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Hello, and welcome to this episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
My name is Diane Kolin.
This series presents artists,
academics, and project leaders who dedicate their time and energy
to a better accessibility for people with disabilities in the arts.
You can find more of these conversations on our website, artsably.com,
which is spelled A-R-T-S-A-B-L-Y dot com.
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Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Dr. Jessica Holmes,
Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen.
Her research analyzes the representation of disability in contemporary Western popular music
with emphasis on vocality, embodiment, and identity formation.
Hello, Jessica.
Hi, Diane.
Jessica Holmes is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen,
and she completed her PhD at McGill University in Montreal.
She's also the founder of the Arts and Health Research Group in her university.
Welcome.
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
My name is Jessica Holmes,
and I'm a musician, an interdisciplinary music scholar,
a teacher, a mentor, and an advocate with expertise in music and disability.
I first got interested in the academic study of music
through my background as a classically trained cellist and singer.
So I was very active in my church choir from a young age.
My father is a Protestant Minister,
so the church played a very important role in my musical education.
I also took private voice lessons as a teenager,
and I attended Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts in Toronto,
which is a performing arts high school,
where I played in in the orchestra as a cellist.
Following high school, not unsurprisingly,
I did a Bachelor of Music at Western University.
And while there, I had the opportunity to take some upper division undergraduate
music history seminars, which I found to be utterly inspiring.
And so I abandoned my plans to attend law school
to pursue an MA in Musicology at Western,
and eventually a PhD in Musicology at McGill, where I was the recipient of
the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for my dissertation on music, disability,
and Embodiment in Contemporary Performance.
Following my PhD, I worked four years at UCLA,
first as a Postdoctoral Fellow of Musicology,
and then as a Departmental Lecturer of Musicology, where I taught courses
in Musicology and in the Disability Studies Minor at UCLA.
Fast forward to 2011 -
sorry, 2021, I should say, not 2011,
when I began my current tenure track appointment at the University of Copenhagen,
where, as you mentioned, I teach courses in Musicology and popular music studies
and serve as the founding Chair of the Interdisciplinary
Art and Health Research Cluster in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies.
Today, you are an assistant professor over there.
What brought you to Copenhagen?
You know, it really, in a way, was quite random.
I was on the job market as a postdoctoral fellow
and applying for jobs in North America, in the UK, and in Europe.
This was an opportunity. This was a position that was calling for expertise in
Popular Music Studies, which is a focus of my work on music and disability.
It just so happened that they hired me.
So, I was very open to living in Europe and excited about the opportunity to learn
about academic life in a new country
and in a new - a different, I should say, system of higher education.
Okay, thank you.
I was interested - I would be interested in knowing more
about your research because I know you've done a lot of work in disability and music.
That's how I know you,
and I admire everything you've done in terms of essays and writing about,
for example, your Beethoven studies and things like that.
Can you talk a little bit about your research?
Absolutely.
My scholarship examines the representation
of disability in contemporary popular music with attention to questions of
vocality, embodiment, and identity formation.
This is work that's really located at the intersections of disability studies,
deaf studies, and MAD studies, and bridges these perspectives with work
in musicology, pop music studies, sound studies,
voice studies, and increasingly, feminist media studies.
Perhaps I can talk a little bit about
my interest in music and disability before elaborating on my research projects.
This is an interest that really stems
from my deep and long-standing familial ties to disability.
My late paternal grandfather had
post-polio syndrome and was a motorized scooter user.
It was through our regular visits and outings that I learned
that the built environment isn't necessarily designed for people on wheels,
at least not consistently in the '90s and in the early 2000s.
My late maternal grandfather had noise-induced hearing loss for most of his
adult life as a result of his prolonged exposure to industrial noise
as the head of a large contracting company in Victoria, British Columbia.
And my paternal uncle has been profoundly deaf since birth.
So it was through witnessing the invisible labors that both my late
maternal grandfather and my paternal uncle undertook and undertake
to compensate for the failures of the built environment
and the technological constraints of their hearing aids, such as lip reading,
observing bodily gesture to intuitive meaning
oftentimes before words are spoken,
that their visual, spatial, and rhythmic propensity for music and the like,
these types of things that got me interested in further exploring
the relationship between disability and music and really
investigating disability, both as a lived experience and as an esthetic category.
