Researching Music- and Place-Making through Engaged Practice: Becoming a Musicking Geographer

How might geographers better understand the active, lived, on-the-ground experiences of musicians in places, and their role in place-making? This paper describes how I have developed a methodological framework that brings together two approaches, musicking ethnography, and music mapping, to examine the co-constitutive processes of music-making and place-making in three Irish towns. As a professional musical practitioner, I bring to geography the perspective of a musicking-geographer, drawing on Christopher Small’s (2011) concept of “musicking”, and Harriet Hawkins’ (2011) work on geography-art “doing”. Working with musicians of all age groups, musical backgrounds and interests from across the amateur-professional continuum (cf. Finnegan2007), I aspire to create egalitarian, engaging, respectful and useful research experiences for the musicians with whom I work. I consider how my approach has developed in response to these aspirations, how my dual-positionality impacted the approach, and how it might be further developed and adapted by practitioner-geographers