Dr. Ellen Gray, Music
Sounding the Environment
I participated in the 2023 Summer Valley and Ridge workshop in order to develop a 300 level Environmental Humanities seminar in the music department focused on intersections between sound, music, listening, and the natural environment. It was important to me that this seminar foster intellectual exchange between music majors and students in environmental studies (and that students who met specific prerequisites from either discipline could participate). As an ethnomusicologist, cultural anthropologist, and interdisciplinary scholar in music studies, in creating this course, I was interested in drawing on perspectives from “ecomusicology,” an emergent subfield in music studies, along with scholarship in the anthropology of sound and music that investigates indigenous sound worlds and place-making. I hoped to put these perspectives in dialogue with new work in the field of acoustic ecology (some at the intersection of the arts and the sciences). The Valley and Ridge workshop assisted me in bringing my ideas into sharper focus and with the development of the formal course proposal. I plan to teach my course “Ear to the Earth” for the first time in the spring of 2024. Some of the central questions this course will explore include: 1) What might we learn about our relationships to the environment by orienting our ears to the earth?; 2) What perspectives might tuning into sound lend to thinking about climate change and resilience?
The Valley and Ridge workshop helped me to catalyze new ideas about how to incorporate place-based learning into my teaching. I am envisioning assignments possibly at the Dickinson farm, on Dickinson’s campus, and at Kings Gap. Dialogue with my fellow participants was invaluable for helping me generate ideas for guest speakers and to think through ways to integrate sustainability values into my pedagogical practice and course design.