♪ 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.
♪ Theme music ♪
Today, ArtsAbly is in conversation with Andrew Dell'Antonio,
Distinguished Teaching Professor and Head of the Musicology
and Ethnomusicology Division of the Butler School of Music
in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.
You can find the resources mentioned by Andrew Dell'Antonio during this episode
on ArtsAbly's website in the blog section.
Welcome to this new episode of ArtsAbly in Conversation.
Today, I am with Andrew Dell'Antonio,
who is a Distinguished Teaching Professor
and the Head of the Musicology and Ethnomusicology Division
of the Butler School of Music in the College of Fine Arts
at the University of Texas at Austin.
Thank you so much for joining us today, Andrew.
Thank you so much, Diane. I'm very honored to be here.
Thank you.
I always start this episode by asking you to present yourself.
Yes. My name is Andrew Dell'Antonio, or my given name is Andrea.
I was born in Italy.
My pronouns are he, him, and his.
I'm delighted to be here to talk with you about disability in the arts.
Thank you so much.
Okay, so I know that, first of all, I discovered by listening to an interview
that you gave a few months ago or years,
that you are a recorder player.
Yes, absolutely.
Yes, that was my first instrument.
I came to music through the recorder.
In fact, the recorder is really the primary instrument that I've always played.
I never trained on an orchestra instrument.
I took some voice lessons, but I never really became a very skilled singer.
When I was very small, my parents had me start on the recorder, as many parents do.
But the turning point for me was a year that my stepfather was the director
of a study abroad program in Firence, in Florence.
My stepfather retired a few years ago from Smith College. He's a medievalist.
He was leading students to this one-year program in Florence,
and so my family went back there.
I'll tell you a bit more about why I'm saying went back.
But we went there and my parents were continuing to suggest that I studied
with the instrument, so I went to study with somebody and I was just
playing the regular folk tunes and so forth that I was playing.
The person asked me, Would you like to learn some repertory that was written for that instrument?
I said, What? From that point on, it was all the way from there.
I really became passionate about early historical, early European repertories.
Did a few summer workshops while still in Italy.
Really, that was my instrument through college.
By the time I got to college, I was most interested in music history.
Once I got to graduate school, I was in musicology, but I continued playing.
In fact, all the way until coming here University of Texas
in 1997, for the first few years, I was playing fairly regularly with early
European music ensembles in the area.
I'm rusty now, but every now and then, I bring the instrument back out.
I often will use it in classes, introductory classes to talk
about improvisation, improvisation of ground basses,
things like that, because that's one of the things that I like the most about
these early repertories on which I've focused in my research is
the flexibility and the the non-determinacy
of the notation and the opportunity for contemporary musicians to make it their own.
But so that's a long way to say, yes, I'm a recorder player.
Okay. And you mentioned you were studying musicology in your grad studies.
What was your...
What schools did you attend?
And what made you really dig deeper
into this 16th and 17th century music?
Yeah, well, I guess I'll start.
By the way, I don't know if I'm going to apologize.
I tend to tell long stories.
This is something that connects to my particular neurology,
and so there you have it.
I'm Italian originally.
My first citizenship is Italian.
My first language was Italian.
I came to the United States at age nine when my mom married my stepfather.
I went back a number of times.
My father was still there. A lot of family is still there.
So part what has always been interesting to me is European culture.
That's part of who I am. I'm a European citizen still.
As I studied music, I was very interested in the way that music played within culture more generally.
Even as I was relatively young, still in high school and college,
I was always very interested in how music created cultural meaning and how music
inserted itself into cultural meaning.
Also, I have this unfair advantage that Italian was the first language I learned.
I learned French when I was very small.
I have this fluency in European languages.
My German is not quite as good.
I learned that in college, but still.
Part of the reason why, again, I gravitated towards the study
of historical European music, having also studied Latin in school,
is that the language makes sense to me, the culture makes sense to me.
And so trying to make sense of how the culture worked with the music
back then and how it works today has always been very interesting to me.
I guess that's where it came from.
Music was not what I automatically knew I wanted to study in college,
but by the time I was there for a year, year and a half,
it was clear that that was a passion.
I went directly -
I was an undergraduate at Yale University I went directly from there
to University of California, Berkeley.
I always was interested in earlier repertories, instrumental repertories,
especially as an instrumentalist.
