Writing, Evaluation, and Oral Examination in Undergraduate Music History Classes in the Age of GenAI

The essays collected in this special issue were written by the students in my upper-level undergraduate seminar “Music in Enlightenment Contexts,” which ran in spring 2026. Each student-authored article represents substantial research; each is written in such a way as to be both meaningful to scholars working in these areas, and legible to other students in an upper-level music undergraduate course such as ours. Several of them represent original contributions to the field of musicology. I offer them here as representative of extraordinary junior-scholar achievement in research and writing, at a time when both are under threat from the incursion of genAI on student learning and evaluation. The aims of this introduction, and of the special issue as a whole, are fivefold.

1. To reflect on the challenges of assessing research and writing in undergraduate music courses in an age of genAI
2. To provide substantive, actionable, research-supported guidelines for preserving writing as a component of our undergraduate courses
3. To provide guidelines for integrating oral examination into the music history classroom
4. To make available for teachers of any kind of music history the assignment structure of a coauthored, peer-reviewed volume of themed essays, as a replacement for the traditional undergraduate research essay (appendix 1)
5. To make available the essays written by the students in my course, prefaced with reflections on a syllabus, and a list of other readings that are suitable for an undergraduate course on music in Enlightenment contexts (appendix 2 and the essays)

My hope is that the articles assembled here, written by junior scholars whose interests and research questions might align with your own and your students’, will have lives of their own as original published research, circulating within this special issue and outside of it. I also hope that the considerations below, regarding the challenges of assigning and evaluating research and writing at the undergraduate level, will be meaningful to my fellow musicologists and teachers of music history. This special issue answers the call by Igor Chirikov, Ivan Smirnov, and René F. Kizilcec for “discipline-specific assessment reform” in response to the growing misuse of AI tools in higher education and their suggestion that disciplinary societies and other field-level forums (such as this Journal) might be the most effective sites for productive conversations about assessment.¹

The Challenges of Research and Writing in Undergraduate Courses in an Age of GenAI

“The undergraduate essay is dead.” So we were recently told in a presentation, in January 2026, given to the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto by Professor Susan McCahan, the head of the university’s task force on artificial intelligence. McCahan came to deliver a lecture about “a range of opportunities for faculty, librarians, staff, and students to learn about and responsibly adopt sector-leading applications of AI.”² That last phrase (“sector-leading applications”) should have tipped us off that this was going to be a sales pitch. One of the problems with attending university-organized events on AI, at least at my institution, is that one always seems to have shown up at the wrong conversation. I went to many such events over the past three years, in the hopes of finding substantive university-wide conversations about whether we should go all-in on genAI at all; whether, by aligning itself so fully with industry and technical innovation at the expense of environmental concerns, moral considerations, the cultivation of knowledge and critical thinking, or the wellbeing of humanity and the planet, the university may have betrayed one of its sacred missions. To become world leaders in AI, universities must not only pursue technological innovation, but also recognize that within their own operations there are precious skills and activities that need to be protected from artificial intelligence.

Writing is one of those skills: writing that is informed by research, learning, and burgeoning personal insights; writing boldly and with intention, as a singer sings from the chest. Reading—the careful, close, focused, critical study of texts—is another. Do universities know this? I am not sure they do. The University of Toronto recently listed “summarizing information” as one of the things students could ask genAI to perform for them as a “learning aid” even when their instructor has instructed them not to use genAI for coursework.³ This policy presupposes a clean division between learning, studying, coursework, and evaluation—between summarizing and synthesizing—that does not exist in practice. Needless to say, professors are still permitted to assign reading and writing in our courses; and if we as instructors suspect unauthorized AI use on graded assignments, we are supported by the standard processes of academic-integrity violation. The problem is that this kind of cheating is pervasive and, unlike more traditional plagiarism, leaves no evidence that is accessible to us; it is rare for instructors to experience the level of certainty that is necessary to pursue an academic-integrity violation, and the threat of bias and false accusations looms large. As instructors, we have academic freedom to choose whether to permit AI use in our assignments and assessments, but no practical supports to protect against it; indeed, no such supports seem to exist. GenAI detectors do not seem to be the answer, at least at present; these are known to be biased against language learners.⁴

In this sense, genAI deals a double blow: against learning, and against the trust between student and teacher. This failure of trust goes both ways. My default posture of reading student work now involves searching for traces of AI-generated prose—those endless contrastive frames (not X but Y), the lists of threes, the facile overstatements of significance, and avoidance of risky detail or the friction of real thought. This can shade into overconfidence on the instructor’s part and become a kind of madness in itself. I recently became furiously certain that the text I was reading was AI-generated; I had forgotten that I was at that moment reading Roland Barthes’s S/Z.⁵ My students who do not use genAI have told me that they experience anxiety about being falsely accused of doing so, and unable to defend themselves (the absence of evidence is a double-edged sword). There is also the risk that instructors might be penalizing competence or extra care, making unfair assumptions about what certain students are able to produce.

