Historically, people with Williams Syndrome (WS), a rare form of neurodivergence, have been fetishized as musical savants. However, through my decade of collaborating with this community, I have observed most people with WS have an innate musicality that departs from traditional definitions of musical talent. This unique ability to engage in creative and emotional expression with others through musical means in manifested through a unique music phenotype termed “Williams music.” In this presentation, I utilize ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a summer music camp for children with Williams Syndrome to examine the development of new music curriculum that centers the cultural, creative, and physiological needs of these campers. Drawing upon ethnographic interviews with music leadership, facilitators, and teenage musicians with WS and in conjunction with autoethnographic reflections, I explore how this curriculum creates sustainable, adaptable, and accessible music programming by foregrounding the creative agency of the campers while providing adaptive instruments and music notation. This longitudinal research builds upon the growing work of music and disability studies scholars (Bakan, Dell’Antonio, Jensen-Moulton, Straus) and serves as a case study for exploring how valuing musicality over traditional ideas of musical talent can create opportunities for neurodivergent musicians to participate in the creation of musical culture. In addition to furthering applied ethnomusicological research on music and neurodivergence, such findings have important implications for the field of music education as they demonstrate that aspects of this adaptive curriculum can be utilized to create inclusive and accessible music environments for neurodivergent musicians more broadly.

As a disabled independent scholar and first time SEM attendee, I will discuss the ways that increased virtual access has facilitated both my conference participation and my continued scholarly work. I will also argue that, while it is a vital component of access, simply setting up video conferencing is not enough for me and other disabled independent scholars to be on equal footing with our colleagues who have institutional support. My identities and position shape not only the format in which I participate, but also the content of my work, the sources I have access to, and my writing process. Following Emily Roberts in her assertion that all scholarship is embodied, I examine the ways that I navigate participation in a musicological field that does not often make explicit space for disabled and academically unaffiliated perspectives. Drawing on disabled activists and scholars such as Sara Acevedo and Cal Montgomery who nuance ideas of access and belonging, I explore what it means not only to include me and other independent scholars, but to make space for non-normative scholarship.

“Would you believe there are some people in this choir who don’t read music?” This veteran chorister’s offhand remark both invoked and troubled one of the core normative assumptions about people who sing in Western art music choirs. Even in unauditioned, community-based choral societies, choristers are expected to sing from notated scores. Members of these choirs feel that this elevates them above other local community choirs. In practice, however, the level of “musical literacy” in these choirs is variable, and “note-bashing”—the joyless repetition of passages to achieve accuracy—occurs often. Recognising this, choir leaders encourage members to make use of assistive technologies like rehearsal tracks, which are welcomed by some and derided by others. In this presentation, I examine the objects and processes of musical literacy in the choral society as “technologies of the self”: that is, tools by which individuals transform their minds and bodies to attain an aspirational state (Foucault 1997). Using ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Melbourne choral societies, I argue that the act of reading music is idealised as a means of “performing abledness”, with the musical score signifying the highest state of the choral art. In doing so, I use critical disability theory to articulate the stakes of reading music and the consequences for choristers who do not. Problematising the concept of musical literacy in this fashion is just one step in revealing how insidiously ableist normativities shape hitherto accepted divides between “community” and “professional” musicians in the Western art music world.