When a performer’s disability directly affects the execution of a musical script, the “dual performances of music and disability” (Straus 2011) are intertwined, so that one directly influences the other. This chapter uses the termsaudibleandsilent disabilitiesas aural analogues to the more commonly used termsvisibleandinvisible disabilities. In music performance, aural disabilities stem frommusical impairments, which emerge from conflicts with three interrelated sets of conventions associated with musical instruments, performance practices and musical scores (in nonimprovised performances), and ideological expectations of a societal audience. Just as curbs, stairs, and door handles constitute part of the “constructed normalcy” of social performance, so do these three musical conventions propose and construct anormal performance bodythat real bodies must strive to match. Conversely,disablist music(like the one-hand piano repertoire) subverts the normal performance body by accommodating aurally disabled performers excluded from conformational musical practices.

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The new, interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on its social construction and shifting attention from biology to culture. Within music, disability has been shown to be a core feature of the musical identity of music makers (especially composers and performers), often an identity that is affirmatively claimed in the face of widespread stigma. It has also inflected reception of the lives and work of composers and performers. Although music is a famously nonrepresentational art form, scholars have shown that musical works represent disability in various ways. Furthermore, music has proven a fertile ground for exploring the contention within Disability Studies that disability (like gender) can be understood as a performance: something you do rather than something you are. In all of these ways, disability both shapes and is shaped by culture, including musical culture.

The essays in this volume share a theoretical and methodological connection to Disability Studies, especially its central idea that disability is a social and cultural construction. Disability is shown to be a core feature of the musical identity of music makers (especially composers and performers), something that affects their lives and works and their public reception. Music represents disability in various ways and affirms the notion that disability is a performance, something you do rather than something you are. These essays make the case that disability is not something at the periphery of culture and music, but something central to our art and to our humanity. They also address an important lacuna within a Disability Studies that has mostly overlooked music as a medium through which disability can be constructed. Indeed, as much as a cultural understanding of disability can teach us about music, music also has much to teach us about the culture of disability.

Paul Wittgenstein's one-handedness has typically been framed as a physical limitation at odds with an able-bodied ideology driving musical performance. Contemporary reviews, for instance, frame the pianist's disability as a tragedy heroically transcended during the course of virtuosic performance; others suggest that Wittgenstein successfully "passed" as two-handed. A study of Wittgenstein's numerous one-hand arrangements reveals similar narratives: the pianist often attempted to imitate the sound of two-handed piano music, and many of his own keyboard exercises train his one hand to assume the load of two. The "deficiency" model can be seen most dramatically in three attempts to arrange Witt-genstein's commissions for left-hand piano into a more "normal" performance medium: Sergei Prokofiev's expressed (but abandoned) interest in arranging his left-hand piano concerto for piano two-hands, Alfred Cortot's completed draft of a two-hand arrangement of Ravel's Concerto pour la main gauche, and, most significantly, Friedrich Wührer's highly successful two-hand arrangements of Franz Schmidt's left-hand pieces for Wittgenstein, which explicitly adopt a program of "strengthening" and "filling in" the supposed weaknesses of a disabled performance medium. Yet, despite the stigma it may have accrued, one-handed pianism is but a more prominent, more public example of the "bodily limits" all performers must confront; similar discourse surrounds the deficiencies of small hands or stiff fingers, for example. For the performer's body must negotiate its corporeal finitude with the complex demands of the musical score. As seen here in the career of Wittgenstein, an aesthetics of disabled performance presents this dialectic in heightened microcosm.