But the question of to what extent genAI has already encroached on student thinking and writing is thornier still. Say, when reading a student essay, that you come across the telltale “tinniness” of multiple AI prose markers working together—is it because the student has made unauthorized use of Claude? Is it because they have used AI to translate their writing from another language, and it made incursions on some of the content, with or without their knowledge? Or is it because they, reading so much AI-generated material, have taken on some of its rhetorical moves and some characteristics of its writing style? Or have they made use of Grammarly’s “Paraphraser tool,” which Grammarly presents as an extension of its original function to ensure mechanically correct and clear English-language prose, but which actually “uses AI to rewrite your text”?⁶ In most cases, one simply cannot be sure enough to pursue an academic-integrity violation. So we are left grading stacks of papers 75 percent of which use identical rhetorical moves, handing out Bs and Cs and remembering the words of Bob Dylan: You coulda done better but I don’t mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time / but don’t think twice, it’s alright.

Do not underestimate the power of the “everyone is doing it” factor. And where genAI is concerned, everyone is doing it.⁷ Roberto Serrano, the economics professor at Brown University who switched his final exam to in-person after suspecting rampant AI use on the midterm, wrote, “We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK. . . . That leads to a declining society, to a failed society.”⁸ In the two most recent academic years, I encountered multiple markers of AI prose in more than half of the assignments I graded; in spring 2026 I found hallucinated sources in nearly every grad student–authored document I read, from DMA dissertation proposals to PhD chapters. While genAI represents a new arrival on the landscape of university education, its capacities and “tells” are constantly changing, and research on it is still in its early stages. However, we do know quite a bit about why students cheat. Several studies confirm peer behavior as one of the strongest predictors of academic dishonesty. As Donald McCabe et al. have noted, “peer cheating provides a kind of normative support or license for cheating.”⁹ Elizabeth Felski puts it in simpler terms: “If students believe their classmates are cheating, they are more likely to cheat themselves.”¹⁰

Some students believe, in good faith, the utopian promise that genAI preserves their original ideas and findings while aiding in their expression. Grammarly is one of the worst offenders here, because of the pains it takes to convince its users that it merely carries out their intentions as an assistant would—a loyal assistant who only wants to build their “confidence.” Grammarly’s “Paraphraser tool” promises that its AI rewrite “keeps the meaning accurate and original.” No one should listen to this. As Sam Kriss writes:

Sometimes people like Richard Hanania argue that there’s no problem with AI writing, since it allows people who have interesting ideas but aren’t very good at writing to express themselves effectively. . . . Wrong! People whose brains have been eaten by LLMs still maintain that “It’s not gradient, it’s texture” or whatever is still their idea, expressed by the machine, but there is almost never any idea there at all.¹¹

Or, worse, perhaps there was an idea there, but the student lacked the skills or confidence to work it out in prose—which, let’s face it, sometimes feels like squeezing blood from a rock even for those of us who do it as a living. I recently received an expression of interest from a prospective doctoral student with strong credentials who had been out of academia for several years; the dissertation proposal they sent was substantially AI-generated. When asked, the student admitted to using genAI for structure, clarity, and narrative logic; but the ideas were all their own.¹² They were of course telling the truth as they understood it, but this is nonsense. In our field, there is not a robust distinction between ideas and the language we use for them. Particularly when we as readers are not familiar with a student’s work or thinking, it is very difficult to discern the difference between surface-level rewrites or heavier incursions from genAI on the writing process; it is not easy to read through AI-generated prose to see real student thinking on the other side. In other words, it all looks like slop. Students who use it for “paraphrasing” have the unfortunate consequence of making their own real research look like slop.

However, it is possible to wish to preserve and enhance the cultivation of writing as part of the humanist education, and nonetheless feel that the role it has come to play in undergraduate education has become outsized. Over the past several decades, graded writing has expanded to fill the gaps left by other disappearing things, like oral evaluation, written exams, and in-class participation, which can (again) tend to put undue pressure on language learners and neurodiverse students, as well as on accessibility services (and by consequence on the instructor). But for the reasons outlined above, writing can no longer be the catchall that it has come to be—the site where a student’s learning, research skills, critical thinking, communication skills, and field mastery are all assessed at once.

That said, genAI does not just affect the research essay: All assessments that involve the preparation of text on an internet-enabled computer, whether in class or outside of it, are vulnerable to cheating. This includes podcasts delivered from a script, fieldwork notes, personal responses, reading responses, descriptions of sensory experience, interview transcripts, presentations read from a prepared text, ad-libbed presentations with prepared slides, and student contributions to online discussion boards. It therefore seems reasonable that all of these assessment components taken together should not amount to more than half of the student’s total grade. This is because, despite all the means we will discuss momentarily, there will still be students who cheat on all of these components by using genAI, and whose cheating will be undetectable or unprovable, and who will get away with it—because most of us would rather be fooled ten times by bad actors than falsely accuse an innocent student once, and this is as it should be.

All this musicology shares with most humanist fields. We will sometimes hear that, while AI may threaten STEM professions, “the humanities need humans,” but nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, the humanities are uniquely vulnerable to genAI for a variety of reasons: Compared to STEM fields we have relatively weak mechanisms for the detection of error; field jargon is abundant while shared subject-matter expertise is ever shrinking; and the imperative to prove has given way to the imperative to persuade. 

