Sing As You Are: Towards a Disability-Informed Voice Pedagogy Curriculum

Anne Slovin, University of Notre Dame, USA

Vocology and voice pedagogy more broadly are disciplines in which it is crucial to understand the inner workings of the human body. In class, students usually learn the default settings of the respiratory system, larynx, vocal tract, and other systems as they relate to singing. While this is certainly valuable information for any singer or voice teacher, our focus on normative vocal anatomy and physiology runs the risk of suggesting that most people who study voice have bodies that function according to the textbook. However, as bass vocalist and disability advocate David Salsbery Fry points out, in the human race there is no normativity, only radical diversity. We are currently seeing incredible surges of conscious casting according to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other identity metrics – but despite a number of recent operas about disabled characters, it is still rare to see visibly and openly disabled performers singing on stage. In this paper, I suggest a reciprocal connection between the way emerging teachers are educated, with a focus on an “ideal” or normative singing body, and this apparent lack – or invisibility – of disabled performers.

Where did this “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer) in the voice world originate? Drawing on the musicological and performance studies research of Nina Sun Eidsheim, Masi Asare, Katherine Meizel and Alexander Cowan, I connect modern voice pedagogy as initiated by Manuel Garcia II to the fringe science of eugenics, leading to an almost total exclusion of disability from voice academia and the voice “industry.” I draw on recent research in disability studies as well as the words of colleagues and former students to show that foregrounding body diversity in our voice pedagogy and vocology courses benefits all voice users. Lastly, I propose practical adjustments to the standard voice pedagogy curriculum that indicate to disabled students that there is a place for them not only in the voice studio, but also on the stage. Only by training emerging voice teachers to see and understand the individuality of their students’ bodies can we create this pipeline of radical acceptance from academia to the professional voice world.