♪ Opening theme music ♪
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 Samantha Bassler, who is a musicologist,
an adjunct professor in New York City, and a multi-instrumentalist.
You can find the resources mentioned by Samantha Bassler during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Samantha Bassler, who is a musicologist
living in Brooklyn, New York.
Samantha, welcome.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for spending some time with us for the conversation.
I would like to start with a question about yourself.
Can you tell a little bit about you?
Your background?
I know you're a musician, you're a teacher, you're a multi-instrumentalist.
You do lots of different things, and you're a scholar, also musicologist.
Can you tell us where all that started?
Sure.
I started taking piano at a young age, and it was - I just really loved it.
I connected with it a lot.
I was born with several autoimmune diseases, and so I spent
the early part of my life in and out of hospitals.
I think that music was a way for me to just be alone and connect and not feel
like I had to perform able bodyedness.
I understand that now, but at the time, I felt a lot of responsibility for
helping my family feel better about me.
And there was just a lot of concern about me and about my being sick.
And so music was a retreat, as were novels.
So I spent the early part of my life spending a lot of time reading and playing a lot of music.
And early on, I got really interested in a lot of instruments.
So I had this kind of voracious knowledge for playing.
And like I said, I started with piano, but I quickly
wanted to learn guitar, so I did that.
I wanted to learn violin.
And my piano teacher at the time, who was a multi instrumentalist herself
and a folk musician, she insisted that I learned mandolin first instead of violin.
I don't know, it was some old school thing.
And so I learned mandolin, and then I learned violin, and then I learned Banjo.
And I used to just go to her -
They would have these jams that her folk band would come together
and they would play and improvise.
And she let me come along because I was so into all this.
And so I did that from the age of eight.
So it started just really into music, but also really loving scholarship.
And so that's what drew me to musicology, because as I got older,
being in the practice room 6 hours a day was really isolating and exhausting.
And I liked that I felt like I had more control over my academic work,
or at least that's what I thought.
And then I went to grad school, and I started having issues
with being disabled at grad school.
That's what got me into disability studies.
Because of my disabilities, I feel more comfortable being independent.
I'm an adjunct, and I love teaching, but I thought a lot about going into
traditional academia, and it just seems like even with accommodations in place,
it would be too difficult.
There's something about people that are sick, that don't look sick,
the people that are able-bodied, it really upsets them,
and they find it really difficult to work with.
So that was my ultimate decision was to continue to be an adjunct.
And luckily, in New York City, we have union protections here.
I have health insurance, and my salary was recently increased because of the union.
So I'm not...
Like most adjuncts, I'm actually making...
I mean, it's still not the best wage, but it's not as bad as it could be.
A lot of adjuncts in the United States really struggle,
and they work for really peanuts, but we have a lot more protection.
So I decided that that would be better.
And on the side, I have a lot of private piano students,
and private voice students, and private string students.
And that has its own challenges, but it allows me to be more -
more in control so that I don't have to...
I have less - I spend less time up against the bureaucratic machine demanding accommodations.
And that's what really I find to be very exhausting.
And that was really the beginning of my career writing about disability.
I actually published something while I was still in grad school about accommodations
for scholars with invisible illnesses because it was just -
I mean when, in 2005,
people didn't know what to do with me.
I wasn't even like that. It wasn't really that difficult.
But what they couldn't grasp was I would just be sick at a drop of a hat
because I was diagnosed with lupus in my 20s, and I had a kidney infection.
I was hospitalized.
You know, it was just -
It was just that they didn't know how to provide appropriate accommodations.
You can provide adaptive accommodations,
you can provide extra time if that's what somebody needs.
But to accommodate a constant illness,
we're not really set up for that in academia.
That's been my passion project since then, it's trying to find a way forward
for people that find themselves to be chronically ill.
That's me and that's where I came from and what I'm doing, I guess.
Yeah, okay.
It's really important because I think it's still not very well
presented in academia, at least in the musicological world.
