Beethoven’s Deafness and the Myth of the Isolated Artist

By: Linda Shaver-Gleason (Lompoc, CA) // In a scene from the 1995 movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, music teacher Glenn Holland tells his high school students about Beethoven’s deafness while playing the second movement of the composer’s seventh symphony (the same movement used fifteen years later during the climax of The King’s Speech). Holland has just …

Avid Listening

By: Andrew Dell'Antonio (University of Texas, Austin) // Our bodies hunger for sound. Listening is so important to our self-definition that American Deaf culture has developed the concept LISTEN-EYES to describe the process of receiving and interpreting through sight information that would otherwise be acquired through sound. The rhythm of a song and its flow …