Disciplinary Journeys of Tuned Listening: From Musicology to Qualitative Research

This paper is written as an homage to Yehudit Cohen, attending to multi-disciplinarity and the contrapuntal relationships among disciplines. Yehudit's musicological work centered on early Baroque, yet simultaneously engaged with contemporary Israeli music and the music education scene. This paper addresses methodological worldviews and practices in musicology and music education with their distinct trajectories, recognizing that eventually both were affected by similar macro forces of the social sciences. Writing from the qualitative research methodology of music and arts education, the second half of the paper reflects, in an autoethnographic style, on the ways that my disciplinary journey has been shaped by broader academic as well as personal contexts. I explore the kind of tuned listening that has guided my research, a listening cultivated by both musicology and qualitative educational research, noting that not only do we research who we are, but that in the process, we become what we research. The paper is written as an invitation for readers to weave in their own disciplinary experiences, attending to differences of perspective and what it may mean for their own inquiries.