The new, interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on its social construction and shifting attention from biology to culture. Within music, disability has been shown to be a core feature of the musical identity of music makers (especially composers and performers), often an identity that is affirmatively claimed in the face of widespread stigma. It has also inflected reception of the lives and work of composers and performers. Although music is a famously nonrepresentational art form, scholars have shown that musical works represent disability in various ways. Furthermore, music has proven a fertile ground for exploring the contention within Disability Studies that disability (like gender) can be understood as a performance: something you do rather than something you are. In all of these ways, disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture.
The essays in this volume share a theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction. Disability is shown to be a core feature of the musical identity of music makers (especially composers and performers), something that affects their lives and works and their public reception. Music represents disability in various ways and affirms the notion that disability is a performance, something you do rather than something you are. These essays make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity. They also address an important lacuna within a Disability Studies that has mostly overlooked music as a medium through which disability can be constructed. Indeed, as much as a cultural understanding of disability can teach us about music, music also has much to teach us about the culture of disability.
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