist, and even ableist in general and antiblind in particular. There may even be a universal potential for countercultures, such as this orchestra represents, of almost any kind to be utilized in this oppositional manner. In a very different non-Western context, ethnomusicologist Adelaida Reyes (1999) has provided an account of how, among forced migrants from Vietnam, Westernized, harmonized Vietnamese popular music (so- called love songs and “sad” songs) that were banned by the Viet Cong came to be regarded as a powerful symbol of the traditional. That is, they became emblematic of pre-1975 Vietnam (the year of the fall of Saigon and North-South unification) and of anticommunism. Significantly, Al-Nour wal Amal’s “brother” school for the blind, the all-male Qasr al-Nour, also has an ensemble. It, however, plays Arab music exclusively, a far more extensively oral tradition whose characteristic textures and rhythms are more immediately apt for per formance by blind musicians. That an ensemble that is female and perceived as feminist and disability-positive specializes in the Western classics may indicate that a music elsewhere regarded as European American “oldtime religion” may be viewed by some in the Arab and Muslim world as a symbol and vehicle of social progress. A theory of “Occidentalism,” which mirrors Edward Said’s orientalism, lists feminism as one of four fundamental pillars of Western culture vilified by those intellectuals and political forces who decry Western Modernism, among them Muslim fundamentalists (Buruma and Margalit 2004). For my research into Blind Culture, I queried my colleagues on the Disability Studies in the Humanities listserv ([email protected]) for their opinions. I also examined the archives of “Blind-X” (blind-x@ maelstrom.stjohns.edu, apparently no longer operating) and “Thought Provoker” (http://thoughtprovoker.info/thought.htm). Most who commented favored the idea of Blind Culture, though not an overwhelming majority. However, the very existence of the latter two groups and many other blindness online discussion groups (BLIST 2002) argues in favor of Blind Culture, regardless of participants’ opinions. Part of the difference of opinion, particularly on the academically oriented ds-hum, depended on the implicit or actual presence or absence of articles of speech—that is, the distinction between a culture,

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the culture, or simply culture. The term a culture is reminiscent of oldfashioned, but apparently still influential, anthropology and implies that cultures possess and may even be defined by a high degree of distinctiveness, autonomy, and even isolation or purposeful segregation. Culture (no article) does not require separation or segregation, only identifiable praxis, an affinity among a group whose ways of life and beliefs might otherwise differ greatly. The presence or absence of a or the makes for very different questions and answers about “culture.” This last formulation, of culture without an article, is consistent with Arjun Appadurai’s analysis of globalization and modernism (1996, 12–13). Rejecting the idea of culture as an object, he writes, “I suggest that we regard as cultural only those differences that either express, or set the groundwork for group identities.” Appadurai’s position is exemplified by Cairo’s Blind Orchestra. Their actions and remarks in the eponymous documentary indicate a solidarity among “the girls” that also fortifies their self-identification as Egyptians, women, and (mostly) Muslims. (It is both interesting and difficult to imagine precisely how the previous discussion might have proceeded in a language without articles. Apropos of this discussion, such languages include Ukrainian, Japanese [both “blind minstrel” cultures], and American Sign Language [ASL].) ASL is a language that disability literary theorist and child of deaf adults (CODA) Lennard Davis knows. Davis’s essay “Who Put the The in The Novel?” (2002) first called my attention to the significance of articles in regard to culture in general and disability cultures such as Deaf and Blind Culture in par ticular. While acknowledging that he is hardly the first to do so, Davis notes that the implies a sense of ownership. For example, Ukraine, Congo, and Sudan were all once “the . . .” but have all lost their preceding article “in a surge of identity politics characterized by postcolonial consciousness and a sense of the power of linguistic collusion in structures of power” (Davis 2002, 80). (Curiously, as previously noted, the Ukrainian language has no articles and thus the linguistic transformation of the name of its homeland can only have occurred elsewhere, most notably in points West, where articles are used.) Though the assignment of a or the to Deaf Culture is, at least for now, optional, I would submit that Deaf Culture always owns at least an implied sense of the power of a preceding article, in the sense in

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which Davis references “The Novel.” A primary theme of Davis’s essay is the ongoing debate among literary theorists about whether “the novel” exists as a distinct and distinctive literary entity with a clear historical and geographic point of origin in England, or whether that claim of autonomy exaggerates the distinctiveness of a sector of the storytelling world in the interest of boosting British, European, and Western prestige and thus also power. In that context, the assertion that (a or the) Deaf Culture exists and (a or the) Blind Culture does not takes on different and far more significance than previously might have been imagined, when one considers that one facet of Deaf Culture’s self-positioning is that it is nondisabled and distinct from disability identities (and DS). This is a claim I have never encountered from blind individuals or organizations. If the considerable degree of isolation implied by a culture or the culture is the applicable standard, one is likely to accept Deaf Culture and reject Blind Culture. The critical difference is not only one of linguistics—that is, the power relations inherent in the use of articles— but also the authority that sometimes accompanies ownership of distinct languages. The sign languages that serve as the discursive foundation for Deaf cultural autonomy are thus compared to and judged to carry more cultural capital than Braille and other linguistic tools of the blind, which foster some distinctiveness but, as essential vehicles of blind literacy, are anything but isolating, an opinion shared by many on the three discussion groups I surveyed. I propose that we, like Appadurai, banish the old anthropological notion of grand cultural autonomy as either no longer valid or never having been valid, and to declare that claims to substantial isolation or the potential to isolate are only cultural variations rather than cultural virtues or strengths. By now it should be apparent that I regard culture—particularly contemporary, globalized culture—quite differently from the old model of purity and isolation. I believe that culture not only permits but practically demands the multiple affinities I call social confluences. By this definition, there is little doubt of the existence of numerous Blind Cultures, defined in manners roughly parallel to the most important and distinctive manifestations of Deaf Culture. Though these Blind cultural praxes offer as one goal a greater independence and autonomy for

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blind people, they do so with less social isolation than can be the result of the distinct languages and institutions of Deaf Cultures. Nonetheless, the three features I identified as key to acknowledging the existence of Deaf Cultures—linguistic distinctiveness, unique institutions, and the creation of environments (where sign language is the dominant idiom of communication) in which Deaf Culture supplants deaf disability—all have analogies in Blind Culture. If these are not found widely in Blind Culture, they are all present in Blind musicking. Blind linguistic distinctiveness, including Braille and other technologies, is familiar. Distinct Blind languages, however, are rare—only the “secret language” of Ukranian minstrels exists, as far as I know. Some of these tools are used expressly for music (National Resource Center for Blind Musicians n.d.). Blind institutions, including schools and numerous multipurpose and specialized organizations, are well known. One such group is the National Federation of the Blind, the foremost organization in the United States “of the blind” rather than “for the blind.” Blind musicians’ organizations have existed on every continent. The final feature of Deaf Culture—its creation of cultural, nondisabled space—may be the most controversial in the case for Blind Culture. There is value here in recalling how ethnomusicologists Nettl, Small, and Kingsbury have demonstrated the great degree to which certain musical environments operate as distinct and distinctive cultural systems. With that understanding and with Kojiro Hirose’s concept of a  blind “special world,” which he defines as grounded in the blind’s capacity for memory but which surely also includes an inclination toward sound (Sacks 2008, 171–176), it is hardly surprising that there would be sites of musicking where blind people function without socially constructed disability. The Blind minstrels’ guilds that once flourished in Ukraine and Japan have been duly acknowledged here. Their impressive autonomy was largely grounded in their development of unique repertoires especially suited to Blind musicking; non-notated, oral or mnemonic traditions of soloists whose per formance practice required no eye contact with ensemble partners or conductors. This did not entirely exclude sighted collaborators. Ukrainian minstrels employed young guides, often boys with physical disabilities. As adults, these former guides would

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work in musical instrument repair, a skill they learned from their blind minstrel employers (Kononenko 1998, 10). Similarly, in the United States, bluesmen used “lead boys,” an occupation in which folk-blues musician Josh White claimed to have apprenticed to several famous artists. The blind female instrumentalists of the Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra differ in many ways from the minstrels of Ukraine and Japan. If gender seems the obvious distinction, it is noteworthy that both Ukrainian and Japanese minstrels had female counterparts. In Ukraine, female minstrels sang a different, a cappella repertoire (Kononenko 1998, 55). In Japan, there are to this day women called itako, blind psychic mediums, who share with the biwa hoshi a reputation for special insight. (According to Hirose [2003], there is a single remaining biwa hoshi, Nagata Hojun.) Both, to some degree, served religious functions, though the itako are regarded as shamans rather than musicians. Their work nonetheless includes the chanting of Buddhist sutras. Unlike the blind minstrels and shamans, the Blind Orchestra is not simply an ensemble but a large ensemble, which, though it has had a music director, performs without a traditional conductor, a challenge for any orchestra. Not only is the group’s repertoire anything but uniquely geared to its blind membership, its specialty—works of late-nineteenthcentury Romanticism, is especially noted for gradual shifts of tempo and dynamics (loudness), for which a conductor is typically crucial. Unlike the minstrels and shamans, there are ways the orchestra has utilized explicitly musical assistance from sighted facilitators, its music director, and some of the Braille notation staff (the music librarian, who copies Braille from Braille, is blind), but a similar kind and level of staffing is typical of sighted symphonies as well. To a considerable degree, many musical confluences operate for blind people as cultural systems without socially constructed disability. The Blind Orchestra has developed protocols that facilitate their performance of the Western classical repertoire, arguably the world’s least amenable to performance by PWDs in general and blind people in particular. If the playing of this music by any other symphony, even the Royal Oman Symphony Orchestra, is an affirmation of core Western values, the musicking of the Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra members, simply by virtue of

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who they are and what they do “as Egyptians, as blind people, and as women” (Schuyler 1996), subverts any number of these cultural stances: its Eurocentrism, its androcentrism, and not least but probably the most persistent of these, its ableism.

4 / Losing . . . My Religion Music, Disability, Gender, and Jewish and Islamic Law The opera isn’t over until the fat lady sings. Dan Cook

Kol b’isha erva (A woman’s voice is nakedness.) Talmud, Berachot (Blessings) 24a

Testing the Social Model of Disability

T

heories must be consistent to bear the rigor of the toughest, most extreme applications, such as those found in these final chapters. Until now our examples have been relatively straightforward in terms of social model disability theory. Our subjects—pianists, jazzmen, and orchestral musicians—have all had physical or sensory impairments. The degree to which these impairments resulted in disability has differed radically according to life contexts or social confluences. For example, guitarist Django Reinhardt would have been regarded as minimally impaired in most U.S. policy and workplace contexts. Brilliant as a jazz guitarist, with an idiosyncratic, self-adapted technique, he would have been unable to play even the most basic classical repertoire. Now, however, things get tough for the social model theory of disability. In this chapter, we will consider provocative instances in which religious laws create disabling conditions affecting demographic groups that would rarely, if ever, be regarded as impaired. The first concerns the Afghan Taliban and its oppression of “musical” people through the

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radical interpretation of Islamic law. The second example is the disabling impact on women of kol isha, the Orthodox Jewish stricture against men listening to the singing of adult females. It has long been argued that there is no single social model theory. In particular, it has been thought that the British and North American versions have always differed significantly, the U.K. model being more political and the U.S. model more cultural. Our British colleagues tend to be more influenced by Marxism and the trade-union movement in their view of disability rights as fundamentally economic rights, whereas Americans see disability rights and DS as more related to our own Civil Rights and ethnic, women’s, and sexuality studies movements. As of 2009, this division has also become an increasingly clearer split between the United Kingdom’s emphasis on social and behavioral sciences and their closely allied professions, such as education and social work, and a U.S. (and, to a lesser degree, Canadian) focus on the humanities, especially cultural studies and literature-related fields. In addition, British scholars Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson have contested the opposed binaries social/medical and disability/impairment (2001). They observe that embodied impairment is not always accompanied by socially constructed disability, in particular when that impairment is invisible. They also acknowledge, more or less as I do, the degree to which impairment is also socially constructed. But my concern here is different and perhaps even the inversion of theirs. Shakespeare and Watson’s observation that impairment can exist without disability is one such difference, the Marxist roots of the British social model leading its adherents to define disability strictly as oppression, which the authors surmise may not occur if the impairment is invisible (2001, 12). While I would require examples to be convinced of this—none are provided—it is more important that their point reifies the distinction between U.K. and U.S. social models, insofar as the latter sees disability fundamentally as socially constructed in some way or other and overwhelmingly, though not inherently, oppressive. I take a position here that is an inversion of Shakespeare and Watson’s—that disability can exist without impairment. This is practically commonplace in the United States, as our ADA is forthright in protecting not only PWDs, but those thought to be or to have been

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disabled (but who are not or were not) who have encountered discrimination. (It is also central to historian Douglas Baynton’s argument (2001) that disability rhetoric is a constant in American history in the rationales for the denial of rights to minorities and women.) The two examples showcased in this chapter offer variations on that theme. In Taliban society, it is musicality, rather than an attribute typically regarded as an impairment, that is disabling. In Orthodox Jewry, it is the nearly always male impairment of uncontrollable sexual urges that is transferred into the disablement of women, who are largely forbidden to sing. Shakespeare and Watson see impairment as a universal human condition, though one that differs in degree so that only some humans are oppressed by disability. This view is also central, if differently nuanced, to Lennard Davis’s idea of “dismodernism” (2002). It also relates well to my soon-to-ensue discussion of ability in general and musicality in particular. But still, I beg to differ on two related points. The distinction that heretofore every dialect of social model theory, including those just cited, made between disability and impairment has done little if anything to successfully establish that they are indeed separate categories. To do so would require that disability and impairment be experienced by different subjects. If they are not, then they are simply different aspects or phases of a single lived experience. For disability and impairment to be separate phenomena would be demonstrable if Shakespeare and Watson’s surmise of impairment without disability were convincing. To me it is not. While an example might have proved helpful, the stigmatization of every “invisible” (a dubious characterization) disability I know (and I have lived with major, episodic depression for decades and chronic pain since 1999) tells me otherwise. Living in stealth and in terror of disclosure, as I did for years with my depression, does not mean one has not experienced oppression. Quite the opposite. The Taliban example in this chapter notes persistent, if covert, musicking under first the Taliban’s regime and later its insurgency. What will establish the independence of disability from impairment in this chapter, though, is a discussion of the disabling of those who are either (1) regarded as impaired only in the most extreme, politicized circumstances, in a manner that fails to convince and indeed

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horrifies most of the rest of the world (under the Taliban), or (2) a class of people who are not regarded as impaired at all, but are disabled as a consequence of another group’s impairment (in Orthodox Jewry). Such are the tough cases to which I previously referred, those that establish a clear independence of disability from impairment, though with the caveat that the dialects of the social model that acknowledge the socially constructed aspects of impairment are in force here. It almost goes without saying that the two categories, which constitute the body of this chapter, have taken place within social confluences whose laws do not conform to normative Western understandings of disability and impairment. Under the Afghan Taliban, musicality was punished as a sociopathy, an immutable, unacceptable urge. Thus an attribute, musicality— one that I maintain is “hardwired” at an early age (and perhaps even in utero) and that is elsewhere mostly valued, sometimes highly—becomes reviled and punished. I liken this to queer sexuality, often also regarded even today as a pathology. The challenge here to the social model is in the argument for musicality as an attribute that, depending on social confluence, can morph from talent—that is, hyperability—to disability. The Taliban illustration is offered as an exemplar of the extreme mutability, over time and space, of social construction—in other words, of the theory of social confluence. Kol isha is an item of Halacha, Jewish law, wherein unimpaired women are disabled because of impaired male (potential) sex offenders. (Of course, women with impairments are disabled in the same manner.) Disability of one group is thus the consequence of the impairment of another; although it is an impairment whose ramifications are often so repugnant that the disability community is justifiably loathe to claim those so impaired. And the disabled (women) and the impaired (a small class of men) are two distinct, mutually exclusive groups. The intricacies of Jewish life and law make the application of social model theory unique and challenging. But DS often does not address the important problem of violence- causing pathologies. And no theory deserves to be called one unless it is demonstrated to be rigorous and consistent in even the most daunting instances. (Chapter 5 makes the arguments put forth here look easy.) Considerable additional theoriz-

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ing is necessary before considering the facts on the Afghan and Orthodox Jewish ground.

Music, Disability, Social Constructivity, and Area Studies One purpose for this book is to demonstrate that relationships between music and disability can illuminate larger social concerns. Before approaching religious law, we must consider social construction, its centrality to the social model theory that underlies DS, and its relationship to the various area studies in higher education that most familiarly address ethnicity or race, gender, and sexuality. Social construction is the manner in which such identity categories are manifested as praxis rather than as embodiment. For example, in Western culture, wearing dresses, part of a social construction of gender, is regarded as feminine, though certainly not biologically female. Disability, too, is often associated with certain “types”: evil (Captain Hook), pitiable (Tiny Tim), socially inept (Laura, in The Glass Menagerie), tragic (Oedipus), or brave and tenacious (Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, especially in the film The Miracle Worker). These disability examples demonstrate how much of social construction is stereotyping, and in particular its deleterious ramifications. The predominant “areas” in area studies—peoples of color, women, those with queer sexualities— are overwhelmingly synonymous with those “identities” most associated with liberatory “identity politics,” groups that historically have experienced discrimination. Area studies’ focus on human taxonomies associated with histories of disadvantage—race, gender, sexuality, and disability—is understandable and, from a moralist or activist standpoint, idealistic. It is less proclaimed, though, that these “areas” are widely presumed to be identities whose owners have no, or very little, control or ability to change: biological, embodied, hardwired, essential, or all of these. The medical address of the condition of gender identity variance (transsexualism), in which body sex and in some cases sexual orientation change (Daskalos 1998), is but one challenge to this presumption of immutability.

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I have long and often heard that the current “area” configuration, common in American higher education curricula, finesses the category of class, either paying it relatively little attention or subsuming it into more readily identified categories, explaining class as a consequence of the marginalization of these “Other,” more “essential” groups. If the study of identity is restricted to marginalized groups (and occasionally their nemeses, as in “whiteness” and “masculinity” studies), this may well serve political purposes, but it both impoverishes identity as a topic of study and ignores less essential categories of marginalization such as occupation and political affiliation. That an identity is socially constructed makes it no less real or life affecting than if it were embodied. Since categories of identity are culturally determined, no matter how embodied these groups’ markers might be, social construction is central to identity formation. That contemporary identity politics and area studies construct identity mostly on the basis of categories regarded as essential begs for interrogation. Why are “essential” categories most important? Assuming this taxonomic choice is rooted in the noble goal of improving the quality of life for vast numbers of people, classical Marxism (whose track record of achievements in this respect is, however, hardly a given) eschewed such essentialism in favor of economically defined classes, categorizations that both communism and capitalism regard as unambiguously malleable, though by quite different means and to different ends. Are the categories currently regarded as essential truly so? The Indian caste system appears to traffic in a brand of essentialism that does not fall easily into the familiar categories. Likened to both race and class, while being neither precisely, it includes aspects of both. A vestige of ineffable class structure also appears essential in the construction of monarchy. Mythologies of royal lineage are grounded in divine birthright, which seems always to exemplify the dominant phenotype, even in the case of the British royals, whose lineage is complex and whose country and commonwealth are diverse. While the essentialist aspect of identity is important to the discourse of postmodernism, it may also be a contemporary manifestation of the ancient question of predestination. Elsewhere in academia, predestination is sometimes called sociobiology or genetics, neither term precisely synonymous with essentialism, but closer than either biologists or postmodern humanists might care to admit.

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To contemplate disability as an “area” is to render performance, even the ranking of performance, a facet of identity. (This may also apply to sex and sexuality.) Juxtaposing musicality and disability reveals that the former is often regarded as an opposite of the latter. Musicality is viewed not simply as an ability, but an extraordinary ability. Music making, at least at the highest levels, is regarded as requiring an exceptional gift within many social confluences. One focus of Henry Kingsbury’s Music, Talent, and Per for mance: A Conservatory Cultural System is that institution’s system of human valuation (Abrams 1998, 59– 60), which concentrates on the concept of talent in many of its various meanings. This opposed binary of music and disability plays out in various scenarios. It is, for example, so useful in plotting films that many (or perhaps most) movies about classical music incorporate disability themes (Lubet and Hofmann 2006). Another manifestation of this binary is the notion of compensation, or the countering of exceptional liabilities by extraordinary strengths. Short men (like me) are branded with “Napoleon complexes,” desiring power and control in place of stature. People with sensory limitations are thought to compensate by enhancement of the senses that remain. The example most relevant here is the supposition that blind people are “more musical.” While what constitutes “musicality” is culturally contingent, neuroscientific research indicates that one of the most studied attributes of musical skill, absolute (or perfect) pitch, is indeed far more common among peripherally blind (that is, not blind from birth) than sighted musicians. Furthermore, it may develop in peripherally blind musicians at a later age than in sighted musicians, and appears to be different in its neural mechanisms (Hamilton, Pascual-Leone, and Schlaug 2004; Sacks 2008, 171–176). There is evidence that areas of the brain normally associated with vision are reallocated to hearing in blind people, lending credence to the idea of sensory compensation. The study by Hamilton, Pascual-Leone, and Schlaug (2004) also indicates that absolute pitch may be partly heritable. Among the medical and psychological literature’s few confident assertions of even limited innate, embodied musical ability—as opposed to the common indications of the benefits of early, sometimes even in utero (Hepper 1991; Overy et al. 2004, 1723) musical learning—are the work of Gottfried Schlaug and his colleagues (Gaab, Keenan, and Schlaug 2003; Gaser and Schlaug 2003;

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Keenan et al. 2001; Schlaug 2001; Schlaug et al. 1995). These are mostly associated with absolute pitch, which, however, neurologist Oliver Sacks notes (1995), in response to Schlaug et al (1995), is a skill that is lacking in many wonderful musicians, is common in musical mediocrities, and is extremely common in people with autism and Williams Syndrome whom Sacks calls “savants.” Regardless of neuroscientific research on innate musicality, the long standing and widely held idea of exceptional musicality among blind people has functioned as far more than conventional wisdom. It has been institutionalized at numerous times and places where musical (and sometimes other) employments have been reserved for blind people. While in the contemporary West the claim of inherently exceptional musicality is made only occasionally, as was noted in Chapter 3, many blind musicians have indeed excelled in numerous musical genres, especially and not surprisingly in idioms less reliant on print notation and conductors (Lubet 2004b, 2006c). My interest here is in locating musicality on an “ability continuum,” and to use the case of music to expand DS thinking to incorporate ability as well. An “ability studies” should not be a counterpoint to DS in the way “whiteness” or “masculinity studies” mirror “studies of color” or women’s-feminist studies. Those pairings are predicated on binary opposition: white versus nonwhite, male versus female. The distinction between PWDs and able-bodied people—has its purposes. But no one could reasonably propose that PWDs are “non-able” and complete outsiders to “ability,” estranged from competence the way individuals are presumed to be definitively “not white” or “not male,” race mixing and intersexuality aside. (The truly vulnerable or comatose, like the late Terry Schiavo, may arguably be exceptions.) Disability and ability might thus both be seen as universal human qualities, distributed differently, of course, and potentially embodied, socially constructed, or both. (Impairment may be the more appropriate term here, but it has no opposite pairment.) Or disability and ability could be viewed as points on a single continuum. As we will see in both the Taliban and Orthodox Jewish examples that follow, talent is a minor player, as all music, regardless of perceived quality, is considered a problem by these groups. But the Taliban is well

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aware of musical talent and not above putting it to use for its own, antimusical purposes.