Since then, I've become very interested in questions of listening and questions
of how music is understood and processed and used by particular cultural groups
to create particular kinds of possibilities or hurdles for others.
Again, my early work in graduate school and shortly after graduate school
connected to instrumental music.
But after that, most of my publications have to do with listening,
both historical listening in the past and listening in the present questions.
I have an essay out there about I'm listening at MTV.
Actually, I have two of them from a while back.
But more recently, I've really become very interested in questions connected
to disability, and I guess this is going to be our segue, and how I might have -
I moved into disability-related matters in the arts and in music, specifically.
Tell us about that.
I'm just monologuing here.
I'm taking over for you. - Great segue!
Well, no, I mean, if that's not where you want to go next, I shouldn't.
No, definitely, it's where I wanted to go next.
You just read my mind.
I read your mind, exactly.
Well, since your podcast has been going on for a while, I've really learned a lot
from people you've brought on, and oftentimes I know that they
have been speaking to how they got into music and disability.
My path to disability, I guess, is twofold.
One is I was born with a particular cognitive way
of operating, which I didn't really know until I was diagnosed with ADHD
at age 54, 55, somewhere in there.
But this is not what...
I mean, looking back over my life, it's like, yes, okay, many of the traits
that are attributed to that particular pathology or pathologization of a way
of being were things that happened to me or I were part of my life earlier.
As it happened, because I was very fortunate.
I had a very supportive family.
I was not a first-generation graduate of college or even of graduate school.
I was in a community that was very supportive of academic work.
I was not disabled according
to social model by my way of being.
That's been very interesting for me to figure out if and how
to claim disability, because certainly there are aspects of the way I am that
could be perceived as being impaired within certain contemporary contexts.
But because they have mostly manifested when I've been older and when
I've been very powerful and privileged, people have had to accommodate me.
I've never actually had to request accommodations of any sort,
which has been really interesting for me to think about, but to be also cognizant
of people who work the way I do having to request accommodations.
If I'd known more about the way I worked then certain accommodations
that might have helped it, I probably would have been helpful for me
when I was younger, but they weren't.
That's part one.
But the way that I initially came to be cognizant of disability culture
was that my daughter Miriam, who's going to be turned 23 -
no, I'm sorry, 24, this August - is autistic, non-speaking,
has epilepsy, a few other difficulties.
Very quickly, as she was growing up, I was placed into this very interesting
community of parents of disabled kids, but also in conversation with,
and sometimes unfortunately, conflict with disabled adults with those
particular configurations of body lines.
I learned an incredible amount from talking with, corresponding with being
online with the autistic neurodiversity community, really over the last 20 years,
especially, I guess, the last 15 years.
It's been a long journey.
Even before my own diagnosis, which, frankly, I saw it partly
because I'd learned so much about what various kinds of neurodivergent,
how they manifested, and I thought, I wonder if, and sure enough.
I have been drawing on certain kinds of resources.
There are medications that have been helpful for my focus.
I have been working with a counselor who is also ADHD and very good at providing strategies.
But where then this all came to a head has been in my teaching.
So my interest in the realities of different ways of being, being
legitimate in the world, and my realization that
in academic contexts, those alternate ways of legitimately being
in the world were not being honored, has led me in the last decade or so to
trying to find approaches, some of them curricular, some of them
political, some of them strategic, to foster diversity, honoring diversity of
all sorts, regardless of your body and mind,
whether using categories of age or race or disability.
So really I sometimes do claim the identity disabled.
I also make it very explicit, as I just did a few minutes ago, that
under the social model, I'm not really disabled at all because
I function very well within my professional context.
But it is true that, for example, I have a very difficult time
keeping track of time.
The flow of time does not process for me the way it does for many other people.
I've had to build lots of strategies to make time work for me.
In a different context, I could have been in a lot more trouble
because I'm late to almost everything. Things like that.
So that's my background. Really, most of the work...
I've published a little bit in Music and Disability, but it's just about...
Most of it has been focused on teaching, a little bit has
been focused on neurodiversity more broadly,
and I'm Ihappy to talk a little bit about that, too.
Yes. But I think also it's a good point about the fact that whatever your disability is,
it can also be a strength.
I know that with hyperactivity because
when you're able to focus your energy on...
Especially you, you did a good job in intersectionality.
You wrote about gender, sexuality.
You wrote a bit about disability, as you said.
But in a way, you have broadened a lot of different perspectives
and views on your society, which has to do or not with disability.