The presence of music in music history courses—whether studied in notation or as performed—complicates this further, both positively and negatively. On the positive side, music is not one of the fields that seems poised to be immediately eradicated, and we have reason to hope that our enrollment will not be much affected by the changing employment landscape. Compared with programmers, violinists are less likely to be competing with bots for entry-level jobs.¹³ What has changed are the declining prospects of the alternatives. Indeed, while five years ago it was difficult to recommend in good conscience that young musicians or budding scholars pursue professional careers in music, at present no one knows what professional fields are safe, or will be safe five years from now; and given all this, the prospect of being in a community of like minds, developing musical skills and scholarly acumen as well as other professional “soft skills” such as empathy, collaboration, professionalism, and communication, seems as good a bet as any for a young life.

Musicology is also better off than some neighboring fields because GenAI is notoriously unable to say anything competent about music. Christopher White recently identified several major impediments to genAI’s gaining music literacy or theory expertise (including small data sets, the complexity of our music notation, poor extraction of “data” from score scans, and an overabundance of conventions that can be deployed correctly or incorrectly in very specific contexts). There is little financial incentive for tech companies to overcome these.¹⁴ GenAI’s capacity to listen for specific musical features also leaves much to be desired.¹⁵

Given these weaknesses, the concerns around assessment in music history classes could be partially resolved by tying the assessment of historical knowledge more closely to the interpretation of scores or recordings—an adjustment that runs counter to recent developments in the graduate field of musicology but would likely be welcomed by many of our students at the undergraduate level. We have laid the groundwork for this at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music by revising our first- and second-year history survey courses, so that they proceed in lockstep with the core theory curriculum. The abundance of undigitized historical materials relating to music—second-hand scores and sheet music, old recordings available on eBay, even the students’ own musical instruments—can also provide very effective subjects for undergraduate research projects.

But the music history course has unique vulnerabilities too. For some undergraduate music students, the required history components of their degree are a resented intrusion on time they feel would be put to better use elsewhere. Performers in particular face a highly competitive professional landscape where the expectation is that they practice eight to ten hours or more per day in addition to their coursework. The fact that music history courses tend to be scheduled first thing in the morning adds another layer of difficulty. It is, of course, entirely in keeping with societal expectations of professionalism that the workday starts at 9 a.m. However, unlike their peers in many fields, music students also have professional and academic commitments that run late into the evenings. The practice rooms at the Faculty of Music—of which we have too few—are often occupied well into the early hours of the morning. A cost-of-living crisis has driven our students to rely on accommodation further away from campus, and many of them work multiple jobs to support tuition and living costs. Unless the entirety of the student body lives an easy ten minutes away from campus, the instructor of a 9 a.m. history class may be facing an equity nightmare in which only those who can afford to live close by are sufficiently rested to focus and participate. More likely, many affected students will simply not attend the class. For a variety of reasons, rates of lecture attendance in postsecondary education have not recovered since the COVID-19 pandemic.¹⁶ This too adds to the risk that students will feel that they are unable to complete course assignments without genAI assistance when crunch time arrives.

And this, ultimately, is the most important factor: If students are confident that they have the time and the capability to perform well without genAI assistance, they are less likely to make use of it. Most students prefer not to cheat; if they do resort to AI-related academic dishonesty, it is because they have felt their backs against the wall; they have been asked to do something they feel unable to do, whether because of scheduling challenges, a lack of scaffolding, poor communication of the rules around acceptable use of aids, or a lack of understanding of the value of the assignment for their own learning.¹⁷

As Thomas Corbin et al. have argued, the problem of AI and assessment is a “wicked” one, meaning that it cannot be resolved by a single solution, but only addressed with ones that are more or less effective depending on their contexts; “the contextually perfect solution might prove impossible to scale across the institution.” Attempts might result in failure, but even these “generat[e] valuable knowledge about what doesn’t work in specific contexts.”¹⁸ At the moment of my writing, the only surefire ways to identify unsanctioned use of genAI involve false bibliographic data and the accidentally included prompt. It now seems unadvisable to assign independent research essays before the third year of the undergraduate curriculum unless class or tutorial sizes are very small, and/or the course is amply supported with teaching-assistant hours. At the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, we have committed to teaching research and writing skills in first- and second-year history and culture classes that prepare students to write semi-independent research essays in third-year classes, and fully independent research essays in their final year.

In addition to creating new problems, the issue of genAI and assessment acts like a barium wash, exposing preexisting problems that should be addressed separately (and some of which fall well outside the purview of the individual academic). These include:

• The financial incentive to internationalize the student body, which has meant recruiting and instrumentalizing students whose language skills are not sufficient for the required coursework¹⁹
• An overreliance on writing assessments in undergraduate coursework at the expense of other modes of demonstrating competence
• A tendency to load students with too much assigned work across multiple courses, particularly at certain points of the term
• A growing distrust between students and teachers following the educational disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in relation to the methods used to enforce academic integrity²⁰
• A failure to articulate in positive terms both the value of history for the performing musician and the learning aims of individual assignments

Should these problems be addressed independently, this may have the effect of strengthening students’ capacity and willingness to engage with their courses, and by consequence, lessening reliance on unsanctioned aids.

