Is Silence Music to the Eye ? Egbert
Is Silence Music to the Eye ? A Review of Signed Music : A Symphonious Odyssey
Lisalee D . Egbert American Society for Deaf Children
On November 15 , 2015 , Towson University had the honor of hosting Signed Music , A Symphonious Odyssey . As one of the conference participants , I had the privilege of viewing this evening performance and would like to share my experience and thoughts with insights . The video production of this evening performance can be viewed at https :// www . youtube . com / watch ? v = 2JjFCM8UZHM . The notion of signed music has been a concept that has led to controversy among many researchers and educators in Deaf Studies . The idea of including music as a discipline within Deaf Studies has been fiercely debated in recent years . It has been suggested that music has no place in the Deaf community and that music is a wholly “ hearing ” notion which is not applicable to Deaf culture , thus there is no purpose in researching its ideology . On the other side of the argument , there are scholars whose work demonstrates and documents a long history of how signed music has always been embedded in Deaf culture .
Given the accessibility and visual ease afforded by the Internet , the output of visual media is overwhelming and raises many questions : Is music a hearing-only concept ? Is music simply an auditory aspect of life ? Can music be a visual notion ? Can music be considered as Deaf art or literature ?
When William Stokoe ’ s work suggested that American Sign Language ( ASL ) was indeed a language ( Stokoe , 1960 ; Stokoe , Casterline , & Croneberg , 1965 ), researchers both Deaf and hearing , as well as lay persons , were quick to condemn his work ( Maher , 1996 ). Accepting ASL as a legitimate language took time in both the research and the Deaf communities . Acknowledgment was slow possibly because , as humans , we are reluctant to accept change . We tend to drive the same route to work , we tend to eat primarily the same foods , and we frequent the same venues . But is it deeper than that ? Are we disinclined to accept new concepts because we are creatures of habit and thereby resist change ? Or , are we perhaps myopic in our paradigms because we do not want to accept what , at some level , we consider to be strange or different ?
Much of the academic community , as well as the Deaf community , has now accepted Stokoe ’ s work through which he demonstrates that the linguistic features of ASL meet the criteria of a language . Language is rooted in culture and culture is woven in language ( Brown , 1994 ; Kramsch , 1998 ). Deaf Studies as an academic discipline emerged from Stokoe ’ s revolutionary linguistic breakthrough . Over time Deaf Studies as a university major was established , followed by the granting of university degrees ( Bauman , 2008 ). A natural progression for the field would be to explore further layers of the cultural and linguistic aspects of its discipline .
Now that Deaf Studies has been acknowledged as a legitimate academic field , research pursuits have begun to proliferate . Deaf Studies scholars have documented the advent of not only Deaf art and literature , but subcategories within art and literature . For example : the performing arts of theater , poetry , and storytelling are acknowledged subcategories within “ Deaf Literature ” ( Peters , 2000 ). These are joined by visual arts such as painting , sculpture , and more . These explorations in Deaf art , poetry , and literature are not new phenomena , but until there was formal and proper apperception by the academy , researchers did not investigate the potential of these
SASLJ , Vol . 1 , No . 1 – Fall / Winter 2017 96