![]() ![]() The art of signed music involves the use of rhythmicized signs from a signed language, such as American Sign Language (ASL), in a musical context. Ultimately, I argue that d/Deaf listeners enrich customary notions of musical expertise: deafness belongs in musicology as a diverse set of experiences within the full spectrum of listening. For instance, vision is a highly versatile listening strategy and is often more reliable than vibration touch is feasible because of its contextual dependence on visual cues, and is further tied to a set of material and environmental variables. ![]() Deaf people reflect on the musical status of aurality in markedly different ways, just as they offer a complex understanding of vision and touch. Deafness resists automatic entry points into music, unsettling any straightforward hierarchy of the senses. Beginning with Scottish deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, I investigate a range of d/Deaf accounts of music, including those of Deaf sign language users, hearing aid wearers, and cochlear implant recipients, and of people with music-induced hearing loss. Increasingly, deafness symbolizes a set of sensory polarities that obscure an intrinsic diversity of musical experiences from which musicology stands to gain, a diversity that encompasses members of Deaf culture and non-culturally deaf people alike, and that is signaled through the person-centered compound “d/Deaf.” My article builds on recent music scholarship on disability to offer a pluralistic understanding of music and deafness. To illustrate the relevance of these concepts to an expanded understanding of Signart, the thesis draws on art epistemology and the ideas and works of a number of modernist and post-modernist artists - notably Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Joseph Beuys.Īttitudes to the relationship between music and deafness suffer from two related misconceptions: the enduring assumption that hearing is central to musical experience in conjunction with an extreme impression of deafness as total aural loss and, more recently, the tendency to reduce deaf listening to tactility, as narratives about inborn sensory acuities among the deaf proliferate in the popular imaginary. The blend of artforms within Signart invites comparisons with the concerns of the modernist project with ideas of synthesis, of synaesthesia and particularly of Gesamtkunstwerk. The results of these investigations suggest Signart as not only blended acts of literature and drawing (here called illumination), but also of gesture-dance, compositional rhythm, and cinematic properties which effect a social sculpture of deafhood within signing communities. A collection of visual artists is established to examine image in a core sample of four Signartworks, and further data is collected through two public events staged at the Royal West of England Academy. A pilot translation of a Signartwork uncovers the significance of image in the form and leads to the adoption of a/r/tography as 'blurred' research method involving art practices, research and translation. In addition to examining the theoretical frameworks through which academic, literary and artistic institutions might perceive and encounter it, Signart is explored through interviews with Signartists, their audiences and those who have not previously been exposed to Signart. 'Sign language poetry' is then re-contextualised through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Derridean grammatology to emerge as 'Signart' - the performed and performative, visual and embodied art form of sign language communities. The study situates current understandings of sign language poetry, tracing the influences of ocularcentrism and logocentrism on the discipline of deaf studies. Whilst previous scholars have examined the form from literary and linguistic perspectives, no work has yet fully addressed the unique visual properties of sign languages as they are exploited creatively. This completed doctoral thesis explores the phenomenon of poetry in British Sign Language.
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