music.
The editors of the Routledge Sourcebook than usually credited, and more drawn out in
have attempted to cast their net a little wider,
including essays and articles written by com-
mentators from and on film music in Britain,
the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany, and
even China. The problem there is balance:
essays about the American industry dominate,
so the others can at best serve as token acknow-
ledgements that other film traditions existç
albeit useful tokens to have in English. A
concerted effort among specialists in these dif-
ferent traditions, including specialists in the
different decades of film-music production, to
produce a truly international resource, is surely
a worthwhile future project.
In addition to the particular perspectives
created in the volume by national context and
‘voices’ heard, the essays also include non-
contemporaneous essays of historical interest.
Two of the five items on the ‘silent film’ era are
retrospectives, for instance. The interview with
Gaylord Carter, who played the organ at Los
Angeles’s Million Dollar Theatre from 1926,
dates from 1989. It hence provides a snapshot of
the very end of the silent era, by someone who
entered the profession at the peak of the
picture palace era and chiefly stands as a
witness to the transition to sound. He did not
enjoy the status of a Jessie Crawford (though
this excerpt includes some memories about
Crawford), and at the time of the interview
was an old man who had witnessed sixty years
of sound film, and historically was more im-
portant for his work as part of the Theatre
Organ revival than as a cinema organ star of
the silent era. His memories also describe ar-
rangements in one of the most spectacular
theatres in a huge city, which will have been dif-
ferent from those in 99.9 per cent of more
modest ‘palaces’.
Temporal perspective is also an issue in Max
Winkler’s 1951 retrospective of his work as a
supplier of cue sheets in the 1910s and 1920s.
His memoir is certainly ‘lively’, as the editor
points out, and I can see why it is an attractive
essay to include: it gives a particular synoptic
view of the development of film music in the
silent era, through the transition to sound, and
then to the studios’ acquisition of music pub-
lisher catalogues. However, for many potential
users of this bookçstudents and teachers
alikeçhaving spelled out what is ‘not alto-
gether reliable’ in Winkler’s account would
have been more useful than simply receiving
that signal. Among the most obvious of these
are the impression given that the transition to
sound happened almost overnight (it didn’t: it
was a more drawn-out and piecemeal process
635
some countries than others); and the impression
that sheer production of cue sheets meant that
they were used as produced (the pieces listed
were most likely subject to widespread substitu-
tion). Perspective is therefore a little skewed,
perhaps, though as long as one is aware of it,
the variety of angles provided in the collection
is useful in itself. How key historical actors
such as Winkler came to see their own contribu-
tion is ultimately almost as fascinating and
telling as the reality of their contribution.
This is definitely a collection to use in full
knowledge of what it is attempting to do, not
necessarily as a comprehensive sampling of
sources across the history of American film
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exhibition and its musical dimensions. Its small
count of readings illuminating the many
technological changes across the decades may
also irritate some. (It is easy to forget the
profound impact of each technological advance
when one comes at film music from the point
of view of ‘scores’, and films as audio-visual
texts. Here the article by Leonid Sabaneev
provides an important contribution.) It will
also doubtless be swamped in the market by
even more source books than have already
appeared. But in its own terms this reader is
certainly a useful addition to the literature and
will be welcomed by students of film music.
JULIE BROWN
Royal Holloway, University of London
doi:10.1093/ml/gcs088
Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music. By
Joseph Straus. pp. x þ 224. (Oxford Univer-
sity Press, New York and Oxford, 2011,
»65.00 (hardback), »15.99 (paperback).
ISBN 978-0-19-976645-1 (hardback), 978-0-
19-976646-8 (paperback).)
