Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and

the Representation of Disability Joseph

Straus
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Broken Beauty
ii
Broken Beauty
Musical Modernism and
the Representation of Disability

Joseph N. Straus

1
iv

1
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© Joseph N. Straus 2018

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Straus, Joseph Nathan, author.
Title: Broken beauty : musical modernism and the representation of disability /
Joseph N. Straus.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048648| ISBN 9780190871208 (hardcover) |
ISBN 9780190871239 (companion website)
Subjects: LCSH: People with disabilities in music. |
Music—20th century—Philosophy and aesthetics. | Modernism (Music)
Classification: LCC ML3877 .S77 2018 | DDC 780.87—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048648

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
For Sally, as always
vi
CONTENTS

Preface  ix
About the Companion Website   xiii

1. Representing Disability   1
2. Narrating Disability   40
3. Stravinsky’s Aesthetics of Disability   69
4. Madness   88
5. Idiocy   104
6. Autism   125
7. Therapeutic Music Theory and the Tyranny of the Normal   155

Works Cited   185

Index  199
vi
P R E FA C E

Modernist music is centrally concerned with bodies and minds that de-
viate from normative standards for appearance and function. The musical
features that make music modern are precisely those that can be under-
stood to represent disability. Modernist musical representations of disa-
bility both reflect and shape (construct) disability in a eugenic age, a period
when disability was viewed simultaneously with pity (and a corresponding
urge toward cure or rehabilitation) and fear (and a corresponding urge to in-
carcerate or eliminate). Disability is right at the core of musical modernism;
it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about.
The most characteristic features of musical modernism—​ fractured
forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simpli-
fication of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism
in others—​can be understood as musical representations of disability
conditions, including deformity/​ disfigurement, mobility impairment,
madness, idiocy, and autism. These features of musical modernism can, of
course, be understood and explained in many different ways. Disability is
only one of many forces at work, but I will argue that it is a central one, and
that it has been generally overlooked.
In making this argument, I draw on two decades of work in disability
studies (sometimes known as cultural disability studies or critical disability
studies) and a growing body of recent work that brings the discussion of dis-
ability into musicology and music theory. This interdisciplinary enterprise
offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on social and cultural
constructions of the meaning of disability, and shifting our attention from
biology and medicine to culture. Disability is simultaneously real, tangible,
and physical and an imaginative creation whose purpose is to make sense
of the diversity of human morphology, capability, and behavior. Against
the traditional medical model of disability, which sees it as a bodily de-
fect requiring diagnosis and normalization or cure (under the direction of
medical professionals), this new sociocultural model of disability sees it as
x

cultural artifact, something that is created by and creates culture, including

musical culture. Disability is simultaneously a material reality and a cul-
tural manifestation. Its impact on modernist music and the ways that mod-
ernist music in turns shapes disability are the subjects of this book.
Along the way, I will try to reclaim a number of formerly stigmatized
terms. The first of these is disability itself. In the disability/​ability system,
there is no overarching term, like gender (for male and female) or sexuality
(for straight and LGBTQ). Instead, disability itself acts as both the over-
arching category and one of its terms. And the stigma is built right into
the term: its dis. A central premise of this book, as of disability studies in
general, is that disability marks a difference, not a deficit. I will thus use the
term in the spirit of biodiversity and neurodiversity, as entailing a welcome
and enriching variation in human embodiment. This book claims disability.
For the disability conditions I will be exploring, I prefer traditional,
common-​language terms to their medicalized counterparts. Thus, I will
speak of madness (not mental illness) and idiocy (not mental retardation).
And I will speak directly of deformity and disfigurement, without euphe-
mism. In the case of autism, there is no common-​language equivalent—​
this was a medicalized category from the outset, split off from earlier
classifications of madness and idiocy. In every case, my goal will be to strip
the term of stigma and to claim it as a positive and enriching human iden-
tity, as well as a resource for artistic and musical creativity.
At the same time, I will fully acknowledge and explore the contradictions,
conflicts, and paradoxes at the core of musical modernism’s representations
of disability. Musical modernism draws on traditional tropes of disability
representation, sorting disabled bodies into a small number of stereotyp-
ical categories. Some of these tropes are explicitly stigmatizing, like the
Obsessive Avenger or Demonic Cripple. Others seem laudatory (the Sweet
Innocent, the Saintly Sage, the Mad Genius), but are no less dehumanizing.
These tropes have arisen from and encouraged critical responses that
marginalize and enfreak disabled bodies. Within modernist music, the
disability representations we will explore very often embody pernicious
stereotypes and encourage sentimentalizing, exoticizing, or more directly
negative responses. Modernist music claims disability as a valuable re-
source, but does so in a tense, dialectical relationship with medicalized,
eugenic-​era attitudes toward disability.
Music is both blessed and cursed with a technical language that permits
us to describe musical objects and relationships with wonderful precision
but that can be an impermeable barrier to comprehension for the un-
initiated. In the text for this book, and in the brief descriptions of spe-
cific musical passages it includes, technical terms are generally kept to a

[x] Preface
minimum, and used more for their suggestive metaphorical and figurative
implications than their precise definition (consonance and dissonance,
harmony and counterpoint, sentence, phrase, inversion, symmetry, devel-
opment, cadence).
Instead of the traditional musical examples in staff notation, this book
incorporates more than one hundred short analytical videos. These videos
are designed to guide readers into the musical representation and narration
of disability.
The analytical videos were directed and engineered by Tim Mastic, a
brilliant graduate student at the City University of New York. Other won-
derful graduate students—​Megan Lavengood, Simon Prosser, and Kristi
Hardman—​assisted in the preparation of examples in music notation and
with proofreading. Also at CUNY, I am grateful to my colleague, William
Rothstein, for guidance in Schenkerian matters.
In writing this book, I benefited enormously from the incisive critique
offered by two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press, as well as
from conversations over many years with Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson,
Blake Howe, Stephanie Jensen-​Moulton, Jennifer Iverson, William Cheng,
Bruce Quaglia, and many other scholars in the emerging field of music and
disability.
An earlier, highly condensed version of c­ hapter 1 appeared as “Modernist
Music and the Representation of Disability” in the colloquy “On the
Disability Aesthetics of Music,” in the Journal of the American Musicological
Society 69/​2 (2016): 530–​36. Earlier versions of ­chapters 3 and 6 appeared
in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies as “Representing
the Extraordinary Body: Musical Modernism’s Aesthetics of Disability”
and “Autism and Postwar Serialism as Neurodiverse Forms of Cultural
Modernism.”
The Oxford Handbook was the brainchild of Suzanne Ryan, whose advo-
cacy for scholarship on music and disability has been crucial for the devel-
opment of the field and for the writing of the present book. I am deeply
grateful to Suzanne, and to the entire editorial team at Oxford University
Press. As with my previous books, my deepest debt of gratitude is owed to
my beloved life partner, Sally Goldfarb. This book is gratefully dedicated
to her.

Preface [ xi ]
xi
ABOUT THE COMPANION WEBSITE

Instead of traditional musical examples in staff notation, this book

incorporates more than one hundred short analytical videos. These videos
include musical scores in staff notation, analytical annotations, and audio
recordings, all with the author’s narrative voiceover. Each video is available
in two versions: with captioning and without captioning.
These videos are available on the Companion Website that accompanies
this book. Videos available online are indicated in the text with Oxford’s
symbol .
xvi
Broken Beauty
xvi
CHAPTER 1

Representing Disability

Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation of disabled bodies.

Its most characteristic features—​ fractured forms, immobilized harmonies,
conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and
radical complexity and hermeticism in others—​can be understood as musical
representations of disability conditions, including deformity/​ disfigurement,
mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Although modernist music
embodies negative, eugenic-​era attitudes toward disability, it also affirmatively
claims disability as a resource, thus manifesting its disability aesthetics.

Disability Aesthetics   2
Defining Disability   4
Defining Musical Modernism   6
Locating Cultural Modernism within the History of Disability   7
Literary Representations of Disabled Bodies   10
Typology of Disability Representation   10
Modes of Apprehension   12
Before and After Modernism   13
Modernist Musical Representations of Disability   16
Deformity/​Disfigurement   17
Mobility Impairment   24
Madness  26
Idiocy  31
Autism  33
Claiming Disability   38
2

DISABILITY AESTHETICS

In their search for new kinds of beauty, modernist artists claim disability as a
valuable resource.

Disability scholar Tobin Siebers contends that modern art espouses a dis-
ability aesthetics, finding new sorts of beauty in bodies that are fractured,
disfigured, and otherwise extraordinary in comparison to bodies that are
presumptively normal. According to Siebers (2010, 3), the representation
of disability is one of modernism’s “defining concepts”:

Disability aesthetics refuses to recognize the representation of the healthy body—​

and its definition of harmony, integrity, and beauty—​as the sole determination of
the aesthetic. Rather, disability aesthetics embraces beauty that seems by tradi-
tional standards to be broken, and yet it is not less beautiful but more so, as a result.1

Whether one thinks of the still-​shocking depictions of wounded World

War I veterans by Otto Dix; Picasso’s cubist portraits of fractured bodies;
the asymmetrical, disfigured bodies in the Viennese expressionism of
Schiele and others; or the large number of paintings and sculptures in the
first half of the twentieth century that depict strange or distorted bodies,
it does seem as though Siebers is right to ask, “To what concept, other
than the idea of disability, might be referred modern art’s love affair with
misshapen and twisted bodies, stunning variety of human forms, intense
representation of traumatic injury and psychological alienation, and un-
yielding preoccupation with wounds and tormented flesh?” (2010, 4).
For Siebers and other scholars of modernism in the arts, disability
functions as an artistic resource: a source of images and an impetus for
narrative. Disability is not a deficit to be filled, an obstacle to be over-
come, or a deviation to be avoided; rather, it is a desirable and defining ar-
tistic quality. To put it most simply, disability enables artistic modernism.
Disability scholars and activists speak of claiming disability, that is, of

1. Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (2010), provided the impetus for this book,
and his reference to “beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken” pro-
vided its title. For related studies of the representation of disability in modern art, see
Ann Millett-​Gallant, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art (2010) and Carol Poore,
Disability in Twentieth-​Century German Culture (2007). For a related perspective on
disability and aesthetics, one that takes full account of the modernist dalliance with
eugenic ideas of degeneration, see Michael Davidson, “Aesthetics” (2015a) and “The
Rage of Caliban: Disabling Bodies in Modernist Aesthetics” (2015b). Like Davidson’s
discussion of Zemlinsky’s opera Der Zwerg, this book treats modernist music “as a site
for studying musical representation of bodily difference.”

