Music Lessons and Other Stories: Partial Inventory

Abstract

In this auto-ethnographic lyric essay, Rishma Dunlop considers the emotional resonance of music education beyond traditional conceptions of acoustical space. She explores what she calls “acute listening” as an embodiment of hearing music across cultural, environmental, and geographical spaces. Dunlop, a poet and a professor of Creative Writing and pedagogy, was a keynote speaker at the Narrative Inquiry in Music Education Conference at Arizona State University in 2008. Her essay explores the significance of the music we listen to and the potential impact of music education on teaching students and provoking ontological concerns about poetics, social practices, knowledge, and concepts of beauty and justice. Human music is explored as it merges in a synaesthesia that is attached to hearing, smell, taste, touch, sight, and memory. “Music Lessons and Other Stories” is an inventory of an epistemology of listening.