Musicality, Musicians, and Ability Studies I refer here to music not as repertoire but as what Christopher Small (1998) calls “musicking,” the gerund form of the verb “to music.” By this, Small means all forms of participation in the process of doing (more accurate than “making”) music, every activity relevant to aestheticized sound. For example, he describes custodians cleaning up after a performance as essential to musicking. Though I accept Small’s broad view, I limit myself here to those musicking activities most indicative of emotional investment: primarily performance and composition, but also active listening, criticism, and the promotion of music-making activities. In the ability continuum I propose, disability and ability are not an opposed binary but a range. My goal here is to locate musicality on that continuum. In particular, I seek to transcend the Western commonplace that making music well is unambiguously an extraordinary gift given to a talented few, and to explore additional implications of an  affinity for music—or lack thereof—across a variety of cultural contexts. The idea of musicality, a propensity for music, has long been examined in fields including ethnomusicology, music education, psychology, and neuroscience. Common questions include whether musicality is ever innate and, if so, how and when it might best be cultivated. But even the assumption that musicality is a capacity worthy of exploitation, exhibition, and cultivation is culturally contingent and a view that is by no means universally held. In certain confluences such as Western classical music, musicality is equated with talent. Talent is by definition unevenly distributed. While it is understood that talent, more associated with performance and composition than with other musical endeavors, must be fostered through guidance and hard work, it is also viewed as innate, a potential found only in some individuals and typically requiring encouragement, nurture, and guidance. Within classical music, talent is regarded as the single most important ability, perhaps the only ability

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that truly matters. Other capacities, particularly the propensity to work hard and long—whose distinction from talent is one I have often heard, but which I regard as arbitrary—are regarded as necessary but, absent talent, utterly insufficient. If the above seems unremarkable and so obvious that it is virtually unnecessary, it is all the more important that it be investigated. Unexamined conventional wisdom is dangerous. Thus, DS routinely interrogates the commonplace, the given, thoroughly to expose basic assumptions. Familiar linguistic idioms are but one example. The term lame excuse carries prejudicial connotations that flimsy excuse does not. The blind leading the blind implies that ignorance and sightlessness are the same. Similarly, if the supposition that the ability to make classical music at a high level requires talent initially seems innocent and obvious, it is nonetheless built on a web of culturally contingent assumptions whose disentanglement will both require and enrich DS. The notion of talent or innate ability is hardly unique to classical music. It is applied to many other kinds of music within their own cultural contexts and to other endeavors within and beyond the arts. Talent is not, however, a universally accepted concept. There have been numerous cultural confluences, including some of those that ethnomusicologists and other cultural anthropologists deem cultures or ethnicities, in which universal competent musical participation is quite simply expected, a requirement of what might be regarded as duties of citizenship. A canonic text on the subject, John Blacking’s How Musical Is Man? (1973), describes such musicality among the Venda people of South Africa. In the equally esteemed The Anthropology of Music (1964, 67– 70), Alan Merriam contrasts philosophies of “talent” versus “universal ability” with regard to music in numerous ethnicities. Among the Venda and similarly minded groups, the idea of music as an activity wherein special, innate gifts might emerge as major markers of an individual’s exceptionality does not exist. In the age of globalization, however, the time for referencing such musical egalitarianism may be past. The Venda and other like-thinking peoples at the very least have surely encountered such talent- centric views of musicality from others. Some “universal ability” cultures like the Venda may even have abandoned or radically transformed older beliefs in favor of the notion of musical talent.

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An expectation of universal musicality requires not only egalitarian sentiment but also a musical praxis that makes possible, and may even require, such broad participation. To be sure, many features of Western classical music mandate what Merriam calls a “talent” system. Any musically Westernized society that claims the overwhelmingly EuroAmerican classics as its own (nowadays this includes much of Asia) cannot simply effect a massive transformation of its core musical values toward greater egalitarianism. It could not expect its current, mostly canonic repertoire—long profoundly informed by notions of virtuosity and with little room for new, differently conceived repertoire—to serve a new, “I’m OK, you’re OK,” nonvirtuosic or even antivirtuosic (such as punk rock) ethos. As Small has observed (1996, 165), the region that had been most invested in the Western musical canon, to the point of censoring and even punishing composers who departed from “classic” values by committing such aesthetic crimes as “vanguardism” and “formalism,” consisted of the failed socialist and allegedly egalitarian states of Eastern Europe, especially the former Soviet Union. At the same time, perhaps the most egalitarian development in Western classical music has been the populist and nurturing teaching philosophy of the late, much- celebrated Japanese music educator Shinichi Suzuki, who preached and incorporated into practice the idea that musical talent was both universal and methodically teachable. Of course, the capacities required to perform and compose Western classical music are not evenly distributed among individuals. The degree to which the attributes required for this brand of musicality are both embodied, like impairment, and innate, like much impairment, has heretofore been nearly impossible to determine, despite much research. With the ascendancy of neuroscience and neuroimaging in particular, such investigations are increasing in both number and potential, both because of interest in music per se and because studying the development of musical skill is of particular value in the neuroscience of brain development, a focus of Schlaug’s research. Whether musical talent is embodied or socially constructed is not a necessary determinant or condition of its existence. Social constructions such as race and musicality are not biological falsehoods, but social realities. That they are believed into existence makes them no less significant or real. Belief is a potent force. While conditions such

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as race and sex, foundational to both area studies and identity politics, are largely grounded in observations and suppositions about phenotypes, the markers of musicality are less readily apparent, except perhaps in a circumscribed manner, with, for example, the assistance of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and other brain imaging techniques. I would prefer, though, that a long-standing, pervasive affinity for music—not necessarily a “gift” for music—be identified as the central attribute of musicality. To draw an analogy from elsewhere in the realm of pleasurable activities, we do not regard sexual orientation as being “good” at a particular erotic practice. This is more, though, than an analogy useful to our ultimate investigation of music under Islam and Judaism. In both cases, we are concerned with religious fundamentalism in which music, like sexiness, is a line in a litany of vices, especially under the Taliban. One can even possess a high degree of musical skill without any desire to utilize it. I have observed a young person on the autistic spectrum—where, as Oliver Sacks (1995, 621) notes, absolute pitch occurs in one in twenty individuals, far exceeding the one in ten thousand frequency in the general population—who has absolute pitch and extraordinary instrumental technique but no interest whatever in music, and perhaps even a dislike for it. No motivation other than coercion could induce this person to practice and she absolutely never listens to music for pleasure. Perhaps hypersensitivity, which can affect any of the senses and is common among persons on the autistic spectrum, was a factor in this extraordinary combination of musical gifts and aversion to music.

Musicality as Disability In nearly four decades of student and professional music making and teaching, I have observed that a passion for music often has a staying power of an intensity similar to that of sexuality. Musicality is thus better regarded as an orientation than as a preference. While musicality is a condition whose social construction is, in mainstream Western contexts, an extraordinary ability, elsewhere it is regarded quite differently.

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Musical orientation has even been regarded at some times and in some places as a disability. The tableau I am preparing, of musicality as disability, requires an additional analogy from queer sexuality studies. First, a few short preludes are needed. Douglas Baynton (2001), a historian of disability, deafness, and Deaf Culture in America, argues that, to justify the exclusion and denial of rights for reasons of race or ethnicity, immigration status, sex, sexuality, or impairment, such “Others” have been declared inferior or defective by comparison to a norm that is at least white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and sometimes also native-born, Christian, Protestant, and possibly of Western European descent. The rhetoric of disability—that is, of inferiority or defect—has thus been used to support discrimination against those deemed inherently incapable of holding their own in American society. In much of the period Baynton considers, U.S. history through the early twentieth century, the unified category disability was not used, though disability is clearly the implicit tie that binds numerous prejudicial policies and attitudes against “Others,” including sexual minorities. Only in 1994 was homosexuality excised from the fourth edition of the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the publication of the American Psychiatric Association upon which many mental health professionals and insurers rely. While this means that in one sense sexual Otherness is now literally history, even the ADA of 1990 (as well as the ADA Amendments Act of 2008) acknowledges that an individual’s history of having been regarded as disabled may be the basis of illegal discrimination. The culture war over samesex marriage indicates that the disabling of same-sex couples is likewise no mere historical matter. Looking back to distant lands and a different legal system, Rabbi Judith Abrams observes in Judaism and Disability that another form of sexual Otherness, intersexuality, in both hermaphrodite and androgyne forms, is grounds for denial of full participation within the Torah’s system of human valuation. Further, some prominent transsexual (TS) activists regard their gender identity dysphoria (a term the TS movement uses) as a birth defect (Allison 1993) or physical problem (Conway 2007) that can, and sometimes must, be surgically corrected. Arguing for the neuroanatomical nature of sexual self-definition, Lynn Conway (2006), a prominent TS spokeswoman and a distinguished

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computer scientist and engineer, even states, “The theory that gender identity is socially constructed is finally shattered.” Some contemporary discourse regarding homosexuality, both homophile and homophobic, is predicated on whether “the girl [or boy] can’t help it”—that is, whether homosexuality is genetic, biologically based, hardwired, or otherwise essential. It should not have to be said that there is great and readily apparent logic for accepting the naturalness of homosexuality as a common human variation, though this is routinely and theologically denied in America and elsewhere by the religious right. It is hardly a “lifestyle” anyone would readily elect in the ongoing context of millennia of vicious, often institutionalized homophobia. Scientific research, however, is not the only, the simplest, or the most compelling argument for the innate nature of sexual orientation (Moser 2004; Roughgarden 2004). It is also obvious and incontrovertible that people’s sexual orientations are quite simply how they feel and that those feelings are clearly immutable, as they continue to be expressed under threat or penalty of opprobrium, violence, and sometimes even death. Such has also been the case with musicality, as it has led to all manner of musicking—not only performance, but listening to and purchasing music—in Taliban Afghanistan and Pakistan. A similar case of immutable feelings can be made on an analogous basis for innate musicality. An embodied desire for music can be powerful enough for an individual to resist strongly the persuasive logic of economies of rational choice. This earns musicality a place in the discourse of DS and supports the idea of nurturing a more expansive and inclusive “ability studies.” The hardwired nature of sexuality, like other apparently innate characteristics such as left- or right–handedness (Schlaug 2001, 289) and musicality (Keenan et al. 2001, 1403) are all manifested quite young. Biologists, some with commendable if vested interests (Moser 2004), pursue such research into sexuality. But there are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex activists and others who are concerned that such pursuits might result in eugenic measures or other negative consequences should such findings become accepted (Haider-Markel and Joslyn 2008; Sheldon et al. 2007). The mainstream interpretation of Orthodox Jewish law, or Halacha (another gendered facet of which is discussed later in this chapter),

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accepts with some empathy the innate nature of homosexual desire (Wurzburger 1983) while steadfastly rejecting all lesbian, gay, or bisexual activity on Levitical and other grounds (Kirschner 1988, 450). This attitude might make even Joan Roughgarden’s persuasive scientific case for the naturalness of the diversity of sexual and gender orientation (2004) futile with regard to the achievement of equal rights for sexual and gender minorities. The cultural situation of musicality is more similar to that of queer sexuality and gender expression than is immediately evident. Surely, the issue of whether and to what degree musical ability is embodied and innate or developed—like sexuality—is familiar in Western and other “talent” cultures. That question is much studied within neuroscience, where research in brain anatomy and development, mostly using fMRI, favors early learning over heritability as the larger contributor to musical ability, though there is evidence of genetic factors as well. But all the neuroscientific and psychological literature I could find was concerned exclusively with music as ability. Of the scholars whose work I surveyed, only British prehistorian Steven Mithen, in The Singing Neanderthals (2005), indicates an interest in the science behind musicality as something more than skill. Like Mithen, I believe that skill is only part of one’s relationship to music, as comparisons with sexual and gender identity make obvious. In cultural practices where musicking is less or not at all professionalized, as is the case in the religious fundamentalism soon to be examined in detail, it is particularly important to pay heed to the musicking of everyday life. If it appears that the search for musical parallels to queer sexuality ends at erotic alterity’s stigmatization—as opposed to the general admiration for musicality—appearances can be deceiving. The social sanctioning of musicality is far more precarious and contingent than might initially seem. Regarding musicality as synonymous with musical talent is a precarious premise, not only because, as I argue, musical affinity is also important, but because of the complex social construction of talent itself. The idea of talent assumes not only that one is good at something, but that that “something” is itself far better than simply “good.” One rarely if ever hears, for example, of a “talent” for plumbing, a skill understood to be only a necessary and good thing, but not a marvelous thing; it is an ability rarely extolled in the same grandiose manner as musical acumen.

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There are also abilities, no matter how well developed, that are perceived only negatively. One hears only perverse references to a “talent” for lying or crime. It can be assumed that musically egalitarian societies, in which participation in music making has been a requisite of full citizenship, have held their repertoires and performance practices in high esteem, with near or full unanimity. But musicality among such groups, though clearly regarded as a sociocultural good, must also be seen, by virtue of its near universality within the body politic, as unremarkable. This is, of course, a view quite different from that held in Western classical music and other “talent” cultures. Where music making is seen as an ordinary major life activity, the nature of talent and its development, the subject of so much speculation in Western culture, must be a virtual nonissue. Exceptional musicians might well be noticed, but with no more drama or celebration than the best maker of casseroles in a small, rural Minnesota town (where they are collectively known as “hot dishes”); they are appreciated, to be sure, though hardly expected or encouraged to turn pro or go on tour. The same cannot be said in social confluences that subscribe to notions of widely variable levels of musicality. Here it becomes necessary to step back somewhat from the concept of talent, with its unambiguously positive connotations, and refer exclusively to a more value-neutral musicality. This allows the possibility that being musical is a doubleedged sword, akin to being “sexy.” There is in fact no cultural circumstance I know of in which musicality has been viewed as a totally unmitigated virtue. And in some situations a powerful predilection for music can be disabling. The term passion, often heard in descriptions of fierce musical proclivity, tends to give musical inclination a positive spin. But, for those who choose to devote their lives to musicking, the more sinister-sounding obsession, compulsion, uncontrollable urge, or even addiction, though rarely heard, are not necessarily inaccurate. To me, surrounded for decades with thousands of people who have stuck with a life in music against all odds and adversities, the idea of a “fatal attraction” to music rings true. Even in the most music-positive environments, there is fear of and ambivalence toward musicality.

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Like ethnomusicologists Kingsbury, Nettl, and Small, I base my observations of the reception of musicality on the common parlance of a major Western classical music institution, in my case (like Nettl’s) the American university school of music, which has been my student and then professional home since 1971. As academic units that pride themselves on training their students for a career while actually finding positions for a far smaller percentage of their graduates than any other professional programs except those in the other arts, schools of music naturally engage in ubiquitous and frequently anxious conversations about job prospects—that is, about economies and rational choices. When students query their mentors about the likelihood of earning a living through their musical calling, a standard faculty response—one I have both heard and provided—is that only those who believe they can truly be content only in a life devoted to music should attempt to pursue it as a career. Thus, these career conversations focus on zeal for the art form as the critical component of musicality: desire, rather than talent, is offered as the ultimate determinant of whether one ought to attempt a musical career. Therefore the pursuit of a musical vocation, even in classical music, Western culture’s most prestigious repertoire, is socioeconomically queer; it is transgressive of mainstream, sanctioned economic behavior, which encourages the establishment and maintenance of secure material comfort. Active, “out” musicality is also often regarded as more than just economically transgressive, particularly when it is associated with less-than-fully-sanctioned repertoires. That this draw toward musical callings is believed to be irremediable for the most zealous evokes parallels to recent research seeking an essential, biological basis for sexuality and gender identity—queerness in particular—and some of their motivations. Whatever success science has discovering the embodied roots of sexual desire and gender identity, this effort may be ineffective in attaining progressive social goals. While findings that support the naturalness of sexual or gender diversity by scholars such as Stanford University population biologist and TS activist Joan Roughgarden are persuasive, they are convincing only to those willing to be persuaded by science, such folk being an endangered species in this era of intelligent design.

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Similarly, there is a vigorous neuroscientific search for innate musicality (Cross 2003; Drake and Bertrand 2001; Norton et al. 2005; Schlaug n.d.; Trehub 2001), albeit less controversial and publicized in musicpositive cultures than is the study of sex. For those in either “lifestyle”— musically (thus economically) or sexually queer—there is sometimes an attempt to justify on the basis of its innate, immutable nature, artistic or erotic, to those who might otherwise regard it as intolerably transgressive (Haider-Markel and Joslyn 2008; Sheldon et al. 2007). The resemblance between career counseling for music students and the discourse surrounding queer sexuality does not end there. During a conversation about musical careers between mentor and student, the adviser often alludes to the great challenges to having a family that life in music life brings. Childlessness is common among both women musicians (Miranti et al. 2008, 10) and female academics (Ward and Wolf-Wendel 2004), the latter, in my experience, including music faculty. Like queerness, the revelation that one is electing a music career also often brings fierce resistance from parents, and even genuine fear of the consequences of outing one’s heart’s musical desires to one’s elders. While the analogy up to this point has emphasized the relationship between musicality and sexuality, there is an argument to be made for comparing the inclination toward music instead to (trans)sexualism— that is, to gender identity rather than to sexual desire. As Roughgarden has stated (in Seligman 2004), “Gender . . . is an expression of identity rather than biological expression. It is much like an occupation. A mechanic, she said, wears a tool belt and overalls, a uniform that, over time, could change. It is an expression of identity and not the identity itself.” Music is certainly experienced as a powerful desire, something I can attest to from a lifetime’s experience. But, for better or worse and surely for reasons of political urgency, the consideration of desire as an essential attribute within academic area studies has focused almost entirely on sexuality. Music, like Roughgarden’s conception of gender, can be both an identity and an occupation. Like gender in general and transsexualism in particular, musicality might be expressed or lived any number of ways, not necessarily full-time or requiring permanent body modification. While the reference to body modification, an allusion to sexual reas-

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signment surgery, may seem tongue in cheek in a musical context, the correlation between professional music making and permanent injury that sometimes requires surgery is stunningly high (James 2000; Yeung et al. 1999). I have had three such operations as well as dozens, if not hundreds, of hours of occupational, physical, hand, and massage therapy, medications, and lessons in the Alexander Technique. Musicality includes strong urges that can be contrary to material self-interest in the way of both economic benefit and other types of sociocultural advantage. Outside the contemporary, globalized West, in places where, for example, certain religious fundamentalisms hold sway (among them Judaism and Islam), the stakes of being musically “out” may be quite different, more negative, and far higher. In such contexts, the logic of regarding musicality as a disability must be tempered with the awareness that when impairments are manifest as dependencies or compulsions that are thought to, and sometimes actually may, harm others, any empathy the disability label might otherwise inspire will surely dissipate. This may occur with substance addictions, some sexual compulsions, and behaviors such as kleptomania. There may well also be resistance, including refusal to confer the disability label and whatever accommodations or empathy might accompany. For example, the ADA (either version) is applicable only in highly circumscribed types of cases concerning addiction. Former addicts are a protected class; current addicts are not. While the consequences of compulsions are sometimes criminal, heinous, or both, the standing of such conditions of “drivenness” under law and standards of morality, as well as the delicate balance between the options of punishment and empathy, are all, of course, social constructions. Musicality, too, has a place in this legal and moral equation. Many, perhaps all, cultural confluences offer varying degrees and types of sanction and condemnation to their music. Several examples are familiar. The evolution of the social position of jazz in America is paradigmatic. Even at an early stage in the development of ethnomusicology—when the study of jazz and other modern urban, notated, and globalized music types were largely terra incognita and terra prohibita—the demonization of jazz during its early history was chosen by Alan Merriam (1964, 241–244) as being exemplary of a musical idiom as pariah. He cites examples from roughly 1920 to 1940 in which jazz was publicly

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condemned worldwide by clergy, physicians, classical musicians, and publications as respected and typically sober and responsible as the New York Times. Jazz was faulted for crime, illness, and mental and physical impairment, even in circumstances where the music had obviously never even been heard. (I am reminded of the frequency of anti-Semitic attitudes in places that have rarely, if ever, known Jews.) Today jazz is widely regarded as America’s classical music. Along with the arguably even more satanic blues, jazz is a major highlight, particularly during pledge weeks, of programming on PBS, the Public Broadcasting Ser vice, and an important imprimatur of American high and middlebrow cultural sanction. By 1964, Merriam had, most perceptively and presciently, already recognized that rock ‘n’ roll had inherited the mantle of the primary musical symbol of evil in America, if not also beyond. If the idea of musicality as impairment remains unconvincing, this may be because its socially constructed liabilities within a polymusical and generally tolerant society like the United States may not seem adequately severe to attain the status of disability. A multicultural perspective on the social status of the musically inclined will provide a more thoroughly convincing demonstration of the potential social liabilities of musicality. There is no need to imagine or invent such a harsh environment in which the terminally musical might suffer for their habit. Such a place exists in recent memory, a nation whose oppression of music, musicians, art, and artists was the stuff of headlines not long ago, with the revival of such tendencies an ever-present threat.

Enter Religion: Tali-Banned The Islamic world is ambivalent toward music (Freemuse 2006). Its musical practices and policies, and those concerning all arts and media, vary greatly. But there is no doubt that music, especially instrumental music, has always been controversial (Al-Albaani and Hudaa n.d.; Muhammadanism 2001). The most familiar recent instances of extraordinarily harsh prohibitions on music, the arts, and their practitioners and devotees were found under the regime of the fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan (Baily 2001; Barton 2001; Moss 2001; Solomon 2002). That even under

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threat of severe punishments such as beatings and imprisonment, covert aesthetic activity and preservation of instruments, recordings, and artworks persevered bears witness both to great courage and to an artistic instinct of such magnitude that many artists and lovers of the arts who understand this great impulse would regard it as embodied—that is, powerfully, unmanageably, and irresistibly felt. Under such dystopian but horribly real circumstances, ingrained musicality became a major socially constructed, disabling liability. Musical life resumed quickly and vigorously with the toppling of the Taliban regime (Solomon 2002), indicating both widespread musicality among the Afghan people and the easy demolition and rapid replacement of at least some social constructions, conditions permitting. But the danger to musicians seems only to have increased with the toppling of the regime in Kabul and the Taliban’s return to insurgent status not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan. My position that musicality has become a disability because of the powerful presence of the Taliban in Afghan and Pakistani life has been challenged. It has been suggested to me that it is not musicality but (as Christopher Small would say) musicking that has been dangerous and punishable. This challenge is worthy of close examination and requires an extended look at the history of Taliban policies toward and actions against music. To distinguish here between musicality and musicking is to separate being from doing. This is not so simple or obvious. Where phenotypical markers might be obvious, such as when one is black or female, punitive actions might be taken simply for being, without the punished having done anything. But other targets might be more evasive as, for example, in the persecution of Jews. Being outed as Jewish might require that the Jew in question do “something Jewish” like praying in a synagogue. And in the case of the quintessential male Jewish marker, circumcision, the line between being and doing is not so clear. The outing of homosexuality, though it is nowadays regarded by all reasonable people as a state of being rather than an elective behavior, is highly likely to require behavioral evidence. (In an interesting union of the two prior demographics, Orthodox Judaism accepts homosexuals but does not condone homosexual behavior [Wurzburger 1983].) I would argue that, in the case of the Taliban, musicality can be detected only through musicking—that is, the evidence is behavioral.

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The question that follows, then, is whether punishments have been meted out to casual music lovers or to the kind of musical zealots already described here. I propose that there are two rather obvious metrics for making this determination. The first is whether serious harm was ever incurred through deprivation of music; the second includes the risks people have been willing to incur in order to musick, primarily in this situation to perform, listen, or sell it. An additional, critical consideration is the Taliban’s unique classification system for distinguishing music from other aestheticized sound and its implementation during the regime, a discussion with which this section will close. One of the most interesting chronicles of the devastation of a life without music comes from “An Awakening from the Nightmare of the Taliban,” a 2002 New York Times feature by Andrew Solomon in which he describes the immediate and enormous resurgence of artistic life in all media in Kabul after liberation. His description of his meeting with the director of music for Afghan Television, classical vocalist Aziz Ghaznavi, merits quoting at length: For family reasons, Mr. Gaznavi could not flee Afghanistan during the Taliban rule. Life was incredibly difficult for anyone whose whole life was music, and he became depressed because of unsatisfied yearnings. He went to a doctor and said he would go crazy without music in his life. The doctor suggested that he listen to the one kind of song that even the Taliban couldn’t make illegal. So he bought his first birds, and fell in love with them. He now has more than 50 pigeons in a coop behind his house. When I went there one afternoon, I was ushered into his light-purple living room to sit crosslegged on the floor and eat candy while Mr. Ghaznavi and a friend tried out some new harmoniums they had just acquired. The sound of the multiple harmoniums playing in this lavender room in which many pigeons were flying around was surreal, and the weirdness was not mitigated by the presence of Mr. Ghaznavi’s son, the allAfghanistan weight-lifting champion, who sat in his shalwar kameez, traditional tunic and trousers, flexing his stupefying biceps when he was not refilling our teacups.

