“Overlapping Ecomusicological Realms: Teaching Ecomusicology to Graduate Students through Collaborative Exploration"

I found my way to ecomusicology by way of an earlier interest in the nexus of music, space, and place. Given its relatively new and interdisciplinary nature, I suspect that many others have come to ecomusicology through a similar inroad. In the spring of 2014, I took the opportunity to explore a few of these interdisciplinary connections to ecomusicology in my open topic graduate seminar titled Approaches to Music, Space, and Place: Theory, Ethnography and Ecomusicology (Appendix I provides a PDF of an abbreviated version of the syllabus). In this brief essay, I will share some of the strategies, activities and approaches that I found effective in teaching ecomusicology to graduate students and offer some critical reflections on issues that emerged from class discussions as well as from the students’ final research projects. Along the way, I will also engage in the important task of introducing the following accompanying articles by graduate students Tanner Jones, Megan Murph, and Ben Norton, explaining how their work arose from this collaborative process.