ABSTRACT
Just as race, class, and gender have slowly entered the horizon within music scholarship, the lens of disability has now arrived. The lens metaphor brings some attention to the ways cultural constructions of disability—and language's complicity within those constructions—recur and inscribe understandings of the world. A lens, afier all, can serve to focus light into patterns that are clearer and more easily perceived; eyeglasses are some of the simplest and most familiar technologies used to accommodate visual impairments. The verbal language musicians use also says much about their assumptions. For example, sight singing constitutes a basic element in music education. To perform music within the cultivated tradition, musicians are expected to read musical notafition, and so the study of sight singing cultivates the skill of translating printed musical notation into performed sound. Yet the implication behind the phrase sight singing assumes something more: that one must have sight to read music. Actually, one does not have to have sight to read music, as revealed through a number of sight-singing books that have been translated into braille—without any apparent irony over the paradox in the words.
