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. Read this article to know more about ArtsAbly.

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.

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. 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 Community Music Schools of Toronto (CMST), funded and supported by York University’s Helen Carswell Chair in Community Engaged Research in the Arts. This post presents the final report and the future of the project: the creation of a new company!

I have been chosen to be part of the professional Recording Academy family. 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.

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.

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. 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 who have changed the music industry: Evelyn Glennie, Gaelynn Lea and Lachi. The book is available in open access PDF for its launch. Printed versions of the book will be available soon on the editor’s website.

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.