This paper offers a broadly applicable model for atonal voice leading, a model of pitch-class counterpoint to connect any two harmonies. Voice leadings are evaluated by three criteria: (1) uniformity: the extent to which the voices move by the same interval distance and thus approach traditional transposition; (2) balance: the extent to which the voices move by the same index number and thus approach traditional inversion; and (3) smoothness: the extent to which the voices travel the shortest possible distance. The most uniform, most balanced, or smoothest way of moving from one set to another in pitch-class space, or from one set class to another in a proposed voiceleading space, provides a standpoint from which to assess any specific compositional realization in pitch space.

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<p>People with a particular profile of strengths and weaknesses&mdash;typically involving prodigious skill in one area (such as calendar or arithmetical calculation, art, or music) and a general &ldquo;mental deficiency&rdquo;&mdash;have long been categorized as &ldquo;idiots savants,&rdquo; or with other, similar labels.&nbsp; It is the goal of this paper to dismantle this category in all of its terminological manifestations by deconstructing both the &ldquo;idiocy&rdquo; and the &ldquo;savantism&rdquo; that underpin it.&nbsp; In its place, I focus instead on people with autism, who typically have special interests and activities they pursue intensively and skillfully: people identified as savants are mostly autistic, and autistic people usually have some sort of special interest or skill.&nbsp; For the idiot savant, the savant skill is understood to emerge <em>in spite of</em> the general lack of intelligence.&nbsp; For the autistic person, the special interests or skills arise not in spite of the autism but precisely <em>because of it</em>: autism enables the skill; the skill makes the autism visible.&nbsp; Instead of enfreaking people as super-crips, I propose to celebrate them in a realistic mode, as autistic people who are good at things.</p><p>Keywords: Idiot savant,&nbsp;savant syndrome, autism.&nbsp;</p>

The emerging interdisciplinary field of disability studies takes as its subject matter the historical, social, and cultural construction of disability. After a brief introduction to disability studies, this article explores the interconnected histories of disability and music as they are manifested in three theoretical approaches to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Western art music (the musical Formenlehre and the tonal theories of Schoenberg and Schenker) and in three works by Beethoven and Schubert. Around the turn of the nineteenth century in Western Europe, disability began to be understood not as something natural and permanent but rather as a deviation from a normative standard, and thus subject to possible remediation. In the same time and place, art music also underwent a significant shift (reflected in the more recent theoretical traditions that have grown up around it), one that involved an increasing interest in rhetorically marked deviations from diatonic and formal normativity, and the possibility of their narrative recuperation. The article describes ways in which language about music and music itself may be understood both to represent and construct disability. More generally, it suggests that disability should take its place alongside nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexual orientation as a significant category for cultural analysis, including the analysis of music.

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