Musical performers are inherently prodigious figures, possessed of “extraordinary bodies.”  Those who are also marked by stigmatized bodily differences find that their disability both inflects their music-making and profoundly shapes its general reception.

Disability, like music, is something they learn to perform, and they do so in accordance with well established cultural scripts.  Joseph Straus considers the simultaneous performance of disability and music for Glenn Gould, Thomas Quasthoff, Itzhak Perlman, and Evelyn Glennie.

Joseph Straus is a music theorist specializing in music of the twentieth century, with research interests that include set theory, voice-leading in post-tonal music, the music of Stravinsky, and the music Ruth Crawford Seeger. His book, Introduction to Post-Tonal Theory, is a standard college textbook on this topic. His book Remaking the Past received the Wallace Berry award from the Society for Music Theory (SMT). Prof. Straus was the President of the SMT from 1997-99.