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      in Music

      Making Music Visible: Singing in Sign

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      On a recent afternoon in a brightly lit studio in Brooklyn, Mervin Primeaux-O’Bryant and Brandon Kazen-Maddox were filming a music video. They were recording a cover version of “Midnight Train to Georgia,” but the voices that filled the room were those of Gladys Knight and the Pips, who made the song a hit in the 1970s. And yet the two men in the studio were also singing — with their hands.Primeaux-O’Bryant is a deaf actor and dancer; Kazen-Maddox is a hearing dancer and choreographer who is, thanks to seven deaf family members, a native speaker of American Sign Language. Their version of “Midnight Train to Georgia” is part of a 10-song series of American Sign Language covers of seminal works by Black female artists that Kazen-Maddox is producing for Broadstream, an arts streaming platform.A look behind the scenes as Mervin Primeaux-O’Bryant and Brandon Kazen-Maddox collaborate on a signed performance of the classic song.Up Until Now CollectiveAround the world, music knits together communities as it tells foundational stories, teaches emotional intelligence and cements a sense of belonging. Many Americans know about signed singing from moments like the Super Bowl, when a sign language interpreter can be seen — if barely — performing the national anthem alongside a pop star.But as sign language music videos proliferate on YouTube, where they spark comments from deaf and hearing viewers, the richness of American Sign Language, or A.S.L., has gotten a broader stage.“Music is many different things to different people,” Alexandria Wailes, a deaf actress and dancer told me in a video interview, using an interpreter. Wailes performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the 2018 Super Bowl, and last year drew thousands of views on YouTube with her sign language contribution to “Sing Gently,” a choral work by Eric Whitacre.“I realize,” she added, “that when you do hear, not hearing may seem to separate us. But what is your relationship to music, to dance, to beauty? What do you see that I may learn from? These are conversations people need to get accustomed to having.”Mervin Primeaux-O’Bryant, who collaborated with Brandon Kazen-Maddox on “Midnight Train to Georgia.”Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesA good A.S.L. performance prioritizes dynamics, phrasing and flow. The parameters of sign language — hand shape, movement, location, palm orientation and facial expression — can be combined with elements of visual vernacular, a body of codified gestures, allowing a skilled A.S.L. speaker to engage in the kind of sound painting that composers use to enrich a text.At the recent video shoot, Gladys Knight’s voice boomed out of a large speaker while a much smaller one was tucked inside Primeaux-O’Bryant’s clothes, so that he could “tangibly feel the music,” he said in an interview, with Kazen-Maddox interpreting. Out of sight of the camera, an interpreter stood ready to translate any instructions from the crew, all hearing, while a laptop displayed the song lyrics.In the song, the backup singers — here personified by Kazen-Maddox — encourage Knight as she rallies herself to join her lover, who has returned home to Georgia. In the original recording the Pips repeat the phrase “all aboard.” But as Kazen-Maddox signed it, those words grew into signs evoking the movement of the train and its gears. A playful tug at an invisible whistle corresponded to the woo-woo of the band’s horns. Primeaux-O’Bryant signed the lead vocals with movements that gently extended the words, just as in the song: on the drawn-out “oh” of “not so long ago-oh-oh,” his hands fluttered into his lap. The two men also incorporated signs from Black A.S.L.“The hands have their own emotions,” Primeaux-O’Bryant said. “They have their own mind.”“The hands have their own emotions,” said Primeaux-O’Bryant, far right. “They have their own mind.”Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesDeaf singers prepare for their interpretations by experiencing a song through any means available to them. Many people speak about their heightened receptivity to the vibrations of sound, which they experience through their body. As a dancer trained in ballet, Primeaux-O’Bryant said he was particularly attuned to the vibrations of a piano as transmitted through a wooden floor.Primeaux-O’Bryant was a student at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf in Washington in the early 1990s when a teacher asked him to sign a Michael Jackson song during Black History Month. His first reaction was to refuse.But the teacher “pulled it out” of him, he said, and he was thrust into the limelight in front of a large audience. Then, Primeaux-O’Bryant said, “the lights came on and my cue happened and I just exploded and signed the work and it felt good.” Afterward the audience erupted in applause: “I fell in love with performing onstage.”Both men spoke of the impact ballet training had on their signing.Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesSigning choirs have long been common around the world. But the pandemic has fostered new visibility for signing and music, aided in part by the video-focused technology that all musicians have relied on to make art together. As part of the “Global Ode to Joy” celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth last year, the artist Dalia Ihab Younis wrote a new text for the final chorus of the Ninth Symphony which, performed by an Egyptian a cappella choir, taught elementary signs in Arabic Sign Language.Last spring, the pandemic forced an abrupt stop to live singing as choirs were particularly thought to be potential spreaders of the coronavirus. In response, the Netherlands Radio Choir and Radio Philharmonic Orchestra reached out to the Dutch Signing Choir to collaborate on a signed elegy, “My heart sings on,” in which the keening voice of a musical saw blended with the lyrical gestures of Ewa Harmsen, who is deaf. She was joined by members of the Radio Choir, who had learned some signs for the occasion.“It has more meaning when I sing with my hands,” Harmsen said in a video interview, speaking and signing in Dutch with an interpreter present. “I also love to sing with my voice, but it’s not that pretty. My children say to me, ‘Don’t sing, mother! Not with your voice.’”The challenges of signing music multiply when it comes to polyphonic works like the Passion oratorios of Bach, with their complex tapestries of orchestral and vocal counterpoint and declamatory recitatives. Early in April, Sing and Sign, an ensemble founded in Leipzig, Germany, by the soprano Susanne Haupt, uploaded a new production of part of the “St. John Passion” that is the first fruit of an ongoing undertaking.Haupt worked with deaf people and a choreographer to develop a performance that would render not only the sung words of the oratorio, but also the character of the music. For example, the gurgling 16th notes that run through the strings are expressed with the sign for “flowing.”“We didn’t want to just translate text,” Haupt said. “We wanted to make music visible.”Just who should be entrusted with that process of making music visible can be a contentious question. Speaking between takes at the shoot in Brooklyn, Primeaux-O’Bryant said that some music videos created by hearing A.S.L. speakers lack expressivity and render little more than the words and basic rhythm.“Sometimes interpreters don’t show the emotions that are tied to the music,” he said. “And deaf people are like, ‘What is that?’”Kazen-Maddox signing “relationship.”Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesPrimeaux-O’Bryant signing “gone” or “left” or “took off,” as in a person leaving.Justin Kaneps for The New York TimesBoth men spoke of the impact ballet training had on the quality of their signing. Kazen-Maddox said that when he took daily ballet classes in his 20s, his signing became more graceful.“There is a port de bras, which you only learn from ballet, which I was really engraving into my body,” he said. “And I watched my sign language, which had been with me my whole life, become more compatible with music.”Wailes, too, traces her musicality to her training in dance. “I am a little more attuned with the overall sensitivity to spatial awareness in my body,” she said. And, she added, “not everyone is a good singer, right? So I think you’d have to make that analogy for signers as well.” More