It is troubling to see evidence that universities, in their eagerness to pursue innovation in artificial intelligence, should be so little inclined to protect research and writing in higher education. Even as the disruptions of genAI on university education continue to grow, more studies appear that confirm the value of undergraduate research as a “powerful pedagogical approach that immerses students in scholarly inquiry . . . fostering critical thinking, problem-solving, interpersonal, and communication skills.”²¹ It therefore falls to us as individual educators, and humanists, to support undergraduate research in ways that are meaningful to the students, and encourage them to perform honestly and at their best.

Guidelines for Preserving Writing in Undergraduate Courses

In the briefest of terms, the guidelines I want to provide here are these: clear policy, small class size, supportive scaffolding, and intrinsic motivation.

Clear Policy

The first principle for assigning undergraduate writing is to clarify, amply and often, that the use of genAI is not permitted at any stage, and that to use it without authorization in your course would be “cheating.” This unambiguous and ethically loaded language—however self-conscious we might feel deploying it—is crucial. As noted above, unfamiliarity with what constitutes academic dishonesty is one of the main causes of cheating at the postsecondary level. An approach that distinguishes between sanctioned and unsanctioned uses of genAI tools muddies these waters and opens the door for convenient self-deception on students’ parts (as well as slippages between the multiple sets of such guidelines that students get across their courses). It is also difficult to enforce.

For this reason, I do not recommend that the instructor who seeks to make research and writing core parts of their course pursue the “traffic-light” approach, which identifies components of the research process on which students are permitted to use AI freely (green light), with caution (yellow light), or not at all (red). I and many of my music faculty colleagues at the University of Toronto put this model to use in fall 2025 by adapting a table published in August of that year by the American Historical Association.²² But my students, who seemed to have studied this table as closely as they studied the rest of my syllabus (that is, not at all), were apparently able to convince themselves that “sanctioned AI use” included whatever use benefited them at a given moment. While the traffic-light approach tends to sanction assistance in the early stages of a research project, new and emergent research raises concerns that genAI use at any stage of the research and writing process substantially diminishes students’ learning and engagement with their projects.²³ A blanket in-course ban, delivered orally over multiple occasions, leaves no room for misunderstanding.

Small Class Sizes

A verbal injunction like this is likely to be more compelling for students in classes that allow for one-on-one interactions with the instructor. Let us put ourselves in our students’ shoes for a moment. If an instructor tells you that something that everyone is already doing, and that you may have already been doing, is not allowed, but that instructor has never spoken to you personally, greeted you, or looked you in the eye, and you can’t imagine her ever doing so, that restriction is not likely to be experienced as binding in the way that it would in a class where personal student–teacher interaction is the norm. Felski confirms the key role played by individual instructors in making “classroom policies and expected behaviors clear and establish[ing] an environment of deterrence and monitoring”: “It is up to the instructor to create an environment where [cheating] is not only not expected but not tolerated, creating an environment for real learning, growth, and career readiness.”²⁴

Instructors who wish to make research and writing a part of their courses need to be realistic about what kinds of learning they are able to support. At present, it does not seem advisable to assign independent research-based writing in history classes that run in a lecture format, have more than (say) twenty-five students, and/or are not well supported by teaching or grading assistants. In those conditions, it is unlikely that instructors will be able to give a compelling account of the verbal contract, or give students the support across multiple scaffolding assignments that are the best bulwarks against rampant AI use; without these, the wave of student cheating can gather unsurmountable force. Let us take care not to feed this momentum inadvertently by designing assessments that are not matched to class scale or student readiness. Faculties and departments can support student research and writing by ensuring that some undergraduate classes are kept small enough for seminar-style interactions, and that large lecture-format courses support this multiyear learning process with preparatory assignments such as note taking, academic-reading comprehension, bibliography (annotated or not), paragraph-writing workshops, and in-class listening responses.

Scaffolding

The essay-writing assignment must be scaffolded with smaller assignments that are graded with a light touch. These should be designed to spread the project as a whole out over as many weeks as possible to avoid panic points, where the student is overwhelmed by the number of choices they must make, or words to write, in short order. Dedicate separate weeks of the term for selecting a topic, locating and reading sources, outlining the paper, drafting, and revising. Of course, as we know, the stages of reading, crafting the argument, drafting, and revising are not fully discrete from one another, and learning that this is the case even for experienced scholars can be very relieving for students. However, these stages should be begun in something like that order, and this process should be made to extend over as long a period as the course allows.

