Music and Critical Disability Theory

Alice Cooper, the Shock Rock character, has died on stage thousands of times during performances since the early 1970s-via guillotine, electric chair, hanging, or otherwise- but he has never had to get "old". Alice Cooper, the musician formerly known as Vincent Furnier, however, has just seen his 72nd birthday (an age many of his fellow rock stars never got to see). The concert show he currently tours holds these seemingly antithetical sides of a persona up and makes one ponder what horrors Alice really thinks of now when the spooky voice ominously begins his show each night: "Welcome to Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle".


A theatrical piece that seems to center equally on bringing together influences from Universal-esque classic monster movies and on celebrating the age-centric youth anthems Alice Cooper has become known for, the "Ol' Black Eyes is Back" tour foregrounds caricatures of all sorts. However, with the menagerie of grotesque creatures that feature in the set list– such as FrankenAlice, giant inflatable scarred babies, a teenage Frankenstein's monster, Jason Voorhees, and Mademoiselle Guillotine – it's important to look critically at which personas are being put forward as "nightmare-fodder" and why.


In this paper, I analyze whether or not age(ing) is one of the grotesqueries of Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle. By listening to changes in Cooper's vocal technique, discussing fan interpretations, and highlighting the differences in the performance of the song "I'm Eighteen" (1970) from the early 1970s vs 2020, I offer up a reading of this show as a resource through which we may question the intersection between tropes of horror and those of age(ing); and even further- understand where those lines might get tangled. This work- building on Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas about "the grotesque", the research done by Anne Basting on the sociology of age in theatre, and a combination of musicological influences in disability studies and the aging voice in opera – serves as an opportunity to consider how rock music and its fans have been contending with and re-presenting the genre's founding themes through decades of musicking.

Dominick Argento's 1979 opera _Miss Havisham's Fire_ concludes with a thirty minute solo epilogue performed by the title character. This scene clearly belongs to the long tradition of operatic mad scenes, featuring the exaggerated coloratura and stylistic fragmentation that are hallmarks of the more famous bel canto mad style. Miss Havisham, however, despite her 1860s literary origins, is a demonstrably late-twentieth century madwoman, and her mad scene is organized around a series of extended auditory and visual hallucinations, which are often made audible as orchestral lines. The centrality of these hallucinations to Miss Havisham's characterization roots her in the explicitly twentieth-century construction of madness, schizophrenia, for which auditory hallucinations are a hallmark symptom.
As this paper will demonstrate, Miss Havisham is just  one of many mid- and late-twentieth century mad opera characters for whom hallucinations are a defining but under-studied aspect of their madness. The rising importance of auditory hallucinations in mad opera reflects the concurrent adoption of schizophrenia by the psychiatric community and subsequently by popular culture, while also placing schizophrenia in dialogue with centuries-old understandings of disembodied voices as supernatural. Schizophrenia was first defined in 1911, and obtained medical and cultural prominence beginning in the 1930s. By midcentury, the schizophrenic woman had "become as central a cultural figure for the twentieth century as the hysteric was for the nineteenth." (Showalter 1985 p. 204). Existing models of operatic madness, focused as they are on operas composed before 1910, have generally understood madness in terms of hysteria. Twentieth-century mad opera demands a new model that reflects its negotiation between the traditional operatic construction of madness as hysteria, and a contemporaneous construction of madness as schizophrenia. My paper will examine Argento's _Miss Havisham's Fire_, Britten's _Curlew River_(1964), and Menotti's _The Medium_ (1946) to demonstrate mid-twentieth century tensions between psychiatric and supernatural interpretations of disembodied voices. I thereby propose a new, historically sensitive framework for twentieth-century mad opera that accounts both for the operatic tradition to which they contribute and the contemporaneous medical and popular culture in which their composers and librettists lived and worked.

