Representing Disability

Abstract

Abstract In modernist music, disability functions as an artistic resource: a source of images and an impetus for narrative. Disability enables musical modernism. Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation of disabled bodies. Its most characteristic features—fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others—can be understood as musical representations of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Although modernist music embodies negative, eugenic-era attitudes toward disability, it also affirmatively claims disability as a resource, thus manifesting its disability aesthetics.

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