Abstracts

Michael Accinno (West Tisbury, MA) 

Toward a Music History of Braille: Tactile Literacy in the Long Nineteenth Century

Since its inception in the early nineteenth century, braille—a system of tactile letters, numbers, and symbols—has enabled blind people to read and write text as well as music. Indeed, the history of blind literacy is inextricably linked to the history of blind music-making. Louis Braille, a blind teacher and professional organist, invented his system in Paris, where it gained broad acceptance in the early 1850s. Keenly aware of the latest pedagogical developments in Europe, American educators soon took note. On a research trip to Paris, an administrator from the Missouri School for the Blind enthused about braille, urging his colleagues to bring the system to the United States. When braille debuted in Missouri in the late 1850s, it caused a rift among administrators, teachers, and students. Some sighted teachers complained they could not read the system’s raised six-dot cells, while others, led by head music teacher Henry Robyn, championed the benefits of braille, which could be adapted not only for music, but for nearly all subjects of study. Braille spread quickly among blind students, paving the way for its eventual acceptance nationwide. Drawing on school annual reports, administrative documents, and correspondence, this paper traces the adoption of braille in the United States, foregrounding the crucial role of musicians in fomenting support for the nascent system. In particular, I focus attention on two influential teachers: Robyn and Francis Campbell, music teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. Like Robyn, Campbell introduced braille in the music classroom, but it spread quickly throughout the school’s curriculum. Attending to the cultural history of blind literacy, I nuance a growing body of music scholarship on tactile literacy systems, which has primarily explored the use of braille in present-day music classrooms (Gillespie 2013; Pacun 2009; Johnson 2009, 2016; Saslaw 2009).

Sébastien Durand (University of Tours)

A Blind Virtuoso in Paris during the Age of Enlightenment: Paradis at the Concert Spirituel (1784)

Maria Theresia von Paradis embarked on a concert tour across Europe in 1783. The following year, she stayed in Paris where she performed multiple times with great success at the Concert Spirituel, a prestigious concert institution, with a new repertoire. For eight months, she captivated the admiration of the French capital, playing before an audience both intrigued by her blindness and captivated by her musical and personal qualities. Possessing an extraordinary personality, she also inspired enlightened minds of her time, like Valentin Haüy, for whom this encounter was crucial, to advance the education of the blind in Enlightenment Europe. By reviving this decisive moment in the history of blindness and the study of blind musicians, this presentation will cover several key points related to the Viennese musician's stay in Paris. These include the study of the repertoire performed in concerts, the discovery of the personalities she met (both musical and non-musical), the presentation of her activities as a pedagogue and composer, as well as the influence of this stay on society's evolving perception of blindness on the eve of the French Revolution.

Kristin Franseen (Western University, Ontario, Canada) and Rena Roussin (University of Toronto, Canada) 

Recovering Paradis?: Mythology, Gossip, and Anachronism in Fictional Reception History

The early 19th century saw a great expansion of public interest in composer biographies, reminiscences about well-known musicians, and fiction on musical subjects, including fictionalized biography (Langley 1989, Unseld 2014, Mueller 2021, Keefe 2023). While later musicologists and critical biographers critiqued this literature for relying too heavily on dubious gossip and anecdote, many such stories persisted in the public imagination and remained inspirations for popular biography and biographical fictions across the 20th and 21st centuries (Wiley 2008, Samaga 2021, Franseen 2022). In the case of Maria Theresia Paradis, fictional musings on her experiences of disability and gender and association with prominent male mentors and colleagues often appear to “recover” a seemingly “lost” Classical composer who readers and audiences might easily admire—even if they never heard a note of her music.

In this presentation, we will explore the place of gossip, mythmaking, and anachronisms in a selection of Paradis-centered fictions across a variety of media formats and genres (including Stevens 1994, Halberstadt 2011, Albert 2017, Wallen 2022). Our presentation examines how these sources rely on and reinterpret surviving historical sources and anecdotes, represent Paradis’s music (including speculation about now-lost works), engage with motifs and plots from other musical fictions set in this period, and endeavour to reconstruct Paradis’s inner life. We argue that while such fictions often explicitly aim to reclaim Paradis’s agency as a significant performer, composer, and educator, they also ultimately risk reinforcing ahistorical and anachronistic conceptions of gender, disability, and musical genius.

