Category: Music and Disability

While preparing to start the next steps of my PhD dissertation (approval of the proposal and writing planning), I decided to publicly launch my new company, ArtsAbly, promoting accessibility in the arts, and adding more conversations about accessibility and disability in music classrooms. ArtsAbly proposes different services tailored to the needs of the customers. There are already partnerships in place, resources to know more about the topic in several artistic fields (music, dance, theatre, multidisciplinary), and a podcast with a speakers series will soon be proposed.

There are multiple ways to support the project, and I hope that you can do at least one of these actions, some of which being very simple but impactful.

1. Visit the website

Here is the link to the website: https://www.artsably.com/
It is available in English and in French. 
You will find a quick video introduction to the project on the homepage, in both languages.
This website will be frequently updated, and I am always curious of what visitors think of it.

2. Academic lectures & general public conversations

A section of the website gives examples of lectures and talks, and will soon be completed with an Accessibility Training part: https://www.artsably.com/accessibility-training/
If you are interested in booking one of the services, don’t hesitate to book a time on the Calendly section to discuss potential lectures or projects: https://www.artsably.com/contact-us/

3. Resources

An extra “Resources” section proposes digital and physical books references with Amazon affiliate links for purchase option, and WorldCat links for university students and staff, and librarians. This is a good start for those who want to know more about disability in the arts: https://www.artsably.com/resources/

4. Financial support

I have created a fundraising to cover the initial costs. There is no small amount. Thank you to those who have already given, and thank you in advance to those who consider giving a donation to support the project. 
The link to the fundraising page is here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-artsably-make-the-arts-more-accessible
It would also help if you could share the link with family, friends and colleagues.

5. Follow ArtsAbly on social media platforms

I have created pages on the following platforms:

• Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/artsably
• Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/artsably/
• LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/artsably
• YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ArtsAbly

To follow the future activities, you can follow these pages, and share these links with others.

6. Subscribe to the newsletter

On the website, at the bottom of the homepage, you can find a form to subscribe to the newsletter.
If you look at the website in English, you can subscribe to the English language newsletter.
If you look at the website in French, you can subscribe to the French language newsletter.

7. Answer the survey

Since I am at the beginning of the project, I would love to hear from you. 
I have put together a survey that is available at this link: https://www.artsably.com/artsably-launch-survey/
It would be helpful if you could fill the survey (available both in English and in French).
I would greatly appreciate if you could also share this survey with others.

8. Send me feedback any time

If you have an idea, a comment, a suggestion, or a complain, feel free to send it to me. My aim is to grow, learn from my pairs, and provide the best service I can to those who will need them.

In November 2023, Professor Andrew Dell’Antonio, Distinguished Teaching Professor and Head of the Musicology/Ethnomusicology Division at the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin, invited me to give two lectures, one restricted to his class, and a public lecture on Zoom open to all. During the public lecture, entitled “A Dive into Music and Disability, from Theory to Practice”, I had the occasion to converse with the audience, including Professor Robert Gross, composer and music teacher, and the flutists Marie-Noëlle Choquette who both shared their experience related to music and disability. Thank you, Professor Dell’Antonio, for inviting me. The recording of the lecture is available below.

If you are unable to look at the video, here are two other alternatives:

• The direct link on YouTube: https://youtu.be/-b5iAQiZMMI?si=KKP6mfbOTwBwjkEi
• The link to the lecture on U of Texas’ sever: https://utexas.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=40738e9e-6da6-45a2-954d-b0ca0151de1e

Every summer, I travel to Europe for some research, projects and meetings. This 2023 summer is not different, with the visit of four countries: France, England, Germany and Switzerland. I just travelled to England to meet the percussionist Evelyn Glennie in Huntingdon, where her office and her huge collection of percussions are located. After interviewing her virtually in 2020, I wanted to meet her in person. I brought her the book containing a chapter I wrote about her and two other musicians with disability, published in March 2023 (see details on this page). She and her team welcomed me warmly. Evelyn gave me a tour of her percussions room.

This project is a part of my doctoral research on Music and Disability in the professional music industry. From January to June 2023, I conducted a series of workshops at the Jane-Finch location of Community Music Schools of Toronto (CMST), funded and supported by York University’s Helen Carswell Chair in Community Engaged Research in the Arts. During this process, I worked with groups of diverse number and age of students. The objective was to introduce transformed and adaptive instruments and voice, which allow people with disabilities to perform music, to students of CMST.

The project was very successful and I will work with the school to make sure the workshops can still be offered to the students in the future. The final report can be read on the Helen Carswell Chair’s website (note: the report is in PDF; if you require a different format, feel free to contact me). The website also references a video podcast produced by CMST on the topic of “Accessibility in Music” that can be watched on the CMST YouTube channel, featuring some of my musicians colleagues with disabilities and myself.

This year made me realize that more needs to be done for the inclusion of performers with disabilities in music education and in the music industry. Some organizations such as RAMPD, Tangled Arts, or The Disability Collective, are already trying their best to increase visibility of disable artists. I want to join them by creating a new company called ArtsAbly, that will propose a series of services for artistic ensembles (starting with choirs and orchestras), for music educators and music schools (tailoring the workshops to different needs), and for accessibility related training, online and in person. This company will officially be launched sometimes in September. A dedicated post will follow. For now, I am working with graphic designers (with disabilities) to create the company’s visual identity. Stay tuned for more information!

I have been chosen to be part of the professional members of the prestigious Recording Academy. This will allow me to support the artists I value, and to extend my disability activism even further! Thank you to those who have supported me in the process, Especially Prof. Rob Bowman and my colleagues at RAMPD.