[2] Broken Beauty

destigmatizing it and choosing it as an affirmative political, social, and cul-
tural identity.2 In that sense, modernist art claims disability.
Modernist art aestheticizes disability into new forms of beauty.
Aestheticizing disability does not mean prettifying it or normalizing it
to conform to traditional standards of beauty, however. Rather, it means
the significant broadening and, in some cases, the radical subversion
and disruption of traditional notions of beauty. Artworks that exemplify
an aesthetics of disability may thus “turn traditional conceptions of aes-
thetic beauty away from ideas of the natural and healthy body” (Siebers
2010, 134) and toward bodies that are deformed, disfigured, fractured,
fragmented, and thus disabled. In short, modernist art bends beauty in the
direction of disability.
Siebers claims bluntly that “the modern in art manifests itself as disa-
bility” (2010, 140). Is it possible to make a similar claim about modernist
music? Can we say that the modern in music manifests itself as disability?
Can we say that modernist music has a fundamental interest in representing
the disabled human body? Can we say that modernist music claims disability?
This book will argue the affirmative for each of these questions. The
sorts of qualities that make music distinctively modern—​forms made of
discrete blocks, stratified textures, immobile harmonies, radical simplifica-
tion of materials, juxtaposition of seemingly incommensurable elements,
extremes of internal complexity and self-​reference—​can be understood as
representations of disabled bodies. Modernist music does many things, of
course, and for many different reasons, but it maintains a fundamental in-
terest in disability. In moving disability representation from a stigmatized
periphery to a valorized center of artistic expression, modernist music
claims disability.
Modernist music claims disability by making it a central concern and
drawing on it as a valuable source of new kinds of musical combinations
and musical effects. But the specific manner in which it stakes that claim
varies quite a lot. The claim of disability is made amid—​sometimes in de-
fiance of and sometimes in compliance with—​traditional stigmatizing
attitudes toward disability, given added weight during a eugenic era. As
a result, modernist representations of disability are often complex, riven
with conflicts and internal contradictions. Amid these cross-​currents, how-
ever, we often find in modernist music some sense of pleasure in and cele-
bration of the disabled body.

2. On the idea of affirmatively “claiming disability” as a personal and political iden-

tity, see Simi Linton, Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (1998).

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [3]
4

DEFINING DISABILITY

Disabled bodies (and minds) make up a heterogeneous category whose members

are marked as abnormal with respect to local norms of appearance and function,
provoking the questions: What happened to you? What’s wrong with you? How
did you get this way?

Disability is a broad category with poorly marked and permeable

boundaries. Even in comparison with other expansive “minority”
identities (like woman or Latinx or queer), disability is notably hetero-
geneous, embracing a wide range of differences in bodily functioning and
appearance, including (but not limited to) facial deformities, unusual
bodily proportions, missing limbs, chronic diseases, sensory impairments
(like deafness and blindness), mobility impairments, psychiatric and devel-
opmental disorders, and cognitive or intellectual impairments. We might
imagine disability as a category with central, prototypical members: more
peripheral members enter the category based on their degree of resem-
blance to the prototypes. Just as the category of “bird” is populated by pro-
totypical members (sparrow and robin) and less typical members (penguin
and ostrich), we might think of disability as having prototypical members
like blindness, deafness, facial or bodily deformity, mobility impairment,
madness, and intellectual or developmental disabilities. For the most part,
this book will be concerned with the relatively central and uncontroversial
members of this category.3
Rather than attempt to impose and enforce a clear boundary on this
category based on the bodily (dis)qualifications of its members, this book
shifts attention away from the inherent qualities of bodies and toward
the social and cultural contexts in which some bodies are understood as
disabled. In thinking of disability this way, I follow a broad consensus
within the field of disability studies. For Mitchell and Snyder, disabilities
are “cognitive and physical conditions that deviate from normative ideas
of mental ability and physiological function.”4 For Garland-​Thomson, dis-
ability is “a pervasive cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of

3. On general philosophical and cognitive issues associated with categorization,

see George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about
the Mind (1987). For exploration of specifically musical categories, see Ian Quinn,
“General Equal-​Tempered Harmony” (2006) and Lawrence Zbikowski, Conceptualizing
Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (2002).
4. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, “Disability Studies and the Double Bind of
Representation” (1997), 1.

[4] Broken Beauty

bodily variations.”5 In similar terms, this book will understand disability
as any culturally stigmatized bodily difference.6 By “difference,” I refer to
deviation from whatever is understood as normal in a particular time and
place. By “bodily,” I refer to the full range of physical and mental differences
to which the human body is subject, whether congenital or acquired, in-
cluding physical and mental illnesses or diseases, temporary or permanent
injuries, and a variety of nonnormative bodily characteristics understood
as disfiguring. By “stigmatized,” I refer to any negative social valuation
(Goffman 1963). By “culturally,” I embrace a conception of disability as
socially and culturally constructed, a historically contingent term whose
meaning varies with time, place, and context. Disabled bodies are marked
as abnormal with respect to some prevailing normative standard for bodily
functioning or appearance.
The concept of the normal (including related terms like abnormality,
norms, normative, and normalization) is central to this broad concep-
tion of disability. Disabled bodies are perceived as abnormal, as violating
norms of appearance and functioning, and as therefore in need of nor-
malization. In the real world, such bodies typically provoke a series
of familiar questions: How did you get that way? What happened to
you? What’s the matter? What is wrong with you? Disability creates a
commotion, a disturbance in the norms that regulate bodily appearance
and function, and these sorts of questions are a common response.
Indeed, we might define a disability as any bodily condition (including
appearance and/​or behavior) that leads people to ask such questions.
Disability seems to require an explanatory story, and it is the telling of
the story, rather than any inherent quality of a mind or body, that sig-
nals the presence of disability.7

5. Rosemarie Garland-​ Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist

Theory” (2004a), 76.
6. This broad definition of disability underpins my previous study of disability in
music: Extraordinary Measures: Disability in Music (2011), 9–​11.
7. The role of the concept of “normal” in constructing disability is the central theme of
Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (1995). For Davis’s
more recent reconsideration of normality and disability, see The End of Normal: Identity
in a Biocultural Era (2013). The sorts of questions evoked by nonnormative bodies,
and the range of possible responses to these questions, are explored in three im-
portant publications by Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson: “The Story of My Work: How
I Became Disabled” (2014); “The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in
Popular Photography” (2002); and Staring: How We Look (2009). The idea that disa-
bility creates a commotion comes from Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander, Bodies in
Commotion: Disability and Performance (2005).

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [5]
6

DEFINING MUSICAL MODERNISM

Modernist musical works make up a heterogeneous category whose members are

marked as abnormal with respect to the normatively sounding and functioning
music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, provoking the questions: What
happened to you? What’s wrong with you? How did you get this way?

Like disability, musical modernism is a broad category with poorly marked

and permeable boundaries. Rather than seek firm starting and ending dates,
or a definitive list of shared style characteristics, we might take the same
route as with disability, imagining it as a category with central, prototypical
members; more peripheral members enter the category based on their degree
of resemblance to the prototypes. The category of musical modernism might
be conceived with reference to prototypical composers and works, including
Schoenberg (Pierrot Lunaire, String Quartet No. 2, String Trio); Stravinsky
(Petrushka, Three Pieces for String Quartet, Rite of Spring, Piano Concerto,
The Rake’s Progress, Requiem Canticles); Ives (String Quartet No. 2); Bartók
(String Quartets No. 3 and No. 4, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta);
Webern (Bagatelles, Op. 9, Piano Variations, Op. 27); Berg (Wozzeck, Lyric
Suite); Ruth Crawford Seeger (String Quartet); and Babbitt (Composition for
Four Instruments). These prototypically modernist works will be the focus of
the disability-​oriented interpretations in this book.
In addition to whatever musical qualities these works may share, they
are united in their agonistic relationship to the conventionally tonal,
classic-​romantic music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With
that in mind, we can define modernism in music as we defined disability
a moment ago, not as a quality that inheres in a body or work, but rather
in its relationship to a regulating, normative standard. Modernist music
is marked as abnormal with respect to the normatively sounding and
functioning music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Like disabled bodies, modernist music causes a commotion and seems
to require an explanatory story. Its deviations from musical convention
are shocking and profound and have provoked endless critical response to
the implicit questions, How did you get that way? What happened to you?
What’s the matter? What is wrong with you? Modernist music in general
seems to provoke those questions, as (synecdochically) do lots of specific
features of modernist music.8 As Maus (2004, 156) observes with respect
to atonality, “Non tonal music seems almost to require a story about how it

8. Standard accounts of modernist music that implicitly seek to answer these

questions include Robert Morgan, Twentieth-​Century Music (1991); Brian Simms, Music
of the Twentieth Century: Style and Structure (1996); Richard Taruskin, Music in the Early

[6] Broken Beauty

got that way. . . . The dependence of non-​tonal music on a special narrative
of origins marks it as different from the self-​sufficient, individualized
works of tonal music at the center of the repertoire.”9
This sense of modernist music as a deviant Other with respect to a
self-​evidently normal musical tradition has been remarkably persistent,
coloring critical reception up to the present day. Traditional tonal music
is understood as normal in appearance and function; atonal music is un-
derstood as disabled, in the specific ways I will discuss. From that point
of view, we might define modernist music not in terms of any inherent
features, but rather as music that leads people to ask for justification and
explanation.

DEFINING DISABILITY AND MUSICAL MODERNISM

Disability Musical Modernism

As a heterogeneous Blindness, deafness, mobility Stravinsky, Bartòk,

category with impairment, facial or bodily Schoenberg, Webern, Berg,
prototypical deformity, madness, idiocy Crawford Seeger, Varèse,
members (intellectual and developmental Ives, Babbitt.
disability), autism.
In relation to Understood as deviant or abnormal Understood as deviant or
normative standards with respect to traditional and abnormal with respect to
prevailing standards for bodily traditional and prevailing
appearance and function. standards for musical form
and construction.
As provoking and How did you get this way? What’s How did you get this way?
seeming to require wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?
an explanation

LOCATING CULTURAL MODERNISM WITHIN THE HISTORY

OF DISABILITY

The period of cultural modernism coincides with the consolidation of the medical
model of disability during a eugenic age.

Twentieth Century (2010); Glenn Watkins, Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century
(1988); and Arnold Whittall, Musical Composition in the Twentieth Century (1999).
9. Fred Maus situates musical modernism in relation to regulating norms of gender
and sexuality in “Sexual and Musical Categories” (2004).

