In spring 2024, my colleagues in music education approached me about how we might collaboratively address a major gap in the curriculum at our institution. The issue—one in every four people in the United States is disabled,Footnote 1 yet music education majors receive little training in accommodating and including disabled studentsFootnote 2 in classroom and ensemble settings.Footnote 3 Lack of teacher preparedness is a national concern. According to a 2021 study by Culp and Salvador, “just over 50% of undergraduate music education programs required PMTs to take at least one music-specific course dedicated to preparing them to meet the needs of diverse learners…over 20% of undergraduate programs may not offer, require, or systematically integrate this information throughout the undergraduate experience.”Footnote 4 Such lack of experience in working with disabled students not only impacts teacher ability to accommodate students in school settings, but also results in disabled students being denied access to music through private instruction due to “private instructors’ discomfort with teaching students with disabilities.”Footnote 5 While collegiate music educators are working to close this gap, both through online and in-person fieldwork, these efforts are inconsistent across programs.Footnote 6
It is therefore no surprise that the majority of the 7.5 million disabled students who receive accommodations under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act are routinely excluded from participation in music making opportunities in school settings.Footnote 7 While lack of teacher preparedness is a concrete problem that my colleagues and I are working to address, we are also aware that this is merely a symptom of ableism, which provides the philosophical justification for the exclusion of disabled musicians. As noted arts education specialist Melissa Bremmer observes,
The basic premise of ableism is that able-bodied people are privileged over people with nonable bodies, therefore disadvantaging people with disabilities. In general, music academies have high expectations of able-bodiedness: Students are usually asked to showcase their musical skills (including complex techniques involving speed, agility, and precision) and musical sensitivity (including nuance and emotionality). Musicians who cannot conform to these able-bodied practices are often excluded from music academies.Footnote 8
As Bremmer suggests, the privileging of “able-bodied practices” is readily apparent in elite music academies. However, as will be explored in this article, the very concept of musical talent as conceptualized within the Euro-American tradition is rooted in ableist aesthetics that continue to shape music education more broadly in the United States.Footnote 9 How did we get here? How can we begin to disentangle notions of musical value (and human value) from ableism? Ultimately, how might we reimagine music education to not only include but also celebrate disabled musical expression and disabled musicians?
In this article, I deconstruct the concept of musical talent to demonstrate the ways in which it serves as a “power-over” structure fueled by exclusive and ableist criteria rooted in eugenic values. In contrast to this hierarchical model, I offer a new theoretical framework for conceptualizing musical value through neurodivergent musicality, which I define as musical engagement that centers the neurodivergent experience, privileges creativity and expressivity rather than formal musical skill, and challenges normative expectations for musical performance, generating musical exchange predicated upon “power-to-and-power-with” dynamics.Footnote 10 “Power-to-and-power-with” musical environments empower musicians to express themselves on their own terms and to embrace the creative agency of other musicians through collaborative and cooperative artistic exchange. I begin by deconstructing musical talent into four distinct, yet interconnected entities—a cultural construct, ideology, lived reality, and form of cultural capital—that work together to enforce normative and ableist expectations for sounded and bodily performance. I then contextualize this understanding of musical talent through a discussion of theoretical frameworks of power, specifically the work of Michel Foucault, Iris Marion Young, Zeus Leonardo, Alicia A. Broderick, Cheryl Harris, Adria Hoffman, and Sarah Lucia Hoagland. Building upon the work of scholars in disability studies, music education, musicology, and critical race studies, I analyze how this ableism was encoded into musical talent and aptitude testing that came to dominate music education research throughout the twentieth century as a result of the eugenics movement. Though such assessments have declined in popularity in U.S. music education, drawing upon music educator Julia Koza’s concept of “glacial erratics,” I assert that the ideology of musical talent promoted through these tests still shapes understandings of who is musically valuable today.Footnote 11 I then shift the conversation from historical constructs of musical talent to neurodivergent musicality, offering a brief discussion of how musicality has been conceptualized within the fields of psychology as an intrinsic aspect of human social bondingFootnote 12 and in ethnomusicology as a cultural construct.Footnote 13 Building upon Joseph Straus, Michael Bakan, Dave Headlam, Jon William Fessenden, and Nicola Shaughnessy’s work on music, autistic music making, and neurodivergent aesthetics and my IRB-approved longitudinal ethnographic research with neurodivergent musicians, I posit the framework of neurodivergent musicality, which is guided by four main tenets. Neurodivergent musicality (1) centers neurodivergent experience in all its diversity; (2) challenges dominant ableist aesthetics; (3) resists fetishization of neurodivergence and historical images of the idiot savant; and (4) generates power-to-and-power-with through collaborative musical exchange. Finally, I offer practical suggestions for how music educators might support neurodivergent musicality through existing and newly created programming.
Positionality
I would like to be clear that I do not take issue with Euro-American music and, more specifically, Western art music, nor do I intend to demonize musicians within this tradition. As a classically trained musician, I appreciate and understand the time and dedication it takes to achieve the aesthetic goals of this tradition. I do believe that musical virtuosity, as defined in the Western art music tradition, is valuable. However, it is not the only marker of value. Furthermore, I do not seek to denigrate music educators, the majority of whom are dedicated to values of inclusion and access to music education for all.Footnote 14 My intention in unpacking the history of musical talent tests and its connection to the eugenics movement is to demonstrate the ways in which “we” as music educators and “we” as a society have unwittingly inherited oppressive ideologies.
My training is in ethnomusicology, specializing in disability studies with a focus on neurodivergence rather than in the field of music education. Through my collaboration with music educators, I have gained a greater understanding of the discipline, yet this research is largely musicological in nature, combining historical and archival research with that of longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork. Despite the differences in disciplinary background and methodology, this work aligns with many of the values of music education, namely, a focus on pedagogy and the belief that access to education is a human right. I argue that all musicians within academia will likely serve as music educators in some capacity, whether or not they receive official training in music education. Furthermore, music educators will all engage with disabled students and fellow musicians at some point in our lives. As a disabled musician and educator who works with countless disabled students in higher education, I have witnessed that disability is ubiquitous yet often serves as a justification for exclusion. In recent years, many scholars in higher education and music specifically have published works recounting their experiences of exclusion, including the inaccessibility of printed music and performance spaces, fear and experience of stigma, disbelief surrounding invisible disabilities, limited resources, and failure to accommodate documented disability.Footnote 15 It is this combination of my collaborative work with neurodivergent musicians, role as a music educator, and lived experience as a classically trained musician, ethnomusicologist, and person with disabilities that has led me to critically examine the limits of “musical talent” in capturing musical worth and to posit a new framework for valuing creative musical expression through a neurodivergent lens, or what I term “neurodivergent musicality.”