Since its inception in 2004, the burgeoning field of music and disability studies has led to numerous insights surrounding the lives, works, and social contexts of numerous composers. Recent paradigm-shifting examples include Joseph N. Straus's work on modernism (2018) and Robin Wallace's revisiting of Beethoven's deafness and compositional practice (2018). Scholarship on Joseph Haydn has largely remained absent from this discourse, a surprising omission given that Haydn's rising international fame coincided with his increasing infirmity and physical impairment. While articles by Floyd Grave (2016) and Nancy November (2007) focus, respectively, on disabled narrative in the composer's late string quartets and melancholy in his English songs, scholarship has yet to fully engage with the ways disability characterized Haydn's life and oeuvre, as Sarah Day-O'Connell has noted (2019). 
I address this gap in scholarly discourse by contextualizing Haydn's biography and late oratorios through the lens and language of disability studies. By analyzing primary documents, including Haydn's correspondence and Dies's and Griesinger's biographies, I demonstrate how Haydn appears to have mediated both his compositional process and aspects of his public persona through his increasing age and impaired corporeal state. Yet biographical studies from Haydn's lifetime through to the present show an ongoing trend of either overlooking or pathologizing his comments rather than critically evaluating them. This practice suggests the need for scholarship to reassess the role that disability played in his life and late works. In this presentation, I contribute to such a discussion by joining biographical research to a cripped reading of Haydn's late oratorios, noting how the two works' musical and textual narratology shift from demonstrating a form of inverted narrative prosthesis in _The Creation_ (the premature ending of which 'cures' the Christian concept of original sin) to offering insights into disability gain in the "Winter" section of _The Seasons_. By considering Haydn's late oratorios - works he knowingly wrote for posterity - alongside the composer's and his contemporaries' comments about his increasing impairment, we might glean stronger insight into how disability impacted Haydn's compositional work, and, in turn, how that compositional work reflects disability. 

The early nineteenth century witnessed a profound shift in how music writers and critics perceived the profession of the composer. Whereas writers from previous eras often acknowledged the technical excellence of certain established masters, by the early to mid-1800s the greatest composers were frequently being described as exceptional, even quasi-divine individuals, whose groundbreaking works changed the course of music itself. At times, however, a composer's identity, and even their status as a great genius, could be enmeshed with personal traits such as their intellectual pursuits, work ethic, physical appearance, mental health, or disability. While scholarship has explored the philosophical and aesthetic forces driving the sacralization of "great" composers in the nineteenth century, as well as the ways in which illness, disability, or mental state can influence a composer's identity and oeuvre, there has been less exploration of how a composer's personal lifestyle, moral character, or physical condition could color future generations' evaluations of their greatness.



The pianist-composer Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) was one such individual whose legacy was tarnished by narratives which linked his lifestyle with perceived immorality and physical disability. Several writers and music critics during his lifetime and after his death viewed him as a musical genius, but they also believed that he squandered his higher creative powers through his pursuit of hedonistic pleasure at the expense of his natural gifts. In particular, Dussek's gluttony, obesity, and death from gout were frequent tropes in his reception, and many writers invoked these details to reinforce an image of Dussek as a lazy wastrel, claiming he was more interested in indulging his body through food and drink than enriching his mind and dedicating himself to his art. These narratives on Dussek's gluttony and obesity resonated strongly with theories of physiognomy propagated by Johann Kaspar Lavater and Thomas Cooke, and the connections they forged between mental aptitude, an individual's moral compass, and certain physical ailments and disability. Additionally, while Dussek's apparent decadence and lifestyle were perceived as antithetical to contemporary archetypes of a "great artist," many writers also concluded that his presumed neglect of his musical genius ultimately made him less worthy of veneration and historical prestige. When studied from this perspective, Dussek's reception broadens our understanding of what constituted a "great" composer in the nineteenth century, but it also illuminates how one's body, purported immorality, and physical health could become intertwined with perceptions of their genius, creativity, and even their place in music history.