I just gave a talk called "Dark Blue World" on the blind Czech composer Jaroslav Jezek. His most characteristic tune is actually called "Dark Blue World" and forms a kind of triple pun on the blues, darkness, and the actual shades Jezek could see. I'm working this and some other Jezek related topics into a larger project.

Even though it's an unconventional notion of disability, I'm working on another project called "Musselmann and Music" about the most marginzalized and disabled prisoners in concentration camps, and in particular, the creation and performance of a song about them written in the camps by Alexander Kulisiewicz.

I'm doing some "Late style" work as well. I published on Janacek's late style in The Gerontologist

I wrote a musical composition about epilepsy, inspired by my daughter, who has seizures every day. It's a multimedia composition that uses artwork by people with epilepsy, called "When the Spirit Catches You ...". The CD version of this piece is available now (w/o the artwork) at http://www.meyer-media.com. The DVD version (with the artwork) will be released soon (pending funding). This artwork, and the friendships that I developed with these visual artists, convinced me that their art was intimately connected with their condition. Their works are both inspirational and disturbing, and they were the guiding light for much of my music.

Theorizing Disability in the Music of Allan Pettersson

Allan Pettersson (1911-1980) was a Swedish composer of formidable distinction active primarily in the third quarter of the 20th century. A beaten child brought up in the slums of Stockholm, he started playing the viola at an early age and eventually turned to composition as well. He made his living as a violist in the Stockholm Philharmonic until severe rheumatoid arthritis forced early retirement from the orchestra. The condition led eventually to wheelchair confinement. A bout with cancer resulted in extensive hospitalization later on. He remained active as a composer throughout these ordeals, his music explicitly reflecting psychological, physical, spiritual, and even political issues that may make him an ideal subject for Disability Studies in music. He left 16 massive symphonies, two violin concertos, a viola concerto, three large concertos for string orchestra, an important song cycle, and several other works of consequence. Pettersson is considered a national hero in Sweden, and has generated substantial scholarly and performance activity both there and in Germany. He is known in the US primarily to record collectors, though he made a brief public splash in this country with the release of his Seventh Symphony conducted by Antal Dorati on a well distributed London LP in the 70s; his Eighth Symphony was recorded by Sergiu Comissiona with the Baltimore Symphony on Deutsche Grammophon and released shortly after his death. His complete works are available on German and Swedish labels and may be easily obtained here. Pettersson's compositions are striking and bring up numerous provocative issues for music theorists. My paper will begin with an introductory overview of Pettersson's symphonic output in relation to the various musical manifestations of disability that may or may not be present in these works. There does exist considerable skepticism in the literature regarding analytical activity that seeks to consider the extramusical connections in this composer's output. As I view these connections to be at some level essential to the works' thorough consideration, these notions will be scrutinized, as will the pieces' reception histories in relation to these issues. Part Two will examine some of the burgeoning recent (mostly German) scholarship on Pettersson and its stance on the potential relation between events in the music itself and the biographical facts. Part Three will examine selected passages mainly from the Sixth Symphony and Second Violin Concerto, and a conclusion will suggest avenues for future research.

My research builds upon Professor Straus' article "Normalizing the Abnormal: Disability in Music and Music Theory." My discussion focusses on physical impairment and how it impacts instrumental performance, specifically at an advanced (ie university and beyond) level. My aim is to move beyond special education and music therapy paradigms. I am hoping to encourage a move towards what Professor Straus describes as a narrative of disability accomodated, which I think has particular relevance to instrumental performance. I argue that distinguishing between the physical fact of impairment, and the negative barriers of disability is a crucial first step in being able to use the impaired body (as I do) to play an instrument. Rather than being threatening, the physical facts of impairment remain neutral, and are accomodated within a technical/artistic approach.

Notational Systems and Conceptualizing Music: a case study of print and braille notation

College music courses that include visually impaired students present challenges that can baffle not only teachers but also sophisticated disability support personnel. The study of music theory is particularly problematic in that it centers at many levels on notation, with students learning to mediate between audible sounds and the visual depiction of those sounds. While one might assume that blind students can simply depend on tactile representations of music in the form of braille notation to function in the place of printed scores, in practice the two systems signify music very differently. Whereas print notation acts as a graphic image of music providing symbols that make direct, one-to-one mappings of many of our musical concepts like pitch and beat groups, braille is an alphabetic code that describes music using combinations of letters and other symbols derived from the 63 possible configurations of the 6-dot braille cell. Moreover, sighted teachers, at a loss for alternatives, often ask visually impaired students to respond to classroom instruction in the terms prescribed by print notation. Thus, both teachers and blind students end up navigating a complex, three-part interaction between music perception, printed scores, and braille music code.