As you know, the interdisciplinary field of disability studies maintains
that what constitutes a disability, our definition of disability,
isn't inherent in biology or in the natural world,
but is rather tied to the structural inequalities of the built environment,
different implicit socio-cultural norms, and socio-economic systems of power.
In my work on music and disability, I'm really interested in examining how
music participates in the complex socio-cultural construction
of disability alongside other positions of marginality
and categories of identity, like gender, like sexuality, race, class, and also age.
In these ways, I really aim to embed and center disability theory and the lived
experience of disability in music studies to impart a more
diverse conception of music and human biocultural diversity in the process.
And this is a research agenda that really culminates, after these many years,
in two distinct areas of expertise represented by my two current book projects.
The first is on deaf ontologies of sound and music, which you already mentioned.
The second is devoted to the esthetics
of mental health, gender, and race in contemporary pop music.
Okay, so these books - can you tell a bit more about these books
and how - when are we going to see these books where you
are in the process and the content, of course, a little bit more?
Yeah, absolutely.
Under contract with the University of Michigan Press for its Music and Social Justice series
is my first book, Music at the Margins of Sense.
This is a book that challenges the prevailing misconceptions
associated with deafness in Western music through analyzing
the creative endeavors of musicians from across the diverse audiological
and sociocultural spectrum of deafness, including
Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie,
Berlin-based sound artist Christine Sun Kim,
DJ Troi Lee who is the director of the UK-based Deaf Rave Collective,
among many others.
The book really argues for a multisensory, multimodal conception of musicianship,
what I simply call expert listening, that defies
passive sense by sense constructions of the sensorium,
the biological certainty ascribed to so-called "normal hearing,"
and the idealized listening subject, implicit in Western music discourse.
And expert listening, this conception of musicianship that I
champion in the book, takes as its point of departure
the disability rights movement's universal demand for control.
Clear from their slogan,
Nothing About Us Without Us, meaning that disabled people need be
at the forefront of knowledge formation and policy making about their lives.
And I take this very seriously given my own positionality as a white,
able-bodied woman with hearing and speaking privilege
entering into the deaf community and needing to take great care
to responsibly manage these power dynamics as I engage with my interlocutors.
Expert listening is also rooted in what
medical anthropologist Cassandra Hartley calls disability expertise.
That is: "the particular knowledge
that disabled people develop and enact about unorthodox configurations of agency,
cultural norms, and relationships between bodies, selves, and the designed world."
So expert listening really tries to work against an ideally sensing deaf person
to draw on deaf anthropologist Michele Friedner's verbiage.
And what I mean by an ideally sensing deaf person,
is this idea that a deaf person inhabits a world of complete and utter silence,
so that deafness is a state of absolute auditory silence,
but has an innate ability, by virtue of the ostensible
compensatory mechanisms of the deaf brain, to make up for that loss through the sense
of touch, and therefore, the deafness automatically bestows this inborn ability
to experience music in a heightened way through the sense of touch.
And the book really tries to work against those cultural mythologies
that ideally sensing deaf person,
by really foregrounding the individual modalities and means
by which my interlocutors engage with music, oftentimes
through reframing and redefining what music can be from an ontological
standpoint, whether that means through highlighting
the musicality of visual spatial gesture, the kinesthetic dynamics of rhythm
relative to the perceptual limits of pitch, the creative affordances
of music technology and musical instruments designed to mitigate against
tinnitus and music-induced hearing loss and the like.
So that's the essence of music at the margins of sense.
I hope to see it in print sometime in late 2025.
I'm currently revising the manuscript.
It's gone through a first round of peer review,
and I'm hopeful that the process will continue to go smoothly.
Thank you. And what about your second book then?
Yeah. So my second book project, which is in its very nascent stages
of development, is tentatively titled The Musical Vernacular of Depression.