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [7]
8

In the very broadest historical terms, there are three ways of conceptualizing
disability, each of which is deeply intertwined with representational
regimes in literature and the arts, including music. First, in the religious
model, which begins with the first recorded discussions of disability and
persists to some extent to the present day, disability is understood as an
outward mark of divine disfavor or sinfulness or, in some cases, of tran-
scendent spirituality.
Second, in a medical model gathering force through the nineteenth cen-
tury and achieving epistemological hegemony in the early twentieth cen-
tury, disability is understood as a pathological condition that inheres in a
body or mind, and which it is the task of medical professionals (physicians
or psychiatrists) to diagnose and, if possible, to normalize or cure. Within
the medical model, two apparently contradictory, but actually complemen-
tary approaches came to dominate thinking about disability in the first half
of the twentieth century. On one hand, this period coincides with what
Stiker (2000) calls “the birth of rehabilitation.” In response especially to
the carnage of the Great War, medical science and medical institutions
turned their attention increasingly toward the normalization and pos-
sible cure of physical and psychic wounds. On the other hand, a eugenic
approach achieved unprecedented heights of influence. As a result, people
with disabilities, especially cognitive and emotional disabilities, were
widely understood as a menace to the health of the community and nation,
and were incarcerated in institutions, sometimes sterilized, and often left
to die of neglect in appalling conditions.10
Cultural modernism emerges in an eliminationist, eugenic age, and its
disability representations often bespeak a corresponding horror and fear
of the nonnormative body or mind. As Siebers observes, “eugenics weds
medical science to a disgust with mental and physical variation” (2010,
27). These apparently contradictory responses, both aspects of the med-
ical model of disability, are two complementary features of what Garland-​
Thomson (2004b) calls the “cultural logic of euthanasia”: the imperative
either to normalize disabled bodies (through medical intervention) or to
eliminate them (either by sequestration in institutions or in more direct

10. On the coincidence of cultural modernism with the “birth of rehabilitation,” see
Henri-​Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability (2000). On eugenics and euthanasia as
central features of disability history and culture, see Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson,
“The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia: ‘Sad Fancyings’ in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartelby’ ”
(2004). For more general historical accounts of eugenics, see Thomas Leonard, Illiberal
Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (2016) and Paul
Lombardo, ed., A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the
Human Genome Project (2011).

[8] Broken Beauty

ways)—​“cure or kill,” in a widely used phrase. Rehabilitation points toward
normalization or cure, eugenics points toward elimination, and both in-
volve a desire to see disability and disabled bodies disappear.
A third model, with roots in the earlier twentieth century and a dra-
matic flowering beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, sees disability as a so-
cial and cultural formation. In this model, disability is valorized rather than
stigmatized, and may be affirmatively claimed as a personal and political
identity. The decline of cultural modernism coincides with the end of the eu-
genic age, symbolized by the late twentieth-​century deinstitutionalization
of people classified as mad or feebleminded. The sociocultural model of dis-
ability has flourished in a postmodern cultural world, after the passing of
high cultural modernism. Nonetheless, in its incipient embrace of disability
aesthetics, the origins of a valorizing attitude toward disability may be traced
right into the heart of cultural modernism in all of the arts, including music.
Cultural modernism expresses a deeply ambivalent attitude toward dis-
ability.11 On one side, we find the medical model of disability and the cul-
tural logic of euthanasia. At the same time, modernist artists, writers, and
composers are aware of disability as a resource for artistic creativity, simul-
taneously a liberating way of shattering conventions and of establishing
radically new canons of beauty. In modernist art as in the societies from
which it arose, disability is thus simultaneously a focus of pity (leading to
normalization or cure), horror (leading to segregation and institutional-
ization), and fascination (leading to valorization and celebration). These
contending impulses are apparent in all forms of cultural modernism. The
affirmative claim of disability always contends with the cultural logic of
euthanasia.

11. Standard accounts of cultural modernism (mostly literary, rarely musical) include
Tim Armstrong, Modernism (2005); Malcom Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds.,
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–​1930 (1976); Christopher Butler, Early
Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe 1900–​1916 (1994) and Modernism: A
Very Short Introduction (2010); William Everdell, The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins
of Twentieth-​Century Thought (1997); Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy (2010);
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–​1918 (2003); Michael Levenson,
Modernism (2011); Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (2007); and
Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2009). None of these sources considers
disability as a significant feature of cultural modernism. Music (but not disability)
plays a more central role in Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music,
Literature, and Other Arts (2000) and Putting Modernism Together: Literature, Music, and
Painting, 1872–​1927 (2015). In just the past few years, we have seen disability scholars
begin to rethink literary and artistic (but not musical) modernism in relation to disa-
bility. In addition to Siebers 2010, see Maren Tova Linett, Bodies of Modernism: Physical
Disability in Transatlantic Modernist Literature (2017) and Rebecca Sanchez, Deafening
Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American Literature (2015).

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [9]
01

THREE WAYS OF CONCEPTUALIZING DISABILITY

Religious Model Divine affliction. Punishment for From earliest written

Disability as a punishment,
or a compensating gift,
from the gods.
Medical Model
Disability as a pathology or
abnormality that inheres
in a defective body. The
cultural logic of euthanasia
(“cure or kill”).
Sociocultural Model
Disability as a social or
cultural construction, a
historically contingent way
of sorting and classifying
the naturally occurring
diversity of human
embodiment.
sin. Outward mark of inner evil. accounts to the
Divine inspiration. Compensation present. A premodern
for bodily deficiency. Outward conception with
mark of transcendent remarkable
spirituality and wisdom. endurance.
Cure. Rehabilitation. From roughly 1800 to
Normalization. Pity and an the present, with
impulse toward care. hegemony in the first
Kill. Segregate, incarcerate, half of the twentieth
sterilize (eugenics). Horror and century. Coincident
an impulse toward elimination. with cultural
modernism.
Difference, not deficit. A political From roughly 1970
and cultural identity to be to the present,
claimed. Fascination and an with roots in the
impulse toward celebration. earlier twentieth
century. Coincident
with cultural
postmodernism.

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABLED BODIES

Modernist literary representations of disability place traditional disability types

(Obsessive Avengers, Charity Cripples, Holy Fools) and modes of response to
disabled bodies (wondrous, sentimental, eugenic, exotic) in conflict with a new
disability aesthetics, and are thus more likely to be created and received in a
realistic mode that moves disabled bodies from the stigmatized periphery to the
valorized center of the artwork.

Typology of Disability Representation

These three models of disability (religious, medical, and sociocultural) give

rise to and in turn are shaped by the representation of disabled bodies in
literature (including opera libretti), which contains such representations
in profusion. As Michael Bérubé observes, “disability is almost always
taken as a sign of something else” and is therefore “necessarily representa-
tional”—​as a sign of divine favor or disfavor, a mark of moral health or
sinfulness, an indicator of character (Bérubé 2015, 154; italics in original).

[ 10 ] Broken Beauty
Throughout Western literature, disability representations have tended to
accrete into three broad types. The first involves a demonic figure whose
disability is a mark of evil. Shakespeare’s Richard III would be a prototype
of this category. The second is a presexual or asexual innocent whose dis-
ability, often blindness or intellectual impairment, is a mark of spiritual
purity. Dickens’s Tiny Tim would be a prototype of this category. The third
is a saintly visionary whose disability is a mark of transcendent wisdom.
Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin would be a prototype of this category. The list
is far from exhaustive, and a disabled character might well have aspects of
more than one, but it provides a starting point for an evaluation of literary
representations of disability.12
Disability conditions may vary among these different types. Blindness,
for example, may be an attribute of any of the three categories: it might
signify moral blindness, or sexual innocence, or a profound inner vision.
Similarly, madness might take the form of megalomania, paranoia, or sa-
distic cruelty, or it might have a visionary, inspired quality. Intellectual
or developmental disability might connote childlike innocence or a spir-
itual awareness uncorrupted by sophisticated civilization. Physical de-
formity might be understood as a mark of sinfulness and a provocation to
violence (hunchbacks and missing limbs are particularly common in this
connection) or an invitation to pity (where mobility impairment is a more
likely disability).

THREE TYPES OF DISABILITY REPRESENTATIONS

Types (Following Holmes 2004, Kriegel

1987, and Norden 1994) Literary Exemplars

The Obsessive Avenger. The Demonic Cripple.
The Begging Imposter. The Degenerate
Criminal.
The Sweet Innocent. The Charity Cripple. The
Afflicted Child.
The Saintly Sage. The Holy Fool. The “Idiot
Savant.” The Inspirational Super-​Crip. The
Mad Genius. The Hyperrational Calculator.
Richard III, Ahab, Long John Silver,
Quasimodo, Rigoletto, Wozzeck, Darth
Vader
Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy, Dickens’s Smike,
Mr. Dick, Tiny Tim, Barnaby Rudge.
Tiresias, Moses, Parsifal, Prince Myshkin,
Sherlock Holmes.

12. For typologies of literary and cinematic representation of disability, see Martha
Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (2004);
Leonard Kriegel, “The Cripple in Literature” (1987); and Martin Norden, The Cinema of
Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (1994).

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 11 ]
21

Modes of Apprehension

To describe the impact of these disability representations on the reader/​

viewer, Garland-​Thomson has identified four “visual rhetorics of disa-
bility,” that is, modes of responding to disabled bodies.13 To her original
four, I have taken the liberty of adding a fifth.
The wondrous mode directs the viewer to look up in awe of difference.
This mode is often evoked by representations of disabled bodies as Saintly
Sages, Mad Geniuses, Idiots Savants, or Hyperrational Calculators. It is as-
sociated with the religious model of disability, where disability may be seen
as a mark of divine inspiration.
The sentimental mode instructs the spectator to look down with benevo-
lence. This mode suggests pity and evokes an impulse toward care and cure.
It is particularly associated with Sweet Innocents and Charity Cripples.
Although it has a strongly moralizing aspect, and is thus allied with the re-
ligious model of disability, it is perhaps even more deeply implicated in the
medical model of disability and the associated cultural logic of euthanasia,
with its impulse toward normalization, rehabilitation, and cure.
The eugenic mode, my own contribution to Garland-​ Thomson’s list,
encourages the viewer to respond with fear, horror, revulsion, and disgust
to an object that seems bestial and thus subhuman. This mode suggests
loathing and an impulse toward elimination. It is evoked most often in re-
lation to Demonic Cripples, especially during the eugenic age, when disa-
bled bodies are seen as a threat to the health and safety of the community.
Like the sentimental mode, it has a moralizing quality in its concern with
sin and evil, but it is linked even more closely to the medical model of disa-
bility and the cultural logic of euthanasia with its impulse toward segrega-
tion, institutionalization, and elimination.
The exotic mode coaches the observer to look across a wide expanse to-
ward an alien object. This mode is associated with what disability scholars
call “enfreakment,” that is, the treatment of an unusual body as a monstrous
spectacle. Any disability may be exoticized or enfreaked in this way, and all
three basic kinds of disability representations may entail exoticization or
enfreakment.14 Like the sentimental and eugenic modes, the exotic mode

13. Garland-​Thomson describes her modes of response to disabled bodies in “The

Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography” (2002) and
Staring: How We Look (2009).
14. The freak show is a common point of reference for cultural disability studies. See
Rachel Adams, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (2001)
and Rosemarie Garland-​Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary
Body (1996).

