page_title: Disability in the arts
section_title: Music
hierarchical_section_title: Disability in the arts / Performing arts / Music
caption_attribution_description: Django Reinhardt at the Aquarium jazz club in New York, NY
context_page_description: Disability in the arts is an aspect within various arts disciplines of inclusive practices involving disability. It manifests itself in the output and mission of some stage and modern dance performing-arts companies, and as the subject matter of individual works of art, such as the work of specific painters and those who draw.
  Disability in the arts is distinguished from disability art in that it refers to art that includes people with disabilities, whether in themes, performance, or the creation of the artwork, rather than works focusing on disability as the central theme. It can also refer to work that is made as a political act toward shaping a new community, fostering disability culture:
  Disability culture is the difference between being alone, isolated, and individuated with a physical, cognitive, emotional or sensory difference that in our society invites discrimination and reinforces that isolation – the difference between all that and being in community.
context_section_description: Beethoven is remembered for his ability to compose classic music after completely losing his hearing. He tried several ways of using his deteriorating hearing before it completely disappeared. He had the legs of his pianoforte cut off, so that it was sitting directly on the floor. By lying on the floor in front of the keyboard, he could feel vibrations while he played, helping him to compose. Different attempts were made to help Beethoven with adaptive or assistive technology.  Thomas Broadwood, the Streichers, and Conrad Graf were all piano manufacturers who tried different methods of adapting the instrument to make it louder for Beethoven: ear trumpets were attached to the soundboard, resonance plates were added to the underside of a piano, and using four strings for every key were all tried. Beethoven ultimately lost all hearing, and could no longer rely on an instrument to help him compose. Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony at this time in his life.
  
  Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt was a 20-year-old, accomplished guitarist when his left hand was severely burned in a house fire, leaving him with only the use of two fingers for playing the fretboard on the neck of the guitar. While he recovered from his burns, his brother gave him a new guitar. Reinhardt devised his own physical therapy, practising daily to stretch his fingers. He also invented new techniques to compensate for the lost fingers: 
  Instead of playing scales and arpeggios horizontally across the fretboard as was the norm, he searched out fingerings that ran vertically up and down the frets as they were easier to play with just two fingers. He created new chord forms using a minimum of notes—often just triads with his two good fingers on the bass strings. He pushed his paralyzed fingers to grip the guitar as well, his smallest digit on the high E string, his ring finger on the B, and sometimes barring his index finger to fashion chords of four to five notes. He then slid his hand up and down the fretboard, employing these chord forms to craft a fluent vocabulary.
   Reinhardt continued to work as a guitarist, and became world-famous as a recording artist. Reinhardt's creative techniques became part of the jazz guitar repertoire.
  Melody Gardot, a jazz vocalist, suffered a traumatic brain injury after she was hit by a car while riding a bicycle. Gardot's injury impaired her memory, including her ability to speak. She spent a year recovering in hospital. While in hospital, her therapy required her to relearn the process of completing simple tasks, such as remembering to shut off a water tap after brushing her teeth. Remembering words to complete sentences was a challenge for Gardot. A doctor suggested that Gardot try singing sentences as an alternative to speaking them, as a way of improving her ability to remember longer sentences. Gardot discovered that this method improved her memory. Gardot gained a music following by adding recordings of her music to Myspace in 2006. Gardot is now a world-famous recording artist, in both French and English, and gives concerts around the globe. She sometimes still has memory lapses while performing, and Gardot needs to wear sunglasses to protect her light-sensitive eyes. She carries a cane as she occasionally experiences vertigo.
  In 2011, British composer Charles Hazlewood formed the British Paraorchestra, an orchestra that aims to consist entirely of skilled disabled musicians to counter his belief that orchestras do not contain enough disabled musicians. The formation of the orchestra was the subject of a Channel 4 documentary, and it also performed during the closing ceremony of the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London.
  In the UK the One Handed Musical Instrument Trust has the objective of removing the barriers to music-making faced by the physically disabled. It comments: "There is currently no orchestral instrument that can be played without two fully functioning hands and arms, denying unlimited participation in musical life to those with congenital disabilities and amputees, as well as the millions who may ha
caption: Jazz guitarist and composer Django Reinhardt became a top-selling recording artist. He developed new guitar techniques used by many guitarists today.
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