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Keeping birds, and pigeons in particular, was in fact a popular Afghan pastime outlawed by the Taliban in 1996 (Cole 2003, 788), though the ban apparently was not strictly enforced. Apropos Mr. Ghazvani’s story, it seems more than coincidence that the definitive work on the banning of music under the Taliban regime is ethnomusicologist John Baily’s 2003 book, “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan. Unless otherwise cited, the information in the paragraphs that follow concerning the Taliban regime (as opposed to the insurgency that began in 2001, following U.S. military involvement) comes from Baily’s book. Because of the limited number of personal narratives available, it is difficult to assess the extent of psychological distress suffered under the music ban. In addition to Mr. Ghazvani’s moving account, there is Baily’s 2000 article on the use of music among exiles in Fremont, California, a community that included a number of prominent musicians. “A medical survey revealed a community with a lot of stress, mental problems, depression and a high death rate.” An active musical life, including concerts featuring important refugee musicians from Pakistan and lessons in Afghan music, has proved effective not only as a form of therapy but also as reconciliation among different ethnic and religious (presumably Sunni and Shi’ia Muslim) groups. The restoration of Afghan musical life, which Baily argued could really survive only in exile during Taliban rule, surely had a restorative power, which Baily calls “generalised music therapy” (British spelling the author’s). But it must also have served a more specific function of restoring music itself to an especially musical people. Baily (2001, 18–19) and others have noted the vast importance of Radio Afghanistan—long the country’s primary musical institution, with functions that include not only broadcaster, but also patron, conservatory, and archive—in forging a national identity out of a diverse and fractious population. And no one, it seems, understood music’s role better than the Taliban, whose goal was to replace that national identity with (Sunni) Islamic universalism (Cole 2003, 796), as evidenced by their hosting of Al Qaeda. As will be discussed in more detail below, nearly 20 percent of the country’s vice laws under Taliban rule pertained to music. There may be no greater evidence of the harm done by the Taliban’s music ban than the rush to restore musical life after the fall of the

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regime. Solomon’s is but one of numerous accounts. Throughout the period of Taliban rule, there was covert defiance of the ban. The depth of the need to musick can be measured by the levels of fear and risk, as well as the penalties and threats for infractions. A distinction must be made here between the brutal behavior of the Taliban as a government and the far greater viciousness of its conduct as an insurgency. My characterization here is meant to apply only to the organization’s antimusic activities. On December 17, 1996, by order of its leader, Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice issued a decree banning sixteen activities (Huwaydi 2001, 68, cited in Cole 2003, 784). Remarkably, three of these involved music (Rashid 2000, 218–219, cited in Baily 2001, 35–36). Penalties might include the closing of the establishment (including shops, hotels, and automobiles) in which musicking occurred, imprisonment, beating, fines, and the confiscation or destruction of instruments and recordings. Prohibitions also concerned the use of music at weddings, dancing, and drumming. The destruction of musical properties sometimes took place in the kind of mass spectacles in large stadiums whose attendance by men, while enforced by the Taliban, was also virtually the only form of “entertainment” (the quotes are mine) still allowed (Cole 2003). But the enumeration of actual penalties imposed does not really capture the level of fear musicians had. The classical vocalist Aziz Ghaznavi was frightened into complete musical silence: “ ‘Of course, practice makes perfect,’ Mr. Ghaznavi said, ‘and during the Taliban period none of us could practice. We lost so much. After five years of not singing at all, I was afraid to hear my own voice, and it was a very scary moment, to sing again for the first time.’ ” (Solomon 2002) One of Ghaznavi’s colleagues, ”Abdul Rashin Mashinee, caught by the Taliban playing a sarinda, was told that they would cut off his hands if they ever found him playing again. He spent the dark years working as a butcher, but, he says, ‘I practiced my instrument diligently, every night in my dreams. ’ ” (Solomon 2002) There are additional accounts of musicians having buried their instruments, awaiting a time when they might be unearthed and played again. Although Baily reports that no one was ever executed for musicking by the religious police, he cites Qasim Shah, a reporter for Pakistan’s

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The News (February 2, 1999) who interviewed a musician who claims to have received a death threat. The possibility of capital punishment could never have been realistically dismissed altogether. Executions were staged at public spectacles for other vice crimes such as homosexuality and adultery (Cole 2003, 803). And music loomed large in an important form of symbolic execution. Both Cole (2003, 790) and Baily report, as part of the spectacle at public executions, the “hanging” of audio (and video) tapes, their “innards . . . ripped out” (Yusufzai 2000, quoted in Baily 2001, 36–37), “disemboweled” (Goldenberg 1998, quoted in Baily 2001, 37). This symbolism must have been far more threatening in Taliban Afghanistan than anywhere else. “Taliban rejection of the visual representation of animate beings, whether human or animal, [led] to the rejection of all forms of visual media such as cinema, television, video, family photographs and representational painting (Baily 2001, 35).” With actual graphic depiction of potential capital punishment for musicking rendered illegal by this extreme interpretation of Islamic law (far exceeding that of Wahabist Saudi Arabia, a major influence on the Taliban [Baily 2001, 39– 40], this allusion to execution by hanging and disembowelment must have seemed all too real. That homosexuality was a vice crime punishable by public execution brings us back to my earlier argument regarding musicality as an attribute that is as hardwired and embodied as queer sexuality or gender. The execution of gays by the Taliban was particularly barbaric: partial burial followed by crushing under a collapsed wall (Gannett 2002, 13; Goodwin 1998, quoted in Cole 2003, 791–792). Yet it appears that gay conduct persisted despite the risk of the death penalty (Gannett 2002; Sullivan 2003). (Goodwin notes only the “accusation” of “buggery,” not the verification of gay identity of those executed, as if that were possible or relevant.) Musicking also persisted in abundance (Siddique 2009), with at least the powerful implication that it might eventually become a capital crime, punished in the most horrible way. There is thus little doubt that a talent once admired in Afghanistan, as much as anywhere, had become a disability. After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the possibility of a death penalty for musicking became more than a threat, not at the hands of the Karzai government but by the Taliban insurgency, not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan as well. In Afghanistan, actual killings have not

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been common. The Web site of Freemuse, the international nongovernmental organization that monitors antimusic censorship and is devoted to “freedom of musical expression,” reports three such incidents: a bombing of a music download shop that killed two and wounded several others (2007), the shooting of a Turkmen singer and six members of his orchestra (2005a), and the shooting of a female host of a popular Kabul television music show, possibly an “honor killing” (2005c). There have also been a significant number of death threats, which will be discussed shortly. Freemuse also lists five incidents of music-related killings in Pakistan, including an honor killing of a popular Pashto (the Afghan/Pakistani ethnic group to which the vast majority of Taliban belong) female vocalist by her brothers, who objected to her chosen profession (2009a). Particularly shocking is that, among the many additional threats on all manner of musickers, eight hundred music stores have been bombed (Beneri 2009). The need to musick under such threatening circumstances transcends any casual fondness. It is a powerfully imprinted attribute that would be a gift elsewhere but is similarly disabling to queer sexuality or gender in this context, where either trait can get one killed. It is, of course, well known that it is not only queer sexuality or gender that is dangerous in the land of the Taliban. In the West (and perhaps elsewhere), it is probable that the most famous aspect of the movement’s oppressive policy by far is its treatment of women. There is little information about the situation of women during the Taliban rule in Afghanistan to indicate that their musical silencing was an exceptionally harsh aspect of their lives. There are only a few women’s personal narratives from that period, doubtless owing in large part to a 90 percent rate of illiteracy for females (Cole 2003, 776, 777). But women’s musicking has survived and is given a particularly useful accounting in a 2007 essay by ethnomusicologist (and wife of John Baily) Veronica Doubleday. Doubleday describes a rich tradition of women’s and women and children’s music. One aspect of that tradition, the daireh drum, has been endangered, no doubt largely a result of Taliban rule. Before the Taliban, most homes owned or could borrow a daireh, but hid or destroyed them during fundamentalist rule (Doubleday 2007, 7). Another important tradition was the singing of lullabies. This persisted under the Taliban,

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but only very quietly, because even this was a forbidden musical activity.  Doubleday emphasizes on several occasions the great importance of  women and children’s musicking from a very early age for their acculturation. But there is additional research indicating that singing to infants is even more important than Doubleday believes. Psychologist Sandra Trehub (2000) has studied lullabies and found that “songs could be considered embellishments of human vocal communication or ritualized expressions of love, hope, or complaint. In all likelihood, this type of behavior, by ministering to the emotional needs of mother and infant, promotes reciprocal affectional ties.” It seems likely that not only “infant- directed music” (Trehub 2000) was self-restrained by women, but also the highly inflected “infantdirected speech” that mothers and other caregivers use with young children, which Ellen Dissanayake (2000, 392) characterizes as music and even as melody. Cole (2003, 797) reports, “Women were not allowed to laugh or even speak loudly.” If this vital form of mother- child bonding was seriously curtailed, the potential for serious emotional, psychological, and informal educational damage from restrictions on women’s expression was even greater. Dissanayake (2000, 393) argues convincingly that this kind of speech-song “provide[s] a number of functional psychological and sociocultural benefits for infants that go far beyond the physical protection and care that are typically cited as the function of attachment [between mother or caregiver and child] behavior in the second half year of life.” These benefits include orientation to attention and arousal, “emotional regulation and support,” “acquaintance with the expressive (or prosodic) features of language,” “exposure to the prototypical and meaningful sounds and patterns of spoken language,” and the “develop[ment] of cognitive abilities for recognizing agency, object, goal, and instrumentality . . . [that] predispose the infant generally to intellectual and social competence.” As discussed at length in Chapter 5, there are critical periods for learning skills (in humans and all organisms) that may be difficult or impossible to acquire if impeded at the appropriate age. The Taliban’s war on women has likely had even more, perhaps unintended, negative consequences. While Afghan women were all but confined to the private sphere (Cole 2003) during Taliban rule and suffered musically as well as every

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other way imaginable, as with men, their new-found opportunities to make music in public have brought unprecedented danger. A couple of murders of female musical personalities have already been noted. But two stories of death threats that have attracted considerable attention in the West are worthy of further attention, as they reveal additional aspects of Afghan culture. In terms of sheer popularity, it is likely that the single most important musical phenomenon to emerge from Afghanistan after Taliban rule has been the Afghan Star television program, which is watched by as many as one-third of all Afghans (Klawans 2009). Writing in The Nation, in a review of the show’s eponymous documentary, Stuart Klawans describes the program as a “blatant knockoff of American Idol, except that the female contestants get death threats,” though it is not only because there are women contestants that the show evokes criticism. The conservative Muslims who object to music are by no means all Taliban, and include Kabul’s council of clerics, which declared it “un-Islamic” (Freemuse 2008). While the show has been hailed for its amiable multiethnicity and promotion of democracy (the audience votes for its favorites by text message), what has gotten Afghan Star its greatest notoriety in the West has been its handful of women contestants (out of thousands of competitors), most notably its third-season finalist, Lima Sahar, a Pashtun from Kandahar, the home of the Taliban. Like several other personalities associated with the show (Ghafour 2009), not all of them women (though the show’s gentle feminism is surely a major reason in every case), Sahar has been forced into exile by attacks and death threats, some from relatives and neighbors (Freemuse 2009a). In addition to serving as yet one more example of musicality as a gift-turned- disability—that is, Lima Sahar’s initial storied bravery has turned into mortal fear and regret—Afghan Star offers several other lessons. Like the Blind Orchestra of Chapter 3, it offers an example of the potentially liberatory power of a foreign musical culture. In this case, though, it is more the format of American Idol than its content that is the critical Western influence. The music is in some ways Westernized (and Indianized), but it is not an import, as Western symphonic music is in Cairo. The program is also emblematic of the Afghan people’s extraordinary desire for music, which I have characterized along with musical ability as musicality. That one-third of the population watches Afghan

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Star (Klawans 2009, 36) in a country with only fourteen television sets for every one thousand people in 2003 (Encyclopedia Britannica World Data 2010) is truly remarkable. (That statistic on Afghan television ownership, the most recent available, is surely higher now, but not enough to diminish Afghan Star’s astounding popularity.) Less known than Afghan Star but a truly extraordinary case (and to me artistically striking) is the Burka Band, “Afghanistan’s first serious pop band since the fall of the Taliban” (Freemuse 2005b). In the preface to John Baily’s (2001, 6) “How Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” (the primary source here for the history of music under that Taliban), Maria Korpe, executive director of Freemuse, states that the ban on music under the Taliban was unique in its intent to prohibit all music, not just certain “objectionable” kinds or topical songs with lyrics troublesome to the regime or its policies. What makes the Burka Band different from any of the previous examples is that its music and its one music video are so politically provocative. This trio of Afghan women musicians did in fact perform (in Cologne, Germany) in full burkas (“tents”), the traditional all- concealing Afghan Muslim garb required of all women by the Taliban. Not only were they incognito on stage, they have never revealed their identities to anyone but a few relatives and close friends, understanding that their work would be so offensive to religious conservatives that it would likely get them killed. Their one album, on Germany’s Ata Kak label, consists of two musically raw but fascinating antiburka songs in English, “Burka Blue” and “No Burka!” as well as their more pop-sounding German remixes. “Burka Blue,” whose video has been posted on the Internet numerous times (for example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Y-sw89qTY), is likely the source of the Burka Band’s lasting reputation. The lyrics at  once evoke the dehumanization of being forced to wear a tent at  all  times in public and gently reference both gender and sexual transgression: We all now wear a burka, You don’t know who is who, If you want to meet your sister, It could be your uncle, too.

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But what is most relevant to our concerns is how forthright the video is in portraying the burka as a socially constructed disablement of the “impairment” of being a woman. The mobility impairing aspect is seen as the women pretend to play their instruments without showing any skin, even their hands, and attempt to dance and groove to the music while so encumbered. Even more compelling is that much of the video is filmed through the fine mesh screen that keeps the burka-wearer’s eyes from being seen but also seriously impairs her vision. (“No Burka!” may be even more provocative, not in terms of disability but with its explicit references to nudity and its sampling of Islamic chant, which surely would be regarded as blasphemy of the worst kind.) The band was a major hit in Germany and even received press from many sources, including the BBC and Spin magazine. But they never performed in Afghanistan. Not surprisingly, one of their members left for Pakistan, where, however, her safety is hardly assured. Their legacy remains small but poignant. One often hears a people characterized as being exceptionally musical. I have always found such rankings hard to accept, given the universal appeal and presence of music. But given their persistence in musicking even under extremely dangerous conditions, I am tempted to accept that the need for music is particularly great in Afghanistan (and those parts of Pakistan with close ethnic and cultural affinities). The centrality of music in Afghan life is perhaps most strongly evidenced in the culture of women and children, as described by Doubleday (2007), though the rush to reinstate music in the public sphere after the fall of the Taliban and the popularity of Afghan Star are also convincing. But it is also in the Taliban’s attitude toward music, and not only in its edicts against it, that we see music’s centrality. The traditional Afghan definition of music does not include unaccompanied singing (Baily 2001, 21). Baily’s discussion of unaccompanied vocal genres that are not regarded as music is limited to Sunni, Sufi, and Shi’ia Islamic idioms, but it would presumably include some women’s idioms as well. The Taliban’s classificatory system—never articulated as such to the best of my knowledge, but which I have culled from their praxis—is somewhat different and might be characterized as self-serving or “Taliban- centric.”

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Religious chanting is obviously permitted by the Taliban, although after it persecuted Shi’ites in Afghanistan (UNHCR/Refworld 1997) and bombed a Sufi shrine “because it was open to women” (Felix 2009), it seems likely that not all Muslim chant is sanctioned. But the Taliban also introduced a genre of “Taliban taranas” or “chants” (Baily 2009), which, through censorship, monopolized the cassette industry in Afghanistan during the Taliban’s reign (Baily 2001, 37). As Baily describes the taranas, they are not for formal worship or private devotions. The texts may be religious, in praise of the Taliban itself, and may reference the group’s own martyrs. One such song, whose text contains all of the above, can be heard at http://www.freemuse.org/sw1106.asp, the online version of Baily’s “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” Baily describes the idiom as resembling Pashtun folk songs. Thus, in both the texts (which are not associated with worship per se) and the idiom (which is not a traditional style of Islamic cantillation), the Taliban’s bandwidth of acceptable forms of aestheticized sound is pushed in the direction of what it might have to admit is “music,” in the unlikely event that one were to engage a talib (“student”) in a serious discussion of the epistemology of music. That professional pop singers were forced to record such songs (Baily 2009) is further, compelling evidence that these were recordings strategized by the Taliban to be surrogates for music, rife as they were with purely musical values, and a covert admission by music’s foes of the need for music, particularly, as we have seen, among the deeply musical Afghan people. But there is more. The Taliban chant that appears in Can You Stop the Birds Singing? is “scored” for “two singers, heavy delay and reverberation.” While there are no musical “instruments” per se, the delay and reverb units are beyond doubt “musical devices” that aestheticize the sound far beyond functional delivery of pedantic text. As my student Scott Keever observed, someone who knew his (almost certainly not “her”) way around a recording studio had to have been in the booth, perhaps under the same duress as the popular singers recruited by force. Baily (2001, 43) observes both that these effects are common in Afghan pop music and that they might be intended to evoke the natural acoustics of religious buildings. But the enhancement of the singing is so dense and elaborate that a listener trained in contemporary Western classical

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music, the field in which I earned all my degrees, would declare this recording to be electronic music rather than any kind of vocal idiom, somewhat reminiscent of the early Steve Reich compositions Come Out and It’s Gonna Rain. (The compact disc that accompanies the hard- copy publication of “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” includes another Taliban chant, with the singing similarly electronically enhanced.) As Baily says (quoted in Siddique 2009), “This isn’t just the banning of music, but it is a competition between different kinds of music, and we can do our kind of music because it doesn’t involve musical instruments, but you can’t do your kind of music because musical instruments are instruments of Satan.” While the instruments of Satan are not permitted, apparently all the cool sound-enhancing modules that Satan might have used with his Fender Telecaster are. That professional singers were being forced into well-equipped recording studios to make recordings of music that pretended to be something else indicates, perhaps oddly and like Afghan Star, that Afghanistan is a “talent” culture when it comes to music. But like the once ubiquitous women’s daireh drum, the Taliban men’s chants provide contradictory evidence of a “musical citizenship” culture. Rahimullah Yusufzai reported from Afghanistan in 2000 that “these cassettes are available for purchase in the bazaar, although as one cassette shop keeper said: ‘How many Taliban cassettes can I sell when only the Taliban buy them. Anyway, every Talib can chant [italics mine], so what’s the point of him buying a cassette with someone else’s chanting?’ ” It seems once again, then, that the need to make music is extremely powerful in Afghan life, even for the Taliban, which denies it to everyone else. By defining and making music in its own idiosyncratic way, while representing its aestheticized sound and use of electronic musical devices as something else, the Taliban has immunized itself from the disabling and even fatal consequences of being musical in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One important concern remains that serves to connect the deeply gendered story of the Taliban’s repression of music with both this chapter’s second example, soon to follow, and Chapter 5. These deal entirely and extensively with the disablement of women. In the West, we are accustomed to thinking of disability as involving a small minority comprising individual cases that require individual attention called “exceptional”

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or “special” within the field of education. In the case of the Taliban, however, there has been massive disablement of a deeply musical populace that has either suffered the effects of music deprivation, which is especially unfortunate in its impact on child development and infant-mother bonding, or endured the brutal consequences of needing to musick despite formidable risks. Despite the evidence earlier in this chapter that musicality is an embodied attribute, I do not believe that it is a socially constructed impairment in this case of Afghanistan and Pakistan. I agree with Baily and Rahimullah Yusufzai that the Taliban’s apparently totalist edicts against music simply denied the musicality and even the innovation of their own vocal, or electronic, idioms. The situation here is, as previously stated, one of disablement of the highly musical in the absence of impairment. The situation described in the remainder of this chapter is that of an application of a statute from a different code of religious law in which the impaired and disabled are different groups, men and women respectively.

The Sounds of Silence: Kol Isha Circumspection around possible deleterious effects of certain musical practices is also common in Jewish rabbinic literature. The Jewish people’s constant state of mourning over the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem has for millennia been the rationale for prohibitions on musical practice as extreme as the banning of all secular repertoire and all musical instruments whatever, including radios, phonographs, and tape machines (Lubet 2006a; Shiloah 1992, 74). More familiarly and well within the mainstream, instrumental performance is prohibited on the Sabbath and major holy days in Orthodox and most of Conservative Judaism. (Mourning was a rationale for restrictions on music by the Taliban as well—in that case, for the dead of the Afghan Wars [Baily 2001, 39].) One distinction between contemporary Jewish musical restrictions and those of the Taliban, of course, is that of enforcement. Not meaning to diminish the gravity of a decision to abandon one’s culture and family, as might be the cost of abandoning Orthodox Jewish tradition, one is free throughout contemporary world Jewry to opt out of any particular Jewish

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community imposing these or other restrictions, musical or otherwise. Professional musicians, including instrumentalists, are found in all Jewish denominations, though not throughout all of Orthodoxy, given the harshness of the edicts already cited. Kol isha is a musical restriction within Orthodox Jewry, binding to this day. It has implications for the interface of disability, gender, and sexuality. The Talmud, the Scripture that preserves and codifies the Oral Law of Judaism, includes the admonition “kol b’isha erva”—“a woman’s voice is nakedness.” Lest the potential implication of the prurience of nakedness seem ambiguous—babies can be naked and utterly innocent— other translations of erva (or ervah) include “a sexual incitement” (Koskoff 2001, 126), “provocative” (Fogelman n.d.), “indecent” (Shiloah 1992, 247), “shameful” (Ben-Ari 2004), “lustful” (Taitz 1986), or “lewdness” (Sturm 1998). Although the binding nature of obedience to the dicta of the Torah and Talmud is immutable in Orthodoxy, the interpretation of Jewish law, some statutes more than others, is subject to interpretation and can vary greatly. The effort to understand and thus properly observe this legal code through lifelong study is an important manifestation of Orthodox faith. Kol isha, this warning about the provocative character of a woman’s voice, contains no explicit call to action or prohibition. The conduct expected to result from it has always been, and remains, contested, now often on online discussion groups and blogs. These have the potentially ironic advantage of enabling mixed-sex discussion without the danger of certain forms of co-ed social intercourse frowned upon in Orthodoxy. Mainstream interpretations of kol isha state that it refers, with few exceptions, to women’s singing voices only. Throughout the ages, rabbis and others have applied this statute with both significantly greater strictness, applying it even to women’s speaking voices in some circumstances (Berman 1980), and leniency, claiming that kol isha requires no practical action or prohibition whatever (Levovitz 2003). One of the most consistent and important exceptions to the ban is the broad consensus that a man may listen to and sing with his own wife (whose nakedness, one hopes, should be familiar to him) when they are alone together, though there are some exceptional circumstances when even this is forbidden by some scholars. Another exception is that men may

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listen to the singing of females yet to attain adequate maturity to be regarded as women, though this is also a standard whose definition is contested. These exceptions sometimes yield great and unfortunate ironies. According to the major Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (1135– 1204), whose positions on music are among the most austere in Judaism, kol isha is the single most severe of all musical transgressions (Shiloah 1992, 85). Maimonides is among the few scholars who include a ban on hearing women’s instrumental per formance as well (Berman 1980, 46– 47; Shiloah 1992, 85). Halacha (Jewish law) is unambiguous in stating that kol isha is a prohibition incumbent upon men. In theory, it is men’s responsibility not to listen to women, rather than women’s duty not to sing. One obvious and crucial implication is that women are regarded as “sexually alluring” and men as “sexually aggressive” (Koskoff 2001, 124). Among the Lubavitchers, who constitute the great majority of Hasidic Jews (Koskoff 2001, 43), women are regarded as spiritually superior to men and “are given the added responsibility of protecting men against their own aggressive sexual behavior” (Koskoff 2001, 124). If in theory the imposition of kol isha is upon men, in practice the onus is largely or mostly upon women to restrict their singing to places where there are no adult males present. Thus, kol isha places considerable restraints on opportunities for women to sing, both socially and professionally (Koskoff 2001). Were this only a concern for Orthodox Jewish women, who accept this restriction as part of the intricate gender praxis of their community, it would be a simple matter of conduct among consenting adults. But frequent deference to Orthodox sensibilities on the part of other Jewish communities, who have otherwise universally rejected kol isha, has fostered significant discontent among those concerned for women’s rights and women’s music. What has made many angry, by no means only women, on the popular Jewish music listserv “World Music from a Jewish Slant” ( [email protected]) is job discrimination against ensembles with female vocalists performing in Jewish venues. Reports of musicians losing gigs, sometimes at the last minute, when an employer becomes aware of a female vocalist have been common. Thus, the impact of this item of Jewish law can have far-reaching implications for anyone engaged in Jewish music and Jewish socialization.