We also have discussions about the fact that
everybody has different access needs.
I talk about that a lot.
When you were talking about this maybe conflictual conversations
with other people with disabilities who have other views, it's important
to really understand the diversity of access needs and abilities that we have.
I think you did a good job in all that because you wrote a lot about
these different perspectives, right?
Yeah. Yes.
Again, in various places, I mean, one of the things that have found...
One of the places where I've been very present in these conversations,
or been significantly present in these conversations,
has been in online social media and I've been boosting a lot of voices.
I've been writing a bit there as well, blogging a bit,
and then again writing a few essays.
I have to say in terms of academic writing on disability, that's not
been my focus, and that's okay.
But I think recently, I'm trying to now remember the author, but I will be able
to give you a link later, Diane, if you want to post it.
An author, a disabled author who, one of whose focus is access and academic access,
talking about access friction
as another way of describing this concept,
which, again, in many ways is often
described as conflicting access needs.
What this author said, which I thought was really useful,
was that if you frame it as conflict, then it's a scarcity model where only
some people can, or potentially, only some people can get what they won't need.
But if you're talking about friction, you're talking about there are multiple
ways that will rub up against each other.
And friction is not always bad.
In fact, friction In another context of -
in all this AI resources
and these large language models that allow you to write without friction.
I've seen people say, actually, friction when you're writing
and thinking is good because you...
thinking, rubbing up against something that
isn't quite resolved is a way that we change and we think and we grow.
If something is frictionless, then it doesn't give us a chance to dwell on
exactly who might be being left out, what the intersections that we're not
paying attention might be.
All this is to say I liked how this person framed access friction.
Often in classes, both disability-focused classes and otherwise,
talked about conflicting access needs or contrasting access needs.
But I appreciate friction as a non-charged or charged,
but not negative term about that.
But absolutely, one of the things...
I have to say, I think I feel very fortunate that...
I think partly because I came to other
marginalized identity studies
before I came to disability musicology.
When I was finishing graduate school, feminism was first, which is bizarre to say,
but first really coming into play, so strong second-generation feminism,
second-wave feminism in musicology.
I was very taken by and very much in favor of the work.
I saw how much it was disruptive, disruptive even to my own thinking.
But I was fortunate back then to not feel challenged to manage to get beyond
the defensiveness and to figure out, Okay, how can we help create
greater equity within this context.
Then when around the same time, actually, queer studies hit hard in academia.
Also, even as a cis man, I was extremely taken by
the importance of those messages.
And so yet again, I had to reconfigure my ideas of my own position
within that marginalization and try not to be defensive.
When then I came across disability as a disability culture,
particularly neurodiversity, neurodivergence culture, and I was faced with the idea that
the way I'd been thinking about my child was potentially harmful and wrong-headed.
I was fortunate to be able to say, Okay
rather than, Oh, my, no, no, no, no, that can't be.
I love my child.
There's no way that the way I've been thinking could possibly
be harmful to my child.
That, I guess, back to this idea of intersectionality is…
I don't want to pretend that I am inherently better on me.
I still make mistakes and I still am learning.
But I've managed over time to cultivate this idea of if somebody tells me
that harm is happening, I do my best not to deny that I have a role in it.
That can be very difficult because, again, one doesn't
want to feel like one has done harm.
One doesn't want to feel like one is creating difficulties for others.
But structural biases, and disability is one of the categories,
thorough structural biases on access
are just so baked into everything we do,
and certainly academic work and the arts, that if we ignore them and we say,
Well, we didn't mean to set them up that way, so
we don't have to do anything about them, then we continue leaving people out.
Leaving people out is something that I've always had a problem with.
Again, I think I've been fortunate that I was able to go
through the exercise of correcting my own thinking significantly
with other identity categories before then I got hit hard with the disability issue,
which was in a way a lot closer to me when you have a child who's disabled and you
come up with a perspective that you think is correct and the best for your child.
Then an adult comes to you who has a disability and says,
No, actually, what you're doing is potentially harmful to your child.
It's much closer than an academic exercise, but it's also more important.
Anyway, so that's how I came into it.
One of the things I really like about or I'm really grateful about
my opportunities within disability in the arts,
is that I am teaching at a university with a very strong performing arts
program in music in my own area, but also as well as in theater and dance.
We have a really good visual arts program as well.
Over the years, I've been here not 27 years.
Lord, I can't believe them.
