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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Interesting Article on Deaf Athletes and Strategies

Noise makers
How deaf athletes deal with noise as part of game strategies
By Carmen Renee Thompson
ESPN The Magazine

Tune it all out. That's the mental approach most athletes try to take in ­pressure situations. Screaming fans, trash-talking opponents, the drumbeat of feet on bleachers ... it's all just white noise. Or so they say. But what if you can't hear any of it? What if you can't hear a coach's instructions or your teammates calling for the ball? What if you live in a world with little or no sound? Nearly three out of every 1,000 American children are born deaf. And that got us thinking: What's it like for athletes who are deaf to compete at an elite level? We caught up with five of them, who shared their strategies for thriving in silence.

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