"Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is seen as the great composer’s towering achievement in a career full of superlatives. That he was deaf when he wrote it makes it even more unbelievable. That act of creation despite the odds is something that Jessica Holmes thinks a lot about. She is a musicologist with a PhD from McGill and these days she is a post-doctorate fellow at UCLA in Los Angeles. Her interest is in the relationship between music and the body and different forms of disability. She’s hard at work on a book about music and deafness called Music at the Margins of Sense for the University of Michigan Press.

'Deafness has emerged as my primary area of expertise in so far as I am interested in the senses and in how they inform the musical experience.' She has a personal connection. Her uncle is profoundly deaf. 'This was my natural entry point into the subject — witnessing the invisible painstaking labours he undertook in his social interactions to supplement the constraints of his hearing aid such as maintaining clear sight lines, intuiting meaning from body language — things that many hearing people take for granted.'"

Link to online article through Artsfile website