Central to this work has been my exploration of the ways in which the designation of musical talent has shaped my own experience as a musician, academic, and teacher—a designation that, while affording me certain privileges, also served to control my musical and creative expression. It was only after collaborating with neurodivergent musicians that I began to listen differently—to listen for human creativity and connection even if it fell outside of expected musical norms—and to challenge dominant power hierarchies designed to disenfranchise musicians with nonnormative bodies/minds. In this way, this article offers a re-imagining of what expanded understandings of musical value might look and sound like and serves as an invitation to critically examine how “power-over” structures shape our access to musical knowledge, opportunity, and resources.
Musical Talent Deconstructed
“Musical talent” is a term widely used by both professional musicians and laypersons alike to ascribe artistic value to an individual. Adria Hoffman comments on the quotidian nature of this term and draws connections to similar designators of privilege stating, “Uses of the words intelligence, smart, ability, and talent have become so commonplace in popular media and professional development industries that the definitions are not questioned; they are normal and ordinary terms.”Footnote 16 Yet how musical talent is defined, measured, and assessed has been a topic of historical debate within the fields of music education and music psychology. My critique of musical talent and, as will be discussed, its connection to eugenics is not novel. I am indebted to the work of Julia Koza, Alex Lubet, Lindsey Wright, Alex Cowan, and Adria Hoffman. However, I believe my deconstruction of musical talent is useful for understanding how musical talent creates power-over dynamics in both theory and practice.
As an ethnomusicologist, I believe it is important to acknowledge first and foremost that musical talent is a cultural construct. Despite ever-increasing globalization and social, political, and economic exchange, understandings of musical talent, normative musical aesthetics, and even conceptualizations of music vary from culture to culture. Lindsay Wright echoes this sentiment in her article exploring the construction of Black musicality through the life of Thomas Wiggins, stating, “musical ability, like music, [is] not as an object or possession to be identified or evaluated but a vast constellation of learned practices that shift across time and circumstance, reflecting the social conditions that cultivate them.”Footnote 17 Rather than making broad statements about the function of musical talent on a global scale, my research specifically examines the concepts of musical talent and musicality within the framework of Euro-American musical traditions. Though there are increasing instances of programmatic diversity, the majority of public music education programs in the United States are rooted in Euro-American art music. “Euro-American traditions” is an incredibly broad category that includes a variety of genres and classifications, including popular, folk, jazz, and art music, each of which has its own aesthetic goals and criteria. Yet, despite the inherent diversity within this designation, I believe Euro-American musical traditions share similar aesthetic qualities that are predicated on valuing normative aesthetics, both in terms of musical sound and the bodies/minds that produce them. Such constructions support and are supported by ideologies of oppression that uphold dominant power structures.
In this way, musical talent constitutes an ideology of oppression that functions through exclusive criteria that bestow cultural capital on the “talented” while depriving the “untalented” of material, creative, and social opportunities. Here, musical talent acts as an ideological construct that enforces normative aesthetics relative to how bodies/minds should look, sound, and perform. This parallels what disability studies scholar Tobin Siebers refers to as “the ideology of ability.” Beyond simply indicating a preference for able-bodiedness, the ideology constructs ability as the litmus test for determining human worth or even humanity itself: “Ability is the ideological baseline by which humanness is determined. The lesser the ability, the lesser the human being. The ideology of ability simultaneously banishes disability and turns it into a principle of exclusion.”Footnote 18 Though ability is broadly defined while musical talent is specific to musical/sounded contexts, their ideological manifestations are permeable inasmuch as they both uphold the tenets of ableism by privileging bodies/minds that conform to normative aesthetic expectations. But what are the criteria that transform this ideology into a lived reality? In other words, what makes some people talented and other people untalented?
Musical talent becomes a lived reality when its tenets are codified and promoted through normative centers of schools, where people are sorted into a hierarchy of “talented” and “untalented.” Euro-American music as taught in educational institutions in the United States is guided by aesthetic criteria aligned with Western art music standards of pitch, rhythm, harmony, timbre, and technical proficiency. When individuals meet these aesthetic criteria, musical talent becomes a lived reality through performance. In turn, the performance of this musical talent allows one to be identified as talented.Footnote 19 This is not problematic in and of itself, but becomes so when this aesthetic is enshrined as the norm and deviation is punished through exclusion. Alex Lubet comments on the phenomenon stating, “‘Talent’ cultures such the West practice the most exclusionist form of music education, particularly in conservatories and universities. While such institutions are fiercely selective and competitive, this exclusionist model permeates the selection/rejection criteria even of public schools and community-based music programmes.”Footnote 20 Within this paradigm, individuals are talented because they are told they are talented. Once assigned, the designator of “musically talented” becomes an inhabited identity characterized by potential, just as its foil of “musically untalented” constructs an opposing identity characterized by deficit.
The identification as “musically talented” imbues one with cultural capital, marking them as valuable and deserving of resources, while those without the designation are constructed as less valuable. While this may appear to be a false dichotomy, the binary is supported by the ideological structures of oppression that govern our understandings of power. Musical talent is one such oppressive ideology because the power generated by displays of talent is considered finite, creating a scarcity mindset in which power-over relationships reign supreme. Lindsey Wright comments on the phenomenon in her analysis of how televised talent shows serve to reinforce exclusive models of talent: “Anti-talent serves as a stark reminder that to offer certain aspirants limited time and resources, whether in the world talent shows create or the one they represent, others need to be denied, excluded, and soon forgotten.”Footnote 21 Thus, the cultural capital produced through the performance of musical talent as a lived reality is made possible by the ideology of musical talent that demarcates the “talented” from the “untalented,” constructing some bodies as valuable while eliminating others.