[ 12 ] Broken Beauty
is associated with the medical model of disability, with its fundamental in-
terest in sorting bodies as normal (us) and abnormal (others).
The realistic mode suggests that the onlooker align with the object of
scrutiny. This mode is extremely rare in disability representations prior
to modernist art and literature. None of the three disability stereotypes
would come into play because within the realistic mode, representations
are relatively neutral: the disability is only one (possibly minor) attribute
of a character and is designed not to signify. It suggests a move beyond
the medical model of disability, beyond a pathologization of difference,
substituting empathy for pity and horror. It is thus aligned with the socio-
cultural model of disability.

FIVE MODES OF RESPONSE TO DISABLED BODIES

(MOSTLY FOLLOWING GARL AND-​T HOMSON)

Wondrous mode Saintly Sages, Mad Geniuses, Idiots Religious model

Savants, Hyperrational Calculators
Sentimental mode Sweet Innocents, Charity Cripples Religious or medical model
Eugenic mode Demonic Cripple Medical model
Exotic mode Any representation Medical model
Realistic mode None of these—​disability does not Sociocultural model
“signify”

Before and After Modernism

All three of these disability types and the first four of these modes of
apprehension stigmatize disability, marking it as something bizarre,
freakish, grotesque, and abnormal. When represented and apprehended
in these ways, disability is constituted as an undesirable Other. Disabled
characters in literary fiction before the modernist period are almost invar-
iably stigmatized Others in this sense. They are almost always secondary
characters rather than protagonists. They tend to be fully engulfed by their
stigmatic traits: the character and the disability are mutually constituting
and coextensive.15 Such stigmatized, secondary characters rarely change,
grow, or develop over the course of the story. Rather, they remain static and
invariant throughout, functioning as a catalyst and touchstone for moral

15. Garland-​ Thomson introduces the concept of “engulfment” in Extraordinary

Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (1997).

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 13 ]
41

and personal growth in the more normative protagonist. I will have much
more to say in ­chapter 2 about narratives of disability, but I will observe
here that the standard literary narrative of disability prior to modernism
is one of overcoming. Narrative closure, in conjunction with the cultural
logic of euthanasia, requires the cure of Charity Cripples and the elimina-
tion of Obsessive Avengers. Both types, and Holy Fools as well, function
to reaffirm the normativity of other, more central characters. And, within
narratives involving any of these disability types, the disability is overcome
and normality is restored.
Modernist literature (including opera libretti) often treats disability
differently. First, it moves disability from the periphery to the center.
While disabled bodies are a common feature of literary and artistic rep-
resentation throughout the ages, with the rise of cultural modernism we
find a sudden profusion of disabled bodies dominating the story and fill­
ing the narrative frame. There is a paradoxical quality to this increase in
fictional representations, coming as they do during a eugenic era in which
people with disabilities are increasingly absent from public spaces. As Alice
Hall notes:

This public and legal refusal to see the disabled was accompanied by the
gradual decline in public displays of “freaks”; it formed part of a wider shift to-
wards institutionalization, medicalization and the segregation of people with
disabilities. In the same period, when disability was becoming less visible in
public places and in spectacles, representations of impairment became hyper-​
visible in novels. (2016, 63)

Second, disabled bodies are more likely to be treated sympathetically,

with disability understood as affirming rather than negating a deeper,
shared humanity. In that way, modernist representations of disability may
encourage a realistic mode of apprehension, in which “the onlooker aligns
with the object of scrutiny.” In the process, disability may be valorized
rather than stigmatized.
Third, the disabled character is less likely to have his or her identity fully
engulfed by the stigmatic trait. In other words, characters may have more
going on in their lives than their disability, which may be incidental rather
than character-​defining.
But I don’t wish to give the impression that all is sweetness and light in
modernist responses to disability. To a significant degree, modernist art
navigates between the twin poles of the “cultural logic of euthanasia.” On
the one hand, disability inspires pity—​that power-​imbalanced dark twin

[ 14 ] Broken Beauty
of human empathy—​and a concomitant desire to help, to care, to cure. On
the other hand, disability inspires horror and loathing—​a disgust with de-
viant, deformed flesh—​and a concomitant desire to avert the gaze and to
hide these loathsome bodies from sight, to segregate them from the human
community.
Modernist representations frequently enfreak disabled bodies, making
a spectacle of bodily difference. In some respects, this is an aspect of the
modernist imperative to “make it new” (in Ezra Pound’s familiar formu-
lation). Modern artists sought to shock a bourgeois audience out of its
complacency by subverting and attacking conventions of all kinds. In the
language of disability, which has so often been turned against modern art
(as sick, diseased, crazy, degenerate), modern artists sought to apply a form
of shock therapy to cure society of its somnolence, its convention-​induced
coma, by positing innovation as a mark of health and vitality. In short,
modernism values transgression, and nothing can be more shockingly
transgressive than a nonnormative body. The profusion of disabled bodies
in modern art, and the central position they come to occupy there, are vivid
signs of the modernist commitment to shatter artistic conventions and
canons of beauty.
But even as it operates within a eugenic frame as an object of either pity
or horror, disability fascinates modern artists for its liberatory potential.
Like racial Others, disabled bodies may be simultaneously frightening and
fascinating. Not only do they help to shatter ossified artistic conventions,
but also they may enable a broader view of what it means to be human.

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY

Model Type Mode of Apprehension

Religious Holy Fool. Saintly Sage. Mad Wondrous mode.

Genius. Idiot Savant. Inspirational.
Religious and medical Obsessive Avenger. Demonic Eugenic mode.
Cripple. Degenerate Horror leads to segregation/​
Criminal. elimination.
Religious and medical Charity Cripple. Sweet Sentimental mode.
Innocent. Pity leads to care/​cure.
All of these. Exotic mode.
Enfreakment.
Sociocultural None of these. Realistic mode.
Empathy.

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 15 ]
61

MODERNIST MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS OF DISABILITY

Modernist music is centrally concerned with representing the disabled body,

either as an object of horror or pity or as a valued resource. Modernist music is
itself a disabled body.

Music consists of nothing but tones and is thus self-​evidently nonreprese­

ntational. And yet music has been widely understood as involving actors,
agents, and characters in an unfolding story or drama. In c­ hapter 2 I will
talk about musical narratives that involve disability. Here, I focus on the
representation of disability in music.
I begin by invoking the familiar metaphorical conflation of a work of
music with a human body, both its morphology and its behavior. Musical
works are often understood as bodies, as living, sentient beings with form
and motion, and often with blood, organs, limbs, and skin as well. In some
cases, the bodies at issue may seem to incorporate disabilities.
Recall my general definitions of disability: Disabled bodies are marked
as abnormal with respect to some prevailing normative standard for
bodily functioning or appearance. Disability is any bodily condition (in-
cluding appearance and behavior) that leads people to ask: How did you
get that way? What’s wrong with you? In the traditional tonal music of the
classic-​romantic period, there are many sorts of musical phenomena that
are marked as abnormal in some way and that seem to require rationali-
zation with respect to the normative frame. Such marked events include
dissonant tones (which deviate from the prevailing consonant framework),
chromatic tones (which deviate from the prevailing diatonic framework),
and formal “deformations” (which deviate from formal norms).
In some cases, the rationalization of these nonnormative phenomena
takes place within the work itself: dissonances resolve; chromatic notes give
way to their diatonic progenitors. Indeed, many works from the late eight-
eenth and nineteenth centuries traverse a narrative in which a normative
opening condition is challenged by an anomalous event (Schoenberg terms
such things “tonal problems”) that the piece must ultimately subsume in
some way. As we will see in c­ hapter 2, the narrative of disability overcome
is the standard trope of classic-​romantic music, and it unfolds over both
short and long temporal spans.
In other cases, the rationalization of the nonnormative elements is not
so much the business of the piece itself as of subsequent critical commen-
tary. This is particularly true in the area of musical form, where musical
configurations are sorted into norms and deformations, with the latter al-
ways understood in relation to the former. (Critical commentary with a

[ 16 ] Broken Beauty
therapeutic, rehabilitative thrust is the subject of ­chapter 7.) As with lit-
erary representations of disability in this period, anomalous events like
dissonances, chromaticism, and formal deformation are peripheral to the
musical mainstream. They are marginalized, secondary events whose role
is ultimately to affirm the solidity and centrality of the norms they appear
to challenge.
In modernist music, however, as in modernist literature and art, disa-
bility moves from a stigmatized, marginalized periphery to an increasingly
valorized and aestheticized center of artistic representation. And, despite
the fear and horror inherent in eugenic attitudes toward disability, it none-
theless becomes an object of fascination and a valuable artistic resource for
modernist composers.
Within modernist music generally, very much including nontexted in-
strumental music, the musical body is frequently disabled by, or under-
stood to represent, five disability conditions: deformation/​disfigurement,
paralysis/​mobility impairment, madness, idiocy (“feeblemindedness”), and
autism. Needless to say, this list is not exhaustive or definitive, and many of
the musical phenomena I discuss might well be described under more than
one of these rubrics. Two of these disabilities are primarily of the physical
body (deformity/​disfigurement and mobility impairment), and three are
primarily of the mind (madness, idiocy, and autism), but all are disabilities
as defined previously: culturally stigmatized differences from established
norms in appearance and/​or functioning. Modernist music is replete with
and distinguished by its representation of these five disability conditions.