Basically, almost a half a lifetime for me.
I've grown in professional accomplishment, authority, privilege,
so that now I can be very visibly
in favor of certain kinds of change
without as much risk to me personally.
I know that a lot of younger scholars, a lot of younger people within an academy
are legitimately more concerned about coming out, as it were,
in favor of certain things that would question certain core aspects
of the academic enterprise.
I feel like I can make a difference.
At this point in my life, it feels very good.
I'm almost 62.
No, 61.
I know how old I am. I'm almost 61.
I'm starting to think backwards towards legacy things, as well as
helping to bring people forward.
Again, the work that younger scholars are doing, that you're doing as they're doing
is so meaningful and so important.
I'm in a position to be able to help support that, I think,
and that feels good.
I'm in a position to help introduce students to ways
of thinking about disability that I myself was not introduced to
in undergraduate or graduate.
If I had been introduced to them earlier, perhaps my own thinking would have
gotten to a better place more quickly.
But all that, actually, everything you're mentioning right now, it's about learning.
You learn as a parent with a child with disability,
you learn as an exchange with others.
I'm not talking about academic, I'm talking about life in general.
Life is a constant learning.
If you're willing to learn and to acquire new knowledge that you're able
to transmit, which is really the heart of what we are doing in
this exercise as a teacher, but also as a person,
and that's what I appreciate when we get together and we talk is that there is this
constant learning in exchange.
I think that's what you're also transmitting to your own students
as a teacher.
Right now, you are developing some other strategies about learning, I think.
Can you talk about that part?
I know you're doing a work about universal design for learning.
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely.
Again, this This concept of universal design for learning, UDL,
has been around quite some time, and I in no way want to
claim primacy in terms of bringing it to music issues.
There are actually some other music scholars, I should name Reba Wissner for one
and maybe we'll link her work out, who has been really working very hard
to make UDL visible within music.
But the principle aspect of Universal Design for Learning,
which again, maybe some other guests may talk about at some point
in this podcast, is the idea that there should be flexibility in the way somebody
approaches learning more broadly defined.
So there should be multiple ways to gain information.
There should be multiple ways to demonstrate that one
has acquired that information.
And there should be multiple ways for somebody to come to information
or learning being meaningful to them.
This last one is actually the one that I find most fascinating.
Because the first two, in a way, a lot of that has been done over the years.
Again, a lot of this is relatively new theorizing of things
that have been done for a long time.
I should say here, as a side note, my mother's specialization
is early childhood education.
One of the areas or one of the models that she worked with a great deal
is an early childhood model from Reggio Emilia,
which is this small city in Northern Italy, which after the Second World War,
began developing these sensational early childhood programs, which were student-driven.
They were driven by the kids with very well-trained facilitator teachers
and especially art, what they call the Atelier system, which was
You have an artist who helps the students learn through making art.
It is one of the most extraordinary, flexible,
ingenious learning systems ever.
Of course, it is not grades-based, and it's based on the students learning
on their own best ways that they can.
UDL, to some degree, connects to that principle, where some people,
even though learning styles per se, you know.
Are you a visual learner? Are you a text learner?
Those aren't confirmed scientifically.
But it's definitely true that different ways of engaging with different kinds of media
can sometimes for multiple people be more meaningful and more effective.
As somebody wants to learn something, I might learn better on a particular day
by listening to a podcast like this one or listening to an audiobook
or whatever, and then I might want to go back and read part of it so that I can
learn through reading and so forth, so that as many different ways
that you can encounter media is better.
Of course, this was in some ways, at least, developed to help people
with a variety of different physical and cognitive strengths.
If your visual perception is not very good, then you'd better
have really good audio materials.
If your auditory perception is not good, then you must have resources
that are good for your reading.
But in a sense, that's not the only people who benefit from having
multiple ways of requiring information.
Likewise, some people, for whatever reason, are very good at time tests.
They're very good at memorization, and they can convey things
through memorization.
I, for example, am really bad at that.
I didn't know why.
It's because of the way that my brain works.
It is why time tests were always really terrible for me.
Memorizing names and dates was always terrible for me.
Actually, I developed my own way of teaching history, which
relied relatively little on memorization with my students and more
on concepts and connecting concepts to things, which is the way I learned.
In a way, I UDLed myself as a young learner, and then
I've passed it on to my students.
Different people will be able to convey having understood in different ways.
