Conference Agenda

This paper will present findings from a co-creative project that combines performer Niamh Gallagher's research on disabled embodiment with composer Nina Danon’s research on musical neuroqueering, to illuminate the complex interplay between our bodies, minds, and musical practices.

Disabled and neurodivergent voices have long been absent in music research, resulting in a lack of representation of disability musical culture in academia. This study positions embodied musical collaboration as a subversive methodology to address this epistemic injustice. This presentation will examine the co-creative process we developed to foreground the lived realities of our non-normative bodyminds. It will highlight how this disabled embodied practice can reveal the subtle, internal nuances of our experiences, countering the ableist standards of music research.

Reflecting on the findings from our collaboration, we propose a framework for future practice research that seeks to dismantle normative pressure on diverse bodyminds, while investigating the tacit dimensions of neurodivergent and disabled lived realities.

In 2024, Disability Studies scholars Margaret Price and J. Logan Smilges challenged academics to critically reconsider accessibility. According to Smilges, scholars must recenter their attention toward the “ableism of access; or rather, how too concerted a focus on individuals’ access needs distracts from the messier, meaner, and more systemic ways that ableism operates in our world” (2024, p. 4). Price’s Disabled Academics Study echoed this sentiment, revealing how accessibility efforts as practiced in the contemporary university system can worsen inequality for disabled people (2024). These calls to action implore us to critically deconstruct accessibility if we are to theorize accessibility beyond the AMS.

This study, following the lead of Sami Schalk and Eunjung Kim (2020), advocates that music scholars attend to the ideologies of identitarian politics which structure disability instead of solely concentrating on the identity category of disability itself. Specifically, this project thinks through how systems of precarity produce bodies that require access, and how meeting individual access needs does not resolve those precarious systems. Using the musical protests of the ADAPT movement as a case study, I demonstrate how these (dis)abled activists challenge our understanding of access. In 2017, ADAPT staged a sit-in at the offices of congressional representatives to protest Medicaid cuts. Rather than solely demanding access to healthcare, the protesters’ musical rhetoric targeted the capitalistic underpinnings that necessitated the existence of Medicaid. This tactic demonstrates how scholars must identify the precarious systems that organize our academic institutions if we are to envision accessibility beyond the AMS.

Since originating as a discipline in the 19th century, modern voice pedagogy has maintained its foundational grounding in medical and scientific research. Because of these roots and the institutional ableism that excludes many disabled singers from pre-professional study and professional work, there is almost no relevant literature examining voice pedagogy from the perspectives of disability advocacy and disability studies. But these frameworks, focusing on the lived experiences of those with disabilities—who are the experts—are essential for all studio voice teachers as they work toward the removal of access barriers in vocal music.

To address this lacuna, we have created an accessible, multimedia open access educational resource that will be available by Fall 2026. This collection centers writing and videos from disabled singers and voice instructors, as well as related research from other contributors, all sharing experiences and suggestions toward making the singing world more accessible. This virtual presentation will include two 15-minute talks:

The Need for Accessibility in Voice Pedagogy will briefly explore the “compulsory able-

bodiedness” inherent in the roots of modern voice pedagogy, and draw from ethnographic work to illustrate the importance of including accessibility and representing disability in the curriculum for singers and teachers.

A New Resource will offer disability-informed and -affirming frameworks for voice teachers to implement. Our hope is that voice teachers, voice pedagogy instructors, and indeed, all educators will find this content beneficial in their teaching of students in all bodies, not only those with disabilities.

The project “Narrating Music: Captioning the Underscore in Streaming Media” investigates how television’s inconsistently captioned non-lyrical underscore can be made reliably accessible for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing (DHH) audiences. While captions now routinely cover dialogue, lyrics, and sound effects (Gomizelj 2022), descriptions of instrumental music remain erratic, subjective, or entirely absent (Deaville 2024). Yet music is a key carrier of audiovisual meaning (Donnelly 2001), with the conequence that DHH audiences are frequently excluded from a crucial dimension of screen storytelling. “Narrating Music” seeks to address this inequity while also advancing scholarly understanding of how musical meaning can be translated into language.