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      in Movies

      Overlooked No More: Granville Redmond, Painter, Actor, Friend

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      He was known for his California landscapes. Deaf since childhood, he acted with Charlie Chaplin in silent films, an early example of deaf representation in Hollywood.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In the opening scene of the classic silent film “City Lights” (1931), Charlie Chaplin’s character, the Little Tramp, dangles comically from a statue while its sculptor watches in horror, raising his hand to his mouth in surprise and wiping his brow in distress.The actor portraying the sculptor, Granville Redmond, appeared in seven Chaplin films, recognizable by his wild mane of hair. Redmond was deaf, and his performances were early examples of deaf representation in Hollywood. Some believe Redmond even taught Chaplin, famous as a pantomime, how to use sign language.But Redmond was first and foremost an artist, one who inspired Chaplin with paintings of California’s natural beauty: quiet, brown tonal scenes; lonely rock monuments jutting off an island peninsula; tree-dotted meadows lit by a warm sun; blue nocturnal marshes under the dramatic glow of the moon. His paintings are considered today among the best examples of California Impressionism.“California Poppy Field” — Redmond  was admired for his landscapes depicting golden poppies, the state’s official flower. California School for the Deaf, Fremont, Gift of Edith RedmondThe Los Angeles Times art critic Arthur Millier wrote in 1931 that Redmond was “unrivaled in the realistic depiction of California’s landscape.” Yet his style was never uniform: Some paintings left sections of the canvas exposed and chunky deposits of pigment, while others took on a smoother look.Above all he was known for his paintings of golden poppies, the state’s official flower. His poppies accented his renditions of the rolling meadows of the San Gabriel Valley, often accompanied by purple lupines. Sometimes they complemented a coastal scene with bursts of yellow highlights.“He painted them better than anyone else; I don’t think that can be argued,” said Scott A. Shields, who curated a show of Redmond’s work last year at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. “You can feel the seasons. You can feel when it’s spring, you can feel when it’s winter, and you can feel when it starts to become summer.”His paintings of poppies became a popular keepsake for tourists, to Redmond’s chagrin; he preferred painting scenes of solitude.“Alas, people will not buy them,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “They all seem to want poppies.”Chaplin supported Redmond’s painting career, offering him a room to paint in the loft of an unused building on his studio lot. On breaks, Chaplin would visit Redmond there and quietly watch him work.“Redmond paints solitude, and yet by some strange paradox the solitude is never loneliness,” Chaplin told Alice T. Terry in a 1920 article for The Jewish Deaf, a magazine.Redmond in his studio in 1917. Chaplin would sometimes visit him and quietly watch him work.Collection of Paula and Terry Trotter.He had such an appreciation for Redmond’s paintings that he took down the photographs of film celebrities from his walls so as not to detract from the Redmond work that he placed over his mantel.“You know, something puzzles me about Redmond’s pictures,” Chaplin was quoted as saying in 1925 in The Silent Worker, a newspaper for the deaf community. “There’s a wonderful joyousness about them all.”“Look at the gladness in that sky, the riot of color in those flowers,” he continued. “Sometimes I think that the silence in which he lives has developed in him some sense, some great capacity for happiness in which we others are lacking.”Grenville Richard Seymour Redmond was born in Philadelphia, Pa., on March 9, 1871, the oldest of five children of Charles and Elizabeth (Buck) Redmond. (He changed the spelling of his name to Granville in 1898 to differentiate himself from an uncle.) His father was a Civil War veteran in the Union Army and a laborer who worked across several trades. Redmond lost his ability to hear when he was 2, after coming down with scarlet fever. The next year his family moved to San Jose, Calif., to live near a family member who owned a ranch.