This paper examines the intersection of voice, hand, and the notion of “aliveness” in late nineteenth-century deaf education. Drawing on pedagogical materials and historical correspondence, I examine American Protestant missionary Annetta Thompson Mills’s school in Chefoo, northern China, where she engaged the hands of deaf Chinese students as delegates of vocalization in speech development and fingerspelling. By teaching the students to manually sense, inscribe, and convey speech formation, Mills sought to assimilate them into the hearing world through a kinesthetic interplay between the voice and the hand—a multifaceted enactment I call “phono-choreography.” I situate Mills’s mobilization of the hand alongside adjacent Victorian discourses around vocal aliveness. In its reach toward a semblance of life, the hand impersonated vocal vitality beyond stagnant letters of the print book. I suggest that it was the notion of aliveness that imbued the hands at Mills’s school with the currency of phono-choreography. Her disability work, which this paper tracks between its inception in 1888 and the publication of her Chinese primer Qiya chujie 啟啞初階 in 1907, unfolds a story of how the hand summoned various facets of the voice—that vexed and vexing telos in nineteenth-century deaf education—in order to dexterously transcribe spoken Chinese sounds. In dialogue with recent works by Anabel Mahler and Jessica Holmes on Deaf musicking, this study posits the hand as a living mediator between the shifting Sinophone and Anglophone deaf education—through its evocative transcription of vocal vitality.

Throughout the Basque Country, a stateless nation of a minority autochthonous people, social dances in town and neighborhood plazas regularly occur. These events called Plaza Dantzak create visibility and audibility for Basqueness through language, music, and dance. In this paper, I claim that Plaza Dantzak in the southern Basque Country (within the nation-state of Spain) are meaningful examples of breathing spaces or argnasguneak: places in which people live through the Basque language and Basque cultural expressions such as music and dance. Typically used by sociolinguists (e.g., Joshua Fishman (1991) and Mikel Zalbide (2019)) to refer exclusively to language use, I expand the concept of breathing spaces to signal how Basque cultural expressions combining language, music, and dance are vehicles for social life that allow for the experience of Basque culture as a vibrant, living, and breathing one. Active participation in such settings is key. In Plaza Dantzak, concepts of tradition, repetition, audibility and visibility interact as requirements for, and effects of, the realization of these events. In this study, I focus on the significant role that the interaction between language, music, and dance plays in maintaining and revitalizing Basque culture and language. While I highlight the successes of such revitalization efforts along with and the future possibilities that the creation of breathing spaces such as Plaza Dantzak open up, I also emphasize the struggles of such initiatives in a context in which cultural and linguistic precarity is an everyday reality.

This paper focuses on the praxis of drummers Sonny Murray on the track “Black Art,” from his 1965 album Sonny’s Time Now, and Denardo Coleman playing on “Freeway Express” from his father Ornette’s 1966 album The Empty Foxhole. On these tracks the physical gesture of Murray and Coleman becomes an equal part of the shared breath of the ensemble in what Larry Neal referred to as “collective motion … that could be harnessed and organized.”

In their first editorial for the Black music magazine The Cricket in 1968, activists and music critics Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal wrote: “the true voices of Black liberation are Black musicians.” Published through Baraka’s New Jersey-based press Jihad Productions, The Cricket was a response to what its editors and founding writers considered an anti-Black music industry – its authors maintaining that Black tradition must be cultivated outside the influence of the mainstream music industry. This separatist cultivation cohered aesthetic and critical languages in what I call “Black Nationalist Music.”

The aim of this paper is to hear Murray’s and Coleman’s drum aesthetic through the music-analytical filter of writers for The Cricket. Black Nationalist Music, as Neal wrote, was “formalistically revolutionary [in ways that broke] with all the previous ways of improvisation.” This neo-improvisational mode was made evident in the liberation of the rhythm section from support system to equal interlocutors. The drummers’ transition, specifically, was made audible through the soloistic vocabularies invented for this unified and newly breath-centric sonic medium.