Historically, music and the experiences of deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) individuals have been intertwined in one manner or another. However, music has never ignited as much hope for the “improvement” of the Deaf experience as during the American oralist movement (ca. 1880-1960) which prioritized lip-reading and speaking over the use of sign language. While it is acknowledged that the oralist movement failed to provide the best possible education to many American DHH students and devastated many within the Deaf community, music scholars have continued to cite publications by oralist educators as rationales for the continued development of music programs for DHH students.

This document is an attempt to reframe the role of music during the American oralist movement with a historical account of ways music was recruited as a tool for teaching vocal articulation at schools for the deaf from 1900 to 1960. During this time period, music was recruited simply as a utility to overcome disability and as an aid for assimilating into the hearing world rather than as the rich experiential phenomenon it could have been for the DHH community. My goal is to add this important caveat to the received history of early institutional music education for DHH students. Primary sources include articles published between 1900 and 1956 in The Volta Review, a journal founded by the oralist leader Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922).

This document explores the presence of stereotype threat among college students training for careers in music. Beginning in the 1990s, an effort led by Claude M. Steele (social psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University) identified stereotype threat as an attribute to the underperformance of minority groups. Continued research has mainly focused on stereotype threat within the following contexts: female performance within science, technology, engineering, and mathematical (STEM) fields, African American performance on standardized tests, and European American performance in athletics. This document contains two pilot studies that strive to apply current stereotype threat research to the field of music education and music performance in order to ask the following questions: Does stereotype threat impact the education of underrepresented collegiate music students? Does stereotype threat heighten gender awareness of musicians when they enter the typical auditioning environment? The two pilot studies consist of the following: (1) a survey intended to analyze the possible impact of stereotype threat on music students’ interaction with their colleagues and music instructors and (2) a quantitative study that explores the presence of stereotype threat (among musicians) through the use of a word-fragment completion task administered immediately before a mock audition.