My deconstruction of musical talent in prose format has perhaps suggested that these entities are nested together like a matryoshka doll,Footnote 22 with musical talent as a cultural construct being the largest overarching force and musical talent as cultural capital being a mere by-product. However, the nested imagery fails to capture how “power-over” radiates across and through them. It is perhaps more accurate to imagine these elements as points on a Hoberman sphere,Footnote 23 expanding and contracting while being inextricably linked. The musical talent conglomerate was supported and sustained by the development of musical talent and aptitude tests that emerged as an outgrowth of the eugenics movement.
Theoretical Foundations of Power
I am indebted to the work of philosophers and music educators who have informed my understanding of power constructs and how they manifest in musical culture.Footnote 24 This section draws a connection between Michel Foucault’s interpretation of knowledge as a tool for control and the ways in which Whiteness, smartness, and, I argue, musical talent, constitute types of knowledge that align with dominant power structures. These kinds of knowledge enforce normativity and are assessed and performed through examinations that transform the ideas of Whiteness, smartness, and musical talent into inhabited identities and forms of property that have real material consequences vis-á-vis access to educational and creative resources. In contrast to these “power-over” mechanisms, I suggest that neurodivergent musicality can challenge hierarchical power structures embedded within normative musical aesthetics and, in so doing, generate a “power-to-and-with” model for engaging in creative and collaborative musical exchange.
Foucault’s power/knowledge construct has proven essential to my exploration of the history of musical talent testing. Though Foucault was interested in the mechanisms that supported the modern penal system, his philosophical analysis of examination and surveillance as tools of control serves as a useful model for understanding how examinations within education settings objectify students. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault explains the role of examination in creating power hierarchies stating,
And the examination is the technique by which power, instead of emitting the signs of its potency, instead of imposing its mark on its subjects, holds them in a mechanism of objectification. In this space of domination, disciplinary power manifests its potency, essentially, by arranging objects. The examination is, as it were, the ceremony of this objectification.Footnote 25
Here, Foucault demonstrates that the examination exerts power over the body/mind of the human examinee, or test taker, by turning them into an object. While the examination provides an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge, it is simultaneously a tool that reduces the test taker to the score received on the examination; their capability becomes inextricably bound to the knowledge they produce therein. Thus, while certain kinds of knowledge that align with the values of the dominant power structure are a form of power, the demonstration of such knowledge through the process of examination actually strips the examinee of power by objectifying their personhood. Rather than accumulating power through the production of knowledge, examinations exert power over the test taker by forcing them to engage in the exercise of becoming quantifiable. The objectification not only makes the examinee knowable but also produces information that is then used to control them. A key component of this control is the “normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish.”Footnote 26 By applying a critical disability studies lens, I posit that Foucault’s evocation of the “norm” in this quote, defined as “constituting, conforming to, not deviating or different from, the common type or standard, regular, usual,” highlights a connection to the eugenic underpinnings of examinations.Footnote 27 Here, examinations function as a way of sorting and segregating individuals by imposing a constructed norm, making adherence to this norm requisite, and punishing or eliminating those whose bodies/minds do not comply. The application of Foucault’s power/knowledge construction in the process of examinations has important implications for understanding how the normative paradigm of musical talent was promulgated through musical aptitude tests that began as an outgrowth of the eugenics movement and flourished in music education throughout the twentieth century.
It is not only the process of examination itself—in this case, musical talent testing—that creates a system of “power-over,” but also the conference of power to an individual who complies with normative expectations. Examinations served to reify normative musical aesthetics and create opportunities for those identified as musically talented while excluding and eliminating those marked as “untalented.” The process of reification aligns with what Iris Marion Young describes as cultural imperialism, or “the universalization of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm.”Footnote 28 Musical talent constitutes a form of cultural imperialism that reinforces a narrow set of musical aesthetics as normative while rejecting musical expressions that do not align with these values as deviant noise. In their article, “Smartness as Property: A Critical Exploration of Intersections Between Whiteness and Disability Studies,” Zeus Leonardo and Alicia Broderick examine smartness as a form of property that endows the possessor with its qualities, becoming an integral aspect of an individual’s identity. Drawing upon Cheryl Harris’s exploration of Whiteness as property,Footnote 29 the authors argue that, like Whiteness, smartness functions as an ideological system of oppression that relies on exclusive criteria to afford privilege to those who demonstrate certain kinds of knowledge:
In terms of ability, constructs such as smartness only function by disparaging in both discursive and material ways their complement, those deemed to be uneducable and disposable. In both cases, the privileged group is provided with honor, investment, and capital, whereas the marginalized segment is dishonored and dispossessed.Footnote 30
Building upon Leonardo and Broderick’s concept of “smartness as property,” I argue that musical talent fulfills a similar ideological function, creating a false binary between those considered “talented” and “untalented.” Yet who determines what musical talent is—what it looks like, sounds like, how it is performed, and what bodies perform it—is a matter of social and cultural construction and directly tied to aesthetic expectations and norms. Music educator Adria Hoffman reinforces this connection, commenting that intelligence and talent are “socially mediated and enacted constructs. Both of these constructs require influential others who provide or inhibit opportunities to perform knowledge in spaces.”Footnote 31 Such gatekeeping constitutes a “power-over” structure that has excluded and continues to exclude disabled musicians from participation in the creation of musical culture.
In contrast to this “power-over” paradigm, I draw upon Sarah Lucia Hoagland’s notion of generative “power-from-within” as articulated in Lesbian Ethics: “‘Power-from-within’ is the power of ability, of choice and engagement. It is creative; and hence it is an affecting and transforming power, but not a controlling power.”Footnote 32 This notion of creative possibility forged from engagement and cooperation offers an alternative to oppressive models of “power-over” that often dominate Western social thought.Footnote 33 In this way, Hoagland’s “power-from-within” aligns with my construction of neurodivergent musicality as “power-to-and-power-with” that privileges nonnormative musical expression.