Deformity/​D isf igurement

For most of recorded human history, deformity and disfigurement have been
understood in religious or spiritual terms, as a punishment for sin and an
outward mark of an inner evil. Beginning in the early nineteenth century,
and greatly accelerated by the appearance in the public space of wounded vet-
erans of increasingly devastating wars, bodily deformities were increasingly
medicalized, to be remediated through surgical or other medical interventions
or normalized with prostheses.
At the turn of the twentieth century, coincident with the rise of cultural
modernism, the history of deformity/​disfigurement observed both impulses
within the cultural logic of euthanasia: toward normalization (cure) or elim-
ination (kill). First, in response to the shocking severity and pervasiveness
of combat-​related wounds inflicted during World War I, society proposed a
regime of rehabilitation, of medicalized eradication of deficiency. As noted

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 17 ]
81

earlier, this is what Stiker (2000) refers to as “the birth of rehabilitation.” He

observes, “The war-​injured will take the place of the disabled; the image of
disability will become one of an insufficiency to be made good, a deficiency
to eradicate” (124). The second decade of the twentieth century thus marks a
culmination of the medicalization of deformity/​disfigurement, with a broad
societal commitment to normalization via rehabilitation, understood as a
medicalized regime to eradicate bodily deficiency.
At the same time, the early decades of the twentieth century witnessed
a sharply negative, stigmatizing response to visible bodily anomalies.
Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, various cities in the
United States enacted what were known as “ugly laws.” Partly in response
to wounded veterans from a previous, devastating war, the American Civil
War, San Francisco in 1867 banned from its public spaces “any person who
is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an un-
sightly or disgusting object.” Similarly, in 1911, Chicago prohibited “expo-
sure of diseased, mutilated, or deformed portions of the body.”16 Cultural
modernism thus arises at a time of deep societal antipathy toward de-
formed bodies.
Deformity and disfigurement enter modernist music as the shattering
of traditional norms of formal continuity: the modernist musical body is
fractured, deformed, and grotesque.17 The extensive literature on mod-
ernism in the arts identifies “fragmentation” as a central, defining feature.
Many modernist works prefer a collagelike juxtaposition of discrete parts
to the more continuous forms of the classic-​romantic tradition. Works
like that have a feeling of being shattered, fractured, or dismembered. In
Stravinsky’s music, for example, this phenomenon is called “block juxta-
position” or “splinteredness,” and this fracturing of musical form is wide-
spread in modernist music, with its apogee in the music of Ives and Varèse.18
Musical works that approach form in this way may give the impression
of Demonic Cripples or Obsessive Avengers, evoking a response in eugenic

16. On “ugly laws,” see Kim Nielson, A Disability History of the United States (2012)
and Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009).
17. On a related attempt among modernist authors to “de-​form” the novel, see
Linett 2017.
18. On the “splinteredness” of form in Stravinsky’s music, see Richard Taruskin,
Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works through “Mavra” (1996b).
On its “block juxtaposition,” see Pieter van den Toorn, The Music of Stravinsky (1983).
Jonathan Kramer adduces Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and several
works by Ives as early examples of “moment form” in “Moment Form in Twentieth-​
Century Music” (1978). Matthew McDonald, “Ives and the Now” (2013), offers an
interpretation of “The Things Our Fathers Loved” that emphasizes its fragmentary
qualities.

[ 18 ] Broken Beauty
mode, in fear and horror of difference. In other cases, the musical frag-
mentation may have a milder quality (a Sweet Innocent calling for a sen-
timental response) or even a religious quality (a Saintly Sage calling for a
response in wondrous mode). At the same time, in many of these musical
representations, there is more than a hint of unrestrained delight in new
formal combinations, however abrupt, and a good-​humored pleasure in in-
congruity. These disabled musical bodies are represented to be appreciated
on their own terms, in celebration of difference. In such cases, we find an
approach to a realistic mode of apprehending and representing disabled
bodies.

Stravinsky, Three Pieces for String Quartet, No. 2. Instead of the

sense of directed continuity that characterizes most classic-​romantic
music, this passage conveys jagged abruption, with isolated fragments
juxtaposed in an apparently haphazard way. Things begin and end un-
predictably, with maximum contrast, and little sense of connection to
what comes before and after. If this music is a body, it is a fractured,
fragmented, Cubist body. There is humor and playfulness in this dis-
ability representation, but also a somewhat darker side: the body in
question is something of a Demonic Cripple and its apparent grotesque-
ness might encourage response in exotic or even eugenic mode.
Stravinsky, Symphonies of Wind Instruments. This work has often
been described as an extreme instance of Stravinsky’s predilection for
formal splinteredness. It states a chunk of musical material, abandons it
for contrasting chunks, and then resumes as if nothing had happened.
A normative continuity and wholeness, dimly glimpsed through the
fragments, has been chopped into bits, dismembered. There is a some-
what solemn, even religious atmosphere in some of these blocks of
musical material, perhaps evoking a Saintly Sage and the concomitant
wondrous mode, in which we look up in awe of difference.
Stravinsky, Serenade in A, first movement. The neoclassical reorien-
tation of Stravinsky’s style brought not only a revival of compositional
interest in consonant triads, diatonic scales, and major or minor keys
but also a greater sense of formal continuity. At the same time, how-
ever, the forms remain splintered, carved into discrete chunks that re-
sist integration into a formal whole. The sense that a more normative
continuity has been sliced into bits is confirmed by Stravinsky’s compo-
sitional sketches, which show him literally slicing things open, creating a
new formal space, and inserting contrasting material into it. And yet the
difference between this and the normative, tonal musical body evokes
little sense of pity or horror; the mode of apprehension approaches a

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 19 ]
02

realistic mode: the form of the piece is what it is, and its disjunctions
seem almost not to signify.
Stravinsky, Requiem Canticles, “Exaudi.” Even as his pitch lan-
guage changed radically in his final compositional period, Stravinsky
maintained his commitment to formal fragmentation. Within his dis-
tinctive twelve-​tone musical language, discrete bits of musical material
contrast with each other not only in every obvious way (instrumenta-
tion, texture, register) but also in their structural underpinnings. The re-
ligious ambience, evident in both the music and the text, suggests that
the formal deformities constitute a disabled body that is something of a
Saintly Sage, evoking a response of wonder, in awe of difference.
Varèse, Octandre, first movement. Varèse’s pitch language is so rad-
ically new and captivating that it tends to obscure the equally shocking
fragmentation of its form, which refuses continuity. The music often
sounds like a series of attempts to move forward, with each attempt
blocked, as the flow coagulates into massive, widely spaced, disso-
nant chords. This musical body is experiencing mobility impairment in
ad­dition to its formal deformation. There is something menacing about
the intense dissonance, a hint that this disabled musical body is some-
thing of an Obsessive Avenger.
Ives, “The Things Our Fathers Loved.” A good deal of Ives’s music
is characterized by rapid changes of scene and mood. Often, each
short scene has not only a distinctive character but also its own de-
fining texture, melody, and harmony. In some of the larger works, the
rapid changes follow a fast-​moving literary program (as in the second
movement of the Fourth Symphony, Putnam’s Camp, and the Fourth of
July), but even in more abstract works (like the Hawthorne movement
of the Concord Sonata), extreme contrasts create a sense of radical dis-
continuity. The same fragmentation of form is apparent in “The Things
Our Fathers Loved,” where rapid changes in the music correspond to
quick shifts in the flow of reminiscence in the song’s text. There is some-
thing of the Sweet Innocent in this disabled musical body, encouraging
a response in a sentimental mode.

Many modernist works fracture and dismember traditional forms,

creating grotesque parodies. The grotesquerie often involves dispropor-
tion and asymmetry, as traditional forms are deformed. In many cases,
the grotesquerie resonates with representations of disabled bodies
as Obsessive Avengers and Demonic Cripples—​ bodies that violently
challenge the normal order, encouraging a response in exotic or eugenic
mode. At the same time, modernist deformations of traditional forms

[ 20 ] Broken Beauty
often have a celebratory air, delighting in a sense of liberation from tradi-
tional constraints.
We will consider modernist musical responses to two sorts of traditional
formal types: the sentence and the waltz. The sentence is a standard, tradi-
tional type of phrase. Normally, it is in two balanced parts: a presentation
(containing two statements of a basic idea) and a continuation (with devel-
opmental intensification to a cadence). In modernist music, many thematic
statements evoke the traditional sentence but undermine, distort, and de-
form it in various ways (see c­ hapter 2 for more on modernist sentences and
other traditional tonal forms).

Bartòk, String Quartet No. 4, first movement. The opening the-

matic statement strongly evokes the traditional sentence. But this is a
grotesquely disproportioned sentence, with a lengthy, intense continu-
ation and cadence. The developmental and cadential tail is wagging the
thematic dog, and a conventionally symmetrical form has been rendered
wildly asymmetrical. This musical body is deformed and disfigured, its
appearance rendered abnormal. Its aggressive tone might suggest a
Demonic Cripple, but in its own context, it creates a challengingly new
sort of beauty.
Varèse, Octandre, first movement. The proportions of this sentence
are quite normal, but its traditional impact is undermined from within,
as an aimless continuation leads to an unexpected cadence (unexpected
in both pitch and location in the phrase). The musical body is disabled
both in appearance and in function. It challenges traditional canons of
beauty in what might seem a violent and menacing way.
Stravinsky, Serenade in A, first movement. The proportions of this
sentence are oddly asymmetrical. The basic idea is followed by a long
silence—​a shocking discontinuity. Then, it is repeated exactly not once
but twice, producing a strangely static and repetitive presentation. The
continuation that follows is only half the length of the presentation.
The silence and the literal repetition create a sense of fragmentation,
undermining the normally continuous, developmental, goal-​oriented
nature of the sentence form. This musical body has a mobility impair-
ment in addition to its abnormalities of appearance: it both looks and
moves in a different way. In its relatively gentle, unthreatening way, the
music seems almost to naturalize its differences and invite an apprecia-
tion in something approaching a realistic mode.

A surprising number of modernist musical works explicitly evoke tradi-

tional dances, like minuets, waltzes, and gavottes. Each of these dances has

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 21 ]
2

an associated formal plan, one typically characterized by formal balance

and symmetry, as well as metrical simplicity and continuity—​sharp breaks,
sudden contrasts, and shocking juxtapositions would contradict their es-
sential dancelike qualities. Modernist renditions of these dances tend to be
grotesque parodies that deliberately deform their formal models, often by
distorting their proportions.
Among traditional dances, the waltz is a particularly common topic
for modernist revision (Frymoyer 2017). Francesca Draughon argues that
modernist waltzes are frequently aligned with the grotesque and the de-
generate (both of which have strong associations with deformed and dis-
abled bodies), and Michael Cherlin contends that Schoenberg’s waltzes
in particular often signify horror.19 Degeneracy and horror are associ-
ated with the eugenic mode of response to a disabled body. The formal
deformations may encourage the listener to experience a sense of fear
or revulsion in the presence of a body that has been stripped of elegance
and refinement, and thus rendered something less than human. At the
same time, modernist waltzes may seem to take a countervailing delight
in tweaking tonal conventions and may do so in a spirit of good (if some-
what black) humor.

Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 3, Waltz (Ballerina and Moor).

Stravinsky’s music incorporates and parodies two popular waltzes by
Joseph Lanner. Lanner’s waltzes are formally simple and symmet-
rically balanced: sixteen-​measure phrases are divided into 8 + 8, the
eights into 4 + 4, and the fours into 2 + 2. The symmetrical form is
articulated by conventional cadences. Stravinsky distorts the form by
adding measures at the beginnings and endings of phrases, and even
more by composing a new countermelody that obscures both Lanner’s
harmonies and his formal boundaries. The form is deformed, distorted,
unbalanced, and rendered asymmetrical. The ballet places us in the in-
herently childlike world of puppets, and the musical texture reflects
a related tendency toward simplification. The deformed musical body
that this music represents is thus a sort of Sweet Innocent perceived in
an exotic mode, due especially to the character of the Moor, an explic-
itly racialized Other.
Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 2, second movement. Schoenberg’s
setting of the blackly humorous waltz “Ach, du lieber Augustin” deforms

19. On modernist waltzes, see Francesca Draughon, “Dance of Decadence: Class,

Gender, and Modernity in the Scherzo of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” (2003) and
Michael Cherlin, “Memory and Rhetorical Trope in Schoenberg’s String Trio” (1998).