In Italy, I remember there was a lot of oral examination,
which could be terrifying, but for some people actually
was what they got used to and they were okay with it.
You are in front of three or four people and they tell you, Okay,
Dell'Antonio, tell me about this, this, this.
Some people do really well on that. Other people do better
in written examinations. Other people do better with essays.
These are multiple different ways of conveying information.
This is the second branch of UDL is multiple ways, flexible ways of conveying information.
But the third branch about multiple ways of accessing,
of making something relevant is really important to me.
In the last few years, as I've been noticing how students have been affected by the pandemic
and by, frankly, the world being on fire, as my
just now turned 18-year-old stepson says, it's very hard to focus on things because
there are so many distractions and so many difficult things happening around us.
It can be difficult to be motivated to study, to engage with something that
is not inherently interesting to us.
The tradition has always been to say, Well, suck it up.
You got to learn this, so learn it the way I got to make you teach it.
I don't care if you are struggling.
If you can't do it, then you clearly are not worthy or not smart enough,
et cetera, et cetera.
UDL says, No, the way that we can help people learn is by making things meaningful,
helping them make them meaningful for themselves, which is
extraordinarily complicated because, of course, I can't make something interesting for you.
But if I provide you multiple ways of thinking about why something
is interesting, then the odds are that you're going to find it interesting.
It's more likely that you'll find it interesting than if I just say,
Okay, this is why it's interesting, or even say, I don't care
if you find it interesting. Learn it.
Because if you have to learn something that you don't think is interesting, that is inherently more difficult.
Again, and some people find strategies and you do it. This is something that's very interesting to me.
One of the things that I've been noticing, so beyond more broadly,
trying to apply these various principles in my teaching, because
coming back to the fact that many of the classes I teach have to do
with historically early European repertories, which
modern, contemporary 21st century students often might say, Well,
how is this important to me?
Which is a fair question.
Now, the fact that these repertories are still played a great deal
and are still very meaningful to a lot of people means that
they can still have meaning in the 21st century.
And so the question is, how can current young students who have not yet
engaged with them very deeply see if they can find them meaningful?
I asked them, Give it a chance.
Here are a few ways that these could be meaningful for you,
just like they're meaningful to people in your generation elsewhere.
That's something more broadly that I've approached.
But one of the things that I'm working on right now is a collaborative project
with a colleague who is the head of our dance area in our Department of
Theater and Dance here at the University of Texas and College of Fine Arts.
Their name is EG Gionfriddo
and EG is a choreographer, primarily, he teaches primarily ensemble, choreography classes,
also helps and directs production classes in the Department of Theater and Dance.
They're an applied person, primarily, and I'm primarily a classroom person.
We're both very interested in the question of how do we help students
learning community in an inclusive way.
Back to this idea of intersectional belonging.
And some of it absolutely has to do with gender and gender identity
and sexuality and ethnicity or race.
And some has to do with ability, disability, ability,
however we define the thing, the way your body mind can and can't do
certain things, which of these things can be
built and learned building on strength, which of these things need to be
accommodated and remanaged because your body mind right now cannot do those things.
And which of these things are essential for you to be able to do?
Or which What are these things can you negotiate?
Back to this idea of access you were saying earlier about -
access is about negotiation.
Is which of these situations in this space
in this time, in this location, are just
a nonstarter that you cannot function in this space, given your body mind?
Which of these are, it's not going to be great,
but I can deal with a half an hour of this if it's the good enough reason for me to do it.
What's the incentive for me to put through a half an hour of physical discomfort,
if in the end, perhaps, then we can get the next half hour,
we can change the circumstances, we can turn off the florist of lights,
whatever it is that is difficult for various people.
But one of the big pieces that we're working on...
Our project has to do with how do you design syllabi, how do you design courses
to create this idea of belonging, but also ideas of accountability.
This is something that is tricky because
particularly performing arts, we count -
when we're on an ensemble of any sort, a production, we have to have our collaborators there.
If a collaborator is not there, then we can't do a rehearsal, we can't
do a performance, or at least that's made more complicated.
As a performer, you are accountable to the people with whom you are working
to be part of the group as much as you can.
But also the community is accountable to the individual if the individual
has moments in which they cannot be physically present.
And so how do we translate that into teaching?
There's so much of teaching that is focused on attendance.
You must be present in order to learn.
For a long time, I've discarded that.