And it analyzes the representation of depression in contemporary pop music
as it reflects both on the increasing statistical prevalence of clinical depression
among young people and its associated gender and racial inequalities,
and the increasing thematic ubiquity of depression in contemporary popular music.
The book really tries to
reframe depression or newly frame depression as a coherent esthetic category
with distinct semantic practices, stylistic conventions, and affective cultures.
What I think of as an emerging musical vernacular of depression that blurs
a biomedical construction of depression as a common and serious mood disorder
with a generational sensibility that is unbounded by diagnosis and pathology.
So the book examines musicians disclosures of depression,
the popularization of internet-based micro-genres like ASMR, bedroom pop,
and emo rap, the algorithmic logics of Spotify's mood-based listening,
and different musical trends on TikTok, and how these contribute to
the esthetic consolidation of the musical vernacular of depression.
I really argue that in these ways, pop music transforms
the way in which young people, the ways in which young people conceive of,
communicate about and tend to their mental health.
And in so doing, I really seek to position pop music
or to think of pop music as a medically unregulated site of mental health discourse
in order to deepen our humanistic understanding of the relationship between
biomedicine and pop culture
and psychiatric understandings of depression and social inequality.
So I should say that my recent article
in the current issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society
on Billy Eilish and the Feminist Esthetics of Depression serves as as a springboard
and proof of concept for this second book project.
In this second book project, I guess that there is always this
conversation about critical disability studies
and the medical and social model,
especially in depression and topics like that, because
it's really related to the medical model,
but I assume that you were exploring the social part of that too, right?
Absolutely.
It's a great question.
One of the interventions the book hopes to make is to really carve out
new theoretical ground through which to understand depression
as it overlaps and departs from the lived experiences
and the discursive logics of disability, of madness, and of melancholy.
So I do approach depression in the same way that I approach disability
as a sociocultural construct in many respects.
And in so doing, I'm indebted to the work of scholars like Ann Cvetkovich,
who calls for the deep pathologization of depression.
She thinks of depression
in relationship to neoliberal capitalism,
and neoliberal capitalism as creating the conditions in which depression can thrive.
At the same time, I recognize that for many people who live
with depression, and through my own personal experiences,
there is tremendous power in thinking of depression
as a biochemical imbalance of the brain, or as a disease, or as a disorder.
So there's a sense in which pop music can teach us about that relationship between
culture or the social model of depression, and the biomedical model of depression.
Pop music really blurs those divisions
and offers an esthetic perspective on a very complex -
a very complex human experience, one that is
approached in the popular consciousness with a considerable degree of urgency.
We hear often about depression as a public health crisis.
We are often also told that depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide.
So there is a certain degree of complexity and ambiguity, and urgency,
with respect both to the prevalence of depression
and its relationship, its uneasy relationship to disability.
That's fascinating.
I also wanted to go back briefly to the first book project.
Could you give examples of...
Because we talked a lot about the theory behind the book, but practically,
when you mention other ways of listening, other ways of living music or experiencing
music through these artists that you are mentioning in your book,
and also this idea of creating instruments
to mitigate or to transform the
tinnitus experience, can you give us examples of, practically, what are these instruments or
what are examples of things that you discussed with these artists
to have this idea of the experience of a person with deafness living music?
Absolutely.
I can give three different concrete examples
that I think speak to the diverse conception of musicianship
that the book advocates for as one that spans
so-called formal musical training and autodidactic forms of musical education.
So let's start with Evelyn Glennie, who is a musician that you know well.
You visited her and you've taken a tour of her percussion studio,
and she is perhaps one of the most visible deaf musicians of our age.
As you know, Evelyn Glennie practices her signature
listening through touch or touching the sound,
sensing music through vibrations, using the percussion instrument
to draw out the sound, to really
circumvent the sort of usual
audiological means of access by practicing this deeply embodied form
of listening that is interdependent with her instruments.
And we know she has a vast and very
exciting collection of percussion instruments.
So we see in Evelyn Glennie's example,
a musician who practices this holistic conception of listening that also engages
visual spatial cues as well as tactility and rhythm.
And Evelyn Glennie does have the benefit of a formal musical education.
