At Texas’s School for the Blind, an Inventive Band of Outsiders Takes the Stage

The kids were exhausted before rehearsal even began. They’d entered the small classroom one by one on this cold evening in mid-February, slowly feeling their way with canes, some with an adult guiding them. All six were blind, some more so than others. They had been gathering almost every Wednesday night for the previous five months at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, in Austin, to compose, play, and record songs. Most of the music didn’t have lyrics—there would be no actual singing—and it wasn’t performed on pianos, guitars, or violins. The students were doing it all on synthesizers, those electronic machines that make the sorts of weird, wavy, cheesy sounds heard in art rock and synth pop, in disco and techno. Sitting in…

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