Conference Agenda

Whether or not they ultimately become musicologists, students learn more by doing musicology than by merely consuming others’ work. This panel explores how working with primary sources constitutes a form of “doing musicology” that helps students build threshold skills and master concepts within the field. Each presentation will offer a different example of primary sources at the heart of active learning techniques that can be applied across courses and institutional contexts. The first presentation will propose a pragmatic approach based on the standard primary source anthologies. By re-organizing information found in administrative documents into daily schedules of historical composers, students assign humanity to iconic figures, demonstrate the impact of job requirements on musical composition, and ultimately correct common misconceptions about canonic composers. After considering the cultural context, the second presentation demonstrates how primary sources offer students opportunities to create educated inferences, form research questions, and differentiate between historical and current cultural analysis. The next presentation concentrates on the latter; students use recent primary sources, including online comments and Google search results, to engage in ethnographic research focusing on current cultural values surrounding music and musicians. The fourth presentation discusses cultural context and canon formation using historical, especially physical, primary sources. In accessing these sources, students learn specific techniques for how to critically engage with a variety of source formats and discuss related social identities. Finally, the last presentation will provide a culminating assignment in which students use both existing primary sources and recent scholarship to invent a fictional primary source that is stylistically, contextually, and factually appropriate for a particular historical era and location.

In critically evaluating primary sources, students can create their own historical perspectives rather than consuming others’. The active learning activities shared in this panel demonstrate how primary sources offer excellent opportunities to reach beyond content to larger concepts and skills that are both transferrable and foundational to the field of musicology.

This presentation proposes a strategic use of primary sources within Western music history surveys. Although scholarship in music history pedagogy has been championing alternatives to these courses, many college teachers (including contingent faculty and graduate instructors) are still routinely required to teach them. While we work to rethink music history teaching more globally, we need to address the reality of the enduring survey, with its composer-focused narratives. Yet precisely when discussing canonic figures, instructors can help students dispel common misconceptions about “creative genius,” while recognizing how canonization itself took place. I argue that primary sources provide the key pedagogical ingredient for achieving these outcomes. I follow research in history education, information literacy, and music history pedagogy (“Rethinking Primary Sources” roundtable, Journal of Music History Pedagogy 2019), which has shown the value of primary sources for the development of students’ historical thinking skills.

I will describe specific teaching activities based on familiar primary sources from the Strunk-Treitler and Weiss-Taruskin collections. I acknowledge the caveats of abridged anthologies (as noted in the JMHP 2019 roundtable), but I intend this presentation especially for teachers who may lack the time or resources to engage with more extended corpora of primary sources. The first in-class activity assigns Joseph Haydn’s 1761 Esterházy contract as a handout to small groups of students. After reviewing the document, each group is tasked to compile in writing a typical one-day schedule for Haydn, thus highlighting the historical reality of musicians’ creativity as linked to patronage and employment; a follow-up assignment invites students to dramatize that daily routine in a micro-play (written or video). A second activity compares and contrasts W. A. Mozart’s letter about the reception of his Symphony K. 297 in Paris with Beethoven’s “Heiligenstadt Testament” to help students realize the difference between audience-oriented and “artist-as-prophet” attitudes. Finally, a guided study of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s article on Beethoven (1813) demonstrates the process of canonization. Even within a survey course, strategic use of primary sources can help students undo the pervasive belief in composers as self-inspired geniuses while also identifying the very origins of genius mythologies.

For many students, the research process looks something like this: formulate a research question or theory, then find sources to answer their question or support their theory. This process has pitfalls, however. Student questions may prove too broad to answer, too obvious or shallow to allow for nuanced argumentation, or simply result in a literature review of what others have said. This paper reframes the role of primary sources, shifting from generating answers to generating questions.

I detail two strategies to help students build skills for better research questions. In the first, students explore an unusual aspect of early music: English Country Dancing. Following a day devoted to learning how to dance, I provide students with a variety of paired or grouped primary sources—dance instructions, musical notation, and images. Comparing sources, students first detail the similarities and differences between the two, then identify possible inferences about what similarities or differences could reveal. In the second, students explore the messages of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (1964). Following a day discussing the music, students are given a general topic to search for in online newspaper databases—either antisemitism, gender roles, or interracial marriage. Students share what they discovered, and we discuss successful research strategies. Drawing on the group’s findings, students complete a worksheet that walks them through the process of finding an argument: summarizing the articles, connecting scenes and songs to the topic, and finally articulating a thesis generated by the primary sources.