Deathness is this, as I mentioned earlier, very plural and diverse experience.
There is no monolithic deaf experience of music.
And as you know, Evelyn began to lose her hearing around the age of nine.
So she did have the benefit of a formal musical training
before the onset of her hearing loss.
But over the years, was able to unlean and relearn
new ways of engaging with music and engaging with sound,
while also drawing on her very strong background in music performance.
Then we have the example of Christine Sun Kim,
who is profoundly deaf, who communicates primarily using sign language.
Her artistic practice as a sound artist
centers on what she calls on learning sound etiquette.
That is the implicit hearing norms
that she internalized from a young age, governing
when and when not to make sounds.
An invisible social contract that really divides along hearing and deaf lines.
So she's really reclaiming a sense of ownership
over sound from the hearing world.
And in Christine Sun Kim's example,
we see her engaging with non-sonorous, oftentimes,
articulations of music as in her Face Opera,
which is a piece scored for nine, prelingually,
deaf performers, whereby they sing using silent facial gesture
from the American sign language lexicon,
which is a piece that challenges the fundamental -
that challenges our
understanding of music in so far as sound is a fundamental precondition for music.
She really makes the case that music can exist independent of sound.
In her iconic
visual music, she repurposes symbols
from Western musical notation along witty written
cues from her everyday experiences as a deaf woman of color navigating
the hearing world to offer reflections on some of those
experiences, and in the process, really invites the listener
to think more deeply and more expansively about music and about entry points
to music and to sound, framing music as, once again,
a deeply embodied experience that engages the whole of the sensorium.
And the final example that I can speak to is American-born Dutch-based violinist
Monica Germino, who is an experimental violinist.
She used to play with Bang On A Can Collective.
Many years ago, Monica developed what's called hyperacusis,
which in medical terms is a disorder of loudness perception
that often causes severe acoustic pain and physical discomfort
in certain registers or certain timbers could prove triggering.
So
in and around the time that her audiologist
suggested that she cease from playing violin,
several of her friends got together to co-compose a theatrical suite
to explore the potential of low decibel violin music.
And this was a suite that was scored for
low decibel violin and mutes, and one in which she used
her whisper violin, which was designed by a luthier
as a low decibel frame violin to mitigate against
the effects of her hyperacusis while also protecting existing hearing thresholds.
I really think of Monica's violin playing
and the ways in which she retooled her violin playing and
reframed her relationship to the violin as a kind of auditory self-regulation,
a self-directed treatment protocol, if you will, beyond medically regulated
channels that, once again, help to make up for the failures
and perils of a dysregulated sonic environment.
Once again, shifting the onus of deficit and compensation away from
the deaf sensorium onto the built environment.
So this whisper violin and this theatrical suite MUTED
composed for low decibel violins is an example of
one of these ways in which a person
with noise-induced hearing loss and hyperacusis engages with music,
perhaps by defying certain esthetic conventions and even the norms,
the acoustical norms of the built musical environment.
These are really fascinating examples.
It's a good segue to my next question,
which is really looking at accessibility in the arts.
I wonder what accessibility in the arts means for you.
In my work on music and disability,
I'm really interested in exploring the dynamic tension
and reciprocity between the musician's body and the physical limitations and
the creative affordances of the designed world.
I hinted at this earlier.
In so far as customary portrayals of music and deafness are concerned,
I'm really interested in shifting the burden of deficit and compensation
away from the presumed failures and the innate plasticity of the deaf sensorium
onto the built environment by foregrounding the disabling
and enabling capacities of what musicologist Blake Howe
refers to as the constructive normalcy of music performance.
And there he's invoking Lennard J. Davis
when he talks about constructed normalcy within the context of disability.
And I'm going to quote Howe.
He says: "Just as architectural features of society have the potential to exclude
and stigmatize bodily difference, so too do the conventions of music
performance frame certain actions, behaviors, and appearances as disabling."
And what I gather from Howe's description
is that music transpires and is experienced within and through a built esthetic environment
with a naturalized set of corporeal biases, physical biases and conventions,
from instrument design to concert venues and sound systems,
to sound recording and production technology, to music software design,
to the modalities and literacies of different music media.
