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ix Among the themes weaving together the women in this study, none is more fundamental than collaboration. And so it is with the book itself. Over years and miles I have benefited from the generous collaborative spirit of dozens of people, some close friends and colleagues, and others professionals I’ve never met. If, as my skillful listeners conclude, we are all parts of a larger endeavor, Music and the Skillful Listener is most assuredly the product of an ecosystem of efforts. My thanks must go first to the composers whose music captured my imagination. Victoria Bond, Emily Doolittle, Libby Larsen, Pauline Oliveros, Joan Tower, and Ellen Zwilich invited me into their lives and helped me to understand the nuances of their relationships to “nature.” They have enlarged my world. I hope that readers will find their way to the pieces that I discuss so that they too can be challenged, transported, and changed. I’m grateful to administrators, faculty colleagues, and graduate students at the Florida State University, College of Music, for encouraging my work. No one questioned me when I proposed courses on music and place in the early 2000s, or offered a doctoral seminar titled “Ecocriticism and Musicology ” in spring 2006. Everyone assumed my ideas had merit. I hope this book proves their trust to be well founded. Travel to archives was made possible by support from my area’s Curtis Mayes Orpheus Fund in Musicology. I’m indebted to Douglass Seaton, Frank Gunderson, Charles Brewer, and Michael Bakan for nurturing creativity. In 2009 the university awarded me financial assistance and time away from teaching duties through a grant from the Committee on Faculty Research Support (coFrs). The grant proved essential to conducting interviews, consulting research, and writing the first three chapters. Numerous other colleagues in the College of Music offered a collaborative hand. Sarah Hess Cohen and Sara Nodine, librarians in the Acknowledgments Acknowledgments x Warren D. Allen Music Library, joined me in many a search for elusive materials . Marcia Porter, Alice-Ann Darrow, and Heidi Williams generously listened, sent me to sources, played with ideas, and cheered me on. Dean Don Gibson of the College of Music is a uniquely talented administrator; each day he creates anew an ideal environment to foster growth. This project would not have come to fruition without his personal support. Dean Gibson’s door is always open. His commitment to his faculty is palpable. Each of us is certain we are his favorite. My colleagues and I will miss him when he retires as dean at the end of the 2012–13 academic year. Leigh Edwards, my colleague in the English Department, provided bibliographical ideas and a lunchtime sounding board. Her excitement about the potential of this project and her belief that I was the person to do it were crucial to its happening at all. I’ve been fortunate to work with exceptional students in classes, in seminars , and as my assistants; they’ve contributed to this particular project in a variety of ways, some of which I’m sure they are unaware. Many of them have graduated, but even so in a number of cases our conversations continue. While it is dangerous to name names and risk overlooking someone, I’d rather make that mistake than to not try. With that caveat I want to thank Caitlin Brown, Toni Casamassina, Amy Dunning, Katherine Etheridge, Andrew Gades, Gonzalo Gallardo, Ashley Geer, Dennis Hutchison, Amy Keyser, Megan MacDonald, Charles Mueller, Crystal Peebles, Erin Scheffer, John Spilker, Stephanie Stallings, Dana Terres, Stephanie Thorne, Lyndsey Thornton, Steve Thursby, Catherine Williams, and Felicia Youngblood; Brianna Rhodes took on the Herculean task of creating the musical examples. Their questions, challenges, curiosity, and excitement inform everything I do. Collaborators recognize no geographic boundaries, and many of mine live well beyond my university home. The very first images that appear in Music and the Skillful Listener come from Tina Gianquitto’s book “Good Observers of Nature”: American Women and the Scientific Study of the Natural World, 1820–1885. Her study was an inspiration for mine. Robin Rausch and Sarah Dorsey made my work on the MacDowell Colony and on Louise Talma possible . I’m regularly emboldened by Sabine Feisst, who lives her commitment to the environment and is a scholar’s scholar. Susan Pickett responded to an inquiry from a total stranger and agreed to share her unpublished work on Marion Bauer with me. While I was visiting his university, Dereck Daschke engaged with me in...

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