Underrepresented Composers: Disabled Composers

This biography of Holst draws on letters and personal collections, engravings, paintings, and photographs to present a multifaceted picture of the composer and teacher.

A musical biography exploring the connection between the inner life of the artist, as well as the aspirations and deceptions revealed in the works of Maurice Ravel. Online access also available through the link.

A revised edition of the classic Beethoven biography, originally published in the 1880s. Thayer talked with Beethoven's surviving friends, gathered anecdotes, and sifted through hundreds of documents to produce these volumes. Now Elliot Forbes, one of the foremost Beethoven scholars of our time, has used this new material to bring the Life up to date without sacrificing Thayer's text. Some portions of Thayer's original text have been deleted because recent Beethoven research has proved them inaccurate.

Forced by a hand injury to abandon a career as a pianist, Robert Schumann went on to become one of the world's great composers. Now, in Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age," John Daverio presents a comprehensive study of the composer's life and works. Drawing on documents only recently brought to light, the author also provides a fresh outlook on the relationship between Schumann's mental illness--which brought on an extended sanitarium stay and eventual death in 1856--and his musical creativity. This well-researched study of Schumann interprets the composer's creative legacy in the context of his life and times, combining nineteenth-century cultural and intellectual history with analysis of the works themselves.

Hogwood paints a portrait of Handel's life and music that blends the evidence from documents of all kinds with biographical observation. It contains a chronological table and traces the Handel legend down to our own time.

This text reexamines the lives of composers from Bach to Gershwin and analyzes their medical histories to offer new diagnoses of their illnesses, disabilities, and health problems based on modern medical knowledge.

Musical talent in Western culture is regarded as an extraordinary combination of technical proficiency and interpretative sensitivity. In Music, Disability, and Society, Alex Lubet challenges the rigid view of technical skill and writes about music in relation to disability studies. Lubet offers pungent criticism of the biases in music education and the music profession, going so far as to say that culture disables some performers by adhering to rigid notions of what a musician must look like, how music must be played, who may play it, and what (if any) is the legitimate place of music in society. Online access also available through link.