Drawing on recent developments in cognitive studies, this paper seeks to add to the ongoing discovery of how music notation systems result from, as well as constrain, the ways in which human beings think about music. An examination of the metaphorical notions that underlie both types of notation provides a basis for understanding some of the differences between modes of representation. Examples drawn from activities undertaken in the music theory classroom highlight these differences, with special focus on analysis, part-writing, and "sight" singing.

I'm currently editing a special forum of Review of Disability Studies on disability and music. My own contribution will be an article on guitarist and inventor Les Paul. I recent gave a paper on Bob Dylan and disability that, further down the line, will serve as the template for a book.

My essay "Richard Wagner and Disability Studies" will be out soon in Richard Wagner for the New Millennium: Essays in Music and Culture (Palgrave), edited by Gottfried Wagner, Matt Bribitzer-Stull, and Alex Lubet.

Colleagues may be interested to read "In the Key of Genius: The Extraordinary Life of Derek Paravicini", published in the UK by Hutchinson and available from internet outlets such as amazon.co.uk. Derek, now 27 years old is an exceptionally talented pianist, despite being blind and having severe learning difficulties. The book relates Derek's development as a musician and a young man, and deals with a range of issues relating to disability and music.

Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata, First Movement, and the Normal Body: The Idea of Formal Prosthesis

My paper explores the discourse surrounding certain 'extrinsic' formal areas such as codas, slow introductions and interpolations in relation to the 'normal musical bodies' to which they are appended. Taking Joe Straus's critique of Formenlehre tradition, and his analyses of Beethoven and Schubert major key sonata movements, (JAMS 59:1, 2006) as a point of departure, I develop the idea of formal prosthesis as a rhetorical narrative strategy in Beethoven. The present paper (presented recently at Rocky Mountain AMS/SMT) confines itself to a discussion of the first movement of the Pathétique sonata, where the passages marked Grave enact such as prosthesis by virtue of their "otherness" and the manner in which they carry, and are carried by, the normative musical body. While this movement may provide one example among many, particularly in Beethoven's output, the idea of formal prosthesis is not dependant upon a distortion of normative form. On the contrary, the very idea of normative form and of normativity itself is, as disability scholars have argued, entirely dependant on the existence of material differences. As the paper expands, I intend to explore many of the commonly remarked upon Beethoven codas that have been under scrutiny since Kerman and Rosen's scholarly exchange of more than two decades ago.

One important strand within this paper is the consideration of 18th and 19th Century form and form theory in relation to biological models of embryonic development and especially the rise of Teratology. In general usage, teratology refers to the study of unusual formations and births found in nature. In earlier centuries teratology simply marked a fascination with anomalies in both the plant and animal worlds, but as biology became increasingly organized as a discipline in the 18th and 19th centuries, it also began to exert an increasing control over human bodies in a complex set of relations that Michel Foucault has called the emergence of biopower. By 1840, biology had undergone a major transformation when Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire created a 'new science', which he called teratology. Its purpose was specifically the classification and study of anomalous human births in order to understand and control how both normal and pathological bodies came into being during embryonic development.

In the final part of this paper I attempt to problematize the idea of rhetorical/formal prosthesis in order to avoid it becoming a fashionable synonym for the same old structuralist parsing of form that I am interested in critiquing. In order to do this I propose a seemingly contradictory model for viewing extrinsic areas as simultaneously acting as 'phantom limbs' and as prostheses. This plays upon memory and especially memory in relation to embodiment. I cite Merleau-Ponty's discussion of anosognosia in Phenomenology of Perception as an example for how such a seeming contradiction may become a means for avoiding Cartesian binary oppositions. This aspect of the paper is presently rendered in purely speculative terms and will need to be demonstrated through musical examples as the work proceeds.

I'll be contributing an article on Connie Boswell to Popular Music's special edition on music and disability studies - an extended and reworked version of the paper I gave at Seattle - that uses Rosemarie Garland Thomson's "rhetorics of disability" to analyse both the production and reception of the Boswell Sisters' music (and, by association, 20s and 30s jazz).

Disability and the "Late Style" in Music. The "late style" is a longstanding aesthetic category in all of the arts. Music in the "late style" is presumed to have certain internal qualities (such as fragmentation, intimacy, nostalgia, or concision) and to be associated with certain external factors (such as the age of the composer, his or her proximity to and foreknowledge of death, lateness within a historical period, or a sense of authorial belatedness with respect to significant predecessors). Upon closer inspection, it appears that many of these external factors are unreliably correlated with a musical style that might be described as late. Late style is better correlated with the bodily or mental condition of the composer: Most composers who write in what is recognized as a late style have shared experiences of non-normative bodily or mental function, that is, of impairment and disability. Composers inscribe their disabilities in their music, and the result is often correlated with what is generally called "late style." I explore this argument through close readings of three modernist works: Stravinsky, Requiem Canticles; Schoenberg, String Trio; and Bartók, Third Piano Concerto. In each case, I contend that the features of these works generally understood as markers of lateness are better understood in relation to the disabled bodies of their composers.