Performing Music and Performing Disability

Musical performers are inherently prodigious figures, possessed of “extraordinary bodies.” Those who are also marked by stigmatized bodily differences find that their disability both inflects their music-making and profoundly shapes its general reception. Disability, like music, is something they learn to perform, and they do so in accordance with well established cultural scripts (as Heroic Overcomers, Saintly Sages, Mad Geniuses, Obsessive Avengers, and the like). Tom Wiggins (“Blind Tom”), Glenn Gould, Thomas Quasthoff, Itzhak Perlman, Evelyn Glennie.

Musical performers are inherently prodigious figures, possessed of “extraordinary bodies.” Those who are also marked by stigmatized bodily differences find that their disability both inflects their music-making and profoundly shapes its general reception. Disability, like music, is something they learn to perform, and they do so in accordance with well established cultural scripts (as Heroic Overcomers, Saintly Sages, Mad Geniuses, Obsessive Avengers, and the like). Tom Wiggins (“Blind Tom”), Glenn Gould, Thomas Quasthoff, Itzhak Perlman, Evelyn Glennie.