The impact of having invisible disabilities as a professor,
as a student, as a music practitioner or someone who plays regularly.
I hear a lot of feedback from people who have invisible disabilities,
and we still feel that the research is not enough and that
there should be more discussions about that.
Yeah, I completely agree.
You were in grad studies where you published this article.
It was in 2005?
No, the article didn't come out until 2009, August of 2009,
but I started my research in 2007.
So I started -
Well, I did my first graduate degree at the University of Oxford,
where I did a master's degree.
But that was actually not as hard to navigate because Oxford
has such an independent system.
I don't know if you're familiar with it, but you basically work on your own.
You occasionally go to seminars.
We went once a week.
But it's not like in the United States, and I think this is the same in Canada,
where you have to take all this coursework
and you have to go to class multiple times a week.
Actually, it was fine.
And I was dealing with some really serious stuff at the time, but I was okay, and
I managed okay without accommodations.
But then when I went to the United States to do my PhD, I started out at Rutgers University.
And that's where I came up against the issue.
The first two years were okay, I managed.
But in 2007, I was diagnosed with lupus, and that's when things got really bad.
And I had to sit for my big doctoral exams,
the generalist exams that you take after two years, or you have to take an exam
to prove that you know everything about the history of music,
and you have to sit for hours, multiple days, and you have to write by hand.
So all of this was difficult for me because I also have rheumatoid arthritis.
It was just like that exam is really impossible.
I can't sit for that long.
It was with a bunch of people, so it's not like I could get up and move around.
I can't write for that long.
My hands would cramp.
That's where the challenges really started.
That's when I realized that there weren't any...
I was the first person, I guess, who had had an issue.
Even in 2007, they were like, What is this?
I had to get my rheumatologist to write a letter.
Then I had to...
That's when I got introduced to the whole system of accessibility
and disability accommodations.
I found it to just be just not really helpful.
Basically, all they could do is say, Well, you can take it again,
and you can have a private room, and you can have more time.
But none of this really addressed all of the systemic problems I was going through
because as a disabled person having to constantly ask for help and the pity.
Rather than the whole system to be set up so that it
was more accessible for everybody.
And that's the crux.
So at first, my research just simply was like, there's got to be other people
like me who are going through this.
So I sent out - I did, I interviewed a bunch of scholars
from around the world, and that's how I I ended up switching
my PhD and going to the Open University in England to do my PhD
because it's a university that was set up, it was founded in the '70s to be
accessible for non-traditional students.
And I met the person who would be my supervisor through that process
because he was interested in my research.
That's interesting, the access needs part.
You had to deal with that as a student, but as a professor, how do you
accommodate your access needs?
Oh, no, I still have access needs.
Yeah, it's absolutely...
And it's worse now because at least when you're a student, They're like,
You know, you're their student and you're paying tuition, and so they're beholden to serve you.
But despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, as an employee,
and the fact that people say things like, Oh, we want to hire diverse employees, et cetera.
They have a limit.
And they're like, Well, you can only be sick so many times in the year.
And if you need more than that, then we're just going to garnish your wages
or you have to do makeup classes.
I mean, it's this whole complicated bureaucratic thing,
but the main issue is we don't know how to accommodate people that are sick a lot.
I don't mean to deride my department or anything.
It's just that even working with the offices that are set
to serve people with diverse needs, this is the only thing they can do.
They only have what's described in the law and what's been negotiated through the contract.
They have to follow our contract, which is, of course.
But the fact that there mustn't be disabled people involved in these contracts
or this would not be the case.
I actually had a similar issue with being Jewish. I wanted to have...
That's a real problem, being disabled and Jewish, because my holidays are not
the same as other people's holidays.
I'm then sick, but also trying to be observant.
So that's like a double whammy.
So then they really don't know what to do, because then they're saying things like,
Oh, well, if you need to miss class because of your Jewish holiday, well,
you can just use a sick day.
Well, no, I need all my sick days.
So, yeah, the access needs are still really complicated.