Eugenics and Musical Talent Testing
The term eugenics, or “the science which deals with all the influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race,” was first coined by the English mathematician Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911).Footnote 34 Though often associated with Nazi genocidal agendas, eugenics first gained traction in the United States and England during the early twentieth century.Footnote 35 Far from being viewed as radical, eugenics achieved widespread popularity among scientists, politicians, economists, educators, and social reformers.Footnote 36 Despite the diversity of shareholders that supported the eugenics movement, the primary motivating factor that united them was fear of the “Other” and the promise of control through the manipulation of heredity.Footnote 37 This symbolic “Other” took many forms, from the disabled individual, labeled “feeble-minded” or “defective,” to the working poor, to the non-Anglo Saxon or Nordic immigrant, to the African American. Eugenics offered a variety of solutions to these phantom threats, both negative and positive.Footnote 38 While eugenics-based policies such as racially motivated immigration restrictions, anti-miscegenation laws, and the sterilization, infanticide, and euthanasia of disabled people constituted the extremes of negative eugenics, positive eugenic endeavors that sought to identify and promote mental and creative abilities in individuals were just as insidious. A controversial and long-lasting eugenic belief is the inheritability of musical talent.
Galton believed that mental ability and certain traits, such as musical talent, were biologically inherited. In his work Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, Galton attempted to use statistics to prove the human race could be studied and perfected through hereditary means.Footnote 39 As Alexander Cowan states in his dissertation “Unsound: A Cultural History of Music and Eugenics,” “Music offered him something that other phenomena did not: proof positive (he thought) that some talents, however subject to the effects of practice or prestige, were at base self-evidently innate, and moreover, hereditary.”Footnote 40 Yet for all his conviction, Galton struggled to elucidate this pattern of heredity: “Although the fact of the inheritance of musical taste is notorious and undeniable, I find it exceedingly difficult to discuss its distribution among families.”Footnote 41 Far from casting doubt upon his assertion that musical talent was biologically inherited, Galton’s views gained traction among his contemporaries and influenced subsequent generations of eugenicists. In this way, understandings of musical talent were co-constructed along with eugenic beliefs, policies, and practices.
It should come as little surprise, then, that the first widely popular musical talent tests had eugenics roots. Though known as one of the fathers of music education and an early pioneer in the field of music psychology, Carl Seashore (1866–1949) was heavily involved in eugenic organizations, published work in eugenic journals, and, most importantly, participated in and championed many eugenic studies on the nature of musical talent and heredity. Seashore believed that musical talent was a biologically inherited gift that could be measured and furthered through selective breeding and educational practices: “Musical talent, like all other talent, is a gift of nature—inherited, not acquired; in so far as a musician has natural ability in music, he has been born with it.”Footnote 42 His Measures of Musical Talents, first published in 1919 and later revised in 1939, were the first standardized battery of music aptitude tests. These music perception assessments were designed to measure one’s ability to discriminate between differences in pitch, intensity, time, consonance, and tonal memory.Footnote 43 Seashore was adamant that his tests could “diagnose” musical talent in individuals who had otherwise gone unnoticed.Footnote 44 The use of the term “diagnose” is significant in its connection to the medical model of disability where a diagnosis is related to pathology. While in this case, the diagnosis of musical talent was a desirable outcome, it also served to objectify individuals and strip them of agency. Seashore reasoned that since musical talent was inherited and immutable, in other words, it could not be acquired through training, the untalented would not benefit from music education. In fact, attempting to train the untalented would result in harm, both to the untalented individual, who would only be discouraged by their inability to keep pace with their talented peers, and to the talented students who would fail to thrive if forced to learn at a rate befitting their untalented peers.Footnote 45 Thus, Seashore advocated for segregating the musically untalented to ensure the success of the musically talented.Footnote 46 Seashore considered public schools to be the ideal venue for implementing these tests, in order to discover latent talent, and likewise, to cull the musically unfit. According to Koza, “Teachers were to use test scores in a process that qualified and promoted some students while simultaneously disqualifying and eliminating others. Test scores would tell teachers at the outset which students would or would not benefit from music instruction and would help them decide who should or should not participate in school music.”Footnote 47 Thus, Seashore’s tests created a standard operating procedure in public schools where students who were identified as musically talented were educated while those who scored poorly were excluded. The tests achieved widespread popularity during his lifetime in public school settings and at the collegiate level, having famously served as the basis for entrance into the Eastman School of Music.Footnote 48
Though Seashore’s tests have been criticized for their lack of validity and bias toward Western art music aesthetics, his Measures of Musical Talent spurred subsequent generations of talent tests.Footnote 49 Far from questioning the internal biases, music educators and music psychologists were convinced they could create better tests. This led to a flourishing of musical talent assessments throughout the twentieth century, including but not limited to Jacob Kwalwasser and Peter Dykema’s Kwalwasser-Dykema Music Tests (1930), Raleigh Drake’s Drake Musical Aptitude Test (1954), E. Thayer Gaston’s Test of Musicality (1957), Herbert Wing’s Standarised Tests of Musical Intelligence (1958), Arnold Bentley’s Measures of Musical Ability (1966), and Edwin Gordon’s Musical Aptitude Profile (1965), Primary Measures of Music Audiation (1979), Intermediate Measures of Music Audiation (1982), and Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (1989).Footnote 50 Unlike Seashore, these researchers did not hold eugenic beliefs, and many were likely unaware of the tests’ eugenic underpinnings. However, despite their efforts to improve Seashore’s assessments, their tests were all “based largely on the constructs of music aptitude that Seashore had identified in his Measures of Musical Talents.”Footnote 51 Not only did the tests reproduce the values surrounding Seashore’s understanding of musical aptitude, but they also solidified particular aesthetic criteria for musical talent that aligned with eugenic agendas of promoting Western European art music traditions.
According to Peter Woods, “Instead of respecting a multitude of cultures or historical realities, the eugenical approach to aesthetics asserted one understanding of aesthetic beauty rooted in European history. This assertion acts as a double gesture, promoting one type of body, landscape, and cultural history while denigrating all others.”Footnote 52 The preference for “one category of person,” often white, male, and able-bodied/minded, was encoded into musical talent tests, which were widely used in music education in the United States through the 1990s. Despite the fact that musical talent testing has fallen out of favor in public education, the “glacial erratics” of these aesthetic values still permeate music education today and influence broader understandings of who is talented, what they look/sound like, and who should have access to opportunities.
Neurodivergent Musicality: a New Framework
I offer this philosophical and historical analysis in order to demonstrate that though musical talent is highly prized by educational institutions and society more broadly, the aesthetic criteria associated with the marker are insufficient for understanding the full scope of human musical merit. The deficiency, coupled with my longitudinal ethnographic research with neurodivergent musicians, has led me to develop an alternative paradigm for understanding musical value through the theoretical framework of neurodivergent musicality.
“Musicality” is a term that has been widely used in a variety of fields to describe musical behavior and phenomena. For instance, Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen’s edited volume, Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship, employs research from developmental psychology to demonstrate how musical expression provides the foundation of human communication. This principle is observable in interactions between infants and mothers, education, healing, and performance. Scholars have crossed the disciplinary boundaries of information studies, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and cognitive biology to suggest that “human musicality is a coevolved system for social bonding” with the term “musicality [encompassing] the underlying biological capacities that allow us to perceive and produce music” for the purpose of furthering “social affiliation.”Footnote 53 More biological and neuroscientific studies are complemented by anthropological, ethnomusicological, and psychological explorations of musicality. As music psychologist Donald Hodges explains, “Musicality is defined as a responsiveness or sensitivity to musical stimuli. It also includes an appreciation or understanding of music but does not necessarily include technical proficiency in musical performance.”Footnote 54
Ethnomusicologist John Blacking argued that musicality is the result of extramusical elements, such as politics, social relationships, and cultural practices, in addition to sounded elements that are deeply rooted in humanity: “musicality is a universal, species-specific characteristic [that exists in] not just a few human beings, but all human beings.”Footnote 55 More recently, musicologists, disability studies scholars, and socially engaged theater professionals have examined concepts of musicality and artistic performance relative to neurodivergence and autism in particular.Footnote 56 My research builds upon their studies by exploring how perceptual and neurological differences shape musical experience and expression. To this end, I conceptualize neurodivergent musicality through the following four tenets.
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(1) Neurodivergent musicality centers neurodivergent experience in all its diversity;
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(2) Neurodivergent musicality challenges dominant ableist aesthetics;
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(3) Neurodivergent musicality resists fetishization of neurodivergence and historical images of the idiot savant;
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(4) Neurodivergent musicality generates power-to-and-power-with through collaborative musical exchange.
Tenet One
Neurodivergent musicality emphasizes the importance of honoring the neurodivergent musical experience. Here, it is important to note that “neurodivergent” is a broad term that describes someone who “diverges from the dominant societal standards of ‘normal’ neurocognitive functioning.”Footnote 57 Neurodiversity is not a monolith, and as such, I do not conceptualize neurodivergent musicality as a manifestation of a shared neurodivergent aesthetic. Indeed, works like Speaking for Ourselves: Conversations on Life, Music, and Autism, co-authored by Michael B. Bakan, Mara Chasar, Graeme Gibson, Elizabeth J. Frace, Zena Hamelson, Dotan Nitzberg, Gordon Peterson, Maureen Pytlik, Donald Rindale, Amy Sequenzia, and Addison Silar, demonstrate that the experience of autistic musicians is rich, varied, and highly individual. Even recent studies that explore commonalities within the autistic musical experience, such as Jon William Fessenden’s exploration of autistic musicality and spectral hearing, acknowledge that such musicality is “plural and infinitely diverse.”Footnote 58 Similarly, studies of music and Williams Syndrome from the fields of music therapy and neuroscience in addition to my own ethnographic research examine shared musical characteristics among these musicians, such as socially motivated musical interaction and call-and-response as a point of departure for musical dialogue. Yet how these individuals process and respond to certain kinds of music is highly variable. I draw upon these two examples of autism and Williams Syndrome because musicians who fall into these diagnostic categories have historically been portrayed in academic literature as having a musical phenotype that is specific to their neurology.Footnote 59 While there is some truth to this, ascribing certain musical behaviors to an entire group of people based on diagnosis can flatten and misrepresent the musical experience of these individuals. As such, neurodivergent musicality rejects diagnostic criteria as predictive of musical behavior and instead embraces a plurality of perspectives and experiences.
Tenet Two
Neurodivergent musicality supports understandings of musical value and neurodivergent musicking that stand in opposition to dominant ableist aesthetics. I intentionally use the term “musicking” in reference to Christopher Small’s conceptualization of how humans participate in the creation of musical culture. Small describes musicking as “taking part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing, or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing.”Footnote 60 I conceptualize neurodivergent musicality as building upon Small’s inclusive criteria for understanding the activities that constitute musical engagement by exploring how these musicians take part in musicking. Neurodivergent musicality challenges musical talent as an ideology of oppression by embracing nonnormative musical expression as legitimate.Footnote 61 This expression can manifest in a variety of ways such as nonconformity to bodily or behavioral aesthetics during a musical activity by engaging in self-stimulatory behaviors including but not limited to humming, speaking, whistling, and repetitive body movement, subverting rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic conventions, or challenging timbral expectations by playing instruments in unconventional ways. In this way, neurodivergent musicality mirrors aspects of musical “cripping,” which unsettles normative expectations by foregrounding the musical expression of disabled musicians as a valuable form of cultural production.Footnote 62 Neurodivergent musicality embraces musical cripping as one such avenue for challenging hegemonic narratives that prescribe, reinscribe, and enforce ableist norms in music. Furthermore, this paradigm rejects hierarchies based on compliance with dominant neurotypical standards for musical value and embraces nonnormative musical expression as a marker of diversity and possibility rather than a sign of deviance and deficit.
Tenet Three
Neurodivergent musicians who display aesthetic markers of traditional musical talent are often presented as savants, which strips these musicians of their humanity and agency by “enfreaking”Footnote 63 them as entertaining anomalies. While such musicians may be labeled as “musically talented,” they are simultaneously fetishized as musical objects rather than perceived as human actors. This is evident through the dehumanizing tropes that are often employed to describe their performances, such as the idea of neurodivergent musicians “overcoming” their difference through normative musical performance,Footnote 64 achieving supercrip status, where the “unusual ability in one narrow area has enabled them to transcend their general disability,”Footnote 65 or what I call the “value despite disability” trope. All of these tropes reinforce the “ideology of ability” by recognizing the neurodivergent body/mind as potentially valuable only when it conforms to the normative aesthetics of musical talent.Footnote 66 However, though neurodivergent musicians are made less threatening and more legible to neurotypical audiences by conforming to normative expectations, they are not granted full inclusion or humanity. Rather, their so-called talent is objectified through performance. While this is problematic in and of itself, as displays of musical talent should not be a required marker for humanity, it also creates a hierarchy of ability that further denigrates those who do not conform to supercrip stereotypes. William Cheng comments on this phenomenon stating,
Media hyperexposure of “savants” and “supercrips” erects problematic hierarchies within disability communities, implicitly devaluing impaired individuals who are not deemed sufficiently extra-ordinary. (The flawed yet pervasive slippage: If this blind contestant can dance so beautifully, shouldn’t all blind people manage—or at least try—to do so?).Footnote 67
Neurodivergent musicality eschews these reductive narratives by resisting the fetishization of neurodivergence and historical images of the idiot savant in which neurodivergent musicians are only valuable in as much as they align with or exceed expectations of normative musical talent.
Tenet Four
Neurodivergent musicality functions as both a philosophy that challenges dominant ableist systems of musical value and a lived practice in which neurodivergent musicians generate power-to-and-power-with dynamics through nonnormative creative performance and exchange. This conceptualization of neurodivergent musicality aligns with the ethical methodological goals of David T. Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theorization of nonnormative positivisms, which go beyond efforts to overcome oppression that have often dominated disability studies and the disability rights movement. Instead, “The work of nonnormative positivisms serves as a site for an alternative ethics to be articulated about why disabled lives matter and how we might revise, reinvent, and transform narrow normative practices, beliefs, and qualifications of who counts.”Footnote 68 Applied to musical contexts, neurodivergent musicality constitutes a nonnormative positivistic approach to conceptualizing atypical musical expressions as valuable. Neurodivergent musicality further disrupts power-over dynamics associated with musical talent by rejecting musical hierarchies that rank musicians based on their compliance with normative musical aesthetics. Instead, neurodivergent musicality is characterized by creative and cooperative musical exchange that generates power-to-and-power-with by empowering musicians to express musical difference and variations both in individual performance and inclusive group musicking environments.
This theoretical framework is designed to contribute to and expand preexisting scholarship on musicality and its role in the creation of musical culture. Indeed, elements of my construction of neurodivergent musicality align closely with extant research on musicality that asserts the importance of expressivity, creativity, and social engagement over the demonstration of technical skill. Yet I assert that viewing musicality through a neurodivergent lens, albeit a lens that is kaleidoscopic in its diversity, has the potential to expand and enrich our understanding of what and who is musically valuable. Philosophically, this framework counteracts stereotypes that reduce neurodivergent musicians to objects of fascination and challenges hierarchical structures within Euro-American art music that mark some bodies/minds as more valuable than others. However, the framework is designed to assist musicians and music educators in real musical contexts.
Implications for Music Education
What might it look like for the principles of neurodivergent musicality to be incorporated into music education practices? This research is ongoing, and I am collaborating with neurodivergent musicians and music educators to develop techniques that could apply to a variety of musical settings. However, at present, there seem to be two avenues for immediate consideration—utilizing the tenets of neurodivergent musicality in the framework of existing ensembles and creating new programming designed around these principles.
The first avenue may be the most urgent for music educators, particularly those who are charged with directing traditional ensembles such as band, orchestra, and choir in secondary settings. It is important to understand that while it may be possible to incorporate elements of neurodivergent musicality and make space for its expression, these ensembles are often built upon Euro-American art music aesthetics that align with understandings of musical talent, require a certain level of technical proficiency to participate, and demand uniformity in order to meet the performance expectations of the genre. This stands in opposition to several of the tenets of neurodivergent musicality, namely defying dominant ableist aesthetics through nonnormative musical expression. However, it is possible to create an environment that acknowledges this cognitive dissonance and still challenges ableism. Educators in these settings can center the neurodivergent experience of their students by employing the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in their course design, ensuring that their classrooms are accessible for all students, and varying musical activities and learning assessments to reflect multiple learning modalities, such as aural, visual, and kinesthetic. Here, a key component of centering the neurodivergent learner is involving them in co-designing learning goals and gathering their input on how they might best demonstrate their learning.Footnote 69 For example, some traditional staff notation may not be accessible to some neurodivergent learners, and learning to read staff notation may not be necessary for their overall musical goals. Thus, instead of emphasizing music reading, educators may instead provide rehearsal tracks for students to learn repertoire or work to develop ear training skills. Furthermore, educators can and should review their students’ Individualized Education Plans or 504 Plans to better understand their learning goals, needs, and accommodations. While this might seem like best practice, attending to a student’s needs and accommodations as stated in these documents, rather than solely focusing on their diagnosis, honors the individuality of neurodivergent students and acknowledges the diversity of experiences within diagnostic categories.Footnote 70 Educators can also work to challenge power-over dynamics of musical talent by creating opportunities for students to explore musical expression outside of established aesthetics through improvisation and original composition. Furthermore, educators can avoid ranking systems in their ensembles that sort students by technical proficiency. This not only works to overturn traditional musical hierarchies but also provides an opportunity for students who may differ in traditional musical skill to learn from one another by seating them in a mixed formation. These are a few examples of how educators can support neurodivergent students while balancing the aesthetic demands and goals of their ensembles.
The second avenue involves creating new musical programming, such as improvisation, songwriting, and composition workshops, that is founded on the principles of neurodivergent musicality. These formats contrast traditional ensembles in that they rely less on uniformity and conformity to Western art music aesthetics and emphasize process-based musicking over more presentational modes of performance.Footnote 71 Due to the difference in musical goals, these workshops can challenge understandings of what constitutes musical talent and make space for musical cripping. Though the workshops differ in the way they accomplish these goals, they all center the neurodivergent experience by emphasizing self-determination (making choices for oneself), expressive autonomy (finding ways to connect and interact creatively on one’s own terms), and individual voice (developing an artistic practice that is authentic to the individual and reflects their choices and experiences) and focus on power-to-and-power-with relationships by centering collaboration (collective creation), alignment (shared creative goals), and awareness (listening to oneself, others, and the environment). The following suggestions for implementation are shared from a curriculum created by my neurodivergent collaborators in the Williams Syndrome community. Though the written curriculum was drafted by longtime neurodivergent and neurotypical program leaders who do not have Williams Syndrome, the educational guidelines, exercises, and “lesson plans” described in the curriculum are based on the musical practices and processes of musicians with Williams syndrome (WS).Footnote 72
Improvisation Workshops
The curriculum for improvisation workshops features exercises that help musicians develop their own voice/instrument in relation to others and build vocabularies and tools to engage in musical dialogue. It may be helpful to have musicians begin by defining how they conceptualize improvisation. This immediately centers the ideas of the musicians and provides a forum for crafting collective definitions and rules. Facilitators can then model collaboration by translating spoken conversation into musical language by starting with speech (e.g., “Hello Peter! How are you?”) and then adding instruments or pitch to the words. This provides a point of departure for engaging in musical conversations. Musicians might build upon this foundation and develop self-determination, autonomy, and individual voice by reflecting on what sounds or musical phrases they wish to create as well as when and how they contribute to the larger musical texture. “Musical Whack-a-mole,” in which the group establishes a drone or groove and then takes turns creating musical interjections or solos over top of it, is one exercise that facilitates this kind of creative decision-making. Such exercises can also be augmented by playing “Outside of the Box,” where, after musicians become comfortable singing or playing a particular instrument, they are encouraged to find a “new sound,” either by picking a different instrument or vocal expression (humming, vocalizations on vowels or consonants, whistling, animal noises, sounds from the natural world). This supports musical contributions that challenge normative musical aesthetics by encouraging exploration of extended techniques, unusual interplay of voice and instruments, and use of acoustics in the built or natural environment. All of these exercises can serve as building blocks for free improvisation sessions—short, timed improvisations focused on musicians engaging in collaborative call-and-response that is centered around creative dialogue rather than mimicry.