[ 22 ] Broken Beauty
 and distorts it in various ways. An added, chromatic counterpoint
undermines the normal, simple harmonies. The oom-​ pah-​
pah bass
is strangely disconnected from the melody, wandering off on its own,
and eventually trailing off. The melody is similarly fragmented and
then liquidated. Formally, the standard 4 + 4 phrasing is distorted by
overlapping—​the phrases intrude on each other instead of following
sequentially in the usual symmetrical layout. The mood is wry and hu-
morous, ironic rather than grotesque, with no sense of menace. This
body is deformed beyond any hope of recuperation (in the words of
the song: “Alles ist hin”), and the work responds with a sense of weary
resignation.
Schoenberg, “Valse de Chopin” from Pierrot Lunaire. This waltz
invokes a sickly, tubercular Chopin. The titular waltz is so fragmented,
so thoroughly ironized, as to be only intermittently audible. The tra-
ditional harmony and melody are disfigured, and the traditional sym-
metrical form is deformed. The waltz is dimly perceived as an exoticized
bodily Other.
Babbitt, Minute Waltz. Babbitt invokes Chopin’s famous waltz in his
title, but his humorous, satirical intent is clear in the time signature: the
measures that are not in the usual 3/​4 meter may be either shrunk or
extended by one eighth-​note. Traditional waltz features include major
and minor triads and frequent oom-​pah-​pah rhythms (although never
extending for a full measure). The waltz is thoroughly disfigured, its
form thoroughly deformed. It is not sentimentalized or exoticized, how-
ever, nor does it appear menacing in any way. This disabled musical body
appears in a virtually realistic mode, the object of gentle humor, per-
haps, but not enfreaked in any way.

In the real world, deformation and disfigurement usually evoke pity or

horror, and the same is true to some extent in the arts, including music.
Modernist artists of all kinds have used deformity and disfigurement for
their shock value and to scandalize a bourgeois audience. Representations of
disability in modernist music frequently draw on familiar and stigmatizing
tropes (Obsessive Avengers, Charity Cripples, and Saintly Sages), and they
often evoke responses in exotic and eugenic modes. But formal fragmen-
tation and deformation often have a positive aesthetic value in modernist
music. By deploying its fractured forms and fragmented textures as a sign
of liberation from conventional restrictions, modernist music often claims
deformity and disfigurement as a valuable and aesthetically desirable re-
source. (Chapter 3 contains a more extended discussion of representations
of deformity and disfigurement in modernist music.)

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 23 ]
42

Mobility Impairment

The history of mobility impairment closely tracks the history of deformity/​

disfigurement, but now we are talking about bodily functioning rather than
appearance. This disability, traditionally understood in religious terms (“the
halt and the lame”), was increasingly medicalized throughout the nine-
teenth century, spurred by the wounds experienced by the combatants in
increasingly destructive wars. With the Great War, Stiker’s “birth of reha-
bilitation” signals the hegemony of the medical model, with its emphasis
on normalization (in part through the use of increasingly sophisticated
prostheses). And we find the same eugenic-​era bifurcation of attitudes of
pity and fear.
The idea of motion—​usually toward climaxes or cadences—​plays a cen-
tral role in traditional canons of musical beauty. But modernist music very
frequently prefers harmonies that are relatively static, turning in on them-
selves, lacking a sense of direction, circular rather than teleological. The
time of modernist music is relatively nonlinear, preferring a sense of si-
multaneity to a sense of one thing leading purposefully toward a logical
successor: instead of one chord leading to another, their notes may be
commingled.20 In modernist music, which usually avoids both the resolu-
tion of dissonance as a means to impel motion and the traditional linear
progression as a means to direct motion, the harmony may appear rela-
tively immobile. In the music of many modernist composers, harmonic im-
mobility is related in part to a preference for inversional symmetry, that is,
for chords that are mirror images of themselves, with the same intervals
from top to bottom as from bottom to top—​palindromes in register. Just
as deformation results from an apparent deficit of (formal) symmetry, im-
mobility may result from an apparent excess of (inversional) symmetry.

Debussy, “Voiles” (from Préludes, Book 1). One common character-

istic of Debussy’s harmony is a slow rate of change: individual harmonies
persist for a long time, animated by active figuration, until being replaced
(suddenly or gradually) by a different harmony. In this passage, a single
whole-​tone harmony persists throughout. Unlike the functional, goal-​
oriented harmonic progressions of an earlier period, this music is har-
monically static and immobile. The music appears lost in the moment,

20. The idea that the time of modernist music is nonlinear is the central conten-
tion of Jonathan Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New
Listening Strategies (1988). Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (2003), considers simul-
taneity a principal defining feature of cultural modernism.

[ 24 ] Broken Beauty
 in a sort of religious trance. We seem to be in the presence of a Saintly
Sage, and look up in wondrous awe of difference.
Stravinsky, Petrushka, Scene 1, and The Rake’s Progress, Act 1, Scene
1. In the opening of Petrushka, a single harmony persists throughout,
shimmering in the accompaniment and arpeggiating in the melody.
There is no sense of motion or progression. In the opening of The Rake’s
Progress, the same type of harmony prevails, presented as an alterna-
tion of two smaller chords. The chords simply oscillate, with no sense of
directed progression. The static usage of these harmonies is enhanced
by their internal symmetry. Unlike the unbalanced consonant triad of
traditional music, which engenders motion, Stravinsky’s symmetrical
harmonies prevent motion: they impair mobility. Their immobility
contradicts traditional canons of musical beauty and suggests a disa-
bility aesthetics.
Bartók, “Subject and Reflection,” No. 141 from Mikrokosmos.
Inversional symmetry is an important feature of a great deal of post-
tonal harmony, and it often has the effect of immobilizing the music.
In this passage, the musical lines maintain a strict inversional balance.
In keeping with the title of the piece, everything that happens in the
pianist’s right hand is mirrored by what happens in the left hand. The
result is harmonic immobility: the music is fixed in its place.
Webern, Piano Variations, Op. 27, second movement. Everything
that happens in this movement involves a mirror reflection around a cen-
tral tone. That note is literally the central pitch of the music, with every-
thing else balanced symmetrically around it. Amid the widely dispersed
bursts of melodic activity, there is an absolute harmonic stasis: the
music is immobile; it goes nowhere. It’s a paradoxical effect: manic me-
lodic activity animating a single static harmony. The underlying immo-
bility aligns with a disability aesthetics, finding new sources of beauty in
the extraordinary (musical) body.

The relative immobility of modernist music has inspired a strong reaction

of horror among antimodernist critics. Heinrich Schenker is the most ex-
treme example—​he repeatedly describes the inhibition of musical motion
toward predefined goals as a form of “paralysis.”21 Observing a cultural
logic of euthanasia, anti-​modernist critics have argued that if this music
cannot be cured of its defects, it should be eradicated entirely from the

21. Schenker develops his sense of musical “paralysis” in two sources: “Further
Consideration of the Urlinie” (1926/​1996) and “Rameau or Beethoven? Creeping
Paralysis or Spiritual Potency in Music?” (1930/​1997).

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 25 ]
62

corpus of great music. But for modernist composers, the disability of mo-
bility impairment has often seemed a valuable artistic resource. If sounds
are freed from their conventional obligations, no longer compelled to move
in foreordained ways toward prescribed goals, they can be enjoyed on their
own terms rather than as part of a directed continuity. Stasis (nonlin-
earity, simultaneity) then becomes a source of liberation and a cause for
celebration. In that sense, with its static (often inversionally symmetrical)
harmonies, modernist music claims mobility impairment as a valuable re-
source and a mark of its disability aesthetics. (Chapter 3 contains further
discussion of musical representations of mobility impairment.)

Madness

Throughout human history, some people have “heard voices,” that is, have
heard verbal utterances in the absence of any actual external source.22
Traditionally, such voices were understood within a religious framework,
as something either divine or demonic, and associated with madness in
either case. In the mid-​nineteenth century, however, in tandem with other
disabilities, this experience fell increasingly under the control of med-
ical science. Under the medical model, the experience of hearing voices
was pathologized as “aural hallucination” and understood as a symptom
of mental illness, especially schizophrenia (a diagnostic category created
by Eugen Bleuler in 1908).23 Indeed, one might argue that the category of
schizophrenia was created, in part, to provide a diagnostic home for the
phenomenon of hearing voices.
As with physical disabilities, mental disabilities were brought fully
under the medical regime during the first decades of the twentieth century.
This is the period when the idea of “mental illness” was consolidated—​the
culturally contingent idea that affect and behavior that deviate from nor-
mative standards are disease entities that require diagnosis and remedia-
tion from medical professionals. This is also the eugenic era of psychiatry,
marked by a transition from the hope of cure via “moral education” to the
pessimism of large institutions designed primarily for segregation of an

22. There is a large literature on this topic, some of which we will survey in ­chapter 4.
The best single source is Charles Ferneyhough, The Voices Within: The History and Science
of How We Talk to Ourselves (2016).
23. Eugen Bleuler presented his new diagnostic category of schizophrenia in a public
lecture in April 1908, published later that year as “Die Prognose der Dementia praecox
(Schizophreniegruppe)” (1908).

[ 26 ] Broken Beauty
undesirable population. Just at the moment that rehabilitation gains mo-
mentum for physical impairments, it is increasingly abandoned as an ideal
for psychiatric disorders, for which horror increasingly trumps pity in the
broader societal response.
Both schizophrenia and modernist art and music are centrally con-
cerned with the splitting of consciousness, of which hearing voices is the
epitome and conspicuous outward mark. Modernist art and literature
frequently explore multiple perspectives, with a cacophony of competing
narrative voices and extreme heterogeneity of style and content. In mod-
ernist music, quotation practices that involve an ambient atonality and the
sharp intrusion of traditional tonal references give a vivid impression of
heard voices.
In modernist music, these heard voices involve different sorts of disa-
bility representations and elicit different sorts of responses. The voices may
seem threatening in some way, a sign of some deep disturbance. Certainly
they have been apprehended in eugenic mode by critics who hear in the
voices a threat to the treasured coherence of the musical work. Music
theorists and analysts have been particularly concerned with containing
the threat posed by the heard voices and demonstrating the ways in which
they are subsumed and normalized musically. (Critical response along
these lines is the topic of ­chapter 7.) But while heard voices may sometimes
be understood in eugenic mode, the music often makes possible a different
approach. The voices often appear welcome in some way, not a threat to
be contained but the bearers of wisdom—​the voices are Saintly Sages. Or
the voices may originate from the beloved dead, and may be heard nos-
talgically in sentimental mode as Sweet Innocents. The urge to normalize
these voices—​to cure them as though they were a sickness of some kind—​
is common in critical commentaries, but modernist music often makes
possible hearings in a more realistic mode, where the voices, and the divi-
sion in consciousness they signal and enforce, are celebrated on their own
terms, as a manifestation of disability aesthetics.

