Engagement with the life and works of Maria Theresia Paradis has experienced something of a renaissance in the twenty-first century. From the digitization of archival sources connected to her international career, to multiple works of fiction speculating on the events of her life, to new understandings of her involvement in education for (and by) the blind in the early nineteenth century, multiple forms of scholarly research and creative practice have sought to reclaim Paradis’s place in history. The hybrid symposium ‘Reframing the Gaze: Maria Theresia Paradis, Blind Musicians, and Musical Culture before and after Braille’, held in person at Mount Holyoke College and online in November 2024, sought to bring together numerous strands of Paradis’s music, life, influence and posthumous reception. ‘Reframing the Gaze’ featured two keynote talks, ten conference presentations, a film screening of the Paradis biopic Licht (Light; also distributed as Mademoiselle Paradis) together with an interview/conversation with the film’s director and screenwriter, a lecture-recital, two concerts and a curated exhibition. In keeping with the symposium’s broader themes, the co-organizers – Adeline Mueller (Mount Holyoke College), Christopher Parton (Princeton University) and Annette Richards (Cornell University) – prioritized accessibility in the broadest sense of the term, making possible full participation in the conference regardless of one’s physical location, and ensuring that technology, visual description and access support were available, affording equitable participation for all attendees and presenters. Every event (with the exception of the film screening) was made available to both online and in-person participants via Zoom and/or the conference website, and audio descriptions by Siggy Ehrlich (undergraduate research assistant, Mount Holyoke College) were also available for the exhibition’s visual and material components. The organizing committee is currently in the process of developing the symposium’s website (https://sites.google.com/mtholyoke.edu/paradis) into a permanent educational resource on Paradis’s life, works and cultural milieu.

The focus on accessibility in a conference about a blind woman musician speaks to the organizers’ awareness that this was not merely a conference about Paradis and her historical contexts, but also an opportunity to reclaim the history of disability and the perspectives of people with disabilities. Rather than being relegated to abstract discussion or theorizing, both the systemic barriers Paradis faced and the technological and pedagogical tools she collaboratively utilized and invented to sustain her career were readily foregrounded. Many of the presenters, including keynote speakers Selina Mills (journalist and co-librettist for the opera The Paradis Files, London) and Stefan Sunandan Honisch (University of British Columbia), spoke to personal experiences of ableist assumptions in professional life, educational settings and the arts. Others, including Evelyn Szabo (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus), Sébastien Durand (Université de Tours) and Waltraud Maierhofer (University of Iowa), concentrated on recent archival work that provides additional context and potential avenues for challenging long-standing myths about Paradis, disability and genius, and more broadly about women in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music. Annette Richards, Kristin Franseen (Western University) and Rena Roussin (University of Toronto) used the myths about Paradis and her world as starting-points for exploring the long reach of biography and fictionalized anecdote – as found, for example, in Licht and Alissa Walser’s 2010 novel Am Anfang war die Nacht Musik (Munich: Piper; trans. Jamie Bulloch as Mesmerized (London: MacLehose, 2012)). Numerous presenters, including Stephanie Probst (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), Hannah Thompson (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Michael Accinno (independent scholar, West Tisbury, Massachusetts), explored the education and experiences of nineteenth-century blind pedagogues, intellectuals and activists beyond Paradis. They reminded us that, in seeking a greater and more nuanced awareness of her place in music history (not to mention histories of gender and disability), we should not – as has sometimes been done in prior scholarship – divorce her experiences from broader international histories of blindness and education. A few speakers, including Jamie Weaver (Stephen F. Austin State University), and Christoph Siems and Solveig-Marie Oma (independent scholars, Leipzig), also bridged historical and present-day questions of inclusion/exclusion, accessibility and ableism in discussing how circumstances for blind composers and academics both have and haven’t changed from Paradis’s time to our own. Collectively, these scholarly presentations moved between the past and present of blind musicking and creativity, inviting attendees to revisit music history and contemporary creative practices with greater awareness of the numerous contributions made by blind musicians.

