Gestures of Inclusion [electronic resource] : Blindness, Music, and Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century Thought
出版項
2016
說明
1 on line resource (207 pages)
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-07(E), Section: A
Adviser: Carol Hess
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Davis, 2016
Includes bibliographical references
In 1832, two schools for the blind opened in New York City and Boston, the New York Institution for the Blind and the Perkins School for the Blind. Influenced by European models, both schools promoted music as a desirable career path for blind pupils, developing a curriculum that included vocal and instrumental music. Some early graduates succeeded in finding musical employment. In New York, Fanny Crosby excelled at music and poetry, and later contributed lyrics for songs and cantatas composed by George F. Root, who taught at the New York Institution for the Blind from 1847--1855
In Boston, Joseph Brown Smith graduated from Perkins and became the first blind student to attend Harvard. A talented musician, Smith led a successful career as an organist and music teacher in Louisville, Kentucky. Other Perkins graduates fared less well, however, leading Perkins director Samuel Gridley Howe to question his commitment to music education. By the early 1850s, Howe doubted whether blind graduates could find employment and social acceptance
In 1858, Francis Joseph Campbell, a blind music teacher, convinced Howe to reform musical training at Perkins. Instituting high pedagogical standards, Campbell helped blind pupils find jobs as organists, piano teachers, and piano tuners. Building on these promising results, Campbell and Howe proposed opening a national college and conservatory for blind students in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although Campbell never realized his dream of establishing an American conservatory, he later moved to London, where in 1872 he founded the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind
After Campbell's departure from Perkins, music education continued to flourish there, attracting new interest from music critic John Sullivan Dwight. A close friend of the Howe family, Dwight had long written about music at Perkins in his periodical, Dwight's Journal of Music. From 1875--1893, Dwight served as a Perkins trustee, giving students entree to Boston's concert life, advising two Perkins directors on musical matters, and even editing a Braille edition of Bach chorales
In 1888, a deaf-blind girl named Helen Keller arrived at Perkins. Eager to absorb the school's musical tradition, Keller studied piano there. In later years, Keller used music to shape her autobiographical and epistolary writings and to frame her public appearances and tours during the 1910s and 1920s. Describing music in kinesthetic terms, Keller invited her contemporaries to value alternative ways of experiencing music
During the nineteenth century, administrators, teachers, and students questioned the broad role of music in blind education, but few dismissed its value. In the present day, blind students no longer feel as much pressure to study music. Nevertheless, as twenty-first-century educators gesture toward ever greater inclusion, they would do well to remember both the successes and failures of the nineteenth-century figures discussed here. They believed that musical training afforded students a path to independence, and they imagined a more just society that remains---as of yet---unrealized
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest, 2017
