Music and the embodiment of disability
Item
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Title
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Music and the embodiment of disability
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:ddf452e3b047:10600
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identifier
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10784
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Creator
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Howe, Blake,
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Contributor
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Joseph N. Straus
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | aesthetics | disability | embodiment | psychology
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Abstract
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Recent studies of music as an art form fundamentally embodied (whether through the physicality of the performer or the perception of music as a physical object) have much to gain from a consideration of disability, which disrupts and disturbs assumptions of bodily normalcy. In considering music as a site of multiple embodiments, this dissertation offers possible incorporations of the emerging interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies into music scholarship and embodiment discourse. Four modular chapters treat this topic: (1) " Schubert, Mayrhofer, and the Dissolution of the Body." Schubert's final four settings of the poetry of Johann Mayrhofer revolve around a shared narrative: when ruptured by active centrifugal (outward-seeking) forces, bodily limitation may yield a desirable state of spiritual transcendence. This philosophy treats the body as a disabled limitation that must be "heroically overcome"---an idea that may have had personal resonance for Mayrhofer, who had been recently diagnosed with disorders associated with excessive interiority (gout, hypochondria). (2) "Music and the Agents of Obsession." Since the late eighteenth century, obsession has typically been theorized as the product of two dueling agencies---the rational, mobile agent, and the fixed, obsessive agent. The eighteenth-century doctor Andrew Harper published a treatise that includes a description of obsession in this vein, filled with intriguing musical metaphors: the mental faculty is "fixed" on a "predominant note" that "brings every image or modulation into unison with itself," so that "the order and harmony of mental operation is destroyed, and discord or insanity ensues." Harper's imagined battle of tones is prescient of a "fixed note" device found in a number of compositions depicting obsessive behaviors, including works by Alkan, Britten, Brunetti, Chopin, Cornelius, Vaughan Williams, and Wolf. (3) "Beauty, Ugliness, and the Challenge of Synthesis in Schreker's Die Gezeichneten." Schreker's Die Gezeichnten (1916), written as a "tragedy of an ugly man," positions beauty and ugliness as oppositional poles in need of synthesis and reconciliation; dramatic tension stems from the difficulty of empathizing with the physically disfigured Other. The process of empathy is dramatized in the opera's aesthetic and moral climax, in which a beautiful character (Carlotta) decides to paint a portrait of, and thereby empathize with, the ugly character (the hunchback Alviano). (4) "Paul Wittgenstein and the Performance of Disability." A pianist whose right arm was amputated in World War I, Paul Wittgenstein spent much of his career developing strategies for one-hand piano performance. Relevant models of disability narratives include notions of "passing" (one-hand piano music written in the style of two-hand piano music); "cure" (Friedrich Wuhrer's controversial two-hand arrangements of Schmidt's one-hand compositions for Wittgenstein); and "heroic overcoming" (in which virtuosity is compensation for corporeal deficiency, a narrative that also has implications for an ethics of able-bodied performance).
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Music
