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Joseph Straus

Joseph Straus
  • Distinguished Professor, Music

Research Interests

  • Modernist Music, Post-Tonal Theory, Music and Disability

Education

  • Ph.D. in Music Theory, Yale University
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Joseph Straus is a music theorist specializing in music since 1900. He has written technical music-theoretical articles, analytical studies of music by a variety of modernist composers, and, most recently, a series of article and books that engage disability as a cultural practice. He written textbooks that have become standard references. Many of his books and articles have received publication awards from the Society for Music Theory (SMT), of which he was President from 1997–99.

Courses Taught

Current Trends in Music Theory Analyzing Atonal Music Music and Disability

Publications

  • Analysis of Sofia Gubaidulina, Reflections on BACH, in Analyzing Russian Music, ed. Inessa Bazayev and Chris Segall (Routledge, forthcoming).
  • Musical Modernism and its Disability Aesthetics. In Art/Sex/Identity: The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies, ed. Crystal Lie, Jina Kim, and Joshua Kupetz. University of Michigan Press (forthcoming).
  • Sum Class. Journal of Music Theory 62/2 (2018): 279–338.
  • Ten Tips for Teaching Tonal Theory. In the Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory, ed. Lumsden (Norton, 2018).
  • Modernist Music and the Representation of Disability. Journal of the American Musicological Society 69/2 (2016): 530–536.
  • Autism and Postwar Serialism as Neurodiverse Forms of Cultural Modernism, in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford UP 2016).
  • Representing the Extraordinary Body: Musical Modernism’s Aesthetics of Disability, in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies (Oxford UP 2016).
  • “Twelve-Tone in My Own Way”: An Analytical Study of Ursula Mamlok’s Panta Rhei (1981), Third Movement, with Some Reflections on Twelve-Tone Music in America. Essays on Music by Women, ed. Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft (Oxford University Press, 2016).
  • Music Therapy and Autism: A Perspective from Disability Studies. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy 14/3 (2014): Special Issue on Music Therapy and Disability Studies Total Voice Leading. Music Theory Online 20/2 (2014).
  • Harmony and Voice Leading in the Music of Stravinsky. Music Theory Spectrum 36/1 (2014): 1-33. **Received the Outstanding Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory (2015)**
  • Idiots Savants, Retarded Savants, Talented Aments, Mono-savants, Autistic Savants, Just Plain Savants, People with Savant Syndrome, and Autistic People who are Good at Things: A View from Disability Studies. Disability Studies Quarterly 34/3 (2014).
  • Music and Disability. The Health and Humanities Reader, ed. Jones et al. (Rutgers University Press, 2014): 77-86.
  • Three Stravinsky Analyses. Music Theory Online 18/4 (2012). Babbitt the Analyst. Music Theory Spectrum 34/1 (2012): 26-33.
  • Contextual-Inversion Spaces. Journal of Music Theory 55/1 (2011): 43-88.
Joseph Straus

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Books

Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability Joseph Straus

Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability

Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018

by Joseph Straus Distinguished Professor, Music

Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation and narration of disability. The most characteristic features of musical modernism—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. Modernist musical representation and narration of disability 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 incarcerate or eliminate). Disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about. This book draws on two decades of work in disability studies and a growing body of recent work that brings the discussion of disability 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 attention from biology and medicine to culture. Within modernist music, disability representations often embody pernicious stereotypes and encourage sentimentalizing, exoticizing, or more directly negative responses. Modernist music claims disability as a valuable resource, but does so in a tense, dialectical relationship with medicalized, eugenic-era attitudes toward disability.

Published May 2018

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Extraordinary Measures: Music and Disability

Extraordinary Measures: Music and Disability

Oxford University Press, 2011

by Joseph Straus Distinguished Professor, Music

Approaching disability as a cultural construction rather than a medical pathology, this book studies the impact of disability and concepts of disability on composers, performers, and listeners with disabilities, as well as on discourse about music and works of music themselves. For composers with disabilities—like Beethoven, Delius, and Schumann—awareness of the disability sharply inflects critical reception. For performers with disabilities—such as Itzhak Perlman and Evelyn Glennie—the performance of disability and the performance of music are deeply intertwined. For listeners with disabilities, extraordinary bodies and minds may give rise to new ways of making sense of music. In the stories that people tell about music, and in the stories that music itself tells, disability has long played a central but unrecognized role. Some of these stories are narratives of overcoming-the triumph of the human spirit over adversity-but others are more nuanced tales of accommodation and acceptance of life with a non-normative body or mind. In all of these ways, music both reflects and constructs disability.

Published March 2011

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