Waltraud Maierhofer (University of Iowa) 

Insight or eyesight: Bourgeois gender roles, disability, and Paradis, the performer and entrepreneur 

In my presentation I plan to expand my previous discussion of Paradis at the intersection of Enlightenment disability discourse and gender norms.I will consider mostly her musical and entrepreneurial career after her celebrity status as one of Mesmer’s patients and her tours as pianist in the 1780s although there are fewer writings by contemporaries about her personality, her life, and accomplishments. While such documents describe her as a pitiable victim of her impairment, I argue that Paradis was able to escape the restrictive gender norms for bourgeois women, the “tyranny of the normal” (Fiedler 1996), because of it and enter masculine professions. Her accomplishments as organizer of dilettante academies and as director of a private music school deserve more recognition, as related contributions in the symposium will also show. Reports about her, however, continued to pity her for her perceived physical deficiency and lack of children as well as social life and thus excused her charging for music lessons. The popular conservative writer Caroline Pichler mentioned in her memoirs that Viennese society loved and respected Paradis the teacher and school director but also pitied her for her perceived misfortune of being impaired.

Enlightenment medicine developed what Michel Foucault calls, in Power/Knowledge, a “Politics of Health” and pursued a strategy of cure rather than assistance for mental and physical impairments. Paradis’ parents pursued this strategy in seeking Mesmer’s help. A cure would have restored the feminine gender of the pianist, and her relapse remains a mystery and source of various theories in biographical writing which I will also examine. It is important that the first biography of Paradis by Ludwig August Frankl (1876) appeared in the nineteenth century in connection with efforts furthering the education of blind persons.

Scholarship on disability in the long eighteenth century has shown that the marker of a disability (then called defect) overrode gender expectations. A young woman with a physical or mental defect was not considered suitable for marriage even if her reproductive organs were fully functional. Being blind minimized Maria’s likelihood of the usual fate of marriage, motherhood, and potentially early death. She even contributed to new means for reading and writing and thus assisting individuals with blindness and was a living model for the success of education of blind persons, what is known today as the social model of disability.

Insights into the complex intersection of Enlightenment views of physical impairments as defects and middle-class gender roles allow me to conclude that it was the deficient eyesight that allowed Maria Paradis to continue her performing career beyond her teenage years–not despite her blindness but because of it. Her status as deficient left Maria Paradis unbound by gender limitations, and she was able to extend her exceptional status as child prodigy on the piano to that of an adult organizer of academies and concerts and an independent teacher in her private music school. 

Stephanie Probst (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst, Vienna, Austria) 

Notational Systems and Appliances for Blind Musicians: Approaches, Affordances, Positionalities

Among the appliances that pianist and composer Maria Theresia Paradis received to assist her with writing and reading, two are particularly famous: tools for letterpress printing of alphabetic text, gifted to her by the inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen (1779), and a wooden board with moveable musical symbols to set staff notation in three dimensions, constructed by her partner Johann Riedinger (1810). The two technologies prefigure a lineage of devices conceived to facilitate writing and reading for the blind across the nineteenth century, accompanying the institutionalization of education for blind people in many European capitals (Paris 1785, Vienna 1804). This presentation revisits these developments alongside a selection of systems for music notation for the blind.

Drawing on a chapter of my current book project on tactile interfaces for reading and writing music, I systematize the diverse approaches according to their representational logic and the socio-cultural positionalities that they emerge from and provide access to. This taxonomy becomes particularly apparent when analyzing the associated tools to produce and handle the notational artefacts in the different scriptural systems and the often-limited ways of interaction they allow for. While the efforts towards ever more inclusive methods for writing and reading document a growing awareness of the affordances of the tactile sense, they also reveal a sense-specific separation between reading and writing that is only rarely mediated. Throughout, I frame these observations within current and perennial concerns negotiated in dis/ability studies and communities, such as the tension between assimilatory and emancipatory strategies, the quest for independence, and the importance of diverse systems of communication.

Annette Richards (Cornell University, NY)

Music on the Dark Side of 1800: Listening to Mlle Paradis

[Abstract to come]

Christoph Siems and Solveig-Marie Oma (Leipzig, Germany)

On Retranslating Musical Scores: Blind Composing Then and Now

Maria Theresia von Paradis, Antonio de Cabezón, Joseph Labor or Louis Vierne; the list of blind or highly visually impaired musicians is long. Some of them are still known as composers today. They all had to deal with the challenge of capturing their music for future generations. Many of them developed their own notation techniques, others worked hard with copyists. Although the dot notation for music developed by Louis Braille became the international standard from the late 19th century, it was primarily used to make classical music literature accessible to a non-sighted audience. However, musical works notated by blind composers were often not translated back into black print. The work of the Norwegian organist Einar Melling (1880–1949) – the first blind student at the Leipzig Conservatory – may illustrate that access to works by blind composers is still a difficulty today. The catalog of the Norwegian Library for the Blind (TiBi) currently contains more of his compositions notated in Braille than can be found in black print.