Joseph Straus’s research on disability has
culminated in Extraordinary Measures: Disability
in Music. This slim volume, much of which has
appeared before, is one of the first monographs
on disability studies in music. Though the book
implies an overview of the topic, Disability in
Music is a more focused project. The title is not
only a pun: Measures refers to notated Western
art music, while Extraordinary references ‘the
normal’, a key concept in disability studies. The
tyranny of the normal, according to Lennard
Davis (‘Constructing Normalcy’, in Davis (ed.),
The Disability Studies Reader, 3rd edn. (New York
and London, 2010), 3^19), emerged in the nine-
teenth century, and posits a binary of normality
and deviance, the latter including disability,
grounded in the newly emergent science of stat-
istics. This concept is fundamental to Straus’s
arguments. Appropriately, the repertory and
theories Straus discusses come primarily from
the period of Enlightenment values, bounded
by Beethoven and Schoenberg at either end of
the historical spectrum.
That Straus applies disability theory to music
analysis should not surprise readers; the barely
acknowledged Susan McClary casts a long
shadow over this new ‘new musicology’. Extraor-
dinary Measures reads conceptuallyçthough
neither organizationally, nor, it appears, inten-
tionallyçlike two books. One reads disability
into scores and theories. The other, more pre-
dictably, concerns people. Perhaps because of
this second ‘people book’, Straus comments
that: ‘My failure to speak about music outside
the West, or about popular or folk traditions
inside and outside the West, or even about
texted [vocal] music inside the West, is obvi-
ously a serious limitation, but I hope not a
fatal one’ (p. 12). This is not quite accurate:
there is, for example, a section on baritone
Thomas Quasthoff. But Strauss is right to
apply his analytical paradigm only to works
where it makes sense. Still, something is lost
without a broader sociocultural framework.
West and East cannot be simply parsed, and
Straus’s discussion of the Japanese composer
Hikari Oe (pp. 42^3), for example, omits the
latter perspective. Neither can high and
popular culture be so easily divided; all the per-
formers discussed are public figures whose no-
toriety transcends classical music.
Straus’s Western focus also shapes his conten-
tion that ‘Until now, disability has not entered
much into discussions of music’ (p. 11). Even
excluding music education and music therapy
(the latter deemed ineffectual (p. 158) and a
‘ghetto’ (p. 157)), a great deal has been written
on disability and music, as the bibliography of
my Music, Disability, and Society (Philadelphia,
2010), 171^185) illustrates. As early as 1964,
ethnomusicologist Alan Merriam’s canonic The
Anthropology of Music (Evanston, Ill.), identified
blind musicians (probably the largest group of
disabled musicians) as an analytical category
(p. 132), decades before disability encountered
music theory and musicology.
Straus’s approach to analysis is justifiably
Eurocentric. Four chapters analyse the works of
prominent composers, mostly artists he charac-
terizes as disabled, though others might regard
them as ill and/or aging, a significant distinc-
tion. One chapter concerns disability in music
theory. Straus stresses the Western organicist
tradition, through which he makes (or
636
borrows) the case for the human body as a
metaphor for a musical composition. Support
for his model is located in Schoenberg’s
remarks concerning his String Trio (pp. 89^
94) and especially the theorist Heinrich
Schenker’s prose (pp. 116^22). The musical
‘body’ experiences disability and the prospect,
fulfilled or not, of ‘cure’. Disability takes the
form of Schoenberg’s (as theorist) ‘tonal
problem’, applied often here, most prominently
to Beethoven and Schubert; asymmetrical
phrasing (the theorist Hugo Riemann; p. 109
n. 9); dissonance (Schenker); or ruptures in
inversional symmetry (pre-serial Schoenberg
and Webern (pp. 72^81) and the theorist David
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Lewin (pp. 122^4)). Accepting this analytical
paradigm requires the suspension of disbelief.
A metaphor is not an explanation: ‘the sun’
tells us little about Romeo’s Juliet, despite the
beauty of Shakespeare’s text. Bodies are matter
in space; music is energy in time. Oddly,
Straus’s metaphorical musical bodies’ sole attri-
bute is (sometimes unspecified) disability.
Alternative embodied narratives of music are
well known, for example in Susan McClary’s
analyses of Beethoven and Schubert (Feminine
Endings (Minneapolis, 2010)), composers to
whom Straus devotes entire chapters. By what
criteria might we assess the relative aptness of
various metaphors?