And not to mention that it requires a huge amount of work.
I literally feel like I have four jobs jobs.
My main job, my musicianship jobs, teaching private students,
and then for my disabilities.
They each have their own job because I have to constantly
document the fact that I've been sick, despite that I have 41 years of this.
You can see I have a lot of feelings about this.
Yeah, I also understand why.
As the creator of your own school with your own private students,
did it make it easier to manage your needs and your accommodation,
I don't know, schedules, hours?
Yeah, because I can basically do whatever I want.
It's my school.
I actually have a contract that my students sign every year,
and in the contract, it says...
I just tell them this because it makes it easier.
I say, your teacher is disabled.
We uphold disability rights in this school, and this person will be sick,
but we will make up whatever the lessons.
Of course, this comes with its own challenges, particularly since COVID.
It wasn't as difficult before COVID.
I don't have any research to back this.
This is something I'm really interested in.
But there's this fatigue surrounding disability and illness,
particularly illness.
Now, people just don't want to deal with like,
Oh, well, I'm sick, I can't do this.
I've also done a lot of reading about - there's a lot of problems with
people - with attendance issues in schools.
I think parents, their teachers are often absent.
I just don't think that that's the I just think that ever since COVID,
our society has really changed in that now we are less likely to go to work or
school when we're sick,
which is good, I think, but we don't have any fail-safe for how to deal with that.
What do you do when you have a teacher that is sick?
There's a lot of sick students, and you have a teacher that's sick.
How do you deal with having substitutes?
There needs to be more systemic institutional ways of dealing with this.
It filters down to me as a private teacher.
I think that people are just really tired of having to accommodate
constantly illness ever since COVID.
There's more and more people that are ill. But I do...
I mean, obviously, it does give me as the fact that I own my school,
I can do what I want.
I do have autonomy.
I just have to find ways of navigating that with these people
that I love and respect, and yet I need my accommodations.
I want to go back to your research, your research as a musicologist.
You mentioned that you had to switch to another university and also change topic.
What's where your different research fields in this research you did?
My PhD was actually not at all on anything with disability.
It's about the London Madrigal Society.
Like I said, I'm a Byrd scholar.
I just published a book, co-edited volume with some friends, but William Byrd.
I was really interested in William Byrd, and I went to the Open University,
and one of my mentors, Kerry McCarthy, recommended that I look into this
London Madrigal Society, which is just this big library
that was donated in 1954 to the British Library.
So like I mentioned before, the podcast actually started.
I also studied choral music, so that was a natural fit.
And at the time, I had some people were recommending that I have a...
For the people that don't understand disability studies,
I have a serious project, more like traditional musicology.
But I'm I'm really excited about that work.
I love it, and I still publish about it.
I did that for my PhD, but at the same time, I was still
developing my disability research.
I do work in early modern disability, so I've written a few articles
about how people can see disability in the early modern era.
That's interdisciplinary. I look at literature and music as well.
Then I've continued to do my more activist work where I try
to bring awareness to accommodations.
I published another article that was similar to my first article
about scholars with invisible illnesses.
Now, I might be jumping the gun.
I probably am talking too much, but I'm more interested
in trauma and the intersections between disability and trauma.
That's where I am at now.
Tell me more about that. We're never talking too much.
Okay, good.
So, based on my experience growing up disabled and dealing with all of this,
I started to become really interested in trauma.
But I also have some other traumas that happened in my life.
I just was really interested in seeing what is the relationship
between disability and trauma? What is medical trauma?
What is - What is chronic trauma?
From chronically living in a society that is not built for you.
I got involved in trauma studies.
I have a couple of friends that also read about trauma.
I started reading in trauma studies.
I started with domestic violence, and then I got into reading about
medical trauma, like I said, more specifically, but also the intersections between
disability and mental illness, because there's a lot of co-curring
disorders there, a lot of people.
That was actually really obvious in my early research that people that are
disabled or chronically ill often also have mental illness or mental difference,
where people have a huge amount of depression, anxiety, even PTSD.
