Encountering Music: Songs Seen, Felt, and Heard

The aesthetics of accessibility, where considerations of access shape both the creation and presentation of a production, are a driving force in Canadian Deaf and disability theatre. In this article, we reflect on sound, music, access, and audism in Songs My Mother Never Sung Me, a bilingual American Sign Language (ASL) and sung English chamber opera written and composed by Dave Clarke and produced by Concrete Theatre at SOUND OFF: A Deaf Theatre Festival in 2019. This fictionalized memoir is based on Clarke’s experience as a CODA (Child of Deaf Adult) and explores the complex relationship of a hearing boy and his Deaf mom. In this piece, music and sound are not only aural elements, but are also tactile vibration, visual projection, and rhythmic ASL. This convergence of the senses expands conceptions of sound and music to comment on the inequality of Deaf and hearing access in the world beyond theatre production as audience position and ASL comprehension gave audiences differing access to the tactile vibration and ASL.