Conference Agenda

When musicology first began engaging with the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and media studies, virtuosity may have seemed the least likely of topics to benefit. After all, the dominant paradigm for virtuosity—the “Liszt Model” (Deaville 2014)—assumes the liveness of a recital context and an idealized performing body that surpasses some threshold of ability or display and thereby overwhelms audiences. Yet, in recent years, scholars of virtuosity have increasingly recognized the salience of disability and media in skilled performance; in some cases the difference between backgrounded musical skill and foregrounded musical virtuosity lies precisely in the presence of disability or the intervention of media. Drawing on a range of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies, this roundtable addresses how disability and virtuosity—as both embodied and fundamentally social phenomena—shape the experience and expression of musical and social worlds. Each presenter differently tracks these “interlocking corporeal performances” of virtuosity and disability (Honisch 2019) through ubiquitous, if rarely foregrounded, layers of media and technological mediation.

Stefan Sunandan Honisch considers disability in piano competitions and public concert life, counterposing “agonistic virtuosity” and “vulnerable virtuosity” as theoretical and analytical frames. Whereas agonistic virtuosity not only normalizes but valorizes severe ability, vulnerable virtuosity embraces collaborative access and sociability. Benjamin Oyler reflects on the “woodshed” of jazz guitarist Pat Martino, whose surgery on a congenital arteriovenous malformation led to postoperative amnesia and a subsequent quest for lost virtuosity in his own recorded archive. Molly Joyce will address the intersection of disability and music technology in contemporary composition. Various new music technologies allow musicians to imagine new performance styles that cater to disability aesthetics, all in pursuit of creating virtuosity from disability. Rachel Gain examines rhythm tap dancers whose “instrument” is modified by physical disability. They consider how audiovisual presentations of tap produce an aesthetic of virtuosity by rendering visible bodily limitations navigated in musical performance. David VanderHamm will discuss “downhome virtuosity” in early country music, including radio star Emory Martin, promoted as “the world’s best one-armed banjo player.” Blake Howe will serve as respondent, further tying together the threads that run through each speaker’s contribution.