Intrinsic Motivation

It is essential that the students develop intrinsic motivation for the writing project. This means that they pursue it for their own intellectual enrichment and sense of achievement rather than “for the teacher” or “for a grade.” This includes clear oral communication of assignment-specific learning goals (in class, not just on the syllabus). It also entails ensuring that the research questions are genuine questions that the students understand, and the audience for whom the students write is clearly defined and comprehensible to them. For the instructor, this means attuning oneself to what one’s students care about and have already cultivated strengths in, and putting these cares and strengths to a collective purpose. The coauthored-volume structure described in this article represents one way of doing this; but the principle applies at any scale.

Oral Examination in the Music History Classroom

Undergraduate research and writing should be given targeted support by the other things that happen in the course. Most of the means I could suggest here (lectures, in-class workshops, small-group work) are already well known to music history teachers, but one—in-person oral examination—is a valuable way of assessing student learning that few of us have much experience with. Oral examination provides an opportunity for genuinely probing conversation between teacher and student; unlike written exams, it offers a means of on-the-spot course correction if the student has initially misunderstood a question; it leaves behind no pile of exams that need grading. Even more than written exams, it is almost impervious to academic-integrity violations. Multiple studies support oral examination for the purposes of learning and assessment.²⁵ My argument here is that, if it is done with care, oral examination can be put in service of student research and writing as a knowledge-consolidation stage. This was an important part of “Music in Enlightenment Contexts,” and the students’ performance, and comfort with the format, far surpassed my expectations. Given that oral examination has rarely been a part of music history courses over the past decades, our students have little experience with the format, and it is likely to cause some anxiety, I recommend proceeding with guardrails. The following paragraphs describe what has worked in my courses.

For an upper-level undergraduate course, I recommend the following parameters:

• The oral examination should be a midterm exam, placed, if possible, a little bit past the precise half-point in the term
• It should be worth 20 percent or 25 percent of the final grade
• A question bank should be provided in advance to the students, with questions closely tied to assigned readings, lectures, and discussion notes
• Each question should be roughly the same difficulty level, and should involve some combination of historical fact, synthesis, and critical thinking
• The precise questions asked in each student’s exam should be a combination of teacher-selected, student-selected, and randomly chosen
• Each student is allotted a window between ten and fifteen minutes long for the exam (depending on class size and available time)
• The instructor should be assisted by a teaching assistant or colleague to keep time, take notes, ensure consistency across the exams, and if necessary, following the student’s departure, give a second opinion on the student’s performance. The assistant’s detailed notes will be useful if the student should wish to contest their grade.

A course that includes an oral exam should list the ability to converse orally about the subject matter among the syllabus course objectives; this is particularly important for ensuring that the oral requirement has support from accessibility services and the administrators (deans, the registrar) should problems arise. It may also be helpful to devote a few minutes in the first class of the semester to describing the exam format, the reasons for which it is part of the course, and the learning, development, and academic-integrity benefits of this kind of assessment. The question bank should be provided at minimum seven days in advance of the exam, but better ten. Each question should be fully answerable in three minutes or less. In advance of the exam, the instructor should give clear guidelines to the students about what kind of answer receives a full grade; this could take the form of a sample answer for one question, or the instructor could offer to look at a student’s sketch of an answer, as long as it is received no fewer than forty-eight hours before the exam.

Many of us have long resisted oral examinations because of the risk that they pose to some of our more vulnerable students: particularly language learners, the neurodiverse, students who experience performance anxiety, first-generation college students, and those who have other accessibility concerns regarding oral communication (i.e., speech, voice, or breath impediments). These considerations are important and should not be downplayed. A few aids can help minimize the disruptiveness of this new challenge for affected students. One of the students in “Music in Enlightenment Contexts” let me know at the outset of her exam that she was experiencing anxiety, and asked if she could have a moment to sketch out her answers on a blank sheet of paper before she began to speak; this was easily done and substantially reduced her distress. Students were asked to pick their own exam times on an editable Canvas page; if the designated interval has more time than is strictly necessary for a three-question oral exam, students who require extra time on exams may use the class signup sheet without drawing attention to their accommodation.

Running the oral exam as a midterm rather than a final has multiple benefits. The scope of the material to prepare is smaller, allowing students to aim for depth and incisiveness rather than straining for coverage. We ran the oral exam in week eight of a twelve-week term, thus avoiding conflicts with the students’ other midterm exams—and the fact that the final projects were already determined by that time allowed us to gear midterm study backward from final course objectives, as recommended by Melissa Buehler and Laura Schneider.²⁶ The absence of a final exam allowed for more sustained efforts on the research project. Further, as noted below, one of the benefits of the coauthored volume is that, as the project reaches fruition, the participants explicitly stop thinking of themselves as students performing for an instructor and a grade (the extrinsic frame), and begin to understand that they are junior scholars with the potential to make a contribution to a scholarly field (the intrinsic frame). A final examination in the midst of the capstone project would undermine this process.

We used a question bank, as recommended by Hazen and Hartmann (see note 25). Each student was assigned a question in advance that was relevant to their individual final project, and each was also allowed to pick a second question in advance; the third question was drawn from a hat during the exam, so even with a very unfortunate random pick or limited time to study, a student who has prepared their assigned and chosen questions well can get a C grade. My expectation was that the students’ answers to their assigned questions would be significantly better than the answers to the questions chosen randomly. However, the students’ performance across all three questions (assigned, chosen by the student, and chosen at random) was roughly equivalent.

