Forging Musicological Skills by Forging Primary Sources

Louis Epstein – Associate Professor of Music – Musicology

This project is associated with Music 345b: Music in Paris in the 1920s. In this presentation I share what my students and I have learned from an assignment that asks students to invent several primary sources. The assignment is modeled loosely on T. Mills Kelly’s historical hoax assignments, which garnered attention and a fair amount of criticism in 2012. Rather than perpetrate a public hoax, my assignment gives students an opportunity stretch their research, critical reading, and writing skills. 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 they will have forged themselves into future musicologists.

	Class project, Music 345b: Music in Paris in the 1920s
	Word processing software, WordPress
	Invented Primary Sources site

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