The Mnemonist’s legacy: on memory, forgetting, and ableist discourse in twenty-first-century inclusive music education

Expert musical memory has been the fundamental focus of research in the field of musical memory, and this line of research has demonstrably informed the ways memory is understood by the current generation of music professionals. In this theoretical inquiry, we draw on Foucault to first argue that the dominant Western classical music expert gaze in music and memory studies can be seen as a form of ocularcentrism. Second, due to this narrow gaze, the field also fails to recognise that the human memory system is characterised by a unique symbiosis of not just learning and remembering, but also forgetting, a potentially powerful theoretical aspect of memory in music education. Third, we argue that the recent 'genetification' of musical memory, together with the narrow expert gaze, may further reinforce old dichotomies between the talented and untalented, abled and non-abled. Through a critical lens towards the politics of knowledge production in memory studies, we argue that there is a need for a more critical, holistic and ethically reflexive understanding of memory in professional education in music and music education.