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What the praxis of kol isha illustrates, particularly in a contemporary context of professional music making, is the belief that an exclusively male impairment, the inability of inherently sexually aggressive men to control their urges when hearing what is presumed to be the irresistibly sexually alluring sound of women’s singing, is disabling to women, who are denied opportunities to work or sometimes even to sing at all. Similar impairment-based arguments have been used to impose even more disabling restrictions on women, in Judaism and elsewhere, such as those seen earlier in this chapter and in Chapter 3. Certainly, sexual violence is an overwhelmingly male pathology that disables women primarily. Koskoff specifically notes concerns for sexual violence in Music in Lubavitcher Life (2001, 49, 69, 123). A case might be made that kol isha is strictly a matter of gender relations that does not belong in DS. I obviously disagree. As Baynton has demonstrated, nearly all forms of Othering are ultimately grounded in the rhetoric of impairment and disability. (Othering on the basis of the presumption of evil may be an exception.) Kol isha, with its gendered attributions of sexual aggression and allure, is no exception. Although these two qualities, aggression and allure, both believed to be immutable, are characterized as differently gendered, the onus of their potential ramifications is on the male in both cases, since allure is passive and is only truly problematic in the context of an aggressive response. While the Lubavitcher rhetoric of female superiority is unusual, even refreshing, it must be weighed against the context of deeply patriarchal Orthodox social praxis, a highly religious culture in which women are absolutely barred from the most important roles in worship (such as becoming rabbis) and in which men thank God every morning in their prayers for not having been born female. Baynton’s perspective on the rhetoric of defect as applied to gender (and racial and sexuality) discrimination is clearly relevant here, and it is an interesting case. But there is yet another level of complexity to the question of kol isha and disability, one that will both unite and justify the long, complex, and perhaps heretofore only opaquely related strands of this discussion. As useful and enlightening as it is to identify disability on Baynton’s terms as the foundation of racial or ethnic and sexual or sexuality discrimination, it is nonetheless also the case that these forms of Otherness

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are mostly and successfully discussed without explicitly referencing disability. Clearly, disability or impairment also functions as a distinct category of identity, and is usefully referenced as such. My reason for discussing kol isha is that this article of Jewish law poses issues not only of gender and defect—owing to Orthodox Judaism’s unique take on differences between the sexes—but also profound and difficult issues in DS and disability activism. At root, these issues revolve around the precise “why” of kol isha. Does this law exist because of a belief in the immutable tendency toward sexual aggression of all men? If so, a useful conversation about sex and gender without explicit reference to disability—that is, a discussion of men rather than of impaired men—is certainly possible. Or is the reason for kol isha that only some men are incapable of managing their naturally aggressive tendencies, prone to sexual violence and other harmful transgressions, and are so potentially damaging that it is thus best not to tempt any man with the erva, the naked “sexual incitement,” of a woman’s singing voice? There is evidence that the rationale behind kol isha at least partly resides in concerns about sexual predation. Orthodox Jews are not the only people who believe that this sociopathy is embodied and intractable, perhaps even immutable. If that were the case, then the tendency toward this most deplorable of human behaviors has both characteristics of an impairment and social manifestations of a disability. That would hardly be good news for disability rights and DS. Yet it is an issue unlikely to disappear politely of its own volition, and thus one upon which I hope kol isha may shed some light. Although my interest in Halacha is related to my heritage, any scrutiny of such a venerable system of law, philosophy, and text criticism is bound to be enlightening. Kol isha is more than a matter of gender. It is also a disability issue that transcends traditional Jewish ideas about differences between the sexes—aggressive men versus alluring women—to address the problem of male sexual predators. If certain schools of feminism historically have regarded all men as potential or even actual sexual predators, that is certainly not a Jewish belief. Kol isha belongs to a category of regulations of conduct and dress that are overwhelmingly directed toward women. These are known collectively as tznius in Ashkenazic Hebrew and tzniut in Israeli or Sephardic Hebrew, and are translated as “modesty.” Why does traditional

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Judaism so value tznius? To be sure, the Talmudic declaration that kol isha is nakedness or indecency is seconded by many subsequent Talmudic responsa and echoed in Koskoff’s fieldwork among the Lubavitchers, who express a serious concern that men listening to women’s voices will lead to even greater sexual indiscretions. Koskoff even documents concerns for rape (p. 49) and sexually transmitted diseases (p. 69) among her informants. Since obviously not all men are rapists, at least part of the reasoning behind kol isha (at least in the minds of some Lubavitchers) is fear of sexual assault, the response to a sexual predatory impulse and an extreme form of the aggression that they believe is a universal and natural male tendency surrendered to by a dangerous few. In these terms, the urge to predation must be viewed as innate and thus as an impairment. (Numerous Talmudic responsa indicate the additional concern, important if less shocking, that women’s voices, even one’s own wife, might distract men from prayer and Torah study.) There is also a deep vein of thought in Jewish law that justifies compliance simply “ ’cause the Bible tells me so;” that observance is mandated by God and requires no further explanation. The vast majority of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) that Orthodox Jews observe are intended for Jewish performance or avoidance only, with no implication of a universally valid ethical basis that would also make them relevant to and binding upon Gentiles. Perhaps most familiar are the dietary laws comprising kashrut, or kosher. No responsible Jewish scholar claims any health benefits for kashrut. Like all mitzvot, kashrut is God’s law; neither to be questioned nor to seek a rationale for (Kook 2008). Nor is there a belief in any moral or other logic for non-Jews adopting these gastronomic practices, nor any mitzvot other than the seven, clearly ethical “Noahide Laws.” Beautiful Within: A Modesty in Concept and Dress as Taught by the Lubavitcher Rebbe (1995) is a collection of talks and writings on tznius for women and girls by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson (1902–1994), the yet-to-be-replaced, much-revered leader of Lubavitch, arguably the most influential Orthodox Jewish leader of our time, whom many Lubavitchers regarded as the Moshiach (“Messiah”). Virtually the entire collection is devoted to extolling the inherent value of tznius, devoid of even a single explicit reference to sex, and with only a very few mentions of such social

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improprieties as a female entering a taxi whose driver is male. There are only two specific references to kol isha, but eleven complete essays on the importance of females completely covering their hair, which, like a women’s voice, is an erva. Unlike the Rebbe’s followers, who were Koskoff’s informants, the Rebbe expresses little overt concern in Beautiful Within for kol isha’s slippery slope of potentially larger problems like rape and sexually transmitted diseases. But the Rebbe is preaching to the choir, whom it seems safe to assume he presumes—or prefers to presume—are safe from such ills. The decorous tone of these homiletic texts themselves bears a sense of tznius. But even if the Rebbe exhibits no overt concern for such worstcase scenarios should kol isha or any other rule of modesty be breached, tznius is a code of dress and demeanor that strikes those beyond the Orthodox community—perhaps even beyond the ultra- Orthodox “black hat” community—as extreme. One might reasonably wonder if these drastic measures were not intended as defense against truly formidable sociopathologies. An important principle in Jewish law indicates that kol isha is indeed a disability issue. The Oral Law, or Talmud, the exegetic rabbinic literature in which kol isha originally appears, is intended as “a fence around the Torah” (the Hebrew Bible)—that is, to magnify the Biblical laws of conduct in, for example, the Ten Commandments and Leviticus, for safety’s sake (Rosenfeld 2000). In a discussion of a section of Pirkei Avos (Ethics of the Fathers, a book of the Mishnah of the Talmud), Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld’s discussion of a fence around the Torah refers to early Rabbinic concern for acts of pedophilia against girls as young as three, at risk from those he calls “sick- o’s.” Rosenfeld’s notion of sickness is not simply depravity, but actual impairment. “In the context of adultery but in reference to all sins,” Rosenfeld quotes the Talmudic Tractate Sotah (“deviation from the paths of modesty” [Schneerson 2006]) 3a: “A person does not sin unless a spirit of ‘madness’ [shetut] enters him.” (The quotes around “madness” are Rosenfeld’s.) (Others, including the Lubavitcher Rebbe (Schneerson 2006), translate shetut variously as “folly,” “going astray,” and “insanity.”) Thus, the Talmud and therefore Orthodox Judaism regard the cause of adultery as mental illness. And kol isha is an important manifestation of the separation of the

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sexes that Rosenfeld and similarly minded Orthodox rabbis regard as fundamental to tznius. Mental illness is a disability and not only a gender issue. Thus, kol isha does not emanate from a belief that all men are capable of acts of depraved sexual indifference against women, but that such conduct by a few is nonetheless an overwhelmingly male domain, as realistic an observation today as in Talmudic times. Therefore, because some men are impaired by “madness,” it is necessary to take no chances and “build a fence.” As antiquarian as kol isha may seem, it stems from logic similar to that of women avoiding certain districts at certain times, not because all or most men are sexually violent, but because most sexually violent people are men.

Finale (Women’s Voices Tacet) My attraction to kol isha research was not only its place at the intersection of three topics that concern me most—music, disability, and Jewish life. I was also confident of finding lessons, theoretical and pragmatic, about DS and the evils kol isha intends to address. I was wrong. It is not that there is nothing larger to be extrapolated from a point in the Talmud and its ramifications in Jewish life. But I was long convinced that kol isha, archaic as it is, might offer clues to social problems that DS might help solve. I have concluded that my hopes were unrealistic, but maintain that my “folly” (“going astray,” “madness,” “insanity”) at least offers a teaching moment. Kol isha looms rather large in my world. It has been discussed online often, at length, and with passion and sometimes rancor. My views on the subject are liberal. I empathize totally with the women who say, with good reason, that they have been harmed by a practice they dislike. But I also respect Orthodoxy and its contributions to both Jewish survival and world intellectual life and appreciate the thinking of Orthodox Jews (mostly men) I have met on the Internet, who cling to their vision of Torah-true Judaism while trying hard to be sensitive to its sometimes painful encounter with Modernism. The online demeanor of the Orthodox has generally been kinder and gentler than that of the

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liberals and I have been impressed enough to want to learn more about their thinking. That ancient Jewish thinking regards sexual misconduct as motivated by madness is hardly surprising. It remains the conventional wisdom today. Assuming that the Talmudic conception of madness conflates with contemporary ideas of mental illness, the conventional wisdom is supported by data indicating that up to 80 percent of juvenile sex offenders have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder (while other characteristics of offenders, such as personal histories of having been physically or sexually abused, are similarly high in occurrence) (Center for Sex Offender Management 2000). Fear of sexual assault is fueled by mass media assertions that therapies for sex offenders are ineffective, that the rate of recidivism is high, and that these overwhelmingly male criminals must be drastically restrained, if not incarcerated for life (Pratt 2000). Each of these stereotypes has been reliably refuted. In addition, the panic that has been instilled by sensationalist media accounts of sexual assaults by strangers belies the fact that the overwhelming majority of such crimes that are reported (many are not) are committed by acquaintances of the victim (Center for Sex Offender Management 2000; Janus 2006). My zeal for this understandably anxiety-provoking topic is rare in DS, likely because the impaired party is the offender. It is also not typically associated with my field, music. But my interest is fueled by the possibility that DS might contribute usefully to a discussion about it. Assuming there are embodied characteristics associated with an individual’s abusive tendency, it does not necessarily follow that a particular antisocial behavior is an inevitable result of the impairment. The secretive nature of sexual abuse, accompanied by limited reporting by victims—who apparently and understandably are inhibited by the continuing presence of attackers within the victim’s family or social network—makes reliable cross-cultural comparisons of quantitative data unlikely. However, the possibility cannot be excluded that lessons might be learned by a more violent society from one where abuse is less prevalent. My initial error was in permitting my passion for Judaism to lead me to overly sanguine conclusions about the lessons of kol isha. Despite my unwillingness to embrace tznius or any aspect of Orthodoxy, my assumptions about the fundamental civility and domestic tranquility (in

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Hebrew shalom bayit, “peace in the house”) of the Halachic lifestyle led me to speculate that such systems of sexual morality and conduct, consistently inculcated and practiced, might correlate with low rates of sexual offenses. It was consistency of message and not necessarily modesty of dress and deportment that I thought was key. One important yet highly contrasting example is sex-positive, sexually tolerant, and diverse preChristian Polynesia (Aspin and Hutchings 2007; Danielsson 1958), whose erotic life certainly shared neither customs nor beliefs with Orthodox Judaism or similarly Puritanical systems (like that of the Taliban). My contradistinct exemplar—one that never fails to elicit laughs—of why the United States is rife with sexual violence is Fox Broadcasting. Fox entertainment programming is a paradigm of titillation, the simultaneous and self- contradictory acknowledgement of and indulgence in “sin.” Its entertainment fare is among the most prurient this side of cable and pay-per-view, including even R-rated cartoons such as Family Guy, which has been known to allude to bestiality. By contrast, Fox News programming epitomizes “conservative values.” My elegant, tidy theory was wrong, though perhaps not immediately or obviously so. Like much about sexual violence, it was premised on conventional wisdom that does not bear scrutiny. In addition to the underreporting of sex crimes that is likely chronic everywhere because of a horrific mix of intimacy and intimidation, there are two common misunderstandings about Jewish life in general and Orthodox life in particular that, when revealed, fail to provide supporting evidence for the utility of kol isha. Jews, especially Orthodox Jews, take pride in a fundamental, comprehensive morality inspired by faith, ethics, and religious law. While it is impossible to provide reliable quantitative data on sexual abuse among Jews or any other group (Central Bureau of Statistics 2002; Kaufman 2003, 29, 46), there is ample anecdotal evidence to demonstrate that a serious problem exists. Sex offenders are found among religiously unaffiliated Jews, in all Jewish denominations, and even among clergy, teachers, and others in positions of similar authority (Awareness Center 2006). On the Web site Alleged and Convicted Sex Offender Registry— Clergy Abuse: Rabbis, Cantors and Other Trusted Officials, maintained by the Awareness Center of Baltimore, it appears that a bare majority of

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offenders worldwide (forty- one of eighty- one) are Orthodox. (In 2000 and 2001, the National Jewish Population Survey reported that 13 percent of U.S. Jews are Orthodox (United Jewish Communities 2005). The Israel Democracy Institute (2008) reported that 19 percent are “religious” or ultra- Orthodox. The problem of abuse is aggravated by a false sense of moral security and even denial, clearly the reason Carol Goodman Kaufman titled her landmark study of domestic abuse within Jewry Sins of Omission (2003). The numerous case histories chronicled by Kaufman (in the United States, particularly Massachusetts, and Canada) and others point to problems of sexual predation and domestic violence in Jewish communities that are unacceptable, even if they could be shown to be less than for other groups. But it is still worth considering whether, in more ideal circumstances, tznius in general or kol isha in particular might serve their intended purpose. Religions are prone to attribute the world’s problems to a lack of adequate, or far broader, acceptance of their principles. So is there any evidence that a broader adoption of Orthodox Jewish principles of tznius might not stem the worst consequences of predatory “madness?” The evidence is not promising. Even if kol isha were universally adopted—and there have been similar practices in Islam, illustrated herein, and Christianity—it would be destined to fail in its goals. The primary reason is that even under kol isha there are two categories of female singing voices to which an adult male may listen. They are children and a man’s own wife (Koskoff 2001, 126). While a female child’s voice is not regarded under Halacha as an erva, the presence of those pedophiles whom Rabbi Rosenfeld calls “sick- o’s,” and even the requirement that tznius in female attire begins at age three, suggest otherwise. Regarding one’s spouse, most interpersonal violence is committed by someone very close to the victim (Carlson 2005, 120). Further, Kaufman copiously documents cases of domestic abuse at all levels of Jewish religious observance. Thus, those whom kol isha does not attempt to protect are the most vulnerable. It serves as evidence that conventional wisdom about the sexual predator as fearsome stranger has not only been wrong but has also largely gone unchallenged for over a millennium, perhaps far longer. (The Talmud, the Oral Law, is regarded to have been in effect throughout Judaism’s

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history, although it was recorded only in the fifth through seventh centuries c.e.)

Coda The consideration of musicality under the Taliban version of Islamic Sharia law chronicled a situation in which aesthetic inclinations became sociopathologized, criminalized, policed, and penalized. Political consciousness and activism were analogously regarded and punished in the former Soviet Union, although psychiatric treatment rather than beatings was administered there. Both cases serve as warnings against the medicalization of “antisocial” expression. The case of kol isha offers different lessons. Despite its various incorrect assumptions, kol isha’s premise of a far greater male tendency toward sexual predation is certainly as correct now as it must have been in Talmudic times. That an uncontrolled urge to commit sexual violence is some men’s impairment rather than a universal male attribute is borne out by the evidence. Kol isha’s implicit expression of hope for a cultural, behavioral, and statutory address of this problem is helpful, even if the solution it proposes is not. From a DS perspective, this instance of male impairment transferring into female disability may be useful as a harbinger of similarly dysfunctional policy. Like Orthodox Jewry, it hardly needs be said that Taliban social praxis is deeply gendered and arguably far more unequal. And although the latter’s sexism has been widely reviled both within and, perhaps far more, beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the Taliban regime and insurgency have been so persistent is indicative that their blueprint for radical social transformation is not without considerable support. Surely, this is, or was not purely, a matter of religious fanaticism but rather an apparently unrealized hope for social tranquility and a decline in corruption. And although the Taliban’s fierce condemnation of music affects both sexes, its impact is clearly far greater on women. Even the last of the three antimusic edicts, that against drumming, is directed to an instrument mostly played by females. And the Taliban version of kol isha, which prevents women from singing to their children, is both paranoid and capable if inflicting genuine harm to developing infants.

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Although my initial hopes for a valuable insight into the relative frequency of sexual violence across societies proved optimistic, my sense that the juxtaposition of music and disability as a valuable window into social problems remains undiminished. It has been an inspiration for a valuable meditation on identity in general and disability in particular. Regarding the problem of sexual violence in a Jewish context, I am more disappointed in my initial naiveté than in the distressing truth I learned. That a ubiquitous problem is also a Jewish problem, unmitigated by religious rules of prophylactic sociomusical conduct, should hardly have been surprising. I am not qualified by experience, lineage, or emotional attachment to weigh in similarly on the extreme practices of the Taliban, but I am confident that others who are have felt a related sense of disillusionment. I remain delighted with those aspects of Jewish life I have always loved. Further, I am deeply impressed by the courage of those who have investigated and challenged the norms of sexual and domestic violence in my community and those organizations whom they report are bravely addressing this moral ill. (There are, of course, those who soldier on in similar struggles in Islam and other fundamentalist religions, as well as those who do so against secular forms of oppression, who are equally worthy of praise.) In that context, it is more than ironic that, in Sins of Omission, Kaufman (2003, 150–153) identifies one such group based in Boston which has named itself Kol Isha (A Woman’s Voice).

5 / Bringing It All Back Home or Teach Your Children . . . Well?

This Nearly Was Mine

I

n 2004 I was invited to interview for an administrative position at another university. The search produced no hire, one reason I have had time to write this book. Though the position was 80 percent administration, I was required to audition as both scholar and teacher. I was asked to give my job talk on the composition or musicology topic of my choice. When I informed the search chair I would be speaking on DS in music, I was asked to select another topic instead, preferably the Second Viennese School of composer Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, the then- current topic of their music history course, miles from my scholarly interests. I refused to change topics. While there was considerable interest in DS throughout the numerous discussions that constituted the two- day interview, remaining true to my principles and interests may have cost me a job that likely would have made me miserable. The victory I had hoped for, winning the position, was replaced by one smaller but better: sticking to my guns. The talk I gave made two concessions to my audience, referring to DS in music as a branch of musicology (Lubet 2009) and citing perti-

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nent and pragmatic cases of well-known classical musicians. Still, this was not easy, despite knowing from my research and personal experience that schools of music are full of faculty and students with concealed performance injuries and invisible impairments such as depression, learning disabilities, and autistic-spectrum conditions. Academic and professional music folk mostly and understandably insist on protecting their careers by pretending to be able-bodied. The world of Western classical music is generally hostile to people with sensory and mobility impairments and even to musicians injured on the job, like me. I have addressed this elsewhere (Lubet 2002), though never so poignantly as Hannah, bassoonist of the Blind Orchestra (Chapter 3), that group’s standout player. Hannah gains admission to the Cairo Conservatoire, but fears realistically that she will never achieve her dream of playing in a sighted, professional-quality symphony. I have never seen any evidence that my colleagues desire to reimagine their field in any manner that would make it more accommodating to Hannah or others like her, a challenge that could complicate their own work in unfamiliar ways and transform their performance practices and perhaps even their repertoire. Though academic music would benefit from such systematic overhaul—beginning, perhaps, by learning from a blind orchestra that knows its repertoire by heart and whose members listen to each other very hard—I thought it best to attempt to sell my audience on DS instead by demonstrating its application to problems of their current, ablebodied, and passing-as-able-bodied students. My project thus was demonstrating the importance of disability within the typical population of American university schools of music. While my lecture referenced themes from earlier chapters of this book, these generated more intellectual light than political heat. My audience found them interesting but hardly calls to urgent activism. My ultimate goal was to demonstrate that the highest theories of DS were applicable to everyday musical problems in straightforward, commonsense ways. I touched on the musicians’ injuries that first inspired my interest in DS. This topic always arouses the interest of performers. But I also addressed another common, if largely covert, issue that I believe only I have framed in terms of impairment or disability: the language difficulties of

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non-native English-speaking international music students. As has often been the case with other unfamiliar topics and positions in this book, a theoretical “warm-up” is required.

We Are the World? A relationship between theory and the commonplace in music, disability, or elsewhere should hardly be surprising. Consider, for example, the impact of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, such as those on the ADA, on every aspect of American life. In a different way, each of the various theories of disability and the manners in which disability is understood— that is, as a punishment or challenge from God, a “special world” of insight (Kojiro 2003), a medical condition in need of cure, a sexual fetish, or a civil rights issue—elicits a different response. Two leading DS scholars have expanded the perception of disability in different yet related ways. Historian Douglas Baynton, in “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” gives numerous examples of how full citizenship has been denied to certain groups on the basis of their alleged inherent biological defects, physical, mental, emotional, and behavioral. Prominent among these rights battles have been women’s suffrage, African American emancipation, and immigration: Opponents of political and social equality for women cited their supposed physical, intellectual, and psychological flaws, deficits, and deviations from the male norm. These flaws—irrationality, excessive emotionality, physical weakness—are in essence mental, emotional, and physical disabilities, though they are rarely discussed or examined as such. Arguments for racial inequality and  immigration restrictions invoked supposed tendencies to feeble-mindedness, mental illness, deafness, blindness, and other disabilities in particular races and ethnic groups. Furthermore, disability figured prominently not just in arguments for the inequality of women and minorities but also in arguments against those inequalities. Such arguments took the form of vigorous denials that the groups in question actually had these disabilities;

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they were not disabled, the argument went, and therefore were not proper subjects for discrimination. Rarely have oppressed groups denied that disability is an adequate justification for social and political inequality. Thus, while disabled people can be considered one of the minority groups historically assigned inferior status and subjected to discrimination, disability has functioned for all such groups as a sign of and justification for inferiority (Baynton 2001, 34–35) [italics in original]. Baynton’s identification of disability as the fundamental rationale for inequality identifies the perception of impairment as the basis for most ethnic and sexual discrimination. An alternative analysis of disability as the fundamental motive for oppression is more provocative and has been quite controversial within DS. More theoretical and less case-based than Baynton, Lennard Davis’s “The End of Disability Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category” (in Davis 2002), like Baynton’s essay, sees disability in more places than is typical. Davis proposes that all the ethnic, sexual, and disability or impairment categories associated with discrimination are too unstable to have meaning or value. He observes, for example, that race has no genetic basis (p. 14). In place of the various Others, Davis proposes a single characterization of disability, one in which all humans are seen as wounded. Wounds are not the result of oppression, but rather the other way around. Protections are not inherent, endowed by the creator, but created by society at large and administered to all. The idea of a protected class in law now becomes less necessary since the protections offered to that class are offered to all. . . . Normal parking becomes a subset of handicapped parking. . . . The dismodern subject is in fact disabled, only completed by technology and intervention (p. 30) [italics in original]. Davis’s goal is the replacement of the paradigm in which wounded Others aspire to the rights, privileges, and power of the white, heterosexual, ablebodied, reasonably tall, Christian male, with a nonbinary, nonconflictual

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(or postbinary, postconflictual) model of mutual human striving and empathy. While Davis’s theory is a laudable utopian endpoint, his DS critics (at a session of the 2004 Society for Disability Studies conference on dismodernism that Davis did not attend) took issue with its viability as an organizing tactic in the present and near future and for his silence on questions of priorities and hierarchies of need that vary between and within accepted identity categories. The ethnographies of Western classical music I referred to throughout this book—the works of Bruno Nettl, Henry Kingsbury, and Christopher Small—provide evidence of, in Davis’s terms, plenty of “wounded.” But stepping back, for now, from Davis’s brave new world of disability redefined and accepting, for now, Baynton’s more modest, less controversial proposal, let us ask who if anyone within the university school- ofmusic cultural system Bruno Nettl chronicles are the Others? And are they disabled in the manner Baynton describes?