Then I got really interested in what is PTSD?
Because our understanding of it is all based on veterans, but It actually
happens to regular people.
Then I got into neurodivergence from there.
That was actually the topic of my AMS (American Musicology Society) paper.
I gave a paper about the intersections between disability and neurodivergence
and trauma, and I looked at different examples in popular music.
So...
I would say my research is still evolving, but I think that in order
to really understand ableism, we need to understand trauma.
That's where I'm coming from right now.
Yeah, I totally agree.
There is the trauma that goes with the disability, and there's the trauma
that goes with the person, which also intersects, right?
Yes, exactly.
That's a fascinating topic.
I also wanted to know a bit more.
You mentioned that you co-edited the book about Byrd?
Yeah.
It was the anniversary of his death, the 450th anniversary of his death,
400th anniversary of his death.
He died in 1623.
And so in 2023, we put together a volume from a lot of different scholars,
looking at his instrumental music, some of his secular music, his situation at court.
But it was basically...
It's called Byrd in the 21st century.
Byrd Studies in the 21st century.
So it's like an updated, how are people looking at Byrd now and where
have we come since the '90s, which was the last edited collection.
That was really fun.
I did that with my colleagues Katherine Butler at Northumbria
in England and Katie Bank.
Katie Bank put together this really cool website because part of it is that
we're trying to also foster awareness about choral music and try to...
Because there's a large contingency of public people that are just
the public is interested in Byrd, particularly in England.
One of the writers in our collection says that he's the Shakespeare of music.
So we put together T-shirts.
I've got my T-shirt on now.
It's got Byrd, and it says Byrd Nerd.
But spelled B-Y-Y-R-D-N-Y-R-D.
So that's really fun.
And then I have some leggings.
So the whole thing was like, we put this in a collection, but then Katie and
Katherine, who are both in the UK, they also did a conference, a mini conference
at Lincoln, where Byrd was the organist and where he is from originally.
And then also they put together this website and this huge general public-facing,
This is Byrd. This is part of the British musical imagination.
That was also something we were really interested in was the relevancy
of reception studies today.
Why do we care about this dead white guy from the Renaissance?
That was really exciting. It was a really fun thing to do.
That's nice. I will publish the links to these websites and these projects on ArtsAbly.
Oh, good.
Awesome.
I have a question about -
what does it mean for you to work in the field of accessibility in the art, specifically in music?
Well, I mean, mostly, I would say my main focus now
is accessibility in music education.
I teach at NYU and at Rutgers Newark.
In NYU, I teach a lot of oral skills classes.
And oral skills is, for your listeners, historically is a very...
It can be a very stressful class.
Some students come at it with...
They didn't have a lot of really oral training for some reason in high school.
Maybe they know a lot about music theory, music theory, visually
or whatever, but they haven't connected it so much to listening.
And some people just don't have..
Some people have really amazing ears.
They just have a perfect pitch or they have nearly perfect pitch.
Other people just haven't had the ability to really connect, like I said, their
intellect and what they think about music intellectually with how they hear it.
I find that one of the first things I noticed about oral skills
is that it creates a lot of anxiety for my students.
Even able-bodied students, even performers, people that
perform all the time, they don't want get up in front of a room
of their peers and sing a solfege.
So I started to become really interested in this because it seems to be,
even for the able-bodied people, inaccessible.
Then when I started to do my research on neurodivergence, I realized that
for obvious reasons. I'm a late-diagnosed autistic person, and
I also have ADHD, also late-diagnosed.
I realized that there's a lot of sensory issues
so, for a lot of wide-ranging conditions.
People who have autism, obviously, have issues with sensory.
They have sensory overload, sometimes it's explained,
but even people who have migraines.
Also how those kinds of...
When that happens, that will affect their performance in their oral skill classes,
but it doesn't actually describe their ability level in the class.
My main focus right now, I'm working on a chapter for a book on music and pedagogy
and trauma, and it's all about this.