Only recently, some computer programs (e.g. Braillevis) have made it possible to retranslate pieces notated in Braille back into black print. Also, widely used notation programs such as MuseScore and Sibelius have become more accessible for blind and visually impaired users. This development is of enormous importance not only for composers, but also for teachers, conductors, choirmasters and many others. In our paper we will present some examples of approaches to the notation of music by blind composers. These will be compared in terms of advantages and disadvantages. With the help of the new tools, we will also demonstrate how compositions by blind musicians can be made accessible today. 

Evelyn Szabo (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Austria)

A red book in a wooden casket: The Stammbuch of Paradis - Insights into Her Vienna Network

The Stammbuch of the pianist, singer and composer Maria Theresia Paradis is well known and has often been discussed. Presumably since her lifetime, it has been examined, either because of the entries by renowned personalities or as an excellent source for research on her biography. Most of the entries express admiration, support and thankfulness for Paradis and often refer to her blindness in verses and poems. With more than 270 entries, the album helped to provide knowledge about her students, her contacts in Vienna and her travels through Europe from 1783 to 1786.

Since Paradis’ album is one of the most requested Stammbücher of the Vienna City Library, I will present its history, materiality and composition. My contribution will focus on the entries written by Paradis’ Viennese contacts. The album does not only show the intimate circle of Maria Theresia Paradis as part of the culture of commemoration, but also served a representative function, showing her relations within the city and beyond. The album will be used as a starting point to examine Maria Theresia Paradis’ network in Vienna and it will be discussed whose support she could rely on and how she benefited from her contacts in the city.

Hannah Thompson (Royal Holloway University of London, England) 

Blind Women Listening, Writing and Thinking in the Nineteenth Century
As work on Paradis shows us, the relationship between blindness, femininity, and music is a complex one. In this paper I will investigate how these three key interconnected themes are portrayed in a number of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts. Thérèse-Adèle Husson was France’s first blind autobiographer. In her recently discovered work, we find a fascinating account of how stereotypes often associated with both blindness and femininity (such as passivity and weakness) can be artfully manipulated so that blindness becomes a “gain” rather than a “loss.” Furthermore, through her discussions of the role of music in her life, Husson reveals how she manipulates non-blind society’s tendency to believe in the (ableist) association between blindness and musical talent to achieve her goals. Like André Gide’s blind Gertrude in La symphonie pastorale and Dickens’ Lucia in Poor Miss Finch, Husson’s narrative persona helps us to unpick society’s assumptions about what it means to be a musically-gifted blind woman in the nineteenth century.

Jamie Weaver (Stephen F. Austin State University, TX)

Difficult to Read: A Study of Paradis’ Literacy and Communication with the Sighted World

Paradis enjoyed unprecedented access to European education and culture for a person of the eighteenth century, especially a female, who lost sight during early childhood. Due to her privilege as a Habsburg court dependent, obvious intellectual gifts, innate talents, and engaging personality, the best music teachers in Vienna spent hours guiding her talents and honing her musical memory. Habsburg tutors educated her in language and other subjects appropriate for a scholar of her standing. Inventors encouraged her gifts by designing tools to increase her access and her communication with the sighted world. Important members of society admired her, inviting her to participate in their society and customs. So extraordinary were her educational accomplishments that they served as a model for the first schools developed to educate blind children in Europe. There was one quintessential activity that Paradis did not achieve, however; she never learned to read.

Through exploration of contemporary sources, current sources in disability studies, and my own experience as a blind musician, teacher, and scholar, I will shed light on the ways in which Paradis’ one-way, written  communication with sighted readers as well as her need for sighted readers to give voice to, or to interpret all information with which she was presented during her education and career, impacted her output, compositional choices, and the reception of her performances and compositions. Without the opportunity to investigate musical works on her own, Paradis’ knowledge of written music and notation would have been limited to works she heard in performance or those her teachers interpreted for her. Additionally, she would have learned most of her scores by ear, impacting her perception of written notation. The transcription of her work and the custodianship of her documents undertaken by her cousin and amanuensis, Johann Riedinger, certainly provided great opportunities, but harbored the potential for error, manipulation, and even suppression as well. The fact that Paradis could not control the cataloging or dissemination of her works herself may have contributed to the loss of many of her compositions. Examining the challenges of Paradis’ communication with the sighted world almost exclusively through the mediation of others will facilitate greater understanding of the value of her musical contributions.