Extraordinary Measures

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