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date: 28 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter reports on a multifaceted ‘disability arts scene’ in music worldwide that comprises visually impaired (i.e., blind and partially sighted) instrumentalists, singers, composers, producers, and others across a range of musical styles and genres. Some such musicians work alone but are usually deeply involved in networks. Others join community music ensembles that can be made up of musicians with a range of disabilities including visual impairments, or that consist entirely of visually impaired people. When promoting their community music participation, some visually impaired musicians draw on the history and traditions of the blind in music across the world, and thus exists the lore concerning special dispensations in the absence of sight. Yet there are also visually impaired musicians who distance themselves from that self-identity. The chapter explores how members of this unique socio-musical group consider the aforesaid ‘scene’ and its integral community music, and how their interpretations correspond or clash; it introduces key matters of accessibility, independent mobility, identity, musical approach and media, notions of discrimination, and social inclusion.

Keywords: music and disability, visual impairment, blindness and partial sight, social inclusion and music, accessibility and music, musical identities

David Baker

David Baker is Lecturer in Music Education at the UCL Institute of Education, UK (University College London), where he is programme leader for the MA in Music Education. David has been Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL. He has also been module leader for ‘The teaching musician’ at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London; and course tutor and MA supervisor for the ‘MA in instrumental teaching’ programme at the Institute of Education, Reading University, UK. He completed his PhD at Reading in 2005, which won a Bernarr Rainbow Award. He has been a professional trumpet player and also taught music in primary and secondary schools for a Local Education Authority in England for over ten years. David is an associate of the Royal College of Music, London, and a member of the Royal Society of Musicians of Great Britain. He first worked with Lucy Green on her ‘Ear playing project’ (2011–2012), which was funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. After completing that venture, David was principal investigator for the ‘Visually-impaired musicians’ lives’ project at UCL (2013–2015). This was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and its partners were the Royal National Institute of Blind People and the Royal Academy of Music, London. He has published various chapters, as well as research articles and book reviews on music education in peer-reviewed journals. David’s research and writing have also taken him as a presenter to Australia, India, Norway, and the United States.

Lucy Green

Lucy Green is a professor of Music Education at the Institute of Education. Her research interests are in the sociology of music education, specializing in meaning, ideology, gender, popular music, inclusion, equality, informal learning, new pedagogies, and most recently, the lives and learning of visually impaired musicians. Lucy led the research and development project ‘Informal learning in the music classroom’ within the British movement Musical Futures (http://www.musicalfutures.org), and this work is now being implemented in schools across the UK and in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and parts of the USA, Brazil, Cyprus and other countries. Her more recent research took that work forward into instrumental tuition, (http://earplaying.ioe.ac.uk). She has written five books and edited two books on music education. Her next book, co-authored with her colleague David Baker is under contract with Routledge (Taylor and Francis), entitled Insights in Sound: The Lives and Learning of Visually-Impaired Musicians.

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