Songwriting Workshops
Though songwriting differs from improvisation in that musicians work towards creating a replicable musical product—a song—these workshops can similarly serve as creative and collaborative spaces where musicians challenge established musical conventions. The songwriting process lends itself to self-determination, autonomy, and individual voice as the musical style and lyrical material are shaped by the perspectives of the songwriters. These workshops not only serve to examine songs as a creative medium by posing questions such as “What is a song?” “How are they/can they be structured?” “What kinds of ideas do songs convey?” but also to center the personal experiences of the musicians by asking them to consider “What themes are most important in your life?” “What kinds of songs do you enjoy the most?” “What message do you want to communicate to listeners?” The collective nature of group songwriting can be especially powerful for providing a space for musicians to share their lived experiences, reflecting on commonalities and divergences. Furthermore, group songwriting allows musicians to practice collaboration, alignment, and awareness by engaging in collective decision-making and exploring different facets of the songwriting process. For instance, some musicians may be more drawn to lyrical or narrative construction while others prefer to provide rhythmic, harmonic, and/or melodic foundations. The division of creative roles may also shift depending upon the song in question, where musicians serve as lyricists for some songs and instrumentalists or vocalists for others. This provides flexibility for musicians to explore a variety of roles and affirms all contributions as valuable and necessary for collective creative expression.
Composition Workshops
In some ways, composition workshops synthesize elements of both improvisation and songwriting, drawing upon the preferences of the musicians as a point of departure for exploring musical themes, ideas, and styles and examining the function of compositions. As in the other workshops, group discussion helps to center musician self-determination, autonomy, and individual voice by asking, “What is a composition?” “Why do people write them?” “How do different genres/styles of music shape the structure of a composition?” and “What compositions and styles of music speak to you?” This allows the musicians to create their own criteria for stylistic goals rather than requiring conformity to a particular aesthetic. Improvisation can aid in the compositional process and help musicians find musical and social cohesion. For example, the exercise “Riff Train,” in which musicians take turns improvising a short riff over an accompaniment, can help facilitate this. Here, musicians can choose whether their riff will be an extension of or a response to that of their peers. Such targeted improvisation assists musicians in listening across the group and thinking about how to incorporate a variety of musical ideas into a composition. Like songwriting, composition offers the opportunity for musicians to generate a collaborative musical product. However, Western-lined staff notation may not be accessible to all musicians and may not be the most accurate representation of a composition. Therefore, it is essential to offer a variety of methods through which these musicians might represent their work, such as chord charts, graphic scores, color-coded drawings, or audio recordings. Finally, as in songwriting, group composition workshops offer opportunities for musicians to explore a variety of roles—generating stylistic ideas, creating melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material for various sections, performing, and/or creating the aural or visual representation of the piece. This collaborative process challenges traditional views of composition as an individual venture that is particularly prevalent in Western art music narratives of the autonomous male composer as creative genius.Footnote 73 Such a focus on collective musicking creates an environment grounded in musical creation as a power-to-and-power-with activity.
In any of the proposed workshops, there are three important considerations for educators to keep in mind. First, we must reframe our roles from that of teacher to facilitator and/or model collaborator. This shift allows us to challenge traditional teacher-student hierarchies and serves as a reminder to empower students to take charge of the musicking process, rather than impeding their creativity. It is acceptable for songs/compositions to have one three-minute-long verse/section, unrelated themes, no rhymes, animal sounds, skits, or comedy sections, as it encourages musicians to think broadly about what songs or compositions can be. We must resist the urge to project our own ideas of what constitutes “good” music in favor of listening broadly for musical expression and creativity. Second, musician reflection can and should be woven into every facet of these workshops. After each exercise, improvisation session, or workshop, provide space for musicians to reflect on the music they made, asking how the experience made them feel, what they liked about it, and what they would want to change. This creates a forum where musicians provide each other with feedback that will help shape future musical processes. Finally, throughout my discussion of these workshops, I have deliberately used the word “musicians” to describe the participants rather than “neurodivergent musicians.” This is because these workshops can and should include students of all neurological designations, making music together. While these workshops are grounded in the tenets of neurodivergent musicality, the focus on creative and process-based musicking over strict adherence to Euro-American aesthetics can be “necessary for some and helpful for all” students.Footnote 74
The principles of neurodivergent musicality are also applicable to non-applied classroom settings. “Listening” for neurodivergent musicality goes beyond sounded musicking and extends to examining the role neurological variation plays in how people understand and express themselves through musical means. Such analytical questions of musical process and representation are key to studies of music history, theory, and culture. In this way, neurodivergent musicality does not ask us to alter instructional content so much as it encourages us to expand opportunities for engagement in musical study by rejecting pedagogical patterns that prescribe a single way to learn and represent material (e.g., score study, “drop the needle” listening exams, written research papers). Such interrogation of teaching methodology is key to challenging ableism in music academia, which “powerfully mandates able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, as well as other forms of social and communicative hyperability.”Footnote 75 As in applied settings, the principles of neurodivergent musicality can be operationalized in musicology courses through UDL. Neurodivergent musicality invites us to interrogate pedagogical approaches, and UDL provides a blueprint for honoring and supporting different ways of accessing and engaging with content (e.g., interactive audio/visual scores, listening assessments that focus on context building rather than memorization, creative assignments such as podcasts, vlogs, poetry writing, composition, or performance). In addition to course design and implementation, the tenets of neurodivergent musicality can serve as guideposts for building interpersonal relationships and facilitating intellectual and creative exchange with students and colleagues. Neurodivergent musicality counters ableism by reframing neurological variation as an opportunity to learn from and about one another. When asked “what can neurotypical people do to support and advocate for their neurodivergent colleagues?” autistic self-advocate and music scholar Steph Ban said, “Ask us what we need and believe us when we tell you.”Footnote 76 Ban’s words serve as a powerful reminder that challenging hierarchical power structures and creating power-to-and-power-with relationships begins by honoring the agency and humanity of neurodivergent people.