Besides the traditional academic contributions, the many performances and related activities enlivened our understanding of Paradis’s creative output, not only as a composer and performer, but also as a teacher and concert organizer at different points in her life. One common frustration that arises in conversations about Paradis – a frustration evoked by multiple participants, including Mills and Weaver, who mentioned encountering dismissive attitudes towards Paradis as a result of her musical obscurity – is that the bulk of her musical output was lost. Furthermore, the attribution of her best-known piece, the Sicilienne, is doubtful. By programming music definitively by Paradis (including her 1789 cantata Lenore as well as numerous smaller-scale keyboard and vocal pieces) alongside works she was known to have performed or programmed, numerous ensembles made up of Mount Holyoke staff, students and select guest artists demonstrated the important place collaboration with performers can have in historical research. Through the recorded performances and various forms of documentation, we anticipate the conference website serving as an important reference for those seeking to teach, perform or study Paradis’s music in the future. Moreover, hearing her music performed by different ensembles and alongside that of her contemporaries demystifies the idea of Paradis as an isolated figure.

While the variety of the presentations and related events on offer was a definite strength – particularly in a small, very focused conference – the conflation of academic and creative approaches was at times counterproductive. It was illuminating to learn of recent depictions of Paradis in opera and film directly from the artists themselves, but academic researchers and creative practitioners often have different intended audiences, critical frameworks and desired outcomes for their outputs. Though we applaud the inclusion of both approaches in this conference’s programme, there were times when the multiple perspectives seemed to be talking past one another. In addition, Mills’s keynote address on The Paradis Files and an interview with film director Barbara Albert and screenwriter Kathrin Resetarits, both of whom developed Licht, were held on different days, with no discussion between these creative artists. At the same time, there were limited opportunities for the scholars and artists present to consider together our shared task of constructing the life and work of Paradis for the public. While further dialogue would have been a welcome addition, we are hopeful that other academic events will build on this conference’s efforts to bridge scholarship and creative practice.

We attended the conference both virtually (in Kristin’s case) and in person (in Rena’s). As someone who has taken part in a number of online and hybrid conferences on both sides of a computer screen over the past few years, Kristin found the online elements of the conference well organized and easy to navigate. The organizers and moderation and tech support teams were prompt at responding to questions, dealing with the inevitable technical glitches and delays, and negotiating relatively equal participation wherever possible between those physically present at Mount Holyoke and those in the virtual space. Kristin was especially impressed with the commitment to livestreaming and recording the concert events, as in her prior experience these sorts of things are often thought of as wholly ‘in-person’ and outside of the general academic conference schedule. As an in-person attendee, Rena found the conference particularly mindful of access barriers that might be faced by in-person presenters. Amplification, an access walk through the conference venue and visual descriptions of individuals and slides were seamlessly integrated into conference activities. Furthermore, all graduate students, adjuncts and independent scholars were offered funding to cover their travel costs, removing an often prohibitive (and frequently unacknowledged) barrier to participation in academic events.

As an anniversary event (2024 marked the two hundredth anniversary of Paradis’s death) and an interdisciplinary conference bringing together diverse methods within and beyond musicology, ‘Reframing the Gaze’ served as an exemplar of how to commemorate and revisit history, particularly at a time when questions of canonical inclusion and exclusion and of connections between the past and the present seem particularly pertinent. Furthermore, the conference’s commitment to hybrid participation and to acknowledging accessibility as a built-in element of conference planning (rather than, as is often the case, measures taken on a case-by-case basis) offered an important template of what disability equity might look like in academia. Beyond its importance to Paradis scholarship in particular, we hope that more conferences (whether online, hybrid or in-person) will emulate the creativity and thoughtfulness displayed by the organizing team of ‘Reframing the Gaze’.