Blind musicians
The legendary 6th century Breton druid and bard Kian Gwenc'hlan is depicted as being imprisoned after having his eyes gouged out for refusing to convert to Christianity and singing out that he isn't afraid to die.
[4] Natalie Kononenko had a similar experience in Turkey, though one Turkish musician of great talent, Ashik Veysel, was in fact blind.
One of the most popular musical works in China, "Erquan Yingyue (Moon Reflected in the Second Spring)", was composed in the first half of the 20th century by Hua Yanjun, better known as "Blind Ah Bing".
[10] Goze were similar communities of visually impaired female shamisen and kokyū players who travelled around the country singing songs and begging alms.
Kononenko states that lirnyks, on the other hand, were blind church singers organized into guilds who sang religious songs and were often associated with beggars.
The image of warrior-bards singing epics was quite popular, and there became a tradition that the great ancient singers were veterans valorously blinded in combat.
[5] Because the art of the kobzars was language-specific and included themes dealing with historic subjects of Ukraine's past, the blind singers were often the focus of persecution by occupying powers, according to researcher Mikhailo Khay.
This persecution reached its height under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, when many forms of Ukrainian cultural expression were crushed by the communist government of the Soviet Union.
Documents have been discovered to show that the renowned bandurist Hnat Khotkevych was executed in 1938 and the blind kobzar Ivan Kucherenko was shot in 1937.
Numerous sources claim that there was an organized large scale massacre of Ukrainian blind musicians in the 1930s, though this has not been confirmed by official documents, and most details of the incident (including year, place, and method of execution) are disputed.
During her research in Ukraine, Kononenko found only one blind folk performer of the old songs, a man named Pavlo Suprun, who had studied bandura playing and voice at the Kiev State Conservatory.
During the medieval and early modern eras, harpists, pipers, and other musicians traveled around Ireland, providing music for dances and other occasions.
It was common practice for blind or disabled children to be taught a musical instrument as a means of supporting themselves, as they could not perform hard labour.
One could argue that even Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frederic Handel, who lost their sight late in life but presumably continued to play and compose, should be included in this discussion, along with the great American popular organist George Wright (1920–1998), who likewise lost his sight late in life but continued to present concerts and make sound recordings until his death.
She studied organ with another blind musician, David Duffield Wood (1838–1910), the organist at Philadelphia's St. Stephen's Episcopal Church for many years.
This is particularly true in blues, gospel, jazz, and other predominantly African American forms – perhaps because discrimination at the time made it more difficult for black blind people to find other employment.
The first recorded gospel sanctified barrelhouse piano player, Arizona Dranes, was blind, as were Al Hibbler, and Ray Charles, one of the most important figures in the creation of soul music.
Jeff Healey was a blind Juno Award-winning and Grammy Award-nominated Canadian blues-rock vocalist and guitarist, who attained musical and personal popularity, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Italian pop tenor, Andrea Bocelli, who was born with congenital glaucoma and completely lost his sight at the age of 12, after a football accident,[17] is the biggest-selling singer in the history of classical music,[18][19][20][21] with worldwide sales exceeding 70 million copies[broken anchor].
[25] One of the prominent blind South Indian carnatic musicians is M. Chandrasekaran, a violin maestro who has received some of the highest awards by many musical institutions in India.
He started his career in the early 1970s, composing for hit movies such as Chor Machaye Shor (1974), Geet Gaata Chal (1975), Chitchor (1976) and Ankhiyon Ke Jharokhon Se (1978).