That was one of the very first pieces of UDL, particularly with the pandemic,
with the shutdown, from when we were all online, our university
was online in the fall 2020, spring 2021.
From that point on, I've had every class have an alternative
non-in-person assignment for every session because people are sick,
because people are... And I've also determined that in some classes,
if enough people aren't there, then it's hard to get the energy
of the class going to do the thing.
Worse still, some students decide, Oh, well, I'll just do the other assignment.
Then they're overwhelmed, they don't.
Then they become disconnected from the class because they're not there
to be held up by the class, but also not doing the work
that they could be doing instead.
We are, in the next couple of years, working with a couple
of colleagues, we're building a small cohort of instructors.
We're going to try to experiment in various ways that we can create
an intrinsic motivation to be in community
to learn, but also an intrinsic motivation
where there's compassion and accommodation built in so that if you
cannot be there, you are not inherently penalized or judged.
There has to be trust in every direction.
The instructor has to trust the student to be there whenever they can,
and the student has to trust their classmates to be there with them
because one learns a community.
I I think that's one of the valuable things about the performing arts,
and certainly about residential university life, is that learning community,
discussion, dialog, conversation, it's different from learning from reading,
it's different from learning from recording.
I think that is where the value of university and the performing arts
continues to be really crucial in creating community.
The question is, how do you juggle that with the reality of some people
not being able to be physically present?
Can you have a synchronous online participation?
As we did, frankly, when we were all in lockdown, that worked pretty well.
It is tricky I did have a class the next year when some people came back and said they didn't want to.
We were masked in class, and then other students
participated online through Zoom.
That worked mostly okay.
We did, again, the issue of how do you create the dynamic between four or five
people in a classroom and four or five people on Zoom in terms of communication.
All this to say the long winding way to say, this is one of these wonderful
problems of community that I think in the performing arts, we have the model.
Students in the performing arts understand that an ensemble
needs to be together to play.
Therefore, when you are participating in an ensemble, you have responsibility
to your ensemble mates to make the ensemble work as an ensemble.
Can we transfer that into academic courses where people often don't think
of the idea that we're learning to be historians together, which we are, which actually is
that's how you learn to be a historian.
But a lot of students will come into college thinking, Well,
it's just a bunch of names and dates. I can learn that by myself.
That's the least important thing, first of all, because I don't want to memorize names and dates, because I can't.
This is a project, again, I'll give you a link to it.
It's a project sponsored by our university.
We have this wonderful program that they call
the Provost's Teaching Fellows, which provides a little bit of money
for the faculty member, but also a little bit of money
to compensate others, whether students or colleagues,
to do something that is going to be meaningful to the teaching enterprise.
It's a three-year project.
The one that I'm doing with EJ is the first one that's been approved in the
10-year program that is a team project.
There's two of us.
I've been realizing, again, as somebody, as a musicologist who's trained to work by myself,
to do my own research, to go to my own archives, that was definitely
what music culture training was in the end of the previous century.
Hard for me to say that, but that's when I did music training.
Still to the present day, people think about, Well, we write our individual articles,
we write individual books.
But collaborative work, I've realized, is incredibly meaningful for me.
I think in our field, I wish we did more of it.
Again, I love how through this podcast, you're building this idea
of conversation, collaboration as creating really important work
so that we don't feel like each of us has to do it on our own.
This is actually one of the things...
People ask me, Well, what research are you doing right now?
For several years, I was a part-time administrator, I was an associate Dean,
I helped coordinate I did undergraduate studies for College of Fine Arts.
I did very little research during that time, but that was the time
when I was really starting to develop my UDL pedagogy,
thinking a lot about disability issues and so forth.
Now, having gone back to full-time teaching for a few years,
really, the research I'm doing is the pedagogy that I'm doing,
is the activism that I'm doing, are the conversations,
and some of it is resulting in written formal, what's that thing called,
peer-reviewed stuff.
And some of it is not. Then on the flip side,
I had the privilege of collaborating with a colleague, William Cheng,
on a series of books from Michigan Press called Music and Social Justice,
of which actually, you probably saw this, we just published a volume on the...
Why can't I remember the name of it now?
That software partly developed by Pauline Oliveros, AUMI.
I remember when that proposal came through four or five years ago, and I said,
Oh, my God, this is fantastic.
That's also something that I feel I'm doing is...
The other people involved in creating the series were also
happy about it, but I was very enthusiastic.