“Moonlight on the Marsh” Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Stiles IIIn 1879, he enrolled in the California Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, and the Blind (now the California School for the Deaf) in Berkeley. It was there Redmond found an affinity for drawing under the instruction of another deaf artist, Theophilus Hope d’Estrella, who introduced him to a Saturday art class at the California School of Design. He went on to enroll in the school. In 1893, he was selected by the faculty to create a drawing for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.Redmond communicated through sign language and writing, but because of his focus on art he never mastered written English, a gap in his education that he came to regret. “In my early days in school I was always drawing, drawing,” he wrote.After graduation, he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian. In 1895, his painting “Matin d’Hiver” (“Winter Morning”), depicting a barge on a bank of the Seine, was admitted to the Paris Salon, a high honor for an artist at the time. He painted in France for a few more years, hoping to enter another painting at the Salon and win a medal, but he struggled financially and returned to California, depressed, in 1898.He married Carrie Ann Jean, who was from Indiana and also deaf, in 1899, and they had three children.Redmond’s paintings of poppies became popular among tourists — much to his chagrin. He preferred painting scenes of solitude. “Alas, people will not buy them,” he said. “They all seem to want poppies.”Collection of Thomas GianettoRedmond’s early works were Tonalist in nature, a nod to his training in San Francisco as well as to the artists of the 19th-century Barbizon school, whose landscape paintings he had come to know in France. Many of his paintings are scenes from Terminal Island, Catalina Island and Laguna Beach in Southern California. He returned to Northern California in 1908, living and painting in Monterey, San Mateo and Marin Counties.“A lot of newspapers would write that he could see more than the average person because his sense of vision was heightened,” Shields, the Crocker museum curator, said in a phone interview. “Redmond kind of believed that himself.”Redmond’s work was well received, but a lack of funds — partly because of an economic downturn at the beginning of World War I — led him to move back to Los Angeles and try his hand at acting.In the silent-movie era Redmond’s disability, coupled with his artistic inclination, worked to his advantage. Chaplin saw him as a natural for small parts in his films because Redmond expressed himself through gestures, Shields said. The two men communicated on the set by signing to each other.Sometimes Redmond’s deafness worked its way into plotlines. In Arthur Rosson’s “You’d Be Surprised” (1926), Redmond played a coroner pretending to be a deaf valet. Only viewers who knew sign language could follow the conversation.The movies also provided him with a new market for his art; buyers included the Hollywood elite, like Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.Redmond died of complications of a heart condition on May 24, 1935. He was 64. (Chaplin died at 88 in 1977.)Alice Terry, the writer for The Jewish Deaf magazine, saw artistic commonalities in the two friends.“For more than two years now, these two have worked side by side,” she wrote in 1920, “Chaplin, silently and dramatically, by his ingenious trivialities, creating mirth and sunshine for millions of tired people; and Redmond, silently and none the less effectively, brightening the lives of all, by his radiant, appealing pictures on canvas.” More