It's about how we can create a more accessible oral skills class that takes
into account without penalizing people.
Because I was working with students who were just not going to class because
they had so much anxiety around it, because they couldn't control
their disabilities and how they might manifest
at any given point during the oral skills class.
Then just generally, I do a lot of my syllabus -
My syllabi are very much organized around universal design in learning,
so they're set up so that
my students have accommodations, but they don't really need them in my classes.
They're just set up to be accommodating.
Does that answer your question?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
It's also this last point that you talked about, it's really important.
If you build your syllabus with the universal design in learning in mind,
then we don't need accommodations anymore in the classical sense or term
of accommodation in universities.
That's a good lesson, a good lesson for some teachers who are still following
a very rigorous model for their courses.
Yeah, because I know that in disability studies, when we get down to the real -
the really intellectualizing critical disability studies, we have some...
I've talked to my colleagues about criticisms
of the social model of disability.
But generally speaking, I find that this idea that
to locate the problem in the person, and that's really what accommodations do.
They locate the problem in the disabled person.
So it really is the medical model of disability.
And so, of course, it doesn't serve because each person is an individual.
And how your disability manifestsests is going to be so different.
And the other thing is that these accommodations,
so many times the people working at these offices or even the practitioners,
like the doctors, they're going by based on medical texts
or intellectual understanding, but they're not disabled and they don't
really know how the disability manifestsates in each individual person.
And the focus is often on on access needs, really obvious access needs,
like physical access needs, as opposed to emotional, intellectual,
developmental access needs.
And so that's why these cookie cutter accommodations that people
reach for, extra time or even delays.
Even if you have an accommodation that you can turn work in late,
there's always an endpoint where that has to stop
because you have to fit in with the medical model.
That's my real problem with it, and that's how I started to really
change my thinking.
I see, yeah.
Okay, thank you.
I have a last question before we conclude this conversation.
It's about people who have worked with you, influenced you, maybe inspired you,
maybe guided you in your career.
If you have one of these people to think of, who would it be and why?
Definitely Joe Straus from CUNY.
He's the patriarch of music and disability studies.
He actually came to...
I was involved in the musicology Society at Rutgers
when I was doing my degree there, Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
He was one of our invited speakers.
We invited a bunch of...
We got this musicology colloquia off the ground, and we started inviting people.
My friend Justin Burton, who was also doing a PhD there, invited Joe Straus.
I didn't know anything about disability studies at the time.
He gave his presentation, which I think was, I don't really remember.
He could probably correct me.
I think it was about one of his presentations on modernism and disability.
You know what it was?
It was late style.
He started talking about critical disability studies,
and he tells this story.
He could see the light go on in my brain.
I was just like, Whoa, what?
Then I raised my hand.
I remember raising my hand and saying, So invisible illness is a disability,
and it needs to be accommodated.
And he was like, Yeah.
So it's his fault.
It's his fault.
It's his fault for many of us, actually.
I know. Yeah.
So he started the whole thing.
And ever since, he's really been a champion for me,
and he's been very supportive.
And actually now I'm also very interested because he's been working on music
in aging, in ageism and age studies.
And now that's also a new interest of mine because obviously the parallels between
ageism and ableism are so apparent to me.
And now I'm older, right?
I'm in my 40s, I start to actually think about getting older now
and what it would be like to age in this disabled body.
I think sometimes people that aren't chronically ill,
they just take for granted aging.
I've had friends say to me, Oh, people are living longer now.
We should really assume we're going to live into our hundreds.
I was like, What? I mean, good luck.
I'll be happy to live to 80, maybe.
I'm fine with that. But anyway, it's just, yeah, he really -
He's a champion, like you said, for all of us.
Well, thank you so much for this conversation
and for taking the time to answer to these questions.
and all the best with all your
current projects and everything that is happening in your life right now.
Great. Thank you so much. Happy to be here.
Thank you. Have a great day.
You too.
Bye.
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