Even if one can suspend disbelief, Straus’s
premiss that Western compositions and theories
are about ‘norming’ the abnormalçthat is,
curing the disabledçgenerates tough questions.
While Schenker’s prose confirms the historical
significance of the embodiment metaphor,
Straus’s contention that in Schenkerian analysis
dissonance is disability, fails to convince. Dis-
sonance is not statistically abnormal in tonal
music. In Schenker’s theory, the relative stabil-
ity of consonances is richly nuanced, such that
the only absolute consonance is the triad, a stat-
istical minority of one and surely not a disabil-
ity. And, of course, dissonance is the lifeblood
of the tonal body through which it circulates.
Problems in analysis become human
problems when metaphor meets biography, as
is the case with Straus’s reading of Schubert:
The term ‘vice’ is apparently [Edward] Cone’s subtle
reference to Schubert’s sexual promiscuityçwhether
gay or straight is a matter of current debate. Schu-
bert’s ‘vice’ in this reading, proves impossible to
repress, and bursts forth with destructive conse-
quences, including the indelible and painful bodily
markers of syphilis. The progress of Schubert’s bodily
experience of illness and the progress of his music
follow the same path, an encounter with and
response to disability. (p. 64)
Straus’s account is emblematic of analysis that
all but reduces Schubert to his venereal disease.
Later, during his discussion of ‘disablist
hearing’ (‘(dis)ableist’ is the accepted spelling),
he pro-actively refutes the anticipated accus-
ation of essentialism. In this case, however, the
charge sticks.
The opening and final two chapters are more
grounded. Straus’s deeply knowledgeable,
well-rounded, diligent humanism is at its best
dealing not with pieces but with humans:
composers, performers, and listeners. The first
and penultimate chapters concern the crit-
ical and public reception of historical and
living personalities, composers, and performers.
Straus references Rosemary Garland-
Thomson’s Staring: How We Look (Oxford and
New York, 2010) to suggest that:
If musical performers have extraordinary, prodigious,
even monstrous bodies, then musical performances
have an aspect of a freak show: audiences pay to see
and hear unusual figures whose appearance and
ability deviate far from the norm. In exchange for
the price of a ticket, audience members can stare
(and listen intently), indulging in the simultaneously
disquieting and reassuring contemplation of a
human embodiment so like and yet unlike their
own. For musical performers with visible (or
audible) disabilities, the affinity between a perform-
ance and a freak show may become even more
pronounced. (pp. 126^7)
Perhaps. But, regarding gifted performers, Ron
Amundson (‘Against Normative Function’,
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences, 31 (2000), 33^53)) provides
a corrective position: ‘as with other quasi-
statistical uses of the concept of normality,
abnormality is usually to be read as subnormal-
ity. Better-than-average function is not usually
labeled as abnormal even though it is statistic-
ally atypical’ (p. 35). Classical virtuosi are thus
hardly viewed as ‘subnormal’ freaks.
Disabled performers’ impairments are cer-
tainly noticed by audiences, often cruelly and
abusively, particularly in Quasthoff ’s case, as is
well documented by Straus. But, much as
Richard Taruskin ‘outs’ the neo-primitivism of
McClary’s racial politics (‘Material Gains:
Assessing Susan McClary’, Music & Letters, 90
(2009), 453^67), the purportedly autistic Glenn
Gould, who is, for example, accused of poor
hygiene (p. 137), needs defending from his de-
fenders. By contrast, the filmmakers Peter
Raymont and Miche'le Hozer, who created The
Genius within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
(2010), recalled after interviewing Gould’s
partner, Cornelia Foss, former wife of the
American composer Lukas Foss, that ‘it was
wonderful to talk with Cornelia Foss’s children,
637
Eliza and Christopher and discover what a won-
derful father-figure [Gould] was for them. . . .