There are further benefits to oral examination for instructor time management and the student–teacher relationship. A twelve-person class can easily be examined in three hours, and there is no residue or follow-up beyond giving the students their grades and comments. Think of it like this: The time spent in oral examination counts doubly or triply, because you are evaluating your students’ learning, and at the same time you are getting to know more about who they are and how their minds work, and they are getting to know you a little better too. In “Music in Enlightenment Contexts,” it was a luxury and a pleasure to spend time face-to-face with my students, in a situation of trust; and they seemed almost as happy to be there as I was, and to be trusted. The oral format also allows the instructor to probe the student’s learning and move beyond their first response, correcting course if they have misunderstood the question. That such follow-up questions are experienced as supportive rather than disturbing depends on the relationship that has already been established between the student and the instructor. While I had been concerned about whether asking follow-up questions would be perceived as fair when the exam was structured around a predetermined question bank, a few students remarked later that they had appreciated the opportunity to supply more information because they felt that I “had their back.” I was also positively struck by the students’ recollections of knowledge from lecture that was not duplicated in the assigned readings. 

As mentioned, the instructor should have a notetaker present (a TA, graduate student, or colleague) who can monitor the timer and ensure that each student is given the same instructions at the outset; the second party can also give an opinion regarding the strength of the student’s performance. I allotted fifteen minutes per student, of which around two-thirds were devoted to the timed answering of questions (again, three minutes per answer). My assistants and I alerted students at the outset that an effective answer would not necessarily take the entire allotted time, and they could feel free to stop speaking if they had come to the end of their answer. After all, in the context of professional communication, knowing when to finish an answer is as valuable as knowing how to begin.

Our question bank was as follows:

• What is empiricism, and how was it relevant to the study of music in the Age of Enlightenment?
• Who was Charles Burney, and why was he important in the history of Western music? Mention two aspects of his career.
• Account for the role of musical automata in the Age of Enlightenment. Give two specific examples.
• Name and describe two musical styles that flourished during the Age of Enlightenment.
• Why was Naples an important center for eighteenth-century European music? Give two reasons and a brief explanation for each one.
• What is aesthetics, and how did writers on aesthetics account for music as a fine art?
• To what extent was Bach’s Coffee Cantata representative of Enlightenment values? Your answer should include information about the role of coffee in Enlightenment culture.
• Name and define three core Enlightenment values.
• What was the public sphere, and why have scholars considered it important to the Enlightenment? What are some limitations of this model?
• How was music an object of cultural study in the Enlightenment? Refer to specific ideas, writers, and repertoires/pieces. (Your main source here is the article on music in the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment.)
• How was music treated as a science in Enlightenment thought? Refer to specific writers, ideas, and domains of musical practice. (See article on music in the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment.)
• What is the significance of the phrase “Sonate, que me veux-tu?”
• Why has the Enlightenment’s position toward difference been subject to critique? How can difference be heard in European music from this period, and what different approaches have composers taken?
• What were the two primary genres of Italian opera during the Age of Enlightenment? Give a brief description for each in terms of dramaturgy, and mention relevant musical aspects, giving examples.

Each of these questions was designed to encourage students to consolidate their learning from the early, “coverage”-related weeks of term, and begin to hone their focus for the research and writing ahead. The exercise also allowed students to build confidence about their ability to communicate, meaningfully and with supporting evidence, about the topics and concerns relating to music in Enlightenment contexts. Field mastery comes in part from knowing the topography of adjacent fields. The aspects of choice and chance within the oral exam can be mapped onto what scholars encounter in the research and writing process, and the students’ strong performance, particularly on the randomly chosen questions, may have increased their confidence in dealing with the unexpected during their research.

Syllabus Considerations for a Coauthored Volume

The edited volume is a project that is spread out over the entire course of the term, in order to give students the time to hone their curiosity, develop their individual projects, read widely and deeply, review their peers’ work, and revise their drafts in response to the feedback they receive. While the topics of the individual projects are determined in week five of twelve, the first two-thirds of the course are largely devoted to learning about the subject matter, doing assigned readings, and listening. After the oral exam, which should happen around two-thirds of the way through of term, the students enter an intensive period of scaffolding and drafting, including the preparation of an annotated bibliography and primary-source dossier; a first draft; peer-review and instructor feedback; chapter submission; and final editing.

The grade distribution was as follows (based on a twelve-week term):

First Weeks of Term

The instructor explains the conception of the course and of the coauthored volume, and builds in workshops on the close reading of primary sources.

