Writing and speaking are essential means of understanding, studying, and sharing music in the Western art music tradition. The papers presented in this symposium were the outgrowth of authors' dialogue during the summer of 2004. Each of them worked independently, yet each of them was also aware of the direction, the themes, and the ways of the others. The result is kaleidoscopic, each author starting from a different place, but seemingly working from the same palette of colors. Among others, Eleanor Stubley writes as a philosopher and conductor. Her work here is part of a larger on-going study that examines the way in which the body fills both language and music makers' experience of music, with a particular focus on the way in which an interest in the body renews their understanding of music, language, and thought. Through a series of inter-connecting meditations inspired by the letter A, she challenges the practice of grounding research and practice in definitions of music as "organized sound." Her writing makes visible the habitual of a variety of education practices, asking them to think anew about instructional technologies such as the alphabet, scale, and taxonomies of musical form, and to find in what they have traditionally thought of as practices of the mind, the omnipresence of the body. It also offers a new perspective on the hand, not as a tool or muscle to be trained as a skill, but as the very ground from which to develop an aesthetics of music that combines and recognizes the multiple ways in which they know and encounter music, through sight, sound, movement, and touch. (Contains 58 footnotes and 12 notes.)