It was also wonderful to be able to see that,
while he was undoubtedly a musical genius, he
was also very much an ‘‘ordinary’’ man who
was desperate to be loved and to love others’
(‘Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn
Gould; Interview with Filmmakers Peter
Raymont & Miche'le Hozer’, 5http://www.pbs.
org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/genius-
within-the-inner-life-of-glenn-gould/interview-
with-filmmakers-peter-raymont-michele-hozer/
1731/4). We need not condone adultery to see
Gould as vastly more sociable than he has been
characterized in those accounts of hermetic
psychopathology that Straus endorses (p. 137).
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The film also reveals that Gould’s famous
idiosyncrasies (medicalized by critics, including
Straus) were sometimes played up, and that his
‘autistic’ playing style instead derived from the
influence of his teacher Raphael Guerrero.
The phenomenon of ‘staring’ is similarly
overstated. Though Straus notes that ‘Itzhak
Perlman occupies an almost unique position in
our culture: a classical musician (acknowledged
as one of the greatest violinists of our time)
and a popular celebrity. He also has a visible
disability’ (p. 143), Perlman’s public persona,
unlike that of Quasthoff or Evelyn Glennie, is
arguably that of an inessentialized disabled
person. As with Gould, film can be revelatory.
In Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler’s House (2006 ),
there is no attempt to hide his disability. But it
is no ‘freak show’ either. Perlman is seen as an
Ashkenazi Jew, a nascent klezmer just learning
the style, a nice, funny guy, and a healthy
eater, among other attributes (including his dis-
ability). Precisely because In the Fiddler’s House
is not about disability, it finds the voyeuristic
hypothesis, as relentlessly applied, both un-
balanced and ultimately false.
Straus continues: ‘For performers with visible
disabilities, audiences come not only to hear
the music but also to stare at the disabled
body: the blind or mad or one-armed pianist,
the guitarist with three fingers, the singer with
vocal damage, the violinist with polio, the deaf
percussionist’ (p. 126 ). The three-fingered
guitarist is apparently Django Reinhardt,
but even this is, strictly speaking, incorrect:
Reinhardt had all his digits, though two were
mostly, though not fully, incapacitated
(Benjamin Givan, ‘Django Reinhardt’s Left
Hand’, in E. Taylor Atkins (ed.), Jazz Planet
( Jackson, Miss., 2003), 19^40). It could have
beençbut isn’tça reference to Jerry Garcia of
the Grateful Dead (who also had a right
thumb). Garcia’s amputee status, impossible to
hide, was nonetheless barely known even to
Deadheads. It seems unlikely that many came
to stare at Garcia’s right hand or that pop fans
are more polite than classical listeners. Here as
elsewhere, a bigger-than-just-classical picture
would have served the whole truth.
In the final chapter, ‘Prodigious, Normal and
Disablist Hearing’, Straus refers to music cogni-
tion as a ‘relatively new field’ (p. 157) and
states that:
Even more than traditional music theories, then,
music cognition is a normalizing enterprise: it
creates and depends upon normal listeners hearing
normally.
Who are these listeners? The normal listener, as far as ex-
perimental psychology is concerned, is usually an
undergraduate student at a research university in the
United States; these listeners make up the vast
majority of the experimental subjects. (p. 153)
There are unsupported claims here. Research
on absolute pitch, a favourite subject in music
cognition whose subjects are often of necessity
‘prodigious listeners’ (with absolute pitch)
rather than any particular demographic group,
began, not recently but in the nineteenth
century (A. J. Ellis, ‘On the Sensitivities of the
Ear to Pitch and Change of Pitch in Music’,
Royal Musical Association Proceedings, 3 (1876 ),
1^32). There is also literature on children (for
example, Sandra Trehub and Erin Hannon,
‘Infant Music Perception: Domain-general or
Domain-specific Mechanisms?’ Cognition, 100
(2006 ) 73^99), and blindness (R. H. Hamilton
et al., ‘Absolute Pitch in Blind Musicians’,
Neuroreport, 15 (2004) 803^6 ). Hamilton’s
findings, in particular, appear to challenge
Straus’s claims. Straus writes (p. 160):
I am not suggesting that all autistic, blind, deaf
people, or people with mobility issues hear in the
ways I describe and I am not suggesting that to hear
in these ways one needs to be autistic, blind, deaf or
mobility impaired. Like disability itself, hearing is a
kind of performanceçone may choose to hear
normally and one may choose to hear in a disablist
mode.
