Understanding Signed Music
Cripps & Lyonblum
in this paper) also falls in line with how scholars have written that every culture in the past and
present has its own music regardless of size (Brown, Merker, & Wallin, 2000; Hamm, Nettl, &
Byrnside, 1975). However, music theory acceptance of signed music is a rather recent
phenomenon. The relationship between culture and music may have existed for thousands of years,
but the topic of connecting culture to music remains new to music scholarship. A book called The
Cultural Study of Music was published in 2003 and its second edition, published in 2012,
documents one of the earliest times when ethnomusicologists with similar interests came together
to further investigate the relationship between culture and music across disciplines. The idea that
deaf people have their own music will reinforce what has been discussed for ethnomusicology and
cultural musicology. The ASL signing deaf community in the United States and Canada is
vulnerable to society’s biases and discriminatory practices, and opportunities for music over the
years has been restricted (especially since signed music has been excluded from, or not even
considered for, curricula in schools for deaf children).
Music has been categorized by scholars into Western and non-Western arts. This division
was formalized throughout the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. Classical music is considered part
of Western art music, and is the foundation of traditional musicology. Ethnomusicologists
concentrate on other types of music, (e.g., jazz, rap, pop rock, etc.) which are considered the roots
of non-Western culture. During the 1980s and 1990s, musicologists, music theorists, and
ethnomusicologists studied new types of music, then considered a radical shift from classical to a
broader perspective on music in academia (Middleton, 2012). These new types of music included
perspectives across the arts, humanities and social sciences. Middleton (2012), one of these music
scholars, experienced obstacles when he argued that culture has a role in music, thus music
scholars must think differently than before, by including culture. Music Studies is the new
approach that he proposed to define this particular “culture and music” paradigm. Cook (2008)
also recommended that musicologists broaden their horizons by including a range of different
disciplines such as ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and music psychology. With this
approach, music scholars are now more receptive to the idea of music as part of culture, as they
have begun analyzing music for its meaning beyond a strictly theoretical perspective.
This approach also gave way to Cultural Musicology, the analysis and criticism of works
in American and Western European Music through cultural studies. The formation of Music
Studies has essentially opened the doors for investigations in signed music as its subgenre (J. H.
Cripps, Rosenblum, Small, & S. Supalla, 2017). To sum it up, when asked “who does music belong
to?,” the second author of this paper, a music scholar, clarified in his interview that “[music]
belongs to whatever culture it comes from” (Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf, 2015, p. 5).
Thus, it is appropriate to state that signed music belongs to deaf culture and deaf people
themselves.
One of many research interests from ethnomusicologists is to examine how cultural
meaning is captured through musical performance. With this kind of investigation, audiences and
performers’ cultural identities can be further analyzed to understand how identity plays an
important role in creating performances (Cook, 2012). That is, the performer and audience who
share cultural identities are likely to appreciate the same musical performances due to similar
experiences and perspectives. Deaf people, may share cultural identities through discrimination.
An example of similar experiences that deaf people faced is “audism” and it is expressed in some
contemporary signed music performances (J. H. Cripps et al., 2017). This term expresses
discriminatory behavior toward deaf people due to their inability to hear, and suggests the
superiority of spoken language when compared to signed language (Bauman, 2004; Eckert &
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