I said, This is a really interesting model for a scholar book, but also which is
clearly community-engaged, clearly bringing in folks, disabled folks,
who are trying to make sense of what this musical tool might be.
That's another thing. I guess I feel like that's mine, too, even though I didn't write any of it, because
I was able to make a really strong case for going ahead with it and
encouraging them, even as they undertook this really complicated project.
At the same time, of course, I was mainly opening the space for it,
and then other people did the work.
I feel like a lot of where I am right now is there, is that I'm in a place
where I can open up spaces, and then amazing people are doing this work, and then
I can be really delighted about that.
For this particular work, I was very happy that it was done
because this is an old project.
I've been working with AUMI since...
It existed way longer before I started using it.
I found it a really interesting collaborative tool for children
to make them understand that music could be played without touch.
When you started editing this project, first of all,
yes, for those who are using it.
We all got to this little note that says, Oh, there is a project
that is reviving that AUMI, and all articles and conversations about how to use it.
It was fantastic. Good job, really.
It's a great book and it gives lots of ideas, too.
It's like, Oh, yeah, I never thought of using it that way, or I never
thought of this as this perspective.
It ties to your UDL work because it's really about when you think of
Universal Design itself, which comes before Universal Design for Learning,
it's to build a tool or to design a product that
can be used by a multitude of people and that can maybe transform the way you would
use a traditional such tool.
So yeah, it really...
It comes to your...
It's really linked to this Universal Design for Learning work that you're doing, too.
Yeah.
Again, I've been familiar with the AUMI before the proposal came through.
I remember playing around because I've been
admiring Pauline Oliveros' work for a long time.
I heard that she had been involved in this experimental instrument, which,
again, from the very beginning was meant to rethink
the way music would be made from a non-classical
and non-standard body and mind way.
I'm glad that the book can make this whole project more visible because
I think within certain communities, I mean you clearly knew about it as well,
within certain communities, AUMI is fairly well known.
But I think the broader significance of it with the possibility of AUMI work being
done across body-mind types, so that it's not just people who are identified
as disabled, who have certain kinds of disabilities who can use it.
But no, this is a musical tool
that can transcend particular ideas about
ability and disability collaboration.
For example, there are times there's a class that I love teaching
about music and disability, and we talk about the various ways that
adaptive instruments and adaptive music making has been configured.
You have orchestras that incorporate one or two instruments or ensembles that are
ally with orchestras that do orchestra repertory, but with a set of people
using adaptive instruments of various sources, people who are visibly disabled,
playing instruments that adapted for them.
That's one, and that is still the presentational basis of
an orchestra of professional musicians.
Phenomenal work being done by professional musicians with disabilities, of course with RAMPD, which
I've been so impressed with the work that you and others have done with RAMPD.
Then there's the other side of, Okay, well, these are things that we do for the special education kids.
It's an entirely different, segregated thing.
What I like about AUMI is that it kind of blows up that distinction
for better or for worse.
That's another area that's worth exploring.
I've been delighted. I remember seeing in your presentation that you gave about a year ago, I guess,
about that you were using AUMI in the schools with the kids,
and I thought, Oh, wow, fantastic.
We have all these cool connections.
Yeah, but that's also what we're doing. We're networking.
That fairly very well.
Yeah.
Okay. Thank you so much for all that.
I have a last question before...
Last question before we wrap it up,
which is about people who might have inspired you
or motivated you in your career
and who you really think of when you're thinking of everything you've done.
If you had one or two names to give, who would it be and why?
Sure. I remember, so you were kind enough to send me a few questions
to think about before this conversation, and I remember getting to that question
thinking, Oh, damn it. How can I possibly?
What's interesting to me is that the people, and I'm going to name a couple of people,
they're all people who are younger than me.
In a way, they're not so much people who have
helped me come to this point when I was younger,
but there are people who now I see as really taking things to the next level
and inspiring me, literally,
in what they are doing that is
well beyond what I could ever do.
So, of course, one person I wanted to make sure to mention
is Elizabeth McLain, who is a Virginia Tech.
I suspect that sooner or later you will have a conversation with her on this podcast.
She is an extraordinary scholar, disabled scholar, a multi-disabled scholar,
who got her PhD on writing and musicology,
theory musicology on a topic that is extremely canonical in a way.
And yet, even as she has done that work over the last five, six, seven years,
has become, I think the most visible US scholar of disability studies
in terms of cross-disciplinary disability work.