But, as Hamilton notes, we may not necessarily
hear as we choose:
MRI images acquired in a subset of blind AP
[absolute pitch] musicians revealed greater variabil-
ity in planum temporale asymmetry compared with
the increased left-sided asymmetry previously
described in sighted AP musicians. This suggests that
neural mechanisms underlying AP in blind musicians
could differ from those in sighted musicians.
(Hamilton et al., p. 803)
638
‘Blind hearing’ differs non-electively, here ana-
tomically rather than performatively, from
sighted or ‘normal hearing’. More problematic
still is Straus’s assertion that ‘deaf hearing is an
alternative to normal hearing’ (p. 170). The
only deaf musician Straus references here is per-
cussionist Evelyn Glennie, who is indisputably
‘extraordinary’ and who seems to embrace her
hearing ‘difference’. In contrast, Cherisse
Miller’s edited collection Making Music with a
Hearing Loss (Rockville, Ill., 2011) includes
eleven personal narratives of ‘ordinary’ musi-
cians for whom, unlike Glennie, deafness is a
painful struggle, sometimes a losing battle, and
surely not a cherished difference.
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As a book about genius and artistic triumphs
çthus an old-fashioned music historyçExtraor-
dinary Measures does not realistically represent
disability in music. Miller’s deaf subjects
barely manage to ‘play musical chairs’. Itzhak
Perlman aside, these chairs are rarely wheel-
chairs, despite what should be boundless
opportunities with few limitations for musi-
cians whose lower body mobility impairments
detract little or nothing from their performing
ability. Other disabled people fare no better.
The past and present state of disability in clas-
sical music is one of exclusion of nearly all but
the ‘extraordinary’, and thus the denial of a
basic human right, a tale that is unsung here.
Extraordinary Measures includes no notated
illustrations; analyses are verbal only. Despite
its glossary of theoretical terms, the anticipated
audience of non-specialist readers, including
disabled people, will find these discussions too
difficult to follow. Ironically, the many foot-
notes, often more than half the page, make
reading ‘difficult’, ‘time consuming’, and even
‘impractical’ for disabled readers, regardless of
the assistive technology employed, according to
psychologist/low vision researcher Gordon
Legge (personal communication, 10 Apr. 2012),
who has severe low vision. And Universal In-
structional Design scholar Jeanne Higbee
proposes that only writing in which all informa-
tion (except citations) is embedded in the body
of a text is ‘truly accessible’ (personal communi-
cation, 19 Mar. 2012). Such a style change
would be a major paradigm shift for many
scholars, but it is both the humane thing to do
(and would be a boon to all readers) and the
only acceptable path for those in disability
studies who believe that having a disabled read-
ership is essential. It is insufficient ‘not [to]
curse the deaf. [Neither should one] place a
stumbling block before the blind’ (Leviticus 19:
14), particularly when writing aboutçand, one
would hopeçfor them.
ALEX LUBET
University of Minnesota
doi:10.1093/ml/gcs081
Play It Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music. Ed. by
George Plasketes. pp. viii þ 267. (Ashgate,
Farnham and Burlington, Vt., 2010, »60.
ISBN 978-0-7546-6809-1.)
Let’s start by talking about terms. Play It Again, a
fifteen-essay collection published as part of the
Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series,
describes itself as ‘the first scholarly volume of
critical perspectives on cover songs’ (p. 3).
