Music and Disability
About
Since 1919, music and the arts have been integral to UCLA. Even before the disability studies minor, faculty from Herb Alpert School of Music have considered how disability and impairment intersect with music. The Music and Disability Lab bring together the different areas of scholarship and creativity activity being led by the School of Music faculty.
The Music and Disability Lab will showcase different initiatives that are currently in progress. The Lab webpage will also begin to document previous scholarship, symposiums, and events that have included disability, trauma, representation and embodiment.
AFFILIATED FACULTY
PAST RESEARCH AND CREATIVE WORK
Theorizing Trauma and Disability in the Arts:
A Conference Oct. 16-19, 2025
The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and the Center for Musical Humanities present a four-day conference exploring different perspectives on trauma and disabilities in the arts. The conference featured musical performances, art installations, panel discussions and audience interaction.
PUNKAST
In this new series, Associate Professor Jessica Schwartz and guest producer Tequila Mockingbird, founder of the Punk Museum, interview punks, punk scholars, and academics to explore the meaning of punk, beyond the framework of genre, as an intergenerational cultural phenomenon.
Center for Musical Humanities
The Center for Musical Humanities is dedicated to advancing the interests of music and the humanities across the whole of UCLA, engaging its faculty, students, and surrounding communities in a series of events that will bring together scholarship, performance, and outreach.
The mission of the center is to foster the study of music within an interdisciplinary context by bringing together scholars and students in a variety of disciplines from around the nation and world to collaborate with scholars and students at UCLA and its associated communities, and to create an effective and vibrant face for the Herb Alpert School of Music by fostering public musical events inspired by its scholarly ventures, featuring faculty and students from across the school.
Fiat Lux
Disability and Broadway Musicals
Professor Raymond Knapp led a seminar focused on how Broadway musicals engage with disability—as a theme, in representation and embodiment, and in terms of practices. Students learned about Deaf West Theatre productions of Big River and Spring Awakening, Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma!, and The Music Man. Students also explored musicals dealing with neurodiversity directly including Next to Normal, Light in the Piazza, and Man of La Mancha.
DIY Punk
Professor Jessica Schwartz led a seminar that studied do-it-yourself (DIY) punk music as a creative and inclusive process. Students had an immersive experience of DIY punk production with an emphasis on Los Angeles’ historical and ongoing underground artistic foundation. The seminars centered Adobe Punk: a Punk Rehearsal in Real Time, a stage work based in 1980s Los Angeles DIY punk through the lens of Latinx, feminist, and decolonial lineages. Students attended a live performance and had a conversation with the theater crew.
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