School Days In 2001, I was literally required to ask these very questions. Like Nettl’s, my site of research was a Midwestern school of music, the University of Minnesota, where I have taught since 1979. If the following seem harsh, that forthrightness is also part and parcel of the previously mentioned ethnographies. I mean no particular criticism of the school, which is characteristic of a very specific type of cultural system—that is, it is a major research university with a comprehensive school of music. These music programs emphasize both liberal education and performance, whereas conservatories emphasize the latter. Schools in the University of Minnesota’s cohort do not characteristically produce many star performers or even contribute extensively to the rank and file of major professional orchestras and opera companies. As cultural systems, schools of music, which specialize in Western classical repertoire, are distinguished by the dominance of the most seriously impaired people of all—the dead, in particular, canonic composers. The so-called great composers, a term actually used by theorist Heinrich Schenker and his disciples, are all male and all dead, but in these insti-

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tutions they are frequently referenced in present tense. Unexamined admonitions that the composer’s intentions be respected during the performance of their works are frequently heard. Major figures in this cultural system, these honored dead men are white, mostly European and Christian, and their sexual orientations are either heterosexual or, if uncertain or even known to be otherwise, contested (Kellerman 2002; Thomas 2002). Regarded as demigods, they are, when necessary, cut several varieties of moral slack. Composer and anti-Semitic polemicist Richard Wagner may be the exemplar (Bribitzer-Stull, Lubet, and Wagner 2007). Several of the great composers lived with impairment and disability at some time in their lives. Nettl characterizes the most famous, Beethoven, as a supercrip (not his term) role model for Western classical music’s work ethic. Nettl counterposes Mozart’s image—which, as Nettl knows, is not entirely consistent with the historical record—as a childlike, naturally prodigious talent to whom music came effusively and effortlessly (1995, 25–27). Numerous primary sources indicate that, like Beethoven’s, Mozart’s brief life was characterized by poor health and possibly impairment as well (Simkin 1999). To walk the halls and examine the demographics of the University of Minnesota School of Music and many other such schools in the United States, one might presume the influence of the great composers was not only musical but also genetic. Students from underrepresented ethnic minorities, such as Latina or Latino, African American, and American Indian backgrounds, are few. I have been told by African and African American colleagues that this is attributable to the Eurocentric curriculum. Thus, we have a student body that looks much like its composers. Asian American students are also represented in numbers that exceed their proportion of the general population, though less in Minnesota than on the coasts. Most of Minnesota’s international music students, and surely those of many other U.S. institutions, are East Asian. In a proscribed and oddly troubling manner, such schools of music are rather egalitarian. It is disturbing because those people of color and people with disabilities (PWDs) who perceive the standard curriculum as ignorant, apathetic, oblivious, or even hostile to their interests are simply absent. Thus, cultural inequities manifest themselves as exclusion, like the “boy’s club” that was ancient Athenian democracy. Among students, faculty, and staff who do find it in their interests to belong to this

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community, their participation as musicians is largely untainted by discrimination on the bases of ethnicity, sex, or sexuality. The rewards and perquisites of musical academia—good grades, choice seating in ensembles, solos, faculty and administrative appointments, tenure, promotions, top salaries, benefits, and even spousal hires—are, in my long experience, distributed in a manner relatively free of prejudice. A system that prides itself on rewarding “talent,” the university music school appears more egalitarian than other academic units, such as the notoriously androcentric fields of sciences and technology (Gropp 2006). Notable exceptions include those who rock the curricular boat in the direction of multiculturalism, popular culture, improvisation, and other transgressive tendencies. Such “boat people” (I count myself among them) are not necessarily “multiculturals” or Others themselves; they are just perceived as troublemakers. Regarding extramusical aspects of the school-of-music cultural system, life for women, sexual or gender issues, and the sparsity of ethnic minorities mostly reflect the practices and values of the surrounding cultural environment, though there are published reports (not at Minnesota) of exceptional heterosexual, male-on-female, faculty-on-student harassment, in part because of the prevalence of private instruction in instruments, voice, and composition (Wilson 2002). (The difficulty documenting such abuse in another context was reported in Chapter 4. Needless to say, kol isha is not an operative principle in music schools.) It is hard to think of any cultural system devoid of inherent “haves” and “have-nots,” Selves and Others, or, using Davis’s terms, least and most “wounded.” Within American schools of music, who are the “most wounded?” What is the nature of their “wounds?” Is the egalitarianism and meritocracy among the selectively admitted only superficial, masking a culture of Selves and Others, as in Baynton’s characterization of disability in America? Is disability the normative human condition, as Davis maintains? Before the publication of either Baynton or Davis, I was assigned to address these questions in a practical teaching situation. Only after years of reflection have I come to realize fully the theoretical implications, as well as pedagogical applications, of this project. Not long after my introduction to DS, healing from neurosurgery and smarting from litigation as a work-injured plaintiff, I participated in the University of Minnesota’s now- defunct Curriculum Transformation

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and Disability (CTAD) program. CTAD’s goal was to prepare faculty to teach students with disabilities, both individuals requiring accommodations and participants in courses that would implement the principles of Universal Instructional Design (UID) (University of Minnesota Disability Ser vices 2004). CTAD participants were required to create and implement syllabi in accordance with UID guidelines. We were to teach our newly designed or revised courses and regroup to discuss our results at semester’s end. UID principles dictate that those elements of curriculum intended to create an environment of full inclusion be applied across the board rather than to individual “wounded.” That is, they should be widely beneficial beyond the targeted population and above all should do no harm. Respect for the integrity of course content is fundamental to UID. Inclusive features should not compromise the material to be learned. Applying these principles thus requires understanding important differences between content, its means of delivery, and assessment. Disabling instructional barriers are sometimes erected over years of unexamined pedagogical tradition. Music teaching abounds in such obstacles. I think this owes in part to a sense of guilt that impels teachers and musicians to make something as inherently pleasurable as aestheticized sound feel as much like hard work as possible. One result has been the teaching of instrumental and vocal practice routines that frequently lead to overuse and other performance injuries, exemplified by the focal dystonia of one-handed pianists Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman. Treating and preventing such trauma is the raison d’être for the Performing Arts Medicine Association and its journal Medical Problems of Performing Artists. This is not to deny that learning music is hard work, that diligence is a virtue, or that repetitive practice is sometimes necessary, only to reject arbitrary and punishing mental and physical drill. In addition to performance, it is also common in music theory instruction to require that certain tasks be demonstrated many times, very quickly, or both. It is presumed that the intense repetition of numerous similar exercises builds skills. This often places some students—who, for various reasons, work more slowly—at a disadvantage. It is also often unnecessary, without benefit to students’ comprehension or application of course material. I find that providing a few, well- chosen examples

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and allowing ample time for careful, thoughtful work is more equitable and more effective, but I am hardly typical.

Happy Talk? The course I revised for the CTAD project was upper-division graduate twentieth-century music theory. What made my particular assignment not only a pedagogical exercise but an investigation of the ontology of disability was the aforementioned total lack, everywhere in our program, of music students claiming disability identities per ADA guidelines— that is, criteria that would mandate accommodations (Lubet 2004b). Any curriculum reform I implemented would thus have to either address the learning difficulties of some other student constituency or else the class in toto. There was a very real possibility that UID features would address the needs of students with disabilities who chose not to identify or to register with Disability Ser vices. I have long suspected that depression, learning disabilities, and autisticspectrum disorders, as well as performance injuries, are common among music students and faculty. One clue, at least regarding depression, is a 2004 University of Minnesota study that confirms the school’s entire student body’s substantial rates of both diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, with 14 percent receiving antidepressant medications (Boynton Health Ser vice 2004). Occasionally students have informed me of conditions that might trigger accommodations, without, however, choosing to register with Disability Services in order to receive formal assistance Some of my students who have refused to contact Disability, Health, or Counseling Services have provided or intimated reasons that include bad past experiences, religious objections to psychotherapy, or stigma. “Invisible” disabilities may also escape diagnosis, and thus students may not even be aware of the source of their difficulties. One constituency, though, had an obvious, understandable difficulty that was hard to conceal. Many class members, mostly graduate students, were international students from East Asia. Many had significant problems with English in every form: spoken, written, and listening comprehension.

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Anyone who spends much time in a school of music (and often other academic units as well) at an American research university will discover that one constituency of students that is frequently “Othered,” in behind-the-scenes grumbling and sometimes through policy, is international students. Not necessarily all are, but certainly those with limited English facility, as well as those from India or Africa who are perfectly fluent in English but have foreign accents. In my department, such students are overwhelmingly East Asian, mostly from South Korea and Taiwan. For that reason, discussions of students with poor English skills are also—at least covertly—about race. I assert that such exchanges are about disability as well. Conflated with race or not, lack of English-language facility is, of course, a serious difficulty for students and instructors alike. It may be more problematic in music than other fields because admissions to music schools are largely based on instrumental and vocal performance skills that correlate little, if at all, with English ability. Often such skills are of a very high order. They are frequently coupled with an exceptional work ethic—an Asian stereotype to be sure, but one buttressed constantly with examples. These and other factors make these international students a great asset to American schools of music, one that is too often underappreciated. Because of their combination of musical gifts and English-language deficit, these students often present pedagogical complexities not unlike those of students with communicationrelated impairments such as learning disabilities and autistic-spectrum disorders. Music faculty and administrators are sometimes willing to distort academic standards and even entire curricula for gifted but Englishchallenged students majoring in musical performance, to alleviate the demands of academic course work in fields including music theory and musicology. International students in musical performance, like their American colleagues, often fail to see the value of such classes. To say that their private instrumental and vocal instructors, often conservatory trained rather than university educated, do not always encourage academic achievement is a polite understatement. For non-native English-speaking (henceforth ESL, or English as a Second Language) students, academic course work that could and should

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be intellectually stimulating as well as pragmatically valuable is often, because of language, almost impossible and thus seemingly pointless as well as frustrating. To performers, it may also be something regarded as even worse than useless, merely time spent away from the practice room. In desperation, academic dishonesty sometimes results. For papers and take-home exams, sometimes ESL students hire editors, making little or no effort to conceal the practice, sometimes with at least tacit approval of faculty members, who may prefer not to have to struggle with unedited early drafts. Research in second-language acquisition (SLA) in general and the neuroscience of SLA in particular indicates that there are critical or sensitive periods for language learning. According to linguist and cognitive scientist Elissa Newport: A critical period is a maturational time period during which some crucial experience will have its peak effect on development or learning, resulting in normal behavior attuned to the particular environment to which the organism has been exposed. If the organism is not exposed to this experience until after this time period, the same experience will have only a reduced effect, or in extreme cases may have no effect at all (Newport 2002). The concept of critical periods is broadly applicable in plant and animal biology. Referring specifically to language development, Newport cites the seminal work of Eric Lenneberg: “Human language acquisition [is] an example of biologically constrained learning, and . . . it [is] normally acquired during a critical period beginning early in life and ending at puberty. Outside of this time period . . . language [can] only be acquired with difficulty or by a different learning process” (Lenneberg 1967). According to Newport (correspondence by e-mail, July 5, 2006), there is evidence that the critical period in first- and second-language acquisition has “a basis in maturational change in neural plasticity.” Scholars of SLA maintain nuanced differences in their interpretation of the critical-period hypothesis and even disagree on its fundamental validity, though even those who reject it find a gradual decline in languagelearning ability with age. However, a 2005 comprehensive literature re-

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view found broad acceptance of the hypothesis (Ioup 2005). Given what scholarship in SLA and cognitive science tells us about age and the capacity for new language acquisition—that, owing to the nature of brain development and the ultimate decline in neuroplasticity, there are major challenges to acquiring native or, more likely, near-native fluency past the age of puberty—it is not unreasonable to think of those ESL music students who struggle with language in American classrooms as having an embodied attribute that makes them, only in the circumstances, “Englishdisabled.” (My Minnesota ESL colleague Elaine Tarone finds the characterization of second-language English learners as “disabled” discomfiting, saying it would be a hard sell to elementary and high school teachers. In practice, this is important to know. But were disability not, as Baynton demonstrates, the grounding for all bigotry, stigmatization, and discrimination, this problem of terminology would cease to exist.) It would be less appropriate to refer to these students as “Englishimpaired” than “English-disabled” because their difficulties are socially constructed, a consequence of their studying in a native-English-speaking environment, a language diaspora. The disabling consequences of their “English impairments” (a term I will use provisionally here, only to refute it later) would, of course, disappear in their native lands. The choice of terminology—language disability versus language impairment—is complex, interesting, and not trivial. I shall return to it in depth.

Carefully Taught Given the language demographics of my students, my pedagogical response was based on what I learned in CTAD about effective teaching practices for learning disabilities. Any curriculum transformation, regardless of its inspiration in any particular students’ challenges, would apply UID principles to the entire class, such that, ideally, all would benefit. Providing any subpopulation an “accommodation” by “special,” exclusive means or by creating any segregated environments would have been inappropriate, overtly prejudicial, and possibly stigmatizing. Two language-related tasks that are often difficult for students with learning disabilities are note taking and timed examinations, particularly tests that require prose composition. Both skills require rapid processing

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of lexical information and thus may present similar problems for ESL students. As course requirements, note taking and timed exams are firmly established traditions in many classes and fields, including music theory. Like many ingrained habits, they are too seldom examined. If either note taking or timed tests serve an important, subject-relevant pedagogical purpose in some disciplines, I am convinced it is infrequent. They certainly did not have that importance in my twentieth-century music theory class. Though students were always encouraged to take their own notes, I distributed official lecture notes (taken by my assistant) to the entire class weekly. An instructor who uses detailed notes (I speak without a script) could easily distribute them, but there are advantages to notes taken as the lecture is given, such as creating an official record of precisely what was said in class. Like any successful UID practice, distributing course notes was much appreciated by the entire class, ESL students or otherwise. It is hard to imagine anyone not valuing access to official summaries of the lectures. The benefit to the instructor of being able to back up any claim as to what was actually said in class is particularly important when lectures do more than explicate assigned reading. Other great verbal challenges for both learning disabled and ESL students are timed exams, short prose answers, and longer essays. To the degree possible, I have long eschewed such testing. Working very quickly, under enormous pressure and often without access to reference materials, has long struck me as a poor measure of what students know and can apply. In addition, in music such tests bear little or no resemblance to on-the-job experience. In place of timed tests, I gave take-home exams to be completed over at least a five- day period that included a weekend. Exams concerned previously unfamiliar works in the musical styles studied in class, with answers in the form of sentences or short paragraphs. Given ample time, papers were nearly always comprehensible; English competence was rarely an issue. Students also wrote several short analytical papers. Since I do value and encourage good expository writing and regard it as a component of every subject I teach, this was the course revision that required the most soul-searching. While I believe nearly every course should have as a goal teaching best writing practices within the discipline, I am also obvi-

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ously reticent to penalize international students for limited English facility, especially in a course whose syllabus was revised precisely to address that difficulty. Since revising this syllabus in 2001, what I have learned of the critical period in language acquisition makes appropriate pedagogy an issue of disability as well as of foreign policy, culture, and race. It may strike the reader that the conflation of foreign nationality and race with disability is politically inflammatory. I will address—and, I hope, defuse— this concern shortly. In thinking through this part of my course revision, certain of my long- developing ideas about mainstream Western pedagogies, particularly in music, were reified. I realized more than ever that the emphasis on efficiently evaluating each student as an individual in order to produce rankings often takes precedence over effective teaching. This can be carried to such an extreme that clearly useful teaching techniques and the cultivation of obviously valuable skills are eschewed or deemphasized if they present problems in the assignation of grades. The most obvious cases of valuable materials and techniques abandoned or delimited are exercises involving teamwork. Collaboration is an essential musical and life skill often underemphasized in American education—music education in particular—because of both the difficulty of assigning separate marks and an overdriven ethic of individualism. Writing, however, not teamwork was the problem in my course. One of my goals was to find means of improving every student’s writing without prejudicing anyone’s grade on the basis of their ESL status. My solution was to comment exhaustively on each student’s writing regarding content and structure, but to use that only in an advisory capacity, not as a basis for grading. This meant that students could choose to take advantage of instructor feedback on their writing without concern for its impact on their grades. My hope that students will embrace a skill that is taught but not graded is idealistic, to be sure. But if we want students to have ideals, we must rehearse them through that process. The one time I received a paper that was truly incomprehensible because of a student’s limited English facility, I returned it with feedback, had a face-to-face meeting with her, and requested a revision within a reasonable time. I recommended a fellow student (not enrolled in the course) with the same native language but superior English skills to

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serve as an informal tutor. At the University of Minnesota, international students from each country, especially Taiwan and South Korea, form tight-knit, supportive communities. This makes such referrals both practical and nonthreatening. These communities sometimes fortunately include immigrant students who are quite bilingual. Interestingly, even students who are quite personally close are often unaware of each other’s English proficiencies until an instructor points them out, never having previously spoken English to each other. My solution to English difficulties in my class may not have been ideal. But it did substantially level the playing field for ESL and native English-speaking students while providing a rich opportunity for everyone to improve their writing. For that reason, and also at least partly because of other UID practices, my efforts were well received. Regarding my decision to teach but not officially evaluate writing, I note that grading is not a universal feature of pedagogical systems (Alter 1994). The idea that learning might be its own reward is certainly laudable. It is also natural in the arts, activities that, pursued professionally or otherwise, are generally chosen for aesthetic fulfillment rather than materialistic motivations. During this experiment in curriculum revision, UID principles yielded good results for all, students and instructors alike. Distributing lecture notes produced several benefits. Take-home exams appeared to be universally preferred to the pressure-cooker, in-class, timed variety. When the students were given ample time to reflect and respond, test answers were more thoughtful and presentations more coherent and legible. By providing feedback but not grading on the mechanics and style of writing in the papers, ESL and native-English students alike were able to focus on analysis of repertoire, the explicit goal of the course.

A Hundred Million Miracles The one time that I required an ESL student to rewrite an initially incomprehensible paper, I approached her personally, gently, and empathetically. She took my criticism extraordinarily well. As already mentioned, I recommended she seek out a fellow student from her country that I knew had advanced English skills. A tutor who knows both lan-

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guages can be a great advantage in matters of translation. This young woman’s revised paper became one of the best assignments ever in a course I have taught for decades—highly readable, perceptive, and rich with unique cross- cultural insights drawn from personal experiences no American student could possibly have provided. Her essay, on Chinese composer Tan Dun’s score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, placed that music in the context of Taiwanese film and revealed that, despite its considerable artistic merit, Tan’s combination and contrast of Western and Chinese instruments was not as innovative as Western viewers thought. In this context, where UID principles might be regarded as the “kindness of strangers,” both the student and I learned much. A student who elsewhere might have been unfairly punished for the limits of her bilingualism, and thus grown resentful of her academic course work, was given the opportunity to excel and inspired to express herself in truly cross-cultural terms, on a topic she understood as no American student could. That small, shared victory alone justified all the work required to revise my syllabus. The benefits of UID for ESL students should not be surprising. The advantages to the instructor are also great when all, not just ESL, students have ample time to compose their thoughts and put their answers into coherent form. Students are evaluated on their ability to apply their knowledge when taking as much time as needed, rather than in an arbitrarily fixed period. Use of the latter is not conducive to many learning styles, so that the instructor never truly learns nor does the student demonstrate what she actually knows and is capable of doing.

A Puzzlement If the terminology of impairment and disability in this context is troubling, please consider the nuances of my usage. My standpoint is disability- and impairment-positive. I do not use the words disability or impairment as invective or metaphor, unlike authors who call ignorance blindness or apathy deafness. That in some countries, like the United States, few people become multilingual while in others conditions make fluency in several languages easy and natural is a result of both cultural

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and cognitive developmental factors. A person whose social environment renders her language- disadvantaged is disabled in relation to one who is not. My reference to international students as “language-disabled” requires further contextualization. Asian students in American universities who struggle with English are still far better educated and more skilled in a second language than the overwhelming majority of American students (Shin 1999), for whom pursuing an advanced degree in an institution where the medium of instruction is a language other than English, let alone a challenging East Asian language, defies imagination. The need for Americans to function at a high level in languages other than English presents itself only rarely, largely because English is the world’s lingua franca. What would be a far more severe language difficulty for Americans if a language disability were to result from an environment that demanded multilingualism generally goes unnoticed. Among the social-confluence-dependent relationships between disability and impairment chronicled in this book, this case of languagelearning opportunities lost is the most intricate. An international student without adequate language skills is at a disadvantage that, according to the critical-period hypothesis in second language acquisition, is neural, thus embodied. A disadvantage based on the social construction (such as a foreign culture) of an embodied characteristic is a disability. Whether that embodied characteristic is also an impairment is a more complex question. As I and others have argued elsewhere (not always in precisely these terms), the distinction between disability and impairment is not social construction, but embodiment (Amundson 2000; Bogdan and Taylor 1992; Lubet 2004b; Tremain 2002; Wendell 1996). Even an obviously embodied characteristic must be socially marked as a deficit to be regarded as an impairment. Though cognitive science finds an embodied cause for the language difficulties of international students, whether this characteristic is a significant embodied difference must be questioned. And significant difference is a fundamental element of impairment. The paradigm of difference deemed insufficient to constitute impairment is low vision correctable to 20/20 or better with lenses (an unusual, impairment-specific point in the ADA Amendments Act of 2008). In contrast, all mobility impairments, regardless of how efficiently they are addressed via technology, are regarded as significant (Amundson 2000).

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Asian students matriculating in American schools of music would nearly all be polyglots compared to all but a few of their American peers, were the latter required to study in non-English institutions, particularly in Asia. Obviously, everyone on earth has missed the opportunity to learn more than a few of our planet’s thousands of languages during their critical period. Thus language deficiency is a ubiquitous embodied human characteristic that cannot be regarded as an impairment. (Ron Amundson [2002] makes a related point, arguing against the concept of normalcy, noting that use of tools is ubiquitous, yet only using certain tools such as wheelchairs is regarded as abnormal.) But, depending on an individual’s social confluence, language deficiencies may well become disabilities. Discrimination against and hostility toward non-native speakers of English are certainly facets of American antiimmigrant and “English only” sentiment, which often translate into racial bias. This kind of antagonism is witnessed in Baynton’s chronicle of the many examples of disability rhetoric used as a political tool to justify the denial of rights throughout American history.

No Business Like Show Business The immigrants among Baynton’s subjects and the international students who are my subject share a status as racial and language minorities. In that regard, the study “Offensive Ethnic Clichés in Movies: Drugs, Sex, and Servility” by media psychologist Stuart Fischoff et al. (1999) is revealing. Fischoff et al. surveyed over 1,200 demographically diverse filmgoers to determine what they had seen in films that offended them as members of their own ethnic group The only four (of nine) ethnic categories for which substantial data could be collected were the most familiar American racial categories, characterized as “European American,” “African American,” “Hispanic American,” and “Asian American.” In this study, survey questions were mostly open-ended. From the responses, the authors initially coded thirty-six “Cited Offenses Taken at Film Portrayals” and condensed these into ten “Offense Code Categories Collapsed in Themes.” The Asian Americans who responded to the survey gave as their second most frequent theme of offense “deficiencies in motivation, language or intellectual skills.” (Italics here represent the

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most frequently occurring offense.) This second-place ranking was only two responses, or 1 percent, behind Asian Americans’ most offensive theme, a difference “of absolutely no practical significance” (correspondence with Christopher Johnstone by e-mail, July 28, 2006). It is significant that Asian American survey respondents perceived this cluster of categories of offense so common that the authors chose to collapse these three categories of offense together, especially deficiencies of language and intellect. Of the three categories of offense, language deficiency was most frequently reported. It is also interesting that Fischoff and colleagues consistently characterize the stereotype of language deficiency, also reported as a major offense by African Americans and Hispanic Americans, though less significantly, as a state of being “linguistically handicapped.” The association of linguistic and intellectual deficiency with the term handicap, only rarely used in DS (Wendell 1996, 13–19), lends additional credence to the case for language difficulty as socially constructed disability. The irony of conflating the limited multilingualism of some people of Asian descent with mental defect is not only the denial therein of a formidable language-learning achievement but also that there is evidence that the ability to move between languages enhances cognitive development in additional, extralinguistic ways (Office of English Language Acquisition 2002). While Asian Americans’ perception of ethnic stereotyping reported in the study by Fischoff and colleagues might differ in some ways from that of my Asian students, it is reasonable to surmise that their reaction could have been similar. Among contributing factors to the likelihood of a shared experience of prejudice is a common external perception and reaction to both Asians as a racial minority and the presumption that a person of Asian ancestry is a foreigner regardless of the duration of her American lineage (Gilman 1999).