This collaborative paper intends to introduce the project’s goals and working methods. Drawing on approaches from disability studies, translation studies, and musicology, the paper presents a framework for captioning streaming television that critically examines how captioners can better convey the affective qualities of the non-lyrical underscore to DHH audiences. Thus we propose the development of tools that aid both captioners and audiences at the intersection of word and sound. This project involves the introduction of methods of categorizing existing captions according to musical affect: on the one hand, the creation of a valence/arousal matrix to help practitioners access emotional interpretation, on the other, a lexicon of vocabulary culled from streamed video and subjected to musicological analysis to facilitate accessibility among caption creators and users. In the end we call for continued improvement in streaming services’ guidelines for captioning and provide a framework for improved accessibility practices.

Live music venues remain largely inaccessible – and disabled musicians livelihoods are at risk. Despite varied improvements to ‘better disabled persons access’ to live music venues, the majority of efforts have been focused on audience access, whilst disabled musicians cannot access venue stages. This essentially designates disabled persons as ‘spectators only’ at live music events. Access to culture, work, and personal life are all human rights enshrined in international legislation, yet ¼ of the UK population are actively denied theirs.

Whilst music and disability studies continues to grow as an academic field, this research bridges academic conversations, legislation, industry best practice advice, and disabled persons lived experience within the context of a renown live music city.

Grounded in emancipatory and participatory-leaning methods, this research sought to explore the ways in which we can move forwards, legitimately working to uphold human rights by improving disabled musicians access to live music venues, through conversations with industry experts who are directly involved in the matter – musicians with disabilities and live music venue management teams.

This presentation is the culmination of 3 years doctoral research undertaken in the UNESCO City of Music Glasgow, supported by both faculties in Music Studies and Disability Studies, in working partnership with the Musicians Union.

In conclusion, the research calls for the improved development of best practices in venue design, policy, as well as ensuring shifts in institutional policies to create a more inclusive environment for disabled musicians, which they themselves can perform, create, and thrive.

“I was naturally gay, but subject from my infancy to hypochondriacal or melancholy vapors, which threw a dark shade over my mind,” writes Carlo Goldoni in 1787 of his intimate, life-long struggle with hypochondria. A leading playwright of Italian comic theater in the 18th century, Goldoni is well-known to operatic scholars for his contributions to opera buffa—specifically for his mission to rid comic Italian theater and opera of old conventions based on commedia dell’arte stereotypes. Notwithstanding the considerable critical attention paid to Goldoni’s contribution to long-lived operatic conventions, musicological scholars have thus far overlooked how Goldoni—a Disabled librettist—represents Disability on the operatic stage. Throughout his operatic works, Goldoni channels his tumultuous relationship with Disability into both mocking and empathetic representations of non-normative bodies. My projectt presents a kaleidoscopic image of opera and Disability culture, interweaving musical analysis from Goldonian opera and revisionist interpretation to foreground the real lives and stories of marginalized individuals from the 18th-century.

Throughout my study of Goldoni’s Disabled characters, I focus on two notable representations of Disability: visible physical Disability in Goldoni’s so-called hunchback (or gobbo) characters and Neurodiversity in his so-called mad characters. The presence of Disabled characters in comic theater was relatively new to the 18th century, as Disability was generally considered taboo in the earlier Italian stock character comedies of the 16th and 17th centuries. The few Disabled stock characters that appeared on the commedia dell’arte stage heavily relied on derogatory stereotypes. Goldoni builds upon the improvised Italian theater tradition, challenging conventional understandings of Disabled agency and the stock character system itself. Furthermore, due to Goldoni’s profound ability to create figures with dramatic potency and adaptability, a lineage of Disabled characters later emerges that clearly takes influence from the librettist’s character models. An exploration of Goldoni’s representations of Disability is a necessary addition to operatic scholarship, as his comic representations of difference challenge traditional assumptions surrounding the librettist’s relationship with the commedia dell'arte and fundamentally re-shape modern understandings of the construction of Disabled identity and Disabled characters today.