Music, Music Therapy, Disability Studies, Bioethics, and Health Humanities

This essay describes two disability-related courses—Disability Ethics and Music, Disability, and Society—which have become de facto requirements (one or both courses) for graduate students in music therapy. Music therapists comprise much of the majority of students in these courses who come from healthcare fields. This essay contemplates, in Disability Ethics, the roles of music/musicians/music therapists in bioethics and the role of bioethics in music therapy. In Music, Disability, and Society, students learn that music-making—presumably a talent or hyperability—offers a uniquely valuable perspective on disability. Disability Ethics proposes that mainstream bioethics takes too narrow a view of its potential reach. It marginalizes those professionals beyond doctors, nurses, policymakers, and administrators, such as health workers and other practitioners in mind–body praxis—including, for example, music teachers—who might benefit from its teachings, methods, and research and who at the same time themselves might have a beneficial impact on those teachings and methods. Music, Disability, and Society proposes that, through contemplating the place of talent in culture, the socially constructed aspects of disability are illuminated.