This conference is an exchange of knowledge between researchers, performers, educators, practitioners, and community organizers. Through a range of informative and interactive sessions, participants discuss the present and future applications and implications of performance work with, by, for, and about children and youth. A range of in-person events, panels, performances, and workshops are presented, spread out during the conference days. This year, all presentations and workshop sessions took place on June 17th and 18th, 2023. My presentation was scheduled on June 17th at 2:30 pm.

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“Disability and music: music education with adaptive instruments”

Adaptive instruments are generally used to teach music to children with disabilities. This project has for objective to demonstrate that children with all abilities are receptive to alternative ways of learning. I believe that the discovery of adaptive instruments can open the mind of a student, whether it is a young child, a teenager, or a young adult. It can also propose other teaching methods to instructors.

The project consists of a series of workshops held between February and June 2023, allowing groups of music students of various ages to discover instruments and musical material made for musicians and singers with disabilities. The workshops are held in classrooms of the Community Music Schools of Toronto at Jane and Finch. Each participant takes part in one of the workshops. Participants of the choir workshop sing with adaptive content such as brail scores and learn lyrics in American Sign Language (ASL). Participants of the jam session workshop imagine instruments that can be played with a missing part of the body or use conventional instruments in a non-conventional way. Participants of the new technology workshop use devices such as an iPad with digital instruments or digital gloves connected to a computer system. During each workshop, students worked together on a piece that has been performed in a recital at the Jane and Finch music school in June 2023, to show what they have learned during the workshops to an audience.

This research has received the support of York University’s Helen Carswell Chair in Community Engaged Research in the Arts, in partnership with Community Music Schools of Toronto at Jane and Finch.

In March 2023, I have won the Toronto competition, allowing me to participate in the national finals in HEC Montreal, on May 10, 2023. The event was organized by Acfas, the French-Canadian Association for the Advancement of Science. We were 21 PhD students from all over Canada, presenting our research in less than three minutes. I presented my current adaptive instruments workshops. It was fascinating to discover the 20 other topics. We were all motivated and happy to share together. This experience was not only rewarding personally, it increased my network and connected me to brilliant actors of francophone research in Canada. I will probably find ways to work with Acfas in the future.

Here is the video of the entire competition. My three-minutes presentation starts at 53 min 17 sec:

If for any reason you cannot watch the full video, here is an independent excerpt:

Some pictures:

The theme of this conference was: Disrupting Music Education: Disability as “an ingenious way to live.” DSandME23 took place from April 27, 2023, through April 29, 2023.

The 3rd Biennial International Disability Studies and Music Education Symposium (DSandME23) explored how disability and lived experiences of disabled persons/persons with disabilities provide opportunities to productively disrupt music pedagogy (e.g., Shakespeare, 2014). Disruption functions as a way to become conscious of ableism within structures and practices in music education (Rathgeber & Bell, forthcoming). As Neil Marcus reminds us, disability both necessitates creativity, and is itself a site of creativity (Marcus, 1993; Keifer-Boyd, 2017). Disruption, then, can be an invitation to reconsider, dream, and transform practices, environments, and relationships through disability-centered frameworks (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Sandahl, 2018).

I presented the adaptive instruments workshops on Friday, April 28, 2023.

Today, March 31st, 2023, is book launch day. This book, published by Transcrip Verlag, contains a chapter I have written about women’s leadership among professional musicians: “Assumptions of Normality: How Three Women with a Disability Changed the Face of Music.” It is based on the interviews of three extraordinary women, musicians, composers, performers: Evelyn Glennie, Gaelynn Lea and Lachi.

The book is available here in open access PDF for its launch: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/369466570_Assumptions_of_Normality_How_Three_Women_with_a_Disability_Changed_the_Face_of_Music

or on the publisher’s website: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839465462-006

Printed versions of the book are available on the publisher’s website: https://www.transcript-publishing.com/978-3-8376-6546-8/women-s-leadership-in-music/

ISBN: 978-3-8394-6546-2.
DOI: 10.14361/9783839465462-006.

Abstract:

Various modes of women’s contemporary cultural, social and political leadership can be found in music. Informed by different histories and culturally bound social mores but also by a comparative perspective, the contributors of this volume ask what can be considered leadership in culture from women’s point of view. They deconstruct the notion of leadership as corporative and career-related modes of success by showing how women’s agency, power and negotiation in and through music can and should be considered as empowering, transformative and role-modeling. By interweaving several disciplinary perspectives – from ethnomusicology, musicology and cultural management to sociology and anthropology – this volume aims to substantially contribute to the study of women’s leadership.

Article about the book on the RAMPD website: https://rampd.org/article/diane-kolin-discusses-new-book-womens-leadership-in-music

For two days, March 24 and 25, 2023, the music department hosted the 2nd annual Graduate Music Students Colloquium. The theme of this year’s colloquium was Forward Motion.

I was invited to join Keisha Bell-Kovacs’ jazz quartet for two songs on Friday, March 24, and I presented my work with Community Music Schools of Toronto, consisting of a series of adaptive instruments and voice workshops, on Saturday, March 25.

Watch the presentation:

Featuring Keynote Speaker and Panelist, Dr. Philip Ewell, whose forthcoming On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone will be published in April 2023. Dr. Ewell’s recent scholarship in “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” has been featured in the New York Times, Die Zeit, the BBC, the New Yorker, and on WQXR’s Aria Code.

Website of the event: https://gmsa25.wixsite.com/york-graduate-music

A few pictures: