Article: "Music by People who Can't Hear"

Music by People Who Can’t Hear

Listening in.

* By Robert Sullivan

The Association of Adult Musicians With Hearing Loss held its first New York concert recently, at the Bruno Walter Auditorium in Lincoln Center, with a program entitled “Incredibly Musical and Significantly Deaf: More Music With Less Hearing.”
Charles Mokotoff, a classical guitarist who has a day job working in IT with the National Institutes of Health, was up first. Among his pieces was one by Edin Solis, a young Costa Rican composer whom Mokotoff communicates with via e-mail. Later, Jennifer Castellano played a tonal piece called Spectrum, Seven Preludes for Piano, which she composed after seeing Spectrum V, a painting by Ellsworth Kelly, at the Metropolitan Museum. It was reminiscent of the more percussive sections of Keith Jarrett’s 1975 improvisations in Köln, Germany, though more optimistic. If you had walked in during either performance, you wouldn’t have guessed that either performer was deaf or hearing impaired.

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