Week 6: Chapter Proposal (see appendix for assignment)

This is the stage at which students decide on their topics. Invite students to suggest two topics on which they would be willing to write, and to indicate which they prefer and how flexible they are with their choices. From this, the instructor should ensure that overlaps are avoided and topics are appropriately sized, map out the subsections of the volume, and identify thematic connections between essays for peer-to-peer conversations. Where paper topics are concerned, it is sometimes difficult to know how much choice is beneficial to very junior scholars. While I am generally reluctant to present my students with a completely open field, several of the authors whose essays appear here remarked that it was a luxury for them to be able to pursue historical topics and questions that interested them. One wrote in their end-of-term reflection, “Because I was working on a topic that I was greatly interested in I was very engaged in it from the start and often spent spare time reading about it.”²⁷ Their genuine curiosity about their topics kept them working when they ran into dead ends. However, some students find a complete freedom of topic choice to be overwhelming rather than stimulating. To assist these students, even just by providing an anxiety-reducing fallback, the instructor can supply a list of suggested topics from which students can choose if they prefer not to create their own. A list of this kind also helps the entire class to conceive of the kind of scope that is manageable for an edited-volume chapter.

The instructor will also want to nix topics that bet the house, so to speak, on hunches or hypotheses (for instance, applying a preselected methodology to a chosen object; or asserting a connection between two objects for which historical evidence might not be forthcoming in the time available). Some instructors may wish to see topic-specific research questions fully articulated at this earliest stage. This was not the approach I took; after all, as we discussed in class, the terms of the question we ask about something may limit the scope of the project’s outcome before we have had a chance to build expertise. To the extent that we had a formula for individual projects, it was shared among all chapters: Students chose an object to research, and asked, What can this object tell us about music in Enlightenment contexts?

Week 8: Oral Exams

As described in the third section of this essay above, this assessment is tied to both the development of shared expertise for the volume, and to students’ individual topics. The latter is accomplished by assigning each student a question from the question bank, and allowing them to preselect another, for advance preparation. The oral examination has multiple benefits for the edited volume: It builds student confidence in their topics, lays an early foundation of expertise which subsequently has time to mature, encourages conversation between students during their preparation for the exam, and allows the instructor to identify areas of weak understanding, both individual and collective.  

Week 9: Annotated Bibliography and Source Dossier (included in appendix 1)

This is a key stage in the building of research expertise. Students are asked to identify, read, and take notes on five pieces of peer-reviewed scholarship on their topics, as well as five primary-source passages (score or text), and one to two relevant images. The goals here are to ensure that the student has managed to locate the scholarship that an experienced academic or field expert would consider necessary for engagement with their topic; and to begin the engagement with their historical objects (in the selection of key passages). Here as in the earlier scaffolding assignments, the instructor wants to ensure that the researchers spread out over four to six weeks the labors that might otherwise be compressed into four to six days, or even hours, before the deadline. The annotated bibliography and source dossier also take pressure off the content decisions, and to some degree the structuring decisions, that would otherwise happen at the drafting stage.

This stage was among the most appreciated of the scaffolding assignments, according to the students’ final reflections, and all remarked on its usefulness vis-à-vis the later drafting stage. One wrote, “The annotated bibliography was one of the most important steps for me. It is easy to treat the bibliography as a preliminary task, but I found that it actually determined much of the later structure of the paper. It forced me to evaluate its usefulness and decide what kind of evidence could genuinely support my argument. This early framework helped me form a clearer thesis and outline, instead of trying to build the paper only after collecting information.” Another wrote, “Honestly, before this course I had never really seen the purpose of an annotated bibliography, but I realized I was not utilizing them enough for my research. The annotated stage allowed me to find all of my sources, I then read through them and located specific quotes that would be useful for my book chapter, and also gave a general description of how I could use this source. This not only allowed me to organize my own thoughts, but also helped shape how I was going to divide my chapter in different sections and gave me a really good skeletal map.” And a third noted: “Although taking more time than expected to complete, the annotated bibliography stage was invaluable, as it helped me determine which of my sources were useful and which ones are not worth my time. Selecting images at this stage was also helpful, as it guided me in writing my chapter as well.”

Week 11: Draft Submission

There are three key factors that must be in place to maximize the effectiveness of this stage. Before the draft is written, students should

• Understand what needs to be present (and what can be “drafty”) in their writing for their work to be legible to others
• Have clarity about what readership they are writing for
• Know that the draft will be read carefully but graded with a light touch

We discussed in class that academic writing needs to make clear its relationship to prior scholarship, both in footnotes and in the main text, so a draft that is lacking in citations of any kind cannot be evaluated as scholarship even if its research foundations are sound. The argument also needs to be in place in a draft. Students were instructed that the draft may, however, have little gaps where material remains to be written—as long as they identify in italics where that material will go and what will be in it. (For instance, Here I will write two paragraphs about X; or, I still need to figure out how to conclude this paper.)

We also used time in class to reflect on our chosen readership. There is a falseness, or mismatch of actual reader to imagined reader, built into most writing assignments at the undergraduate level: Students recognize that the instructor knows more than they do about their topic, but they are meant both to write for an imagined reader who is not familiar with the subject matter, and to impress the instructor with expertise that the instructor already knows that the student does not have. A writing assignment built on this false foundation is not likely to give rise to the delights of unique expertise, or inspire the kind of singing-from-the-chest confidence that I wanted my students to experience in this assignment. My thinking on this was developed following conversations with Professor Jane Freeman, director of the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto, who related that many of her students’ writing problems disappeared when they were asked to write about any subject on which they were already an expert.

