Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music

FAIN: FT-278486-21

Anabel Maler
University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA 52242-1320)

Research and writing of a book about deafness and music in the United States, including the history and analysis of sign language music, from 1800 to the present.

This monograph contextualizes recent musical practices in Deaf culture within the history of deafness and deaf education in America, and proposes a methodology for engaging analytically with the musical products of Deaf culture, in the form of musical works created and performed in sign language. The project’s aim is to bring the long and rich history of sign language music to the attention of music theorists, to engage with it seriously and thoughtfully as a musical art, to understand what elements of music are resilient across modalities, and to grapple with the methodological quandaries that signed music raises for the discipline of music theory. In redefining music as movement, the book argues that sign language music, rather than being marginal or extraneous to histories and theories of music, is in fact central and crucial to our understanding of all musical expression and experience. It argues, above all, for the resilience of music in the face of enormous obstacles.