Ives, String Quartet No. 2, first movement. Out of a dissonant,

densely chromatic, imitative environment, a series of recognizable tunes
emerges: “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” “Dixie,” “Marching through
Georgia,” “Turkey in the Straw,” and “Hail Columbia.” These tunes are
heard as though from outside the frame of the piece, and they stratify
the texture into discrete layers. The consciousness of the piece is thus di-
vided between its ambient atonality and the traditional tonality of these
well-​known tunes. These heard voices pose a threat to the unity and co-
herence of the music, and critics have been tempted to try to show how,

R e p r e s e n t i n g Di s a b i l i t y [ 27 ]
82

despite their profound contrast with the ambient atonality, they none-
theless really fit in. In that way, they seek to cure the piece of a trou-
bling disability. But the music itself makes possible a response in a more
realistic mode: the voices come and go without causing any damage.
Indeed, they are sweet reminiscences of a bygone era, the voices of the
beloved dead.
Schoenberg, Quartet No. 2, second movement. After an extended
and intense imitative development of two contrasting themes, every-
thing slows down and stops, with a portentous pause. Then we hear
a different voice, seemingly from outside the frame of the piece: the
blackly humorous folk tune, “Ach, du lieber, Augustin,” with a simple
oom-​pah-​pah accompaniment—​a deformed waltz—​layered against a
tune from earlier in the movement. The folk tune sounds like a heard
voice, and has the effect of stratifying the work into contrasting layers,
expressive of a divided consciousness. From the point of view of the am-
bient atonality, the folk tune (and its waltzy accompaniment) are a brief,
blackly humorous digression, neither demonic nor sweetly innocent.
The voice is heard as though from a great physical and stylistic distance,
but is accepted rather than exoticized or pathologized.
Berg, Lyric Suite, sixth movement. The music is a sort of densely
chromatic labyrinth, with several different forms of two twelve-​tone
rows unfolding simultaneously. Then the texture thins, and rising from
the depths we hear a different voice, Wagner’s voice from the opening of
Tristan und Isolde. It disappears, and the music then builds to a wild out-
burst of grief, back in Berg’s now-​familiar twelve-​tone style. The voice is
reminiscent, but not sweetly nostalgic. Rather, it signals an uncurable
psychic wound in the consciousness of the piece.

Even in the absence of quotation, modernist music frequently stratifies

the musical texture into discrete layers. These layers are often identified
by different, clashing centric tones (an effect sometimes referred to as bi-
tonal), and are further differentiated by distinctive internal rhythms and
a lack of rhythmic coordination among the layers. Furthermore, neither
layer functions as a ground for the other’s figure, or as a norm for the
other’s deviation; rather, the layers are heard as independent and self-​
sufficient, and the piece that contains them is irrevocably divided. In some
cases, the division is felt as a disabling wound that elicits a response in
eugenic mode: emotional horror and a desire to normalize or somehow
eliminate. More commonly, however, such bifurcations of musical con-
sciousness elicit a more realistic response: these divisions represent
difference, not deficit, and are among the new forms of beauty provided by

[ 28 ] Broken Beauty
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Trophi—see Mouth-parts
Trox, stridulation, 195
Truffle-beetle, 222
Trumpeter bumble-bee, 58
Trypanaeus, 230
Trypanidae, 395
Trypetidae, 504, 506
Trypoxylonides, 118
Trypoxylon, 118;
T. albitarse, 118;
T. figulus, 119
Tse-tse fly, 512, 513
Tubulifera, 1 f.
Tubulifera (Thrips), 531
Tulip-tree, tubes on, 578
Turkey-gnats, 477
Turnip-flea, 278
Tusser, or Tussore, silk, 374
Tympanoterpes gigas, 572
Typhlatta, 179, 180
Typhlopone, 178, 179, 180

Ugimyia sericariae, 507

Ulidiidae, 504
Ulopa, 578
Uncus, 314
Urania rhipheus, 419
Uraniidae, 368, 419
Uric acid pigments, 357
Urodon, 278
Uzel, on Thysanoptera, 527

Vanessa, 352;
larva, 354—see also Pyrameis and Araschnia
Vanessula, 356
Vapourer-moths, 407
Variation, of Anomma burmeisteri, 179;
 of Bombus, 58;
of larvae, 336;
of Sphecodes, 23;
of male and worker ants, 160;
of workers and females, 162;
due to parasites, 26;
of larva and imago, 408;
generic, 401;
local, 398;
in nervuration, 414;
and dimorphism in Geometrid-larvae, 412;
of mandibles of Lucanidae, 193;
in colour of Psyllidae, 579;
trichroism of hind wings, 351;
in size of Brenthidae, 297;
of time and form in Cicada, 570;
in wings, 540;
as to winged or wingless, 531;
change in, 414;
seasonal, 335
Vasa deferentia, 321
Veils, 493
Veins—see nervures
Velia currens, 552
Velleius dilatatus, 227
Verhoeff, on Agenia, 106;
on Halictus, 25;
on Siphonophora, 239;
on Stelis minuta, 29;
on terminal segments of beetles, 186
Vermileo degeeri, 481
Vermipsylla alakurt, 523, 526
Verson, on rudiments of wings, 328
Vertebrates, larvae of Diptera, attacking, 506, 510, 512, 514,
517, 520;
tick-fleas on, 526
Vespa, nests of, 79, 83;
 V. austriaca, 81, 88;
V. crabro, 81;
V. germanica, 79
Vespidae, 78
Viviparous, Aphids, 583;
fly, 506, 511, 513, 518 f.;
moths, 430;
Staphylinidae, 227
Voice—see Song, Sound-organs, Stridulation
Volucella, 500;
V. bombylans, 441

Wagner, on morphology of fleas, 523 n.;

on paedogenesis, 460
Walker, J. J., on Halobates, 552
Wallace, on flight of Hesperiidae, 364
Walsingham, Lord, on Tortricidae, 427
Walter, on mouth of Lepidoptera, 308, 310
Wandering ants, 175 f.
Wanzenspritze, 536
Wasmann, on Ants'-nest Insects, 181 n., 183;
on Lomechusa, 142, 226;
on Weismann, 143
Wasps, 71 f.
Wasps'-nest, beetle, 235;
Insect, 268
Water-scorpion, 563
Wax, 65, 575, 576, 597
Wax-glands, 589
Wax-hairs, 580
Wedde, on mouth of Hemiptera, 535
Weeping-trees, 577
Weevil, biscuit-, 247;
pea-, 277
Weinland, on halteres, 448
Wet- and dry-season forms, 336
Whirligig-beetle, 215
White wax, 576, 597
Whittell, on Pelopaeus and Larrada, 117
Wielowiejski, on luminous organs, 250
Wing-cases, of beetles, 186, 270
Wing, of bugs, 539;
of Diptera, 447;
of Lepidoptera, 315 f.;
development of, 328;
structure of, 329
Wingless—see Apterous
Wingless and winged Aphids, 584
Wing-nervures—see Nervures
Wing-rib, 330, 333
Wing-veins—see Nervures
Winter-gnats, 473
Winter-moth, 414
Winter-mother, 586
Wire-worm, 258
Wood-ant—see Formica rufa
Wood-leopard moth, 309, 395
Woodpecker, Diptera in, 506
Workers, 54, 66, 67, 79, 85, 132, 140
Worm-eaten furniture, 248

Xantharpyia straminea, parasite of, 521, 522

Xenos, 303;
X. rossii, 299, 301
Xestobium, 248
Xylocopa, 32, 34, 70;
submentum of, 14;
X. chloroptera, 34;
X. violacea, 33
Xylodiplosis, 458, 459
Xylophagidae, 479
Xylophaginae, 480
Xylophilidae, 266
Xylotrupes gideon, 199
Yellow-fever-fly, 464
Yolinus, 558
Young carried, 556
Yucca-moth, 432

Zabrus, 205
Zaitha anura, 566
Zelotypia staceyi, 396
Zemioses celtis, 296
Zeuzera aesculi, 309, 395
Zeuzeridae, 395
Zygaenidae, 369, 388, 390, 392, 394
Zygia, 253
 END OF VOL. VI

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

THE CAMBRIDGE NATURAL HISTORY.

COMPLETE LIST OF SERIES.

VOLUME I.

Protozoa, Marcus Hartog, M.A., Trinity College (Professor of

Natural History in the Queen's College, Cork); Sponges, W. J.
Sollas, Sc.D., F.R.S., St. John's College (Professor of Geology
in the University of Oxford); Jelly-fish, Sea-Anemones, etc., S.
J. Hickson, M.A., Downing College (Beyer Professor of Zoology
in the Owens College, Manchester); Star-fish, Sea-Urchins,
etc., E. W. Macbride, M.A., St. John's College (Professor of
Zoology, M‘Gill University, Montreal).

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Assistant-Lecturer in Zoology in the Owens College,
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Thread-worms, etc., A. E. Shipley, M.A., Christ's College;
Rotifers, etc., Marcus Hartog, M.A., Trinity College, D.Sc.
(Lond.), (Professor of Natural History in the Queen's College,
Cork); Polychaet Worms, W. B. Benham, D.Sc. (Lond.), Hon.
M.A. (Oxon.), Aldrichian Demonstrator of Comparative Anatomy
in the University of Oxford; Earth-worms and Leeches, F. E.
Beddard, M.A. (Oxon.), F.R.S. (Prosector to the Zoological
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to the Royal Agricultural Society); Scorpions, Trilobites, etc.,
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Zoology in St. Mungo's College, Glasgow); Pycnogonids, etc.,
D'Arcy W. Thompson, C.B., M.A., Trinity College (Professor of
Zoology in University College, Dundee); Crustacea, W. F. R.
Weldon, M.A., F.R.S., St. John's College (Jodrell Professor of
Zoology in University College, London).

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Peripatus, A. Sedgwick, M.A., F.R.S., Trinity College; Centipedes,

etc., F. G. Sinclair, M.A., Trinity College; Insects, Part I., D.
Sharp, M.A., F.R.S.
[Ready.

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[Ready.

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Balanoglossus, etc., S. F. Harmer, Sc.D., F.R.S., King's College;

Ascidians and Amphioxus, W. A. Herdman, D.Sc. (Lond.),
 F.R.S. (Professor of Natural History in University College,
Liverpool); Fishes, T. W. Bridge, Sc.D., Trinity College
(Professor of Zoology in the Mason University College,
Birmingham).

VOLUME VIII.