However, its contributors variously refer to its
topic as ‘cover songs’, ‘cover versions’, ‘cover
records’, ‘cover recordings’, ‘cover renditions’,
‘covers’, ‘versions’, ‘re-recordings’, ‘reworkings’,
‘remakes’, ‘recontextualizations’, ‘iterations’, ‘in-
terpretations’, ‘translations’, ‘tributes’, ‘homages’,
and ‘send-ups’. They also examine subcategories
of this larger grouping such as ‘self-covers’ and
‘parodies’. Despiteçor, perhaps, because ofç
this proliferation of terms, there seems to be fun-
damental confusion about what a cover (as I
shall refer to it) is exactly. Editor George
Plasketes defines covering as ‘the musical
practice of one artist recording or performing
another composer’s song’ (p. 1); ‘cover songs’
would therefore be the musical output of this
practiceçthat is, one artist’s recording or per-
formance of another composer’s song. But this
term and its definition are problematic in two
respects: that of roles and that of works.
With respect to roles, the definition suggests
that recording and performing artists must
write their own songs; indeed, a number of
authors in this volume seem to privilege the
Romantic ideal of the artist, as embodied in
the model of the singer/songwriter. However,
many artists do not fit this mould, including
names as varied as Elvis Presley, Ce¤line Dion,
and Milli Vanilli. Yet we would not label all of
their recordings and performances ‘covers’.
Rather, ‘Hound Dog’ is considered to be a
cover, but ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ is not. The differ-
ence lies in the fact that ‘Hound Dog’ was
recorded and released by Big Mama Thornton
prior to being recorded by Presley, whereas
Presley himself was the first to record ‘Heart-
break Hotel’.
We might therefore amend our definition of a
cover to be ‘one artist’s recording or performance
of a song previously recorded and released by
639
another artist’, but this raises a new set of ques-
tions. To begin, what exactly constitutes a
‘song’ or ‘work’ in popular music? Musicology
has long considered the composition, as repre-
sented through the notated score, to be the
central ‘work’ of Western art music. In popular
music, however, songs have been replaced by
recordings and performances as the central
interest of critics and listeners. Scholars such as
Andrew Kania, Allan Moore, and Albin Zak
have pointed out that recordings and perform-
ances in popular music often do not refer back
to any pre-existing ‘work’. Rather, they bring
these very ‘works’ into being. As such, the
singers, musicians, engineers, and producers
who contribute to these recordings and per-
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formances all share credit for the ‘authorship’
of these works alongside the songwriters: it is
just that their authorial contributions typically
lie not in the manipulation of melodic,
harmonic, and rhythmic relationships through
notated symbols, but in the materialization of
timbral, textural, and spatial relationships
among aural objects.
In this volume, however, the relationship
between a song and a recording or performance
of that song remains ill-defined. As such, there
is a lack of clarity about what a cover is and
how to refer to it, with the consequence that
the authors, in their eagerness to show the
prevalence of the practice, are at times unhelp-
fully broad in their application of the term,
allowing that not just individual works but
even musical styles and personae can be
‘covered’. Greg Metcalf, for example, suggests
that the 2007 album Dylan Hears a Who, a collec-
tion of newly composed songs performed in the
musical style of mid-1960s Bob Dylan recor-
dings, are ‘covers’ of Dylan’s style (p. 184).
Sheldon Schiffer suggests that even personae
can be ‘covered’, as were those of the 1960s
group of stage and film actors known as the
Rat Pack in the Steven Soderbergh films
Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Twelve, and Ocean’s
Thirteen (p. 82).
However, the problems do not go away even
if the term is used more restrictively: the pres-
ence of a musical similarity between recordings
or performances does not, in itself, mean that
one is a ‘cover’ of the other. Intention and ac-
knowledgement, whether public or merely
private, are also crucial elements of this rela-
tionship. Deena Weinstein misses this point
when she suggests that George Harrison’s ‘My
Sweet Lord’ is a ‘cover’ of Ronald Mack’s ‘He’s
So Fine’, originally recorded by The Chiffons
(p. 245). As Weinstein reports, a 1976 lawsuit