Grand . . . Coolie . . . Damn! This chapter began with my job interview, unsuccessful by conventional standards but to my mind a small victory for DS and my own integrity. I now recount someone else’s job interview, which was successful by normative standards and both an interesting snapshot of American

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higher education in music and an inspiration for my interest in language disability. All parties involved remain anonymous, less to protect the guilty, who deserve to be outed, than to guard myself. In the early 1980s, candidates were interviewed for a senior administrative position in music at a major public U.S. research university (“Big U”). The finalist who made the most positive impression on nearly everyone (“Big F”) emphasized throughout the interview the importance of fund raising. Though fund raising is certainly a good thing, Big F’s proposed public relations and marketing strategy and its potential impact on the character and quality of music instruction at Big U were both troubling. Asked how millions of dollars might be raised for music, Big F replied that the easiest way to create the necessary positive impression was through high- quality performances, mostly of the Western canon. An important means to enhance the quality of performance was by recruiting more “Asians” as students, particularly to staff the large ensembles: orchestra, choir, band, and opera. And the way to recruit more Asians was by offering performance diplomas or certificates. Diplomas and certificates are standard offerings at conservatories. The following description, from the Web page of the Manhattan School of Music, typifies diploma programs: “Students may choose to pursue a diploma course of study, which is the same as the bachelor’s curriculum minus the humanities core and humanities elective requirements; the diploma represents recognition of accomplishment in the field of music, but does not carry with it the rights and privileges of a college degree (Manhattan School of Music 2008). Certificate programs may attenuate liberal education offerings even further. In addition to eliminating extramusical subjects entirely, they may also require little or no academic course work in music, such as theory or music history. Despite their even more radical eschewal of liberal education, performance certificates seem to be less a challenge to liberal education than diplomas, in that they do appear to be promoted as supplements to, rather than substitutes for, academic degrees. While diploma and certificate programs long predate the large influx of Asian students into American higher music education, Big F’s intention was explicitly to create less academically challenging programs expressly for students whose difficulties with English might make

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an opportunity for them to escape the rigors of demanding course work seem especially attractive. Though Big F did not state this, foreign students also pay much higher out- of-state tuition and, because of their typical language difficulties, often fail to qualify for teaching assistantships, which substantially reduce or eliminate tuition. Thus, while the performance skills of these “Asians” would enhance the luster of Big U’s concerts and presumably raise the interest of potential donors, such international students would also generate valuable tuition revenue. Thus, Asian students would subsidize the public relations function in that they serve as highly valuable, if not exactly highly valued, performers. While diplomas are standard programmatic offerings of conservatories, generally they are not offered by university schools of music except those institutions whose music program is structured on the autonomous conservatory model. Examples include Oberlin Conservatory and the College Conservatory of the University of Cincinnati. A program of study that excludes liberal education—the signature feature of a diploma—was antithetical to the educational philosophy of Big U, where Big F eventually was offered, and accepted, a position. (Interestingly, Big U is unique in even extending its liberal education philosophy, to the extent practical, to all its graduate and professional programs, even the MD program). Though Big F’s tenure at Big U was too short to implement the diploma or certificate plan, which the university’s administration would almost certainly have rejected, it remained an idée fixe throughout Big F’s tenure. Though not unanimously, Big U music faculty, especially performers, supported it. The plan to create a special education program for full-tuition-paying Asian “coolie labor” was but one facet of an educational philosophy that ultimately put Big F at odds with Big U’s upper administration and led to Big F’s departure. I chose this history because it illustrates the manner in which language, race, and disability are conflated in my profession. Fischoff and colleagues might say, and Baynton might agree, that they are collapsed into a single theme. In my terms, race and language become disability within the social confluence of American higher education in music. Lennard Davis’s vision of a ubiquitously “wounded” human race plays out interestingly here. Regarding language acquisition, there is indeed evidence that we are all “wounded” not only figuratively, but liter-

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ally, by the standards of cognitive science. Everyone has missed the critical period for learning some potentially useful second languages, though that is problematic only for some people and certain languages. Thus, only if one’s linguistic wounds show, as they do for Asian music students in the United States, are they wounds at all. This is as strong a case as can be made for the social construction of disability: the linguistically “wounded” have no impairment, but they do have a disability that is externally perceived into existence. Douglas Baynton’s observation, “Disability is everywhere,” grows in its prescience when juxtaposed with a similar observation concerning the ubiquity of music. Music’s universality—noted by many, including ethnomusicologist John Blacking (1973) and his admirer, prehistorian Steven Mithen (2005)—is often accompanied by the question “Why?” A facile answer is not readily forthcoming, except perhaps in the hearts of the terminally musical like me, for whom aestheticized sound is an incurable addiction. I do not think I have ever heard anyone ask why “disability is everywhere.” It is easier to accept the omnipresence of impairment, an embodied state, than of disability, a social construction (Tremain 2002). The lack of an ontological exploration of Baynton’s important observation is something even DS has yet to ponder. The impairment- disability binary, despite its foundational importance to DS, has yet to fully permeate DS thinking, which retains vestiges of the common parlance and therefore does not fully distinguish between these two terms. Most familiarly, the frequently used abbreviation PWD to refer to persons or a person with a disability nearly always really refers to impairment. I have never encountered a usage of PWD where it pertains to someone whose socially constructed disability is unaccompanied by what the author perceives as an impairment. And while Baynton is clearly referring to disability as a social construction, he seems to have been understood more casually, as if impairment could be substituted for disability without a significant shift in meaning. Whatever the nuances of the various parsings of the impairment- disability binary, it is clear that “impairment is everywhere.” But that is not what Baynton said or meant. Why would disability, a social construction “which is imposed on top of our impairments,” be similarly ubiquitous (Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation 1976, 4)?

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I propose that the institution of socially constructed disability might serve a social, cultural, and emotional role so powerful that a body politic might implicitly regard it as essential, such that it would need to be created, even in the absence of any acknowledged impairment. The school of music as a cultural system is one that fiercely resists the inclusion of those with impairments, refusing to educate those the surrounding culture most readily acknowledges as impaired and forcing others with performance injuries and invisible disabilities into the closet. Perhaps the Asians Big F wanted to recruit are even more useful than Big F thought, not only filling positions Americans cannot or will not fill and paying out- of-state tuition for that privilege, but also providing a sort of obscene catharsis for those who require easily marked scapegoats in a cultural system that is in disability denial. As Fischoff et al. observed, language and intellectual deficiencies are readily conflated. In the school- of-music cultural system, this “defect” is conveniently marked by its intersection with race. Conversations I have heard among faculty and administrators at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere about the language difficulties of Asians are perhaps subtler and more superficially polite than those today’s teenagers have about “retards” and “gays,” but they are even more upsetting. In certain demographic circumstances there may be an additional category of Otherness apt for easy marking of this cultural system’s scapegoat. Schools of music in comprehensive major research universities generally do not draw performers of the first echelon, who either attend the top conservatories or a handful of truly exceptional university programs, such as Indiana University, the Eastman School of Music (of the University of Rochester), or Yale University. The University of Minnesota—and, I am confident, its peer institutions—are often the choice of Asian couples whose wife is a musician and whose husband studies medicine, business, or a technical field. Thus, “linguistically handicapped” Asian music students are also, in these institutions, mostly female. With exceptions such as orchestral conducting and composition, in general classical music is more gender-egalitarian than some fields, but scapegoating a particular group of women—Asian foreign nationals who are disabled in English— makes for an easily marked Other. Those who regard themselves as the majority in this system may thus benefit from feeling “normal,” which Amundson notes can easily be inferred to translate into “superior” in

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ability, race, and gender, since “abnormality is usually to be read as subnormality. Better-than-average function is not usually labeled as abnormal even though it is statistically atypical” (2000, 35). The majority is, of course, anything but superior, having nothing upon which to ground their smugness other than an invaluable homefield and language advantage in a cultural system that is both hugely competitive and deeply Eurocentric. Some feminist thinkers also regard the category woman as an example of “false universalization” (Wendell 1996, 30–31). As a gendered group, the Asian women students in American schools of music—racial, diasporic, linguistic, noncitizen Others— are easily imagined as a group both distinct and distant from their European American “sisters.”

The Long and Winding Road While there remains unfinished business in the example at hand, the conclusions I draw here will necessarily encompass all the situations chronicled in this book’s five chapters. The tie already identified in these diverse intersections of music and disability is the theory of social confluence. Examples were chosen because they demonstrate how wildly disability status can morph as an individual migrates across cultural systems, even on a minute-to-minute basis. Each successive case is a more complex, tougher test for this theory. An additional feature of this final instance is its powerful intersectionality. Though intersectionality of disability with race and gender has been evident in this book since Chapter 2, especially with race and gender, here the complexity of mingled identities has grown and taken center stage.

Highway 61 Revisited, or Over the Rainbow DS in music must first and foremost concern musicians above repertoire. While I once believed that DS in music was a subfield of ethnomusicology (Lubet 2004b), I have revised my thinking, not least because the latter’s “fieldwork” so often requires adventure tourism to exotic but often inaccessible “fields.” (Michael Bakan’s efforts to localize, personalize, and

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politicize are exceptional.) Neither is DS a subfield of musicology. While, as in musicology, I rely mainly on text sources rather than fieldwork, I rarely reference individual works of music. More important, the radically interdisciplinary nature of DS mandates a sharply critical relationship to Western classical music that positions it against most musicology, a discipline still mostly married to the Western canon. As early as 1993, ethnomusicologist Philip Bohlman raised the “crisis” of Eurocentrism and apoliticism in music scholarship as a concern, not only about historical musicology, but musicology writ large—historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, and music criticism—mostly following the lead of Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings (McClary 1991). To be sure, all these disciplines have changed radically since Bohlman and McClary wrote, not least in the repertoires they sometimes consider. But it must also be said that even radically revisionist critiques of canonic works such as McClary’s—Bohlman is more concerned with the meaning of the process of canonization itself and even how it often Westernizes non-Western music through, for example, notation—can serve to propagate the canon by insisting on its centrality. Even at a 2010 conference on music and disability at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, all but one of the twelve papers dealing with repertoire (mine, on Bob Dylan) concerned the Western classics. None of these papers even discussed classical music as a cultural system, a critique of its ableist protocols conspicuously absent. The predominant concern (as I see it) was the use of disability as a metaphor with which to describe (both canonic and obscure) Western art music repertoire, operatic, vocal, and instrumental. While I do not wish to challenge the good intentions or scholarly acumen of my colleagues, for me, this is a project that is at best marginal to the emancipatory mission of DS, in music or otherwise. Alternatively, it is a means to, in Bohlman’s terms, essentialize and depoliticize musicology (writ large, to include music theory) and keep the ball in the hegemonic Western court. DS is both inherently political and epistemologically interdisciplinary. DS research and teaching must also be accessible across disciplines and use discourse accordingly. Valuable quantitative research on disability in fields like education can only truly be DS when its findings are communicated to those who are not immersed in statistical methods.

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Similarly, DS in music must be circumspect regarding use of notated examples and music’s vast, idiosyncratic terminological lexicon. But even interdisciplinarity and clarity are insufficient. DS demands an even more profound commitment to accessibility. The educational and performative cultural systems of Western classical music have long all but barred their doors to PWDs. Thus, in contradistinction to mostly canon-loving musicology, it is more appropriate for DS in music to bury these institutions than to praise them, bearing in mind that this critique is of cultural systems, not individuals or repertoire (Lubet 2009). Its harsh mistreatment of green crones aside, the Wizard of Oz is one of the great disability films of all time. Dorothy, played by a Minnesotan PWD (chemically dependent Judy Garland) aids the Munchkins, a powerfully unified impairment community of little people, who in turn support her struggle to reclaim her Kansas homeland. Seeking clinical expertise in Oz, Dorothy collects three crip comrades-in-arms— brainless, heartless, gutless—with whom she ultimately gains audience with the Wizard. The Wiz turns out not to be a clinician after all, and liberates Dorothy’s homies not by curing them of their impairments but by explaining to each, in case-specific terms, the social construction of their disabilities. Liberated from their anxieties and misconceptions, they unite to govern the now disability-positive Oz. Revealing that he is technology challenged, the Wiz departs. Glinda, who earlier disabused Dorothy of her antiwitch stereotype, returns to instruct her in the mobility technology of ruby slippers, which finally enable her to access her home. Dorothy returns to loved ones in Kansas, who live happily ever after despite their sepia-white syndrome. Dorothy’s real Midwestern home was also Bob Dylan’s and mine: Minnesota, where Highway 61 connects Dylan and Garland’s North Country to my St. Paul home. Like Dorothy, I have found in the Heartland my heart’s desire—in my case not contentment, but a site in which to conclude by uniting five apparently disparate narratives culminating in this chapter, whose site is the University of Minnesota School of Music. The “long, strange trip” that is this book begins and ends in the world of Western classical music. Its master narrative, the theory of social confluence, came to me at home in Minnesota in 2000. That summer I discovered, going from agency to agency seeking the ser vices I needed to return to work after spinal neurosurgery, that my disability

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status was utterly contingent on numerous factors, morphing wildly through the day. I might be anything from lost cause to perfect specimen, depending on with whom, usually a human ser vices provider, I  was dealing. Amid my frustration, I reckoned I might be onto something of broad interest. Henceforth I began to compile five extraordinary intersections of disability and music. I am struck by their intersectionality, in which disability combines with religion, race, and especially gender. The most complex, discussed in Chapters 3 through 5, focus on women. But even in Chapters 1 and 2, women are conspicuous by their absence. I know of no women among one-handed classical pianists. The only prominent female jazz musician with a physical impairment (not blindness, a sensory impairment) I encountered was vocalist Ella Fitzgerald, who became a diabetic double-leg amputee late in her career. This gender bias may owe to the expectation in music that women performers be decorative as well as proficient. Music audiences prefer not to view women’s impairments, but have less difficulty gazing at those of men (Lubet 2004b). Female bodies, no matter how typical, historically have been regarded as impaired and thus subject to disablement (Baynton 2001, 41– 44; Hughes 2005). Such discrimination is compounded in the exclusion of women with physical impairments from jazz and even in the travails of ambiguously gendered vocalist Jimmy Scott. In Cairo, something different can be witnessed, if only at the moment of musicking by a singular ensemble. While hardly fully emancipated by their own standards, let alone those of the West, the “girls” of the Blind Orchestra have inverted an entire symphonic protocol. In their eponymous documentary film tribute, orchestra members speak of the unique opportunities that music and their same-sex residential facility have afforded them as blind, Egyptian, mostly Muslim women. They travel, work gainfully, study, and perform in public. Such freedom could hardly have been predicted. Western symphonic protocols of sighted reliance on a conductor and print notation, ubiquitous everywhere else, are eschewed in favor of extensive rehearsal, intense listening, prodigious memorization, and Braille notation. Part of a long and complex history of colonial and postcolonial engagement (Farrell 1999), the modishness of Indian classical music in the West—beginning in the 1950s, exploding in the 1960s thanks to

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Beatle George Harrison, and roughly coincident with the Blind Orchestra’s founding—illustrates how a sense of liberation can accompany the embrace of the Other’s music, regardless of the direction, east or west, in which the sound travels. Monotheistic global religions and Western classical music are two facets of a shared narrative of hierarchy and power. The Taliban’s notorious abuse of women is evidenced even in its extraordinary hostility to music or, perhaps more accurately, any music other than its own. This has been especially obvious during the insurgency period following the collapse of the Taliban government in Afghanistan, when female singers have been murdered, gone into exile, and performed in full burkas while hiding their identities. While kol isha declares “a women’s voice is nakedness,” it is that Halachic statute and Orthodox Jewry’s code of modesty that, like the emperor, have no clothes. Kol isha’s practical impact is in silencing women’s singing while failing to prevent predation and other sexual transgressions. The denial of the basic human right to sing—or any other human right—will never make women, children, or anyone freer or safer. Like Dorothy’s dream-trip to Oz, this book required no actual fieldwork. Like Dorothy, I conclude in my Midwestern home, perhaps having been there, at least psychically, all along. I have learned more about disability and its intersections with social constructions of language, race, and gender in Minnesota than anywhere else. What makes this final example remarkable is that its subjects, my students, are (apparently) able-bodied, musically gifted, bright, and well-heeled, products of prosperous nations (South Korea and Taiwan) with admirable ethics of hard work and filial piety. The language difficulty many have is at once an embodied disability and entirely the result of a socio- environmental cause, a function of where they are from and where they study. But it is not an impairment. What can we learn from these wonderful students from afar? Above all, that empathy is essential to teaching and that inclusive pedagogy works in even more situations than its architects and advocates might expect. I have learned hence that even past the critical period when attaining near-native fluency is no longer likely, significant second-language learning is always possible and should be nurtured. SLA specialists emphasize “strategic competence,” a focus on the learner’s survival basics,

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a more realistic, practical, logical, and perhaps even more attractive goal than native fluency (Phakiti 2008). Big F’s dream of a special-education curriculum that effectively segregates Asians from everyone else must be recognized as the orchestral guest-worker program it would have been. Even under the façade of “the market,” providing the attenuated plan of study that Asian students might choose for themselves would be entirely corrupt in institutions such as Big U, comprehensive universities that regard such programs as substandard, as vocational training and not really education at all. I doubt this is what most international students desire, though it may be all they think they can successfully negotiate in an unempathetic if not overtly hostile learning environment. It begs credulity to presume that young people who have traveled to a strange culture on the other side of the world to immerse themselves in an exotic art music tradition lack intellectual curiosity. I have taught far too many languagechallenged students who, given an empathetic learning environment, are eager to learn and not simply train to believe that anyone relocates twelve-and-a-half thousand miles just to become a more accurate, facile instrumental or vocal technician. Several important questions remain, foremost one of gender and liberation. Anyone who has seen The Blind Orchestra understands the positive impact of the Western symphonic tradition on its members: as women, Muslims, Egyptians, and PWDs. It is remarkable how they juxtapose a unique orchestral performance practice, transformed beyond recognition from normative sighted protocols, with a conservative, but also heavily orientalist, repertoire. Their implicit cultural and political stance is complicated: conspicuously Muslim, performing in elegant hijab while also wearing makeup. A complex, delicate balance between tradition, Western exoticism (likely also perceived in context as modernity or postmodernity), femininity, feminism, and the demand for rights are implicitly espoused by this blind women’s residential school and independent living facility and its renowned music program. There is a partial parallel between the Blind Orchestra of Cairo and the—owing to Minnesota’s Scandinavian heritage—largely blonde orchestra of Minneapolis, with its considerable complement of ravenhaired Asian guest workers. Whether our Asian students feel the liberatory value of embracing “Other” music as “the girls” do in Egypt is a

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multifaceted question. The familiar opposed binary of Western versus non-Western music fails to distinguish here between the non-Western, if not anti-Western, Middle East, where any symphony orchestra is relatively novel, and the highly Westernized Far East, which has been making the Western musical canon its own for well over a century. The complicated and contentious relationship between Islam and the Blind Orchestra (Schuyler 1996) is interestingly contrasted to the Asian situation through the example of South Korea. I have observed, and my Korean students have confirmed, that their interest in Western classical music and their (in almost all cases) Christianity are a frequent, mutually reinforcing intersection. The connection between Christianity and classical music may carry additional associations for Easterners, including liberation (which Westerners nowadays often seek in Buddhism), modernity, or exoticism. Such intersections and liberatory impacts are only background to our focal concern, disability. Here, Cairo and Minneapolis could not be more different. It is hard to imagine a gesture more emancipatory than the appropriation of the most virulently antiblind of musical institutions, the symphony orchestra, and the inversion of its performance practice to create a space for women in Blind Culture that enables its members to experience activities unimaginable to their able-bodied countrywomen, such as touring the world, including the West. Because of their unique intersection of disability and music, the Blind Orchestra’s members have traveled as far as the frozen North, touring Canada in 2005. By contrast, many Asians, able-bodied by any standard, have made a similarly long, icy journey to Minnesota, only to experience language disability, likely for the first time. If “exotic” music’s liberatory impact owes to transgressiveness, as it does in Cairo, it may be that the repertoire and not the musicians must travel to a site where it represents the Other. While in recent decades Western music in several genres has certainly been viewed as transgressive in the shrinking Communist world, including Asia (see Reyes 1999, on Vietnam), it is now so deeply rooted in the cultures of capitalist East Asia (as well as the People’s Republic of China) that I wonder if it is still capable of expressing any kind of contrarianism at all. At most, classical repertoire may foster a spirit of internationalism that might inspire students to study abroad. When they arrive to matriculate in institutions that do not share their enthusiasm

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for multiculturalism, their disablement in the form of anti-inclusive pedagogies can hardly be liberating. Readers may question whether, in the absence of impairment, the final example falls within DS at all. My answer is yes. There is simply no inherent, intrinsic correlation between impaired bodies and disabled subjects, as Baynton’s brief history of disability in America proves (2001). He chronicles the use of impairment rhetoric— name calling as disablement—against women and racial, ethnic, immigrant, and sexual minorities, all branded as having embodied mental or cognitive defects. Baynton says relatively little about those whose conditions would reasonably be regarded, by DS standards, as actual impairment. Even the examples he provides are largely intersectional. For instance, he describes the use of impairment as grounds for exclusion of potential immigrants and sometimes even the tagging of particular ethnic groups with attributes such as “the slow-witted Slav” and the “neurotic condition of our Jewish immigrants” (Grayson 1913, 103, 107–109, cited in Baynton 2001, 46). Simply to be a woman was to be considered defective, “sick and suffering and . . . physically disabled from performing physiological functions in a normal manner” (Smith n.d.). Baynton establishes that both disability (immigrants) and impairment (women) are contingent on social confluence. In Chapter 4, I proposed that DS develop into “ability studies.” Such an extension would not only underscore the contingent nature of disability and impairment, it would reify the fiction of an objective distinction between ability and disability. The example in Chapter 4 is of musicianship under the Taliban; a “talent” almost anywhere else, musicality was transformed into a disabling sociopathy under that fundamentalist regime. Kol isha is subtler. While any woman’s voice is, under Halacha, an erva to be avoided by religiously observant adult males, the Talmud (Tractate Kethuboth 75a), in tracing the origin of kol isha to Song of Songs 2:14, spins a web of disablement of, well, Talmudic proportions: “Samuel said: A woman’s voice is a sexual incitement, as it says [in Song of Songs], For sweet is thy voice and thy countenance is comely” (Tractate Berakoth 24a).