Amphibia and Reptiles, H. Gadow, M.A., F.R.S., King's College.

VOLUME IX.

Birds, A. H. Evans, M.A., Clare College. With numerous Illustrations

by G. E. Lodge.
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Zoological Society).

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 NOTES

[1]

Systematic monograph, Mocsáry, Budapest, 1889. Account of the

European Chrysididae, R. du Buysson in André, Spec. gen. Hym.
vol. vi. 1896.

[2]

Ent. Mag. vi. 1869, p. 153.

[3]

Ann. Sci. Nat. (7) ix. 1890, p. 1.

[4]

C. R. Ac. Paris, cxviii. 1894, p. 873.

[5]

Trans. ent. Soc. London, 1873, p. 408.

[6]

Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xxv. 1875, p. 184.

[7]

Morph. Jahrb. xxiv. 1896, p. 192.

[8]

Zeitschr. wiss. Zool. xxx. 1878, p. 78.

[9]

Proc. ent. Soc. Washington, iii. 1896, p. 334.

[10]
Trans. ent. Soc. 1878, p. 169.

[11]

The mode of wetting the pollen is not clear. Wolff says it is done by
an exudation from the tibia; H. Müller by admixture of nectar from
the bee's mouth. The latter view is more probably correct.

[12]

In studying the proboscis the student will do well to take a Bombus

as an example; its anatomy being more easily deciphered than
that of the honey-bee.

[13]

Leuckart proposed the term lingula; but the word gives rise to the
impression that it is a mistake for either lingua or ligula. Packard
calls the part "hypopharynx."

[14]

For figures and descriptions of the proboscides of British bees,

refer to E. Saunders, Jour. Linn. Soc. xxiii. 1890, pp. 410-432,
plates III.-X.: and for details of the minute structure and function to
Cheshire, Bees and Bee-keeping, vol. i.

[15]

Breithaupt, Arch. Naturges. lii. Bd. i. 1886, p. 47.

[16]

See Fig. 26, p. 71.

[17]

Bull. Mus. Paris, i. 1895, p. 38.

[18]

C.R. Ac. Paris, lxxxvii. 1878, pp. 378 and 535.

[19]

Catalogus Hymenopterorum, Leipzig, 10 vols. 1892-96; Bees, vol.

x.

[20]

Zool. Jahrb. Syst. iv. 1891, p. 779. This paper is a most valuable
summary of what is known as to the habits of European solitary
bees, but is less satisfactory from a systematic point of view.

[21]

Bull. Soc. ent. France, 1894, p. cxv.

[22]

Marchal, Rev. Sci. 15th February 1890, and Ferton, t.c. 19th April.

[23]

C.R. Ac. Paris, lxxxix. 1879, p. 1079, and Ann. Sci. Nat. (6), ix.
1879, No. 4.

[24]

Act. Soc. Bordeaux, xlviii. 1895, p. 145.

[25]

Verh. Ver. Rheinland, xli. 1884, p. 1.

[26]

It is impossible for us here to deal with the question of the origin of

the parasitic habit in bees. The reader wishing for information as to
this may refer to Prof. Pérez's paper, Act. Soc. Bordeaux, xlvii.
1895. p. 300.

[27]

Refer to p. 70 postea, note, as to a recent discovery about

Xylocopa.
[28]

Souvenirs entomologiques. 4 vols. Paris, 1879 to 1891.

[29]

The "Chalicodome des galets" or C. "des murailles" of the French

writer; in some places he speaks of the species as being C.
muraria, in others as C. parietina.

[30]

Trans. Zool. Soc. London, vii. 1870, p. 178.

[31]

Mt. Ver. Steiermark, xxxi. 1882, p. 69.

[32]

Zool. Anz. vii. 1884, p. 312.

[33]

SB. Ges. Wien. xxxviii. 1888, p. 34.

[34]

Ent. Nachr. xii. 1886, p. 177.

[35]

Tr. ent. Soc. London, 1868, p. 133.

[36]

Tr. ent. Soc. London, 1884, p. 149.

[37]

Ann. Soc. ent. France (5), iv. 1874, p. 567.

[38]
See Pérez, Act. Soc. Bordeaux, xxxiii. 1880, p. lxv.; and Cameron,
Tr. Soc. Glasgow, n. s. ii. 1889, p. 194.

[39]

Ann. Nat. Hist. (6), xix. 1897, p. 136.

[40]

Janet has suggested that the folding is done to keep the delicate
hind-margins of the wings from being frayed.

[41]

Zool. Anz. xix. 1896, p. 449. See also note, antea, p. 70.

[42]

Monographie des guêpes sociales, Geneva, 1853-1858, pp. cc.

and 356, plates i.-xxxvii.

[43]

Hence probably the great difference in the abundance of wasps in

different years: if a period of cold weather occur during the early
stages of formation of a wasp family, operations are suspended
and growth delayed; or death may even put an end to the nascent
colony.

[44]

CR. Ac. Paris, cxvii. 1893, p. 584; op. cit. cxxi. 1895, p. 731; Arch.
Zool. exper. (3) iv. 1896, pp. 1-100.

[45]

Kumagusu Minakata, in Nature, l. 1894, p. 30.

[46]

As this work is passing through the press we receive a book by Mr.

and Mrs. Peckham on The Instincts and Habits of the Solitary
Wasps, Madison, 1898. They are of opinion that, in the case of
some species, it does not matter much whether the victim is or is
not killed by the stinging.

[47]

P. ent. Soc. Washington, iii. 1896, p. 303.

[48]

Monograph by Lucas, Berlin ent. Zeitschr. xxxix. 1894.

[49]

"Die Gattungen der Sphegiden," Ann. Hofmus. Wien. xi. 1896, pp.
233-596. Seven plates.

[50]

We will take this opportunity of correcting an error in the

explanation of Fig. 333 of the preceding volume, showing the
propodeum, etc. of Sphex chrysis. f points to a division of the
mesonotum, not of the metanotum, as there stated.

[51]

Pelopaeus disappears from the new catalogue of Hymenoptera as

the name of a valid genus; its species being assigned to
Sceliphron and various other genera. We have endeavoured, as
regards this name, to reconcile the nomenclature of previous
authors with that used in the new catalogue by placing the generic
name adopted in the latter in brackets.

[52]

When a second cell is more or less perfectly marked out, the cell
with which it is connected is said to be appendiculate. The
nervures frequently extend beyond the complete cells towards the
outer margin, forming "incomplete" cells; only complete cells are
counted, except when "incomplete" is mentioned.
[53]

See on this point the note on p. 130.

[54]

The pupae and cocoons of ants are usually called by the

uninstructed, "ants' eggs." In this country they are used as food for
pheasants.

[55]

The parthenogenetic young produced by worker females are

invariably of the male sex.

[56]

The student must recollect that the winged female ants cast their
wings previously to assuming the social life. The winglessness of
these females is a totally different phenomenon from that we here
allude to.

[57]

See Forel, Verh. Ges. deutsch. Naturf. lxvi. 1894, 2, pp. 142-147;
and Emery Biol. Centralbl. xiv. 1894, p. 53. The term ergatoid
applies to both sexes; a species with worker-like female is
ergatogynous; with a worker-like male ergatandrous.

[58]

Nature li. 1894, p. 125.

[59]

Biol. Centralbl. xv. 1895, p. 640.

[60]

Prof. Forel has favoured the writer by informing him of several

cases of these rare intermediate forms he has himself detected.
[61]

Biol. Centralbl. xiv. 1894, p. 53.

[62]

Forel's latest views on this subject will be found in the Ann. Soc.
ent. Belgique xxxvii. 1893, p. 161; the very valuable paper by
Emery, in Zool. Jahrb. Syst. viii. 1896, p. 760.

[63]

Ann. Soct. ent. France, 1893, p. 467.

[64]

Ann. Soc. ent. France, 1893, Bull. p. cclxiv.

[65]

Forel, J. Bombay Soc. viii. 1893, p. 36.

[66]

See von Ihering, Berlin. ent. Zeitschr. xxxix. 1894, p. 364; and
Forel, Ann. Soc. ent. Belgique, xl. 1896, p. 170.

[67]

Ann. Soc. ent. Belgique, xxxvii. 1893, p. 163.

[68]

Bih. Svenska Ak. xxi. 1896, Afd. iv. No. 4.

[69]

Until recently this genus was generally known as Atta, but this
name is now applied to the leaf-cutting ants, that were formerly
called Oecodoma.

[70]

Forel, Bull. Soc. Vaudoise, xxx. pp. 29-30, 1894.

[71]

Tr. ent. Soc. London, 1893, pp. 365-467.

[72]

For a valuable revision of Dorylus and its allies see Emery, Zool.
Jahrb. Syst. viii. 1895, pp. 685, etc. We, however, doubt the
wisdom of extending the sub-family so as to include Cerapachys,
Parasyscia, etc.

[73]

A Catalogue of Myrmecophilous and Termitophilous Arthropods

was published by Wasmann, Berlin 1894.

[74]

For a summary of this subject see Wasmann, Congr. internat.

Zool. iii. 1896, pp. 411-440.

[75]

For explanation of this term see vol. v. p. 524.

[76]

An interesting exception occurs in the Malacodermidae, where this

coadaptation is wanting, or is imperfect; they are frequently
considered to be the most primitive of existing beetles.

[77]

In a series of memoirs in various German periodicals during the

last five or six years (see especially Deutsche ent. Zeit. 1893 and
1894, also subsequent years of Arch. Naturges.). It should be
noticed that in the course of his studies Verhoeff has modified
some of his earlier views.

[78]

We consider this term inferior to Tetramera for nomenclatorial

purposes.
[79]

Danske Selsk. Skr. (6), viii. No. 1, 1895.

[80]

Horae Soc. ent. Ross. xiv. 1879, p. 15.

[81]

In this sub-family there are numerous forms in which the elytra

cover the pygidium, and in which the number of conspicuous
ventral segments is reduced to five or even four. We use the term
Coprides as equivalent to the "Laparosticti" of Lacordaire (Gen.
Col. iii. 1856); it thus includes the "Coprini" and "Glaphyrini" of the
Catalogus Coleopterorum, vol. iv. Munich, 1869.

[82]

Considérations genérales sur l'anatomic comparée des animaux

articulés, etc., Paris 1828, 4to. xix. and 435 pp., and Atlas of ten
(xx.) plates, and 36 pp.

[83]

Raspail, Mém. soc. zool. France, vi. 1893, pp. 202-213.

[84]

Ann. soc. ent. France, (v.) iv. 1874, p. 39.

[85]

In Theratides this outer lobe is in a rudimentary state, like a seta.

[86]

The first portion of a classification of Cicindelidae by Dr. Walther

Horn, Revision der Cicindeliden, Berlin, 1898, has appeared since
this was written.

[87]