And just everything that she does in the way that she does it
is so deeply ethical and so smart and so inventive.
And in the face of extraordinary medical ableism
and pretty significant academic ableism as well,
she's not minimizing the difficulties then hanging in there
and really building her own work and bringing other people along.
Through Elizabeth, the other person I want to mention is Gaelynn Lea,
whose work is entirely different in a way because as a performer,
she's certainly an intellectually deep performer, but her work is really advocacy and performance.
Again, I'm sure you mentioned this elsewhere,
Diane, but her co-founding of RAMPD is, I think, one of the most significant
things that's happened in the last several years, and her continuing work through
social media as well, on her Patreon.
She has these meetings where she invites
musicians with disability studies people, and they're often very small.
The investment of time is significant for her to have four or five people on a Zoom,
but she's there opening spaces and teaching and so forth.
I wanted to mention a third person, if you can, squeezing one more person,
and this is Stephanie Ban.
Steph is a graduate of the University of Chicago, an independent scholar.
She actually works in access, disability access, specifically,
doing primarily what's called plain language work.
Plain language is this phenomenal approach
where you acknowledge that
language is an aspect of access.
People with intellectual disabilities or first language learners or a variety of other folks
deserve to receive information that is
nuanced and complex and not simplified, but in a language that is not
inaccessible, that is not highfalutin, is not
necessarily university-trained language.
I've been very interested in plain language as a facet
of UDL, and Steph works in plain language in the UDL world.
But she also writes, has been publishing extensively on music and disability.
Her own training is not technically in music.
She's a history bachelor major, but she is an extremely sensitive musician,
even though she was denied the opportunity to learn to actually play music herself.
It's just an interesting counter example to Gaelynn Lea.
Gaelynn, very famously in her own telling her own story, had a teacher
who perceived her as being musically very interested and very talented
and helped her develop an adaptive approach to learning how to play music.
Steph was told that given her body, she couldn't play music.
And still, she is extremely musically thoughtful, very interested in issues
of philosophy, disability, and music.
And so she and I have collaborated a few times.
She is inspiring because she is creating a space for her scholarship that is,
first of all, plain language informed, second of all, highly ethical,
and third of all, that does not need academia for a scholarship.
This is another piece of UDL that I think is really important
is access is also about, can you get admitted into programs
and can you successfully complete programs?
And Diane, as somebody who's writing a dissertation,
you know very well what extraordinary
hurdle a dissertation is for any human being,
let alone somebody who, for whatever reason, has not been encouraged
or given the support that they need.
Steph has basically said she knows she could not succeed in academia,
given the ableism in academia.
And still, she has the capacity and the determination
and the networking skills to get support and get published all sorts of places,
which I think is a great example of how we can be
cognizant of the work that can be done by public intellectuals who are not
officially within academia.
Academics are extremely possessive of their academic spaces.
My colleagues themselves, I've had trouble convincing them.
Steph is not an example of this, but one of our graduate students
wanted to bring a non-PhD specialist in as a member of their doctoral committee.
My colleagues said, No, he doesn't have to be a PhD, he can't be part of the doctoral committee.
I was flabbergasted because this person they were bringing in,
wanted to bring in, was one of the most recognized experts
in their particular area of musical practice and even social work,
but they didn't have a doctoral degree, and so they couldn't be in a doctoral committee.
This is something, another piece of access that I'm really interested in,
and I'm still trying to figure out how to help facilitate, but I really
value the work people are doing who are not within an official academia.
Steph is somebody who I know who does the work, and so I love collaborating
with her and boosting the work.
I think I may be able to give you a link or two to her work if readers are interested in reading it.
Oh, yes, I would join that.
Of course, all that will be published on ArtsAbly's website.
But yeah, these are all fantastic people.
I know them also, and - But it's true that
when you know the story behind the person
and how they can make this academic or non-academic world a bit better,
it's refreshing and it's hopeful.
Thank you so much for all that.
Thank you for being here today with us. Thank you so much.
My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Yes.
Great conversation.
It's always lovely.
I should say I hope you can leave this in for the listeners that
having conversations with Diane is something that I've had the pleasure of doing now for a few years.
I always come away from conversations with Diane refreshed and energized.
Thank you for doing this work. Looking forward to the next conversation.
Yes, thank you. I'm looking forward to it, too.
Have a great day and talk soon.
Thank you. Bye.
Take care. Bye.
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