On the Disability Aesthetics of Music

BLAKE HOWE is Assistant Professor of Music at Louisiana State University. He is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Recording Reviews Editor for Nineteenth-Century Music Review. His writings have appeared in this Journal, Music Theory Spectrum, the Journal of Musicology, and the Musical Quarterly.

STEPHANIE JENSEN-MOULTON is Associate Professor of Musicology and American Studies at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her edition of Miriam Gideon's 1958 opera Fortunato was published by A-R Editions in 2013, and she is coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her writings on music and disability have appeared in American Music, Music Theory Online, and American Music Review. Her current book project focuses on opera and disability in twentieth-century America.

JOSEPH N. STRAUS is Distinguished Professor of Music at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is the author of Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (Oxford University Press, 2011) and coeditor of Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music (Routledge, 2006) and The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford University Press, 2016). He is currently completing a monograph on modernist music and the representation of disability.

JENNIFER IVERSON is Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. In 2015–16 she was External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she was working on a book on electronic music in the mid-twentieth century. Her articles have appeared in Twentieth-Century Music, Music Analysis, Tempo, and Music Theory Online, with another forthcoming in Music Theory Spectrum.

JESSICA A. HOLMES is a PhD candidate in Musicology at McGill University, where she is completing a dissertation on disability and contemporary music performance with a particular focus on music and deafness. She is a former recipient of the prestigious Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2012–15), and has presented her research at the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society, the Society for American Music, and the Society for Disability Studies.

MICHAEL B. BAKAN is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Florida State University. His research on the ethnomusicology of autism has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies. His books include World Music: Traditions and Transformations (McGraw-Hill, 2007) and Music of Death and New Creation (University of Chicago Press, 1999). He is currently completing a book entitled Speaking of Music: Conversations with Autistic Thinkers.

ANDREW DELL'ANTONIO is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the way different modes of listening influence the social uses and cultural meanings of music. In addition to a collaboration with Elizabeth Grace, he blogs at http://www.theavidlistener.com, and is the editor of Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing (University of California Press, 2004), author of Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (University of California Press, 2011), and coauthor of the textbook The Enjoyment of Music (12th ed., W. W. Norton, 2015).

ELIZABETH J. GRACE is Assistant Professor of Education at National Louis University in Chicago. Interested in performance and disability studies, she is currently working with Andrew Dell'Antonio on an ethnographic oral history of neurodivergent musicking and experience, and is completing an autoethnographic monograph about theater training and autistic ethical thought. She serves on the board of directors of the Society for Disability Studies.