Conference Agenda

The association between music and visual disability has been a constant throughout history in a variety of cultures. From the Greco-Roman period, visual disability has been associated with special musical and mnemotechnic abilities, and music has customarily represented a professional path for people with visual disability. It was usual that blind children were taught how to play a musical instrument to earn a living, which is reflected in the early modern tradition of blind oracioneros, who recited and sang prayers and songs accompanying themselves with plucked or bowed string instruments in return for alms, representing a fundamental element of the soundscape of numerous urban centers in countries such as Italy and Spain.

Likewise, although music notation for blind people and music teaching institutions for them emerged in the eighteenth century, in Spain, as in other European countries, there was a substantial presence of organists who reached recognition and prestige before the eighteenth century and worked at the royal court, universities or ecclesiastical institutions, such as Antonio de Cabezón (1510-1566), Francisco Salinas (1513-1590), Pablo Bruna (1611-1679) or Pablo Nassarre (1650-1730). This paper aims to rethink, from the perspective of disability, the career and historiographical position of early modern Hispanic organists with visual disability, in order to assess how this affected their creative process, their careers, the written transmission of their works, and the reception of their music output by audiences and historians.

In the early modern Hispanic context, the Christian association between blindness and devotion influenced the perception of this disability, so blind musicians were considered to have a profound spiritual capacity to affect the deepest emotions of people through music. This notion of compensation and the binarism between physical disability and intellectual and spiritual overcapacity remained in historiography. Through an analysis of archival documents, testimonies of their contemporaries, and the studies on these musicians published from the nineteenth century onwards, this paper argues that disability not only functioned as a sign of identity for these organists during their careers, but was also used by music historiography to glorify them as emblems of the so-called Spanish musical mysticism.

Since the phenomenological turn of the 1990s, scholars have explicated how Hollywood filmmakers harness image and sound to develop a material connection between the perceiver’s body and the bodies on screen. Phrases such as the film body, the cinematic body, body genres, and the skin of the film aggressively announced the importance of embodiment. As Jonathan Sterne claims, despite this refocused attention, phenomenological arguments frequently ignored impairment and disability by centering a bodymind with full command of its faculties (2021). This study strives to crip our theories of cinematic sound by reimagining phenomenological film theory, specifically the groundbreaking work of Vivian Sobchack (1992), to contend that if films have bodies, then those bodies can be rendered sonically disabled.

Inspired by Michel Chion (1994), this project introduces the concept of rendering disability as a framework to describe how films utilize sound design and the musical score to sonically simulate, stand in for, approximate, and flesh out the phantasmatic disabled figure. The filmic apparatus typically approximates a normative, yet hyper-capable, bodily experience that, in Sobchack’s words, “signifies possibilities and liberation from the disfigured bodies some of us presently live” (163). However, when the disabled bodymind enters frame, filmmakers often choose to aurally reproduce the character’s impaired phenomenology. This sonically disabled body offers presumedly able-bodied audience members a novel, yet disconcerting, proprioceptive episode. According to Arnie Cox’s “mimetic hypothesis,” perceivers, to various levels of consciousness, interpret musical stimuli by imitating the sound within their bodies (2016). Internalizing the character’s musical impairment activates an intense kinesthetic awareness of the stark differences and troubling similarities between the disabled and non-disabled form. To demonstrate, this paper conducts a close reading of the score for I Am Sam (2001). John Powell’s intricately layered electronic ostinatos render several stereotypes of a neurodivergent symptomology. The music’s hyperactive temporalities place perceivers in a brain undergoing sensory overload. This musical stimming may be affectively exhilarating, but it represents a potential to undermine the audience’s capacitated, able-bodied subject position. To resolve this tension, director Jessie Nelson juxtaposed Powell’s score with covers of Beatles tunes to depict the character’s childlike, nonthreatening nature.

On 26 August 1918, the renowned deaf author and activist Henri Gaillard (1866–1939) returned to the specialist school he had attended, the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets de Paris, in which a state-of-the-art ‘speech laboratory’ had recently been installed. Inaugurated in 1912, the Laboratoire de la Parole had come to play an important part in the Institution’s pedagogical practices, just as it was beginning to in therapeutic musical practices: it was there that the deaf and the otherwise vocally disenfranchised came for analysis of their spoken and sung French, for the Laboratoire’s director Hector Marichelle to examine them with the help of his many scientific instruments.

One of most significant of these instruments—as Gaillard reported in La Gazette des Sourds-Muets—was a specially designed phonograph system that could transcribe pupils’ wax cylinder recordings onto paper, thus allowing them to see their own vocal traces and compare them with those of their hearing professors. Over the course of his visit, Gaillard—who sometimes described himself as ‘sourd-parlant’ (‘deaf-speaking’)—made a recording, repeating the words ‘toujours mieux’ (‘ever better’) after Marichelle. In the transcription he saw the effects of his early-in-life hearing loss: a lack of tonal variation.

The transcription of Gaillard’s recording has been lost, but the recording itself survives, one of 228 wax cylinders preserved by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The larger project from which this paper is drawn examines the history of this collection, investigating how it found its way to the BNF and what has happened to it since being digitised and catalogued alongside more straightforward items in the BNF's care. Gaillard’s cylinder, for example, is described as an interaction between professor and pupil rather than two equals, one hearing, the other not—an easy mistake to make, as it follows the same pattern of other sessions featuring ‘impaired’ students and ailing singers and their teachers/therapists, yet one that tells us something striking about the cataloguer’s expectations of what expertise could or should sound like (Holmes 2017). Contextualising Gaillard’s recording in his time and also in ours, this paper considers how d/Deaf histories have been—are still—told through their traces, ‘parlant’ and otherwise.