"Music... to Cure or Disable:" Therapy for Whom?

Autores/as

  • Stefan Honisch University of British Columbia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v14i3.793

Palabras clave:

disability, selfhood, music therapy, Disability Studies in Music, reflexivity, accessibility, performance

Resumen

This article responds to two intertwined questions: :“What is the role of a Disability Studies perspective within music therapy?” And: “What is the role of music therapy from a Disability Studies perspective?” Exploring some of the congruities and tensions that have emerged in recent years between music therapy, and the burgeoning field of Disability Studies in Music (Lubet, 2004 & 2010; Straus, 2006 & 2011; Straus & Lerner, 2006), I argue that both Disability Studies in Music, and music therapy, can benefit from greater acknowledgement of music's capacity to constrain and enable the human body,in complicated ways. The approach taken in this  article imagines music therapy as a a reciprocal encounter in which diagnoses and intervention are replaced by a spirit of collaborative learning. The article pushes music therapy towards the idea of ability and disability as bodily performances (Sandahl & Auslander, 2005; Straus, 2011), rather than either exalted or pathological states of being, and suggests that in taking such a perspective as a point of departure, both music therapy and Disability Studies in Music will find new pathways between their respective theoretical and methodological environments.

Biografía del autor/a

Stefan Honisch, University of British Columbia

Stefan Sunandan Honisch completed his undergraduate training at the University of Victoria, where his teachers included Eva Solar Kinderman,  Cary Chow, John Celona, and David Clenman. He subsequently completed Master's degrees  in Piano Performance and in Composition under the supervision of Professor Jane Coop and Dr. Stephen Chatmanat the University of British Columbia. Honisch is currently a doctoral candidate at the Center for Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education at the University of British Columbia. His dissertation (in progress) is centered on a 2013 solo recital at the University of British Columbia by the pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii(co-gold medallist of the 2009 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition), exploring how this performance—by a blind pianist who has repeatedly insisted that he wants his audiences to think of him as "simply a pianist" (Oda, 2009; [Itsuko] Tsujii, 2009)— was received by select professors and graduate students. The study turns on the following question: how might this recital have taught both performer and audience to question normative definitions of musical experience, definitions which serve in various ways to reinforce the privileged status of what disability historian Paul Longmore caustically refers to as "the severely able-bodied." (in Garland-Thompson, 2005, p.33; see also, Straus, 2011) In examining the assumptions upon which the pedagogy of normal musical experience is based, performer and  audience come to understand themselves, and, by extension, their relationship to each other in ways that put pressure on accounts of selfhood based on simplistic distinctions between ability and disability.In addition to completing his dissertation, Mr. Honisch continues to be active as a free-lance pianist, composer and teacher.  He has published articles based on his research in Music Theory Online, and the International Journal of Inclusive Education, and has a chapter on the early-twentieth century Hungarian pianist Imre Ungár (1909-1972) in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (forth-coming with Oxford University Press).

Publicado

2014-10-20

Cómo citar

Honisch, S. (2014). "Music. to Cure or Disable:" Therapy for Whom?. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 14(3). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v14i3.793