Music and Disability

Catalog description

This course introduces students to key concepts in the interdisciplinary field of disability studies for investigating embodied variations in musical practices. Through course discussions, lecture, assignments, and readings, students will learn how to analyze musical texts through a disability lens, asking what we can know and learn about disability through music and sound. Likewise, students will also examine how disabled bodyminds challenge ideas about musicality, beauty, skill, virtuosity, performance, and creativity. Topics covered will include sociocultural models of disability; disability aesthetics and musical representation; racial, gendered, and classed intersectional analysis; blindness, deafness, and Deaf culture; prosthesis and technology; aging and old composers, performers, creators, and listeners; history of eugenics; trauma studies, and depression. Students interested in issues of disability in music cultures, performance, composition, music industry, and advocacy are encouraged to enroll. All are welcome.