Conclusion: Disrupting the Narrative
I want to emphasize that I am not naïve in thinking that the model I am suggesting will provide a “quick and easy fix” to the issue of disability inclusion/exclusion, nor am I ignorant of the logistical challenges involved in curriculum reform. If anything, embracing neurodivergent musicality as valued musical expression alongside that of musical talent will take time and continuous effort because it constitutes a radical act of disrupting dominant power structures. This kind of change is challenging because it requires us as musicians and educators to move beyond the musical training we often receive in formalized settings and to experiment with methods that are not readily available in textbooks or clearly supported within the national and competitive standards through which teaching is often assessed. Furthermore, it requires us to think beyond the limits of inclusion and accessibility. Rather than the neuromajority providing access to musical opportunities for minority groups, we must eradicate the root cause of the barriers that prohibit access to these resources in the first place. In her interview with Feminist Wire, Mia Mingus, a queer, physically disabled, Korean woman and disability advocate, critiques the notion that accessibility is solely about access:
Access has to be done in service of something. What I mean is that access for the sake of access is not necessarily liberatory, but access for the sake of connection, breaking isolation, love, justice and liberation is liberatory….Stop thinking about access as the end goal, but rather as an evolving process and practice that can help us create the kind of world we ache for.Footnote 77
Just as access for the sake of access does not equate to a liberatory process, neither does inclusion of neurodivergent and/or disabled musicians in music education lead to an embrace of disabled ways of musicking as legitimate forms of creative expression.
Embracing neurodivergent musicality is not about having a neurodivergent person in the room—though many often are present, whether or not their disability is apparent and/or they have an IEP; it is about having neurodivergent musicians recognized as being valuable creators of and contributors to musical culture because of the way they express themselves musically, not in spite of it. I believe that a shift toward valuing neurodivergent musicality in educational and community settings has the potential to expand opportunities for disabled people to participate in musicking. However, I argue that this musicality is fundamentally about redefining what musical expression looks/sounds/feels like and transforming our beliefs about who “counts” as valuable musical actors/musicians. In this way, neurodivergent musicality supports a power-to-and-power-with system that stands in opposition to power-over structures of musical talent. As Adria Hoffman states, “If we truly aim to provide equitable opportunities for students to learn and if we believe that all students can gain from participation in the arts, then we must re-examine the ways in which we sort students based on so-called talent. By doing so, we might interrupt the social reproduction arts education perpetuates.”Footnote 78
It is important to note that individuals and organizations are already challenging established aesthetics of musical talent by pioneering adaptive and inclusive musical opportunities for disabled musicians with notable examples being the Music Inclusion Program, the 3 Strings, the Spectrum Project, United Sound, and RAMPD (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities).Footnote 79 Though no longer active and focusing specifically on autism, Michael Bakan’s Artism Ensemble is a program examined in recent musicological publications that closely aligns with the tenets of neurodivergent musicality and provides an important model for synthesizing elements of improvisation, songwriting, and composition in a way that rejects prescriptive, normative musical aesthetics and privileges neurodivergent musicians as musical experts.Footnote 80 Yet there is still much work to be done, as evidenced by the glacial erratics of music eugenics that permeates music education practices today. Therefore, it is incumbent upon us as musicians and educators to advocate for broader understandings of what constitutes musical value and who is worthy of participation. I believe that implementing programming that centers neurodivergent musicality has the potential to transform music education spaces to not only be more accessible and inclusive but also more liberatory.
However, this liberation cannot be achieved without a united effort across and beyond the field of music. My intent in establishing this theoretical framework expands beyond the practicalities of music education to critiquing hierarchical systems of power historically rooted in eugenics that continue to shape our professional, creative, and personal lives today. While the latter part of this article may read as a “how to” guide for music educators, and indeed I hope that the philosophical underpinnings of neurodivergent musicality will find practical applications, I urge readers to resist the disciplinary siloing that often occurs within academia. In other words, the eugenic legacies in music education that create exclusive criteria for participating in the creation of musical culture are not a “music education” problem, nor it is a “disability” problem. Rather, the intersection of musicological studies and social theories explored throughout this article demonstrates that this topic must be seriously considered within the realm of American music studies more broadly. Achieving liberation through educational and creative access and inclusion is a collective responsibility.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the Williams Syndrome Association, the musicians with Williams Syndrome at Whispering Trails, the Brothers of Charity, Limerick, the Roselawn Rovers Return, and Peter Littlejohn, Kohl Weisman, Donovon Thakur, and Emma Thomas for their collaboration on and support of this work. I am also deeply grateful to Felicia Youngblood, Emily Allen, Victoria Carrico, Marian Wilson Kimber, Wendi Griffiths and this journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Excerpts from this paper were presented at the 2024 Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting (online), the 2025 Disability Studies and Music Education Symposium (online), and the 2025 Arts Better the Lives of Everyone (ABLE) Assembly (Boston, MA).
Alexandria Carrico is an assistant professor of Music History at the University of South Carolina. Her research interests include music and disability studies, disability pedagogy, traditional Irish music, and gender and sexuality. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics and is the co-author of Disability and Accessibility in the Music Classroom (Routledge, 2022). Additionally, she is a classically trained vocalist and singer of traditional Irish music and bodhrán player (Irish frame drum).
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