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The female lover’s vocal and physical attractiveness is, in Song of Songs, clearly seen as positive. But it nonetheless inspires or justifies an entire code of oppressive feminine “modesty,” whose constraints are, however, characterized otherwise, as protective of domestic tranquility in general and of women in particular. A Scriptural paean to female beauty is thus cited as grounds for rules many women must have found disabling even then. Admonitions, after all, exist to restrain actual behavior. That female beauty serves as grounds for disablement becomes a problematic premise later in the Talmudic discusson of kol isha: “R. Hisda further stated: A harsh voice in a woman is a bodily defect; since it is said in Scripture, For sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely” (Tractate Kethuboth 75a). Because of a reference to a “sweet voice” in Hebrew Scripture’s most erotic text, any woman’s voice becomes an erva, which translates not only as “nakedness” but as “indecent,” “shameful,” “lustful,” “provocative,” and “lewdness.” And yet, “A harsh voice in a woman is a bodily defect.” Go figure. Apparently any woman’s voice, sweet or harsh, is grounds for disablement. (Deafness, and the vocal silence that often accompanies it, were also regarded as major cognitive disabilities in Talmudic times [Abrams 1998.]) Given the frequent conflation of femininity and disability, this is hardly surprising. It is further proof of the contingent valuation of any human attribute—sweet voice, harsh voice, no voice—as ability or disability. This new discussion of kol isha is only apparently a diversion from our Asian example. Though few were female (Abrams 1995, xx, 2–12), the contributors to the Babylonian Talmud were also international students from Asia, exiled from Israel in the Persian diaspora, happier in Hebrew than in the lingua franca, and, in Psalm 137, characterizing their exile as a state of multiple impairments, a withered right hand and a paralyzed tongue, the latter, of course, making it impossible to sing (Lubet 2006a). If, while exiled “by the rivers of Babylon,” diasporic Jews’ ideas about women’s voices and disablement became complicated to the point of contradiction, they were in good company. The voices of modern diasporic Asian women may present a linguistic handicap in American schools of music (in fairness, I have never heard that precise term invoked by colleagues), but if I cross the Mississippi to the University of Minnesota’s progressive and empathetic ESL program, these same

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women become “bilingual” and “strategically competent.” Susan Wendell observes a similar reversal of fortune among those Deaf who sign and thus make similar language journeys between eloquence and silence on a daily basis (1996, 28–29). If the valuation of human attributes on an ability-disability continuum is always mutable, it is doubly so for women. Because of kol isha, the reason is clear: it concerns sexual allure, which automatically invokes ambivalence in many cultural confluences. The situation of the Asian students is subtler, but clearly gender is implicated, at least in schools of music where women constitute the vast majority of international students. A larger male Asian student presence would, at a minimum, end the convenient bundling of Otherness in which race, gender, language, diaspora, and disability can all be packed into female bodies. Further, these women’s experience of and acclimation to East Asian forms of patriarchy may work to their disadvantage in an American context. All but the first example, that of one-handed classical pianism, explicitly concern diaspora, though classical music feels imported everywhere but in Europe. Wounded Gypsies and Africans find accommodation in Euro-American jazz; the European orchestral canon wanders “blindly” into Egypt; in wandering Judaism, an aesthetic of domestic peace is attempted and perseveres, despite its failure. (The Taliban, while homegrown, imported its Puritanical version of Islam and its aversion to music from Wahabist Saudi Arabia.) Finally, innocents abroad, Chinese and Korean Dorothy Gales, seek education in a far-off, frozen Oz, off to see barely comprehensible and ultimately disappointing professor-wizards whose wisdom was supposed to make the trip worth it. The parallels between blind and blonde orchestras have already been noted. What is new is the recognition that diaspora is one more thickener of a plot that includes language, race, gender, and, most important, the language disability that is embodied without being an impairment.

The End DS scholars must constantly explain what they do. DS in music requires two further explanations. In the school- of-music cultural system in which I have spent my entire career, disability is so marginalized that

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it renders my work hard to fathom by both the music and the DS side. What is gained from this difficult juxtaposition of what are sometimes constructed as opposites—extraordinary musical giftedness versus tragic incapacitation (Lubet and Hofmann 2006; Wendell 1996)—is perspective. From this unique vantage point where aestheticized sound meets rejected bodies (Wendell 1996), one can perceive with clarity the fragmentation of contemporary identity, sometimes even shifting with the itinerary of the day (Wendell 1996, 183). From the perspective of disability status alone, a musician might, as I have done, play enough different parts to constitute a crip quartet in a single workday. Fragmentation of identity is but one of the lessons learned here. There is also the vast mutability of human and even anatomical valuation. An impaired pianist’s hand might be functionally amputated by classical repertoire that denies its existence or aesthetically vindicated by Horace Parlan’s unique jazz textures. The typically archconservative symphony orchestra, against all odds and custom, leads the blind out of Egypt on world tours or leads administrators such as Big F to exploit “Asian” tuition and talent. There are also questions of intersectionality, the crossing of paths of disability and other identities, always a hot topic within DS, particularly with regard to race. However, with few scholarly spaces in which to discuss disability from a social model perspective and many more venues for conversations about any other category of marginalization, one of the anxieties of intersection is that diffusing focused consideration of disability can amount, in effect, to changing the subject. Music is inherently intersectional. Not the universal language it is often purported to be, it is nonetheless a universal phenomenon. Unlike language, music is untranslatable and thus culturally specific, enabling— even mandating—exchanges about race and place. Music is both performed and heard. Its inherently social nature and its physicality and incitement to gesture also assure its gendering and sexing. In every example offered here, gendering is unambiguous and vivid. It is in this intersection that it becomes clear that the social construction of disability can be fully understood only in the context of the total person, a complex of intersecting and mutable identities. Though extralinguistic, music’s value is its expressivity (Mithen 2005). This includes a remarkable power to create a sense of rightness

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through, for example, dissonance and syncopation and their respective terminations, as expressions of conflict resolution. Like music, DS expresses itself through conflict between social and medical models of disability. This is a culture war DS may (Longmore 2005) or may not have created. There are dangers in defining oneself in oppositional terms such as social versus medical, not least of which are the ceding of authority to the opposition and the identity crisis that would surely ensue should the conflict ever end. One should hope that DS would have reasons to persist beyond the hoped-for demise of the hegemony of the medical model, much as Jewish studies must transcend the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. But it also behooves DS, which constantly debates nuances of the social model, to revisit its purportedly evil medical twin (Shakespeare and Watson 2001). In an essay critical of medical-model teaching, I cautioned the DS community to contemplate what is in a name: The model DS terms “medical” is also frequently referenced in disability studies in discussions of the non-medical field of education. Other non-medical “helping fields” like social work and criminal justice are similarly prone to “medical model” problematization—pathologization—of individuals deemed defective, deficient, or deviant. Without wishing to excuse the medical fields—only to spread the culpability—I recommend we replace the term “medical model” with something more accurate. Although my recommendation is grounded in a desire for precision, it may also ease disability studies’ relations with healthcare programs whom it would thus cease explicitly demonizing (Lubet 2004a). Whatever name is used for the problematizing model, there are reasons to make at least provisional peace with the fields that most familiarly inflict social stigmatization on disability: special education and medicine. The DS critique of special education is primarily rooted in the deleterious impact of involuntary segregation (Linton 1998, 54– 64). As only DS could reveal, a similar dynamic of quarantine operates within

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the school- of-music cultural system regarding Asians, if only or mostly as wishful thinking for a special coolie curriculum. But the benefits of inclusive education demonstrated here are shown to be applicable to situations and identities beyond impairment and disability, including gender, language, race, and diaspora. Regarding medicine, making peace may be more complex. But it begins by observing that, despite the medicalization or pathologization of disability, I am unaware of any suggestion within DS that the practice of medicine is unnecessary. The exception, concerning a single specialty, may be the “psychiatric survivor” movement (Adame and Knudson 2008). I personally have benefited greatly from the support of both mental and physical health practitioners, some quite empathetic and receptive to DS thinking. However, the inspiration for this peace overture came not from medical practitioners or scholars, but from feminist philosopher Susan Wendell. Throughout The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, Wendell cautions readers that impairment and disability are not merely socially constructed. Because of her personal experience of impairment, she is adamant that one need neither embrace nor deny as simply discursive pain, fatigue, functional limitation, or shortened life expectancy. I doubt that the working title of Second Wave Feminism’s Bible of women’s health and sexuality, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective 1973) was ever Our Theories of the Body, Our Social Constructions of Ourselves. Even Descartes was, after a disembodied fashion, confidently self-aware. Wendell’s frank discussions of the prediscursive, untheorized vicissitudes of living in her impaired, chronically fatigued, and painful body affirm that biomedical knowledge can be good not only for the tenants of impaired bodies, but for DS as well. Throughout this book, especially Chapters 4 and 5, I found research in evolutionary biology (Roughgarden 2004), cognitive science (Mithen 2005), and neuroscience (Newport 2002) invaluable. In particular, the cognitive science of SLA was foundational to the consideration of language disability. A son of the 1960s, I am of the generation that loves laboring under the delusion of a causal link between music and peace; a teacher of rock

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music, I earn my keep as one of its mythologists. Woodstock remains a useful fiction. Therefore the possibility of scientific swords being beaten into cultural plowshares, so that DS need not define itself precariously only as social-model David in opposition to medical-model Goliath, is one for which I would most gladly suspend disbelief.

References

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Index

Ability studies, 96–97, 102, 164 Able-bodied, 3, 6, 9, 21, 39, 41, 46–47, 65–66, 96, 101, 135, 161, 163 Ableism, 83, 88, 158 Abrams, Judith, 19–20, 63, 70, 95, 101, 165; Judaism and Disability, 101 Absolute pitch, 71, 95–96, 100 Accommodation (of disability), 21–22, 29, 33, 36, 40 67–68, 145, 166 ADA. See Americans with Disabilities Act ADA Amendments Act (of 2008), 2, 13, 16–18, 22, 35, 49, 101, 150 Adame, Alexandra, 169 Addiction, 104, 107, 155 Adultery, 113, 127 Afghanistan, 12, 89, 92-93, 109–111, 114–121. See also Kabul; Taliban Afghan Star, 116–118, 120 African American music, 11, 43–45, 51, 56, 59, 62–63, 66–68, 71, 136, 139, 151–152. See also Black music; Blues; Jazz Al-Albaani, Muhammad Nassir ud-Deen, 108 Alaskan Native, 68

Alexander Technique, 107 Ali, Mehassen Ali Mohamed, 81 Allison, Becky, 101 Al-Nour wal Amal (“Light and Hope”) Orchestra (and residential facility), 69, 75–79, 81–83, 87–88. See also Blind Orchestra Al Qaeda, 111 Alter, Andrew, 148 “Amazing Grace,” 70 American Federation of Musicians (AFM), 29 American Idol, 116 American Indian, 68, 139 American Psychiatric Association, 101 American Sign Language (ASL), 84 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), 2–3, 13, 15–23, 26–27, 29, 34–36, 45, 49, 54, 57, 90, 101, 107, 136, 142, 150. See also ADA Amendments Act Amigo Mobility International, 21 Amputation (amputee), 11, 14, 15, 17, 21, 37, 39, 40, 43, 50, 55, 66, 160, 167 Amundson, Ron, 150–151, 156 Anantawan, Adrian, 21, 49

188 \ Index

Ancient Voices of Children (George Crumb), 58 Androcentrism, 77, 83, 88, 140 Anthropology, 5, 8, 10, 70, 84–85, 98 Anthropology of Music, The (Alan Merriam), 70, 98 Anticommunism, 83 Anti-Semitism, 108, 139, 168 Appadurai, Arjun, 8–9, 84–85 Arab, 77–79, 82–83 Area Studies, 93, 95 Asia, 12, 18, 78, 99, 142–143, 150–157, 162–163, 165–167, 169 Asian American, 48, 139, 151–152 Aspin, Clive, 130 Asthma, 26 Ata Kak (record label), 117 Athletes, 23–24. See also Disabled list Atkins, Chet, 47 Atlantic Records, 63 Autism (autistic spectrum), 9, 96, 100, 135, 142–143 “Awakening from the Nightmare of the Taliban, An” (Andrew Solomon), 110 Awareness Center, 130–131 Ayeroff, Stan, 45–47, 50 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 34, 40 Baily, John, 108–109, 111–114, 117–121; “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan, 111, 117, 119–120 Bakan, Megan, 9 Bakan, Michael B., 9, 81–82, 157 Bali, 81–82 Bannister, Paul, 29 Barton, Karen L., 108–109 Barz, Gregory, 9 Bassoon, 81, 135 Baynton, Douglas, 77, 91, 101, 124, 136–138, 140, 145, 151, 154–155, 160, 164; “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 136 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 118 Beast with Five Fingers, The (film), 34 Beautiful Within: A Modesty in Concept and Dress as Taught by the Lubavitcher

Rebbe (Menachem Schneerson), 126–127. See also Tznius Beethoven, Ludwig van, 40, 77, 139 Ben-Ari, Nitsa, 122 Beneri, Shaheen, 114 Bentley, John, 28 Berman, Saul, 122–123 Bertrand, Daisy, 106 Biology, 105, 144, 169 Bisexual, 102–103 Biwa, 70 Biwa hoshi, 70, 72, 74, 79, 87 Black music, 67. See also African American music; Jazz Blacking, John, 98; How Musical Is Man? 98, 155 Blind Culture, 11, 32, 69–88, 163 Blindness (blind), 11–12, 20, 32, 43–44, 52, 54, 60, 64, 68, 69–76, 78–88, 95–96, 98, 116, 135–136, 149, 160–163, 166. See also Blind Culture; Blind Orchestra; individual blind musicians Blind Orchestra, The, 12, 69, 75–88, 116, 135, 160, 162–163. See also Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra Blind Orchestra, The (film), 78, 80, 82, 162 Blind-X (online discussion group), 83 BLIST, 83 Blue Note (records), 53 Blues, 61, 71–72, 74, 87, 108 Body modification, 106–107 Bogdan, Robert, 150 Bohlman, Philip, 158 Bolcolm, William, 33; Gaea for Two Pianos Left Hand, and Orchestra, 33 Bolivia, 36 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. See Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women Botox, 38 Boynton Health Service, 142 Brahms, Johannes, 34 Braille, Louis, 73 Braille (writing and musical notation systems), 73, 75, 79–80, 85–87, 160 Braille Monitor, The, 82 Brandfonbrener, Alice, 29, 34

Index / 189

Bribitzer-Stull, Matthew, 139 Britain (British), 24–25, 44, 85, 90, 94, 103, 111. See also United Kingdom Brodsky, Warren, 23–25 Brown, Ruth, 61 Brummel-Smith, Keith, 9 Buddhism, 87 Burgermeister, Jan, 79 Burka, 117 Burka Band, 117; “Burka Blue,” 117; “No Burka!” 117–118 “Burka Blue” (song), 117 Buruma, Ian, 83 Cairo, 12, 69, 75, 80–82, 84, 116, 135, 160, 162–163. See also Egypt Cairo Conservatoire, 80–81, 135 Campbell, Meredith, 78 Canada, 29, 78, 131, 163 “Can You Stop the Birds Singing?” The Censorship of Music in Afghanistan (John Baily), 111, 117, 119–120 Capitalism, 77, 83, 94, 163 Captain Hook, 93 Carlson, Bonnie, 131 Cassette, 119–120 Caste, 94 Celebrity, 45, 48, 57–60, 66 Center for an Accessible Society, 29 Center for Sex Offender Management, 129 Central Bureau of Statistics, 130 Chaconne, in D Minor for Violin (Johann Sebastian Bach, arranged for piano by Johannes Brahms), 34 Chant, 87, 118, 119–120; Buddhist, 87; Islamic, 118; Taliban, 119–120 Charles, Ray, 43, 70 Cheresh, shoteh v’katan (deaf-mute, mentally ill–mentally disabled, and children) 20. See also Talmud Chesnutt, Vic, 68 Chicago blues, 71. See also Blues Child, Fred, 36 Child development, 121 China, 36, 163 Christianity, 58, 82, 101, 130–131, 137, 139, 163

Christlou, Mirella, 80 Chronic pain, 38, 91 City University of New York, Graduate Center of the, 158 Civil Rights, 35, 90, 136 Classical music (Western classical music), 3–4, 7–9, 11–12, 14–41, 42–43, 49, 51, 54–55, 57–58, 64, 66–67, 69, 77, 79, 95, 97–99, 104–105, 108, 134–170 Cliburn, Van, competition, 36 Clinton, Bill, 56 CODA (child of deaf adults), 84 Cognitive science, 144–145, 150, 154–155, 169 Cold War, 36 Cole, Juan, 111–116 Colker, Ruth, 35 College Conservatory of the University of Cincinnati, 154 Cologne (Germany), 117 Come Out (Reich), 120 Communism, 83, 94, 163. See also Anticommunism; Marxism Conductor, 10, 26, 29, 31, 43, 71, 75, 79–80, 86–87, 96, 160 Confluence (confluential), 17–19, 21, 23, 36, 39–40, 43, 50–51, 57, 64, 69, 72, 85, 87, 89, 92, 95, 97–98, 104, 107, 150–151, 154, 157, 159, 164, 166 Congo, 84 Conservative Judaism, 121. See also Judaism Conservatory, 31, 36, 40, 81, 111, 143, 154; Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System (Henry Kingsbury), 95. See also individual conservatories Constitutional law (U.S.), 39 Conway, Lynn, 101–102 Cook, Dan, 89 Corker, Mairian, 73 Cornell University Law School Legal Information Institute. See also Supreme Court; Toyota v. Williams Coryell, Larry, 65 Critical period (biology, linguistics), 115, 144, 147, 150–151, 155, 161 Cross, Ian, 106

190 \ Index

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (film) (Tan Dun, composer), 149 Crumb, George, 58; Ancient Voices of Children, 58 CTAD. See Curriculum Transformation and Disability Cultural studies, 6, 90 Cultural system, 10, 18, 157; Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra as, 69; classical music as, 3, 5, 33–34, 55; conservatory as, 95; jazz as; 42, 44, 51, 56, 64–66, 68; music as, 1, 9–11, 36, 38–40, 44, 68, 86–87, 140; orchestra as, 69; school of music as, 138–140, 156–159, 166, 169 Curriculum Transformation and Disability (CTAD), 140–142, 145 Curtis Institute, 49 Cutting sessions ( jazz), 42, 67 Daily Telegraph (London), 78 Daireh (drum), 114, 120 Danielsson, Bengt, 130 Daskalos, Christopher, 93 Davis, Blind Gary (Reverend Gary), 71 Davis, Lennard, 27, 84–85, 91, 137–138, 140, 154; “The End of Disability Politics and the Beginning of Dismodern-ism: On Disability as an Unstable Category,” 137; “Who Put the The in The Novel?” 84 Deaf Culture (Deaf), 11, 32, 68–69, 72–77, 84–86, 101 Deaf-mute, 20 Deafness (deaf), 40, 72–73, 75–77, 84, 86, 101, 136, 149–150, 165. See also Deaf-mute Deaf school(s), 72–73 “Deficiency, the” (Kallman’s Syndrome), 62, 65 Democracy, 116, 139 Denmark (Danish), 44, 54, 56 Depression (mental illness), 26, 38, 78, 91, 110–111, 135, 142 DePriest, James, 29, 31 Der Rosenkavalier (Richard Strauss), 65 Diabetes (diabetic), 26, 43, 54, 160 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), 101

Diaspora, 12, 19–20, 145, 165–166, 169 “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History” (Douglas Baynton), 136 Disability identity, 1–2 Disability rights, 6, 12–13, 50, 90, 125 Disability status, 2–4, 6, 11–12, 15, 21, 25, 27, 34–38, 53, 57–59, 62, 64, 72, 74, 77, 108, 137, 157, 159–160, 167 Disability studies (DS), 4–9, 11–12, 15, 17–18, 20, 23, 27, 31, 37, 46, 48, 50, 53, 57, 64, 71, 73, 81, 83, 85, 90, 92–93, 96, 98, 102, 124–125, 128–129, 132, 134–138, 140, 152, 155, 157–159, 164, 166–170. See also Society for Disability Studies Disability Studies in the Humanities (online discussion group), 83 Disabled list, 23–24 Discrimination (against people with disabilities and other minorities), 31–32, 35–36, 62, 63, 67, 91, 93, 101, 123–124, 137, 140, 145, 151, 160 Dismodernism (Lennard Davis), 91, 137–138 Dissanayake, Ellen, 115 Donaldson, Lou, 52 Dorn, Joel, 63 Doubleday, Veronica, 114–115, 118 Drake, Carla, 106 Dregni, Michael, 45, 47–48, 50–51 DS. See Disability studies DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), 101 Dylan, Bob, 3, 48, 158–159 Eaglin, Snooks, 72 Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester), 156–157 Ed Sullivan Show, 31 Education, 7, 9, 11–12, 17–18, 40, 65–66, 79–81, 90, 93–94, 97, 115, 121, 138, 147, 152–154, 158–159, 162, 166, 168–169. See also Higher education; Inclusive education; Liberal education; Music education Egypt, 69, 75–76, 78, 80–82, 84, 88, 160, 162, 166–167. See also Cairo

Index / 191

el-Aid, Abu, 75, 79–81. See also Al-Nour wal Amal Orchestra; Blind Orchestra Electronic music, 120 el-Kholy, Samha, 80–81 Ellington, Duke, 45 “End of Disability Politics and the Beginning of Dismodern-ism: On Disability as an Unstable Category, The” (Lennard Davis), 137 English (language), 79, 136, 143, 145, 148, 151, 156 English as a Second Language (ESL), 143–149, 165 Erva (ervah) (nakedness), 89, 122, 125, 127, 131, 164–165 ESL. See English as a Second Language Essentialism, 5, 93–94, 102, 105, 158 Ethnic studies, 90 Ethnomusicology (ethnomusicologist), 5, 7–10, 33, 70, 77, 83, 86, 97–98, 105, 107, 111, 114, 155, 157–158. See also Medical ethnomusicology Eugenics, 40 Eurocentrism, 77, 82, 88, 139, 157–158 Europe, 46, 48, 59, 68, 78, 99, 166 “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” (Jimmy Scott), 63 Faith in Time (David Ritz), 59 Family Guy (television show), 130 Fariña, Richard and Mimi, 48 Farrell, Gerry, 160–161 Fawz, Iman, 80 Feather, Leonard, 52–53, 56 Felix, Quaiser, 119 Feminine Endings (Susan McClary), 158 Feminism (feminist), 80–81, 83, 96, 116, 125, 157, 162, 169 Feminist studies, 96. See also Women’s studies Fifth Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, 78 Fischoff, Stuart, 151–152, 154, 156; “Offensive Ethnic Clichés in Movies: Drugs, Sex, and Servility,” 151 Fishbein, Martin, 22–24, 30, 40 Fitzgerald, Ella, 43, 160

Fleisher, Leon, 14–15, 17–18, 21, 25–26, 28, 31, 33, 35–38, 51, 54, 141 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), 100, 103 Focal dystonia, 15, 17, 21, 24, 33, 141. See also Musicians’ dystonia Fogelman, Yaakov, 122 Four Seasons, The (vocal group), 62–63 Fox Broadcasting, 130 France (French), 44–45, 48, 51, 73 Francis, Connie, 63 Freemuse, 108, 114, 116–117 Fremont (California), 111 Fujie, Linda, 8, 71 Fujiwara, Chris, 52–53 Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), 100. See also fMRI Fundamentalism (religious), 39, 83, 100, 103, 107–108, 114, 133, 164. See also individual religions Gaelic, 71–72 Gamelan, 81–82; Gamelan beleganjur, 81 Gangsta rap, 63 Gannett, Lewis, 113 Garcia, Jerry, 47 Garland, Judy, 159; The Wizard of Oz, 159–160 Garrett, Shannon, 14 Gaser, C., 95–96 Gay, 102–103, 113 Gaye, Marvin, 62 Gaznavi (Ghaznavi), Aziz, 110–112 Gender, 4, 5, 12, 37, 56, 58, 61, 63, 65–67, 82, 87, 89, 93, 101–103, 105–106, 113–114, 117, 120, 122–125, 128, 132, 140, 156–157, 160–162, 166–167, 169 Gender identity, 12 Gender identity dysphoria, 101 Gender orientation, 103 Genetics, 94, 102–103, 137, 139 Germany, 22, 31, 117–118, 137 Ghafour, Hamida, 116 Gilman, Sander, 152 Givan, Benjamin, 45–47, 50, 52 “Glass bone disease.” See Osteogenesis imperfecta Glass Menagerie, The, 93

192 \ Index

Glieck, Elizabeth, 31 Globalization, 1, 8, 64, 78, 84–85, 98, 107 Goldenberg, Suzanne, 113 Goodwin, Jan, 113 Gordon, Dexter, 52 Gosling, Ju, 7 Graffman, Gary, 14–15, 17–18, 21, 25–26, 28, 31, 33, 36–37, 54, 141 Grappelli, Stephane, 45, 65 Grateful Dead, 47 Grayson, Thomas, 164 Groce, Nora, 76 Gropp, Robert, 140 Guardian, The, 113 Guitar, 4, 11, 44–53, 64–65, 71–72, 89 Gypsy, 44–45, 48–49. See also Roma Gypsy jazz, 45 Haider-Markel, Donald P., 102 Halacha (Jewish law), 12, 92, 102, 123, 125, 131, 164. See also Judaism; Oral Law; Talmud; Torah Hamilton, R. H., 95 Hampton, Lionel, 63 Handicap(ped), 29, 137, 152. See also Linguistic handicap Hand trauma, 15, 18, 26–27 Harp, 72 Harrison, George, 59, 161 Hasidic Jews, 123, 126. See also Jews; Judaism; Lubavitch Hawke, Ethan, 56 Healey, Jeff, 72 Hearing loss, 24, 77 Heartland Excursions (Bruno Nettl), 77 Hebrew (language), 125, 165 Hebrews (ancient), 40 Hepper, Peter, 95–96 Higher education, 66, 93–94, 153–154 Hindustani classical music, 67. See also Indian classical music Hines, Earl, 52 Hirose, Kojiro, 79, 86–87 Hispanic American, 151–152. See also Latino Hitler, Adolf, 46 Hoffman, Earl, 30 Hofmann, Ingrid, 95