This presentation considers popular sources recently published online as primary sources, readily available and widely accessible to students no matter their prior musical education or ability. Considering sources such as social media comments, marketing materials on websites, headline diction, or Google search results as ethnographic data allows students to become aware of current and historical value systems affecting music culture.

I discuss two examples of active learning primary source activities. In the first, students in small groups analyze the terminology, images, and related questions that are generated in a Google search for “classical music composers.” After viewing the fifty-one images of white composers mostly from Europe, 49–50 of which are men, and seeing the recurring words of “famous,” “the best,” and “the greatest,” students construct their own definition of a canon. When comparing this data with who and what is included in the Google search results for “pop music artists,” students begin to discuss the different ways our culture views and judges “classical” versus “popular” music. The second activity produces a similar discussion about canons. In this activity, students evaluate online comments posted after Kendrick Lamar’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize win for the hip hop album DAMN. Students identify the main viewpoints surrounding the Pulitzer win, connect arguments to specific points of evidence, and relate responses to historical belief systems.

These activities, which foreground the ubiquitous and self-perpetuating ideology of the western European art music canon, are accessible to and meaningful for majors, non-majors, and even graduate students. By using commonly accessed media formats, these activities train students to think critically about the information they see everyday, increasing transferable information literacy. Finally, in framing currently-produced material as primary sources, students can consider how they choose to navigate or are affected by cultural values and structures.

History courses often include work with ephemera, but music history faculty have not always been able to successfully adopt this practice given our emphasis on coverage. Activities that take time away from lecture have sometimes been viewed as unimportant. However, the use of ephemera such as magazines, postcards, and concert programs to discuss music history in class allows students the ability to work hands-on with material and shows them what it means to “do” music history, helping them to better understand how music history is created and written. Ephemeral objects also allow them to understand what they are studying in context, including exploring canon formation, cultural context, and historical context. Ephemera can enhance the study of music history, especially when actual objects are used, though digital objects can also serve the same purpose.

In this presentation, I will discuss methods for introducing the teaching of music history through ephemera such as postcards, sheet music, concert programs and Playbills, and magazines. I will provide tips for accessing such material, both physically and digitally, and ways to engage students with it through sample discussion topics and in-class assignments, including having students create their own ephemera. I will also show ways that these lessons can be adapted for music history discussions that include gender, sexuality, race, culture, and ethnicity and how they can be used in tandem with coverage rather than against it.

In 2012, historian T. Mills Kelly and his students at George Mason University received national attention when they perpetrated a historical hoax. As the final project in a semester-long course, they invented a nineteenth-century serial killer, posting fictional primary sources about the killer on Reddit, Wordpress, and Wikipedia. An early exercise in exposing the ease with which misinformation could circulate in a post-truth world, the hoax raised ethical hackles and eventually led George Mason University to remove Kelly’s course, “Lying About the Past,” from its curriculum.

The assignment may have been ethically dubious, but its pedagogical bones were strong. In this presentation I share what my students and I have learned from an assignment called “Forging Primary Sources.” The assignment asks students to generate fictional primary sources such as letters, diary entries, bureaucratic memos, and newspaper articles. My fictional primary source assignment draws on research on writing pedagogy, critical information literacy, role-playing, and the science of emotion to help students playfully engage with authentic primary sources, bringing their authors to life. Unlike T. Mills Kelly, we are not out to perpetrate a public hoax, but rather to stretch students’ research, critical reading, and writing skills in a way that leverages their creativity and sparks joy in their readers. Drawing on qualitative data from my classes and on work in primary source pedagogy by Sam Wineburg and T. Mills Kelly as well as by the authors of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy Roundtable, “Rethinking Primary Sources for the Music History Classroom,” I argue that the creation of fictional primary sources by students deepens their engagement with historiography and improves students’ ability to adapt their writerly voices to different readerships.

Training students to evaluate the credibility of primary sources is more important now than ever; having forged a few sources themselves, students are more likely to diagnose misinformation in the future. And most satisfying of all, by convincingly forging a primary source, they will have forged themselves into musicologists.