To Howe's point the physical habitats
associated with some of these conventions, with some of these objects, with some of these spaces,
are accessible or are either accessible or
inaccessible to the extent that they have the capacity to enable and disable.
And I'm thinking, especially here in terms of
literal access, what Bess Williamson describes as literal access.
That is one's ability, and I'm quoting from Williamson here,
one's ability to enter, move about within, and operate the facilities of a site.
So we can think about literal access in the musical realm along those same lines.
So in my work, I really think about
the question: how do musicians from across the diverse audiological and sociocultural
spectrum of disability or deafness approach, mediate, circumvent,
and in some cases, altogether, reject the esthetic constraints and implicit
hearing norms of music discourse or sound etiquette,
to draw on Christine Sun Kim's characterization,
by foregrounding the multisensory and multimodal aspects of musicianships,
spanning both sonorous and non-sonorous conceptions of music and sound.
So in that sense, I think a lot about this
active dynamic notion of music perception and creation, where disability,
and here I'm going to quote from Howe once again, engenders the flourishing of new,
different, and intrinsically valuable modes of music making
that are unbounded, ultimately, and these are my words,
by some of the restrictions and constraints of conventional music making.
It's funny that you're mentioning Blake Howe because when you were talking about
your book, I was thinking of some of his writings, like
the articles about the one handed pianist, for example, where he was talking about
the perception of - the different perceptions of an audience
while listening and watching a performer with disability,
and in this case, a one handed pianist,
in a public sphere
and a public understanding of the music and reception of the music.
I was thinking of that, these writings.
So thank you for quoting Blake Howe.
I think that's a great example of academic connections.
Yeah. Oh, wonderful.
I think I'm very indebted to Blake Howe as a mentor, colleague, and as a writer.
I think he's a beautiful writer,
and to my mind, his work is foundational to
music and disability studies as a subfield of music studies.
So I'm glad that you find his work meaningful and generative, too.
He's also someone very approachable
with whom we can talk and we can debate and exchange.
Yeah.
Plus, you're right about the fact that really he was among the first people
to really write in an academic world and decide to bring together
scholars to edit this first book about disability studies and music.
And then many, many others appeared after that.
Really, all this work has been also very influential to my own research.
So thank you for that. Of course.
That's wonderful.
To conclude, I have a question about inspirations.
We just mentioned
several scholars and several artists who inspired or different works.
I was, had this idea of -
Maybe there is always in our mind someone,
this one person that we would like to meet
or that we would like to talk with and converse about this inspiration.
I was wondering if you had one person who is active in the field of music
intersections between disability and music, maybe, in the arts, who would it be?
This is going to sound terribly cliché,
but I would I have to say Joni Mitchell for a few different reasons.
First,
Joni's music figures prominently in my coming-of-age story,
in my understanding of womanhood, and my own singing voice and songwriting,
having discovered her music in my first year of college.
So I've always been an admirer and lover of Joni Mitchell's music.
And second, like my late paternal grandfather,
she contracted polio during one of the major outbreaks of the 20th century.
And this is an experience that has had a lasting impact on her musical craft
as she sought to devise unorthodox guitar tunings
that more readily corresponded to the unique architecture of her hand.
And once again,
to return to some of your questions around accessibility, and in particular,
Blake Howe's discussion of musicianship and the ways in which
again, and I'll quote from Howe, disability engenders this flourishing
of new and intrinsically valuable modes of music making.
I think her work is a shining example of that and the ways in which
some of the conventions of music, the ways in which disability
can sort of unsettle some of the conventions of
music performance and playing technique in ways that are unbounded,
that are really unbounded and imaginative.
Thank you so much for your work and for your words.
It was a fantastic discussion. I really enjoyed it.
And all the best for your books
and your upcoming projects and your
teaching in Copenhagen, everything.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me, Diane.
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
And yes, we will publish some of the links
to the resources that you mentioned on ArtsAbly's website.
Wonderful.
Thank you. Have a great day.
You too. Bye-bye.
Bye.
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