Holcomb, Thomas, 74 Holocaust, 168 Homosexuality, 101–103, 109, 113 Hong Kong, 22–23 Honor killing, 114 hooks, bell, 62 Hooper, Joseph, 56, 60–61 Horowitz, Vladimir, 66 “Horrors of One-Handed Pianism, The” (Neil Lerner), 34 Hot Club. See Quintet of the Hot Club of France How Musical Is Man? (John Blacking), 98 Hudaa, 108 Human valuation, 36, 95, 101 Hunter, Jim, 7 Hutchings, Jessica, 130 Huwaydi, Fahmi, 112 Hyperability, 12, 92 Identity (identities), 1–2, 8–11, 14, 18, 20, 22, 27, 64–65, 84, 93–94, 133, 138, 157, 167–169; Afghan national, 111; Deaf Culture as, 72–74, 76; disability identity, 1–2, 18, 65, 76, 85, 124–125, 133, 138, 142, 167–169; gay identity, 113; gender identity, 12, 93, 95, 101–103, 105–106, 169; identity politics, 5, 84, 93–94, 100; intersectionality and, 167; Islam and identity, 111; musical identity (musician as identity; pianist as identity), 10, 14, 18, 20–21, 27, 106, 142; racial identity, 44, 169; sex and sexuality as, 95 Identity politics, 5, 84, 93–94, 100. See also Identity Impairment, 4–5, 12, 15–16, 18–21, 23, 26–29, 31–32, 34, 37–38, 41–59, 63–65, 68–74, 76–77, 90–92, 96, 99, 101, 108, 118, 121, 124–127, 129, 132, 135, 137, 139, 145, 149–151, 155–156, 159–161, 164, 166, 169; status, 53, 58–59, 74. See also Language impairment Improvisation, 11, 40, 50, 54, 59 65, 67, 140, 160, 163. See also Indian classical music; Jazz Inclusive education, 169

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India, 67, 94, 116, 143, 160 Indiana University, 156–157 Indian classical music, 59, 160, 163. See also Hindustani classical music Indonesia, 82 Infant-directed music, 115 Infant-directed speech, 115 Insurance, 29–30 Intelligent design, 105 Internet, 8, 117, 128–129. See also Online Intersectionality (between categories of oppression), 12, 128, 156–157, 160, 161, 164, 167 Intersexuality, 63, 96, 101–102 Ioup, Georgette, 145 Iraq, 22 Islam, 12, 78, 82, 89–90, 100, 107–108, 111, 116, 131, 133, 163, 166. See also Islamic law; Sharia Islamic chant (cantillation), 118–119 Islamic law (Sharia), 12, 89–90, 113, 132. See also Islam; Pakistan; Sharia; Taliban Islamic music, 118–119 Israel, 19–20, 131, 165 Itako, 87 It’s Gonna Rain (Reich), 120 Jackson, Michael, 61–62 Jackson, Travis, 9 James, Ian, 22–23, 107 Janus, Eric, 129 Japan, 22, 72, 74, 86–87 Jazz, 4, 11, 32, 41–68, 69–70, 89, 107, 108, 160, 166–167. See also African American music; Black music; individual musicians Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 71 Jesus, 39 Jewish law (Halacha), 12, 92, 102, 122–123, 125–127. See also Halacha; Judaism; Talmud; Torah Jews (Jewish, Jewry), 12, 19–20, 39, 46, 63, 89, 90–96, 102, 108–109, 121–123, 125–133, 161, 164–165, 168. See also Judaism Johnstone, Christopher, 152

Joslyn, Mark R., 102, 106 Judaism, 12, 19–20, 38, 70, 100–101, 107, 109, 121–131, 166. See also Oral Law; Talmud; Torah Judaism and Disability (Judith Abrams), 101 Kabul, 109–110, 114, 116. See also Afghanistan Kallman’s (or Kallman) Syndrome, 56–58, 62–64 Kandahar, 116 Karzai, Hamid, 113–114 Kashrut (kosher), 126 Kaufman, Carol Goodman, 130–131; Sins of Omission, 133 Keenan, J. P., 95–96, 102 Keever, Scott, 119 Keller, Helen, 93 Kellerman, Robert, 139 Kennedy Center, 49 King, B. B., 47 Kingsbury, Henry, 3, 7, 9, 10, 33, 36, 77, 86, 95, 105, 138. See also Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System Kirk, Rahsaan Roland, 43, 52, 70 Kirschner, Robert, 103 Klawans, Stuart, 116–117 Kloss, Eric, 44 Knudson, Roger, 169 Kobylarz, Fred, 9 Koen, Benjamin, 9 Kol isha, 12, 89–90, 92, 121–133 Kononenko, Natalie, 73–74, 87 Kook, Avraham, 126 Korea. See South Korea Korpe, Maria, 117 Koskoff, Ellen, 122–124, 126, 131; Music in Lubavitcher Life, 124 Langhorne, Bruce, 47–48 Language disability, 12, 145, 150, 152–153, 163, 166, 169. See also Language impairment Language impairment, 145. See also Language disability Larkin, Colin, 59

194 \ Index

Latino (Latina), 139 Lazarus, Riel, 54, 56, 67 “Lead boy,” 87 Left-hand (piano), 17, 33–34, 36–37, 45, 52, 54, 66. See also One-hand(ed) Lenneberg, Eric, 144 Lennon, John, 56, 60 Lerner, Neil, 7–8, 11, 15, 17, 32, 34, 37; “The Horrors of One-Handed Pianism,” 34 Lesbian, 62, 102–103 Levovitz, Mordechai, 122 Liberal education, 138, 154 Linguistic disability, 155. See also Linguistic handicap Linguistic handicap, 152, 156, 165. See also Language disability; Language impairment; Linguistic disability Linguistics, 12, 85, 144 Linton, Simi, 7–8 Little Anthony (and the Imperials), 59–60, 62 Little Richard, 59–60 Living My Song, 49 Longmore, Paul, 168 “Lookism,” 32 Lorca, Garcia, 58 Lubavitch, 123–127; Music in Lubavitcher Life (Ellen Koskoff ), 124. See also Hasidic Jews Lubet, Alex, 8, 20–21, 26, 28, 31–32, 40–41, 70–72, 76, 95–96, 121, 134–135, 139, 142, 150, 157, 159–160, 165, 167–168 Lubet, Steven, 28 Lucas, Lazy Bill, 71 Lute (musical instrument), 70, 72 Lymon, Frankie (and the Teenagers), 59, 62 Lynch, David, 56, 59–61. See also Twin Peaks Madonna, 56, 59 Maimonides, Moses, 123 Major life activities (Americans with Disabilities Act), 16, 18–19, 22–23, 26, 35, 57–58. See also ADA Amendments Act; Americans with Disabilities Act

Manhattan School of Music, 153 Manheim, James, 28 Margalit, Avishai, 83 Marginalization, 6, 31, 36, 38, 94, 166–167 Martha’s Vineyard, 76 Marxism, 90, 94. See also Communism Masculinity studies, 94, 96 Mashinee, Abdul Rashin, 112 Massachusetts, 131 Matisoff, Susan, 70 McClary, Susan, 158; Feminine Endings, 158 McLaughlin, John, 47 McTell, Blind Willie, 71 Medical ethnomusicology, 9 Medical model (of disability), 168, 170 Medical Problems of Performing Artists 4, 141. See also Performing Arts Medicine Association Meiji era, 72. See also Japan Mencimer, Stephanie, 26 Mendelssohn, Felix, 40 Mental health, 101 Mental illness, 22, 127–129, 136, 142 Merriam, Alan, 70, 98–99, 107–108; The Anthropology of Music, 70, 98 Midget, 60–61 Miles, M., 70, 74 Mindess, Anna, 74 Mingus, Charles, 52, 66 Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, 112. See also Taliban Minneapolis, 71, 162–163 Minnesota, 2, 104, 159–163 Minstrel(s), 72–74, 84, 86–87 Miracle Worker, The, 93 Miranti, Riyana, 106 Mithen, Steven, 103, 155, 167, 169; The Singing Neanderthals, 103 Mitzvot (commandments), 126 Model minority, 48 Modernism, 83–84, 128 Monarchy, 94 Montgomery, Wes, 47, 65 Moser, Bob, 102

Index / 195

Moss, Stephen, 108–109 Mullah Omar, 112. See also Taliban Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System (Henry Kingsbury), 95 Musical instruments. See individual instruments Musicality, 6, 12, 38, 42, 67, 71, 79, 91–92, 95–109, 113, 116, 121, 132, 164 Music education, 7, 9, 11–12, 17–18, 40 65, 97, 147, 153. See also Education Musician’s dystonia, 15. See also Focal dystonia Music in Lubavitcher Life (Ellen Koskoff), 124 Musicking (Christopher Small), 77–78 Musicology, 8–9, 39, 134, 143, 158–159 Music therapy, 7, 9, 111 Muslim, 12, 69, 75, 78–79, 82–84, 111, 116–117, 119, 160, 162. See also Islam Napoleon complex, 95 Nation, The, 116 National Council on Disability, 22 National Federation of the Blind, 86 National Jewish Population Survey, 131 National Resource Center for Blind Musicians, 86 National Symphony, 26 Nazi, 22, 48 Nelson, Willie, 47 Nettl, Bruno 3, 7, 9, 10, 15, 33, 36, 39–40, 86, 105, 138–139. See also Heartland Excursions Neumayr, Anton, 14, 22, 33, 40, 51 Neuroscience, 9, 79, 95–97, 99, 103, 106, 144, 169 Newman, Robert, 72 New Orleans, 72 Newport, Elissa, 144, 169 News, The (Pakistan), 112–113 New York, 63, 75–76 New York Times, 60, 108, 110 “No Burka!” (song), 117–118 Normal(cy) (as a concept in disability studies), 21, 27, 30, 137, 151, 156–157, 164

Norton, A., 106 Notation (of music), 10, 43, 71, 73, 75, 79, 87, 96, 158, 160 Oberlin Conservatory, 154 Occidentalism, 83 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 16, 35. See also Supreme Court; Toyota v. Williams Oedipus, 70, 93 “Offensive Ethnic Clichés in Movies: Drugs, Sex, and Servility” (Stuart Fischoff et al.), 151 Office of English Language Acquisition, 152 Omaha, 78 Oman, 77–78. See also Royal Orchestra Symphony Orchestra One-hand(ed) (piano), 11, 14–15, 17, 21, 25, 33–34, 36–38, 44, 50, 141, 160, 166–167; “The Horrors of One-Handed Pianism” (Neil Lerner), 34 Online (discussion groups), 5, 72, 83, 119, 122, 128. See also Internet; individual groups Ono, Yoko, 56, 59–60 On-the-job injuries, 26, 28, 30–31. See Workers’ Compensation Oral Law, 122, 127, 131. See also Judaism; Talmud Orchestra. See Symphony Orientalism, 83, 162 Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, 75–76, 78 Orthodox Judaism. See Judaism Osteogenesis imperfecta (“glass bone disease”), 43 Other (Othered, Otherness, Othering), 6, 9, 37, 61–63, 66, 82, 94, 101, 124, 137–138, 140, 143, 156–157, 161–163, 166 Ott, Katherine, 16, 70 Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective), 169 Overy, K., 95–96 Pain (physical), 2, 4, 23, 25, 28, 169 Pain and suffering, 27–28

196 \ Index

Pakistan, 12, 102, 109, 111, 113–114, 118, 120, 121, 132 Paraplegia, 68 Parlan, Horace, 11, 44, 51–58, 64, 66–68, 167 Pascual-Leone, A., 95 Pashto (Pashtun), 114, 116, 119. See also Afghanistan Paul, Les, 47 Pedagogy, 140–143, 145–148, 161, 164 Pedophilia (pedophile), 127, 131 People with disabilities (PWDs), 6, 8, 11, 16, 21, 32, 35, 41–43, 48–49, 51–52, 54, 65–67, 71, 77, 87, 90, 96, 139, 155, 159, 162 Performing Arts Medicine Association 4, 141. See also Medical Problems of Performing Artists Peripheral blindness, 95 Perlman, Itzhak, 21, 29, 31, 67 Personal-injury law, 27–28, 30 Personnel Policy Service, 29 Pesci, Joe, 62–63 Petrucciani, Michel, 43 Phakiti, Aek, 161–162 “Phantom Fingers: The Case of the One-Armed Pianist” (Oliver Sacks), 38 Physical blemishes 19. See also Physical disability Physical disability (physical impairment, physical blemishes), 4, 11, 14, 19, 40, 42–44, 52, 58, 63–65, 68–69, 86, 89, 108, 136, 155, 160, 164 Physical impairment. See Physical disability Pine, Rachel Barton, 28–31 Pipes (musical instrument), 72 Pisetsky, David, 37 Poland, 36 Polio, 21, 52, 54, 67 Postmodernism, 94, 162 Pratt, J., 129 Pre-Rabbinic Judaism, 19. See also Judaism Pribek, John, 52 Prokofiev, Sergei, 33 Proper Path Guild. See Todoza Prosthetic, 21, 28, 49

Protestantism, 101. See also Christianity Psychiatric survivor, 169 Psychiatry, 101, 129, 132 Psychology, 9–10, 34, 38, 40–42, 95, 97, 103, 115, 136, 151 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 108 Punk (rock), 58–59, 99 PWDs. See People with disabilities Pyschiatric survivor movement, 169 Qasr al-Nour (school), 83 Quasthoff, Thomas, 31, 34 Queer sexuality, 92–93, 103, 105–106, 113–114 Queer studies, 101 Quintet of the Hot Club of France, 45, 47, 65 Rabbinic Judaism, 19–20, 127. See also Judaism Race, 4–5, 12, 31, 35–37, 39, 43–44, 48, 61, 66–67, 93, 96, 99–101, 124, 136–137, 143, 146, 151–152, 154, 156–157, 160–161, 164, 166–167, 169 Rape, 126–127. See also Sexual assault; Sexual predator; Sexual violence Rashid, Ahmad, 112 Ravel, Maurice, 33 Ray, Johnny, 62–63 Real Time Captioning (RTC), 73 Reed, Lou, 56, 59 Reed, Susan, 35, 38 Rehabilitation, 7, 28, 38, 45, 54 Rehnquist, William, 35 Reich, Howard, 36, 54 Reich, Steve, 120 Reid, Vernon, 47 Reinhardt, Django, 4, 11, 44–58, 61, 64–68, 89 Rejected Body, The (Susan Wendell), 169 Religion, 12, 39, 82–83, 89, 108, 131, 133, 160–161. See also Buddhism; Christianity; Islam; Judaism Religious law. See Halacha; Islamic law; Jewish law; Sharia Renn, Aaron, 28 Reyes, Adelaida, 83, 163

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Right-handedness, 14, 47, 49, 52–54, 102 Ritz, David, 56, 58–59, 61–63; Faith in Time, 59 Roberts, John, 16. See also Supreme Court; Toyota v. Williams Robinson, Smokey, 62 Rolfing Structural Integration, 38 Roma, 46, 48, 50. See also Gypsy Romanticism, 87 Roseman, Marina, 9 Rosenfeld, Dovid, 127–128, 131 Roughgarden, Joan, 102, 105–106, 169 Royal Orchestra Symphony Orchestra, 78, 87. See also Oman Sabri, Mustafa, 79–80 Sacks, Oliver, 11, 14–15, 17, 21, 24, 33, 37–38, 54, 71–72, 79, 86, 95–96, 100; “Phantom Fingers: The Case of the One-Armed Pianist,” 38 Sahar, Lima, 116 Said, Edward, 83 Saigon, 83 Santana, Carlos, 47 Sarinda (musical instrument), 112 Saudi Arabia, 113, 166 Savant, 96 Schenker, Heinrich, 139 Schiavo, Terry, 96 Schlaug, Gottfried, 95–96, 99, 102, 106 Schmitz, Alexander, and Peter Maier, 46 Schneerson, Menachem (the Lubavitcher Rebbe), 126–127 Schoenberg, Arnold, 134. See also Second Viennese School Schumann, Robert, 14–17, 21–22, 26–28, 31, 33, 35, 37, 40, 51 Schuur, Diane, 44, 70 Schuyler, Phillip, 75–76, 79–81, 88, 163 Scott, James V. (“Little” Jimmy), 11, 44, 56–67, 160 Second-language acquisition (SLA), 144–145, 161, 169 Second Viennese School, 134. See also Schoenberg, Arnold Seligman, Katherine, 106 Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:30), 38–40

Sex offender, 92, 129–130 Sexual assault, 126, 129. See also Rape Sexuality studies, 56, 90, 101 Sexual orientation, 93, 100, 102–103 139 Sexual predator (predation), 12, 125–126, 131–132, 161. See also Rape Sexual violence, 124–125, 126, 130, 132–133. See also Rape Shaban, Hana, 81 Shah, Qasim, 112–113 Shakespeare, Tom, 90–91, 168 Shaman, 87 Shankar, Ravi, 59 Sharia (Islamic law), 12, 132. See also Islam; Islamic law Shearing, George, 44, 70 Sheldon, J. P., 102, 106 Shepp, Archie, 52 Shetut (madness), 127–128 Shi’ia (Islam), 111, 118–119. See also Islam Shiloah, Amnon, 121–123 Shin, Jung-Sun, 150 Siddique, Abubakar, 113, 120 Sign language, 72–73, 84–86. See also American Sign Language Simkin, Benjamin, 139 Sin, 38–39, 127, 130–131, 133 Singing Neanderthals, The (Steven Mithen), 103 Sins of Omission (Carol Goodman Kaufman), 133 SLA. See Second-language acquisition Slobin, Mark, 8–9 Small, Christopher 3, 7, 9, 23, 32–33, 36, 55, 74, 77–79, 82, 86, 97, 99, 105, 109, 138. See also Musicking Social confluence, 1–4, 8–12, 14–16, 34, 36, 51, 64, 69, 85, 89, 92, 95, 104, 150–151, 154, 157, 159, 164. See also Confluence; Social confluence theory Social confluence theory, 1–2, 4, 8–12 Social construction, 5, 39, 48, 92–94; of disability 4, 15, 19, 20, 40, 150, 155, 159, 167–168, 170; of musicality, 100; of talent 103

198 \ Index

Social Darwinism, 39, 77 Social model of disability, 4–7, 89–93 Social model theory, 5–7; of disability 89–93 Society for Disability Studies, 4, 138 Sociobiology, 94 Sociopathy, 92, 125, 127, 132, 164 Solomon, Andrew, 108–110, 112; “An Awakening from the Nightmare of the Taliban,” 109 Source, The (Jimmy Scott), 63 South Africa, 98 Southern (U. S.), 68 South Korea, 143, 148, 161, 163, 166 Soviet Union, 36, 99, 132 Special education, 7, 79, 154, 162, 168 Speech dysfluency, 68. See also Stuttering Spin (magazine), 118 Spina bifida, 68 Standard repertoire (in classical music), 33, 55 Stanford University, 105 Stelling, Jeff, 49 Stereotype, 93, 152 Stevens, Milt, 26 Straus, Joseph, 7–8 Strauss, Richard, 65; Der Rosenkavalier (opera), 65 Sturm, Mike, 122 Stuttering, 68. See also Speech dysfluency Sudan, 84 Sufi (Islam), 118–119. See also Islam Sullivan, Annie, 83 Sunni (Islam), 111, 118. See also Islam “Supercrip,” 21, 40, 48, 51, 55, 61, 66, 139 Supreme Court (U.S.), 13, 16, 22, 35, 136 Suzuki, Shinichi, 99 Symphony (orchestra), 3, 23, 25, 36, 55, 67, 69, 75–80, 82, 87, 135, 160, 162–163, 167. See also individual orchestras Syracuse University, 81 Taitz, Emily, 122 Taiwan, 36, 143, 148, 161

Talent, 12, 92, 95–99, 103–105, 113, 120, 139–140, 164, 167; Music, Talent, and Performance: A Conservatory Cultural System (Henry Kingsbury), 95 Taliban, 12, 89, 91–92, 96, 100, 102, 108–121, 130, 132–133, 161, 164, 166. See also Afghanistan; Pakistan Talmud (Talmudic), 20, 70, 89, 122, 126–129, 131–132, 164–165. See also Judaism; Oral Law; Torah Tan Dun, 149; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (film), 149 Tarana (Taliban chant), 119 Tarone, Elaine, 145 Tate, Jeffrey, 29, 31 Tatum, Art, 52, 70 Taylor, Steven, 150 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, 36; competition, 36 Temple (Judaism), 19–20, 38, 121. See also Judaism Terry, Sonny, 71 Thomas, Gary, 139 Thought Provoker (online discussion group), 83 Tillis, Mel, 68 Tiny Tim, 93 Titon, Jeff Todd, 8, 71. See also Worlds of Music Todoza (Proper Path Guild), 74 Torah, 20, 101, 122, 126–128. See also Judaism; Talmud Toronto Symphony, 49 Tort law, 28 Toyota v. Williams (Toyota Motor Mfg, Ky., Inc. v. Williams), 16–17, 22, 35, 37. See also O’Connor, Sandra Day; Roberts, John; Supreme Court; Williams, Ella Transgender, 102 Transsexual(ity) (TS), 93, 101, 106 Trehub, Sandra, 106, 115 Tremain, Shelley, 150, 155 Tristano, Lennie, 44 Tritos, Nicholas, 57 TS (Transsexual), 101–102, 105. See also Transsexuality

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Turrentine, Stanley, 52 Twin Peaks (David Lynch), 60 Tznius (modesty; also tzniut), 125–129, 131. See also Beautiful Within: A Modesty in Concept and Dress as Taught by the Lubavitcher Rebbe; Hasidic Jews; Lubavitch; Schneerson, Menachem UID. See Universal Instructional Design Ukraine, 72–74, 84, 86–87 UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees), 119 Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, 155 United Kingdom (UK), 90. See also Britain United States (of America), 12, 13, 18, 22, 29, 34, 36, 45, 48, 49, 54, 68, 71, 81, 86, 87, 90, 108, 130, 131, 139, 149, 155 Universal (musical) ability, 98 Universal Instructional Design (UID), 141–142, 145–146, 148–149 University of Minnesota, 2, 138–142, 148, 156, 159, 165; Disability Services, 2–3, 141–142 University of Nebraska–Kearney, 49 UNK One-Handed Woodwinds Program, 49 U.S. Census (Bureau), 68 Valente, Judy, 28 Valli, Frankie, 62–63 Vancouver Symphony, 49 Veltri, Dan, 74 Venda, 98 Vienna Philharmonic, 79 Viet Cong, 83 Vietnam, 83, 163 Violin, 21, 28–29, 34, 45, 49, 65, 67, 75 VSA Arts, 49

Wagner, Gottfried, 139 Wagner, Richard, 139 Wahabi(sm), 113, 166. See also Islam Ward, K., 106 Watson, Nicholas, 90–91, 168 Wendell, Susan, 150, 152, 157, 165–167, 169; The Rejected Body, 169 Western classical music. See Classical music; individual musicians White, Josh, 87 White House, 49 Whiteness studies, 94, 96 “Who Put the The in The Novel?” (Lennard Davis), 84 Williams, Ella, 16–17, 35, 37. See also Supreme Court; Toyota v. Williams Williams, Hank, 68 Williams Syndrome, 96 Wilson, Robin, 140 Wilson, Teddy, 52 Wimmer, Bill, 52–53 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 14 Wittgenstein, Paul, 14, 17, 21, 26, 30, 33, 36, 38, 54 Wizard of Oz, The, 159, 161, 166 Wolf-Wendel, L., 106 Women’s studies, 90, 96. See also Feminist studies Wonder, “Little” Stevie, 59–60, 62 Wong, Deborah, 9 Woodstock, 170 Woodwind (instruments), 49 Workers’ Compensation, 2, 26–29, 50 Worlds of Music (Jeff Todd Titon), 8, 62, 71 World War I, 14 World War II, 45, 48, 74 Wurzburger, Walter, 103, 109 Yale University, 49, 156–157 Yeung, E., 22–23, 107 Yusufzai, Rahimullah, 113, 120–121