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      in Television

      How This Comedian Came to Embrace Her Deafness

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      How This Comedian Came to Embrace Her Deafnessvia Jessica FloresJessica Flores, a comedian and improv performer, went from hiding her hearing loss to posting YouTube videos about it.I recently spoke with Flores about channelling her lighthearted nature to spread awareness. Here’s what she told me → More

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      in Music

      I Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His Music

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyI Think Beethoven Encoded His Deafness in His MusicGabriela Lena Frank, a composer born with high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss, describes her creative experience.“Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic?”Credit…Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis, via Getty ImagesDec. 27, 2020Gabriela Lena Frank, a composer and pianist and the founder of the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, which aims to foster diverse compositional voices and artist-citizens, was born with a neurosensory high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss. In an interview with Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, she described her creative practice and her exploration of the music of Beethoven, who gradually lost his hearing and by his 40s was almost totally deaf. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.From the time I was a little girl, I have been fascinated with how deafness affected Beethoven. If you look at his piano sonatas, in that first one in F Minor, the hands are very close together and the physical choreographies of the left and right hands are not that dissimilar. As he gets older, the activity of the hands become more dissimilar in his piano work, and farther apart.The progression over the course of the sonatas — a musical document of his hearing loss in transition — is not perfectly linear by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s undeniable. By the time of the “Waldstein” Sonata, not only are the hands far apart, but they are doing very different things: that left hand pounding in thick chords against the right hand’s spare little descending line, for instance.Well, I recall from my therapy classes for hearing-impaired children that I was taught to recognize thick from thin. My therapist had me close my eyes and indicate from which direction a rumbly drum was coming, as opposed to a high-pitched whistle. I couldn’t really hear them, but I could certainly feel them and their contrasting energies.I think it’s fascinating, too, that as Beethoven’s hands stretched for lower and higher notes, he demanded pianos with added notes, elongating the pitch range of the keyboard; he asked for physically heavier instruments that resonated with more vibration. More pitch distance and difference, and more vibration and resonance, create a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person, trust me. A more dissonant and thick language, with clashing frequencies, also causes more vibration, so the language does get more physically visceral that way, too.That said, if I don’t wear my hearing aids for a couple of days, my composing ideas start to become more introverted. This can produce music that is more intellectual, more contrapuntal, more internal, more profound, more spiritual, more trippy. And I think these are also hallmarks of Beethoven’s later music, and not just for piano.Yet more from my own experience: When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music, as some composers do. In fact, I do the opposite: I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream when unusual and often impossible events come together, the perfect place from which to compose. And when I put in my hearing aids again, I can feel all these wonderful ideas and connections fly away, just as a dream disappears when awakening.The composer Gabriela Lena Frank in Boonville, Calif. “When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music,” she said. “I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream.”Credit…Carlos Chavarria for The New York TimesI wonder: Is it an exaggeration to say that composers after Beethoven, the vast majority of them hearing, were forever changed by a deaf aesthetic? And that the modern-day piano wouldn’t be with us if a deaf person hadn’t demanded its existence? This is beyond my expertise, but I’ve also wondered about sign language. Are there certain spatial gestures in the language that appear in the choreographic execution of certain kinds of music? And if so, does this imply yet more levels in which a deaf sensibility infuses the music-making of a hearing world?I often wonder how Beethoven would react to modern-day hearing aids considering his great frustration with the ear trumpets of his day. Personally, I miss the old analogs of my girlhood, for their simplicity. Nowadays it’s an effort not to roll my eyes as a technician fits me with the ubiquitous digital aids that, in addition to all manner of dazzling bionic-lady bells and whistles, default to the type of correction desired by late-deafened people — namely, high frequencies and spatial reorientation to help with speech recognition. That’s completely understandable as losing the ability to communicate with loved ones is an awful and dispiriting experience.Yet those of us born with hearing loss are often champion lip-readers (as I am) or use sign language. And whether or not we are musical, we join musicians with hearing loss (at any stage) in desiring hearing aids that prioritize beauty of sound, unchanged pitch, unchanged timber and naturalness — restoring proper weight to middle and low frequencies, and spatialization. We don’t want hearing aids that ply our sound world with obvious artifice, like a supposedly “acoustic” album that’s been overworked by a manic sound engineer.In this vein, I don’t think Beethoven would like how so many modern-day digital hearing aids massage all kinds of processes into what the wearer hears. It helps to have an imaginative and sensitive technician, preferably one with experience with performers and composers. A good fitting is an art so the music can just breathe.At the piano, I usually start practicing without my hearing aids, entering a world of profound silence familiar from my earliest years, when I wasn’t yet fitted. At first, I’m still hearing the music in my head, but after a while, I’m more aware of the choreography, how it feels like a dance in my hands. Focusing on a physical experience that feels good and healthy can counteract bad habits which appear when you are only listening to the sound.For instance, if one plays a large chord of, say, eight notes, the tendency will be to bring out the lowest note and the highest note — the bass and the melody — to give them more audibility and importance. Because of the structure of the hands, this means the weakest pinkie fingers are bringing out the most important notes. To help the poor fingers out, the hands may be tempted to angle out, left hand pointing to the bass, right hand to the melody.This is a very unnatural position for your hands to be in, and in fact it mimics the wrist-breaking karate locks taught in dojos, inviting injury. Imagine a series of these chords up and down the keyboard, in such an unnatural position. But because you are chasing a full-bodied sound from this eight-note chord, and not paying attention to its physicality, you start to do dangerous things. With the ability to take the sound out of the equation, I focus on the feel. I solidify a good technique first, and know it. Knowing it, I can hang onto it once I do put my hearing aids back in, and then work on the sound.So, ironically, even though we are talking about a sonic art form, sound can be a distraction. Sound can take your attention away from the many other factors that go into making music. Music, after all, is about so much more than volume. For my own loss, I’m just missing volume. I’m not missing everything else one needs to make or enjoy music. And I even have perfect pitch, so in some ways, I hear better than hearing people.And I think that had to have happened to Beethoven. He learned to create music without sound, however reluctantly. While he increasingly withdrew from society and disliked talking about his disability, he left us a living document of his hearing loss in transition likely starting with music written in his mid to late 20s, when his hearing began to fade. In other words, I think he encoded his deafness in music. And as I say, the progression in his music is not a perfectly linear one, just as his progression through deafness was likely not perfectly linear, but the journey is there. Unmistakably.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More