Blog curated by Marco Ramelli, TU Dublin Conservatoire
From earliest times, blind musicians have been closely associated with musical instruments and plucked-string instruments in particular, as evidenced by cuneiform sources from Mesopotamia, one of the earliest known forms of writing in human history. These sources indicate that as early as the eighteenth century BCE, blindness was associated with a natural inclination toward music, and blind musicians playing instruments such as lutes, lyres, and harps were already highly popular, suggesting that the association of blindness with plucked instruments dates to still earlier times.[1]
Although this association is often attributed to the lack of viable occupations available to blind individuals—primarily music and charity—a quite different possibility must be considered, namely, that blind musicians were particularly well suited to these instruments. Examples of blind musicians specializing in plucked-string instruments appear across many cultures: they include early depictions of harpists in ancient Egypt and Greece, blind harpists in Ireland, the guilds of blind musicians and fortune-tellers in China, the goze nomadic female shamisen players or the tradition of biwa hōshi (lute priests) in Japan, and the kobzars, players of the Cossack lute in Ukraine, to name just a few.[2]
The musical abilities of blind individuals in these communities were often associated with other intellectual and spiritual qualities, such as wisdom or a connection to the spiritual world.
[1] Nele Ziegler has mined cuneiform sources to reveal further connections between music and blindness. In the myth of Enki and Ninmah, the god Ea decrees a favorable fate for a blind man by making him a musician. Blind musicians were held in such high regard that King Yasmah-Addu of Mari reportedly had sighted children intentionally blinded so they could be trained as musicians. While this was likely an exceptional experiment, it provides evidence of a strong cultural belief in the connection between blindness and musical ability.
Additional evidence from Old Babylonian texts shows that blind children were commonly sent to receive musical training from older musicians. Mesopotamian culture was not unique in this regard: similar associations between blindness and musical or poetic ability can be found in other ancient civilizations, including Egypt and Greece. Nele Ziegler, “Music, the Work of Professionals,” in Karen Radner and Eleanor Robson, eds., The Handbook of Cuneiform Culture (2011; online ed., Oxford Academic, 18 Sept. 2012), 294, doi.org/10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199557301.013.0014.
[2] Of course, blind musicians have also been associated with instruments beyond plucked strings, notably the organ, flute, and piano. For a general overview of the connection between the blind community and music, see, for instance, David Baker and Lucy Green, Insights in Sound: Visually Impaired Musicians’ Lives and Learning (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 15–18.
For further reading – I suggest Eric J. Harvey post: The songbird: linking music and blindness in ancient Babylonia
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