Students in “Music in Enlightenment Contexts” were instructed to gear their essays for the edited volume toward a readership comprised mainly of junior scholars, including upper-level undergraduate, master’s, or early PhD students. This had the dual benefit of clarifying to the students what kinds of things needed to be spelled out as they made their arguments, and of addressing a real gap in the academic literature on music (described in greater detail below): that is, the absence of published research whose questions and scope are legible to junior researchers with musical but not musicological background.

Several students remarked how much they appreciated the luxury of a distinct drafting stage. They also enjoyed the experience of writing to meet their research goals rather than for grades. Their assignment reflections used terms like experiment, explore, and write without worrying. One wrote, “The draft was really useful for me. Instead of having to produce a final version from the get-go, the first draft allowed me to focus on experimenting with ideas, putting everything out on the page, so that I could later go back and tighten up the loose ends.”

Week 12: Peer-Review Assignment

This is where the magic of the edited volume as a collaborative project begins to take shape, and where students get first-hand experience with the stages that scholars go through to get their work published. Each student is paired with one other student for an exchange of drafts. Some of the pairings can be made based on complementary subject matter, while others might be done to expose students to different strengths (e.g., a detail-oriented student might be paired with a student who tends to focus on the big picture without providing sufficient evidence). For their peer review, students should be given very specific guidelines about what to read for and how to structure their feedback (see appendix 1). A second review is written by the instructor, who collates this with the peer-reader report. For our volume on Music in Enlightenment Contexts, most of the peer reviews done by students were superb; occasionally, a review made a suggestion that was not likely to be productive in the time that we had, so I let the original author know that they did not need to pursue that revision.  

Post-Term: Final Chapter Due

Since this project as a whole is designed to minimize moments of acute pressure for the writer, the due date for the final submission should be placed as late as possible after the end of the term.

Why This Project Worked for Us

Students praised the collaborative nature of the volume more than any other aspect. As music students, they had models for collaborative work in ensemble playing, which helped them put into context the ways in which their individual contributions were shaped by a collective responsibility. One student wrote, “I am a performance major and my main instrument is violin. The responsibility of this book chapter assignment reminded me of when I am producing a final product with an orchestra or a chamber ensemble, where you are striving for the highest level of refinement in your craft so that you do not let any of your fellow colleagues down. It made me take revision more seriously and pay closer attention to formatting and details.” Another student compared honing an argument to tuning and giving feedback to deep listening: “Feedback helped me fine-tune my voice so that the central message could come through more clearly. Sometimes the most useful comments were about small adjustments that changed the rhythm or precision of a sentence. An argument can be strong but still fail to reach the reader if the language is not tuned carefully enough. I think writing is a process of tuning, maybe like a deep listening practice.”

Students also appreciated being part of a project with a larger purpose. When reflecting on this aspect, the categories they used illustrated a shift from “student,” “grade,” and “assignment” to “scholar” or “authorship,” “voice,” and “responsibility.” One student noted explicitly that the project allowed her to see herself in a new light. She wrote, “Getting to contribute to a volume and having the opportunity to write a book chapter has been really eye-opening to me and definitely changed my sense of authorship and responsibility. For the first time in my academic career, instead of just writing for myself or for a grade, I felt like my work was a part of something bigger, which not only made me feel more responsibility, but also made me more aware of my scholarly voice and how clearly I was presenting my ideas.” And another wrote that the edited volume “allowed us to engage in Enlightenment music and values as scholars actively seeking out knowledge rather than as students being graded for our knowledge. I think that the end product of an edited volume shifted the focus of the paper from achieving a good grade on a paper that would be marked by a professor to immersing ourselves in the topic and creating a scholarly work that would be part of a larger whole.” When invited to reflect on how I might improve the exercise for future use, students suggested adding an outline stage to the scaffolding, and having a mini-conference at the end of term, at which the class gets to learn about the other projects in greater depth.

While an edited-volume project on the course theme is moderately more time-consuming for the instructor, it is likely to be considerably more rewarding than a standard term paper. Particularly given the importance of sustained in-course conversation and peer-to-peer feedback to this exercise, the gains in outcome are likely to be much greater than the increase in instructor workload. More importantly, students are provided with a valuable exercise in independent research and writing, which may bring with it a taste of agency, greater intellectual confidence, and valuable skills in peer-to-peer communication and expression of their ideas. In these respects, the coauthored volume meets the definition of a “high-impact educational practice,” with substantial academic, practical, and comprehensive learning gains.²⁸ Let me also put it in these more personal terms: When we wrote this volume together, we felt ourselves to be fulfilling the highest purpose of the university. One of my students described the edited-volume project this way:

At the beginning of the course, I thought that we were each writing our own chapter, but I did not immediately understand why the collaborative structure mattered so much. Over time, I noticed how the edited-volume format made the writing process more dialogic. I do not think writing is a solitary act. Even books and articles that appear under a single author’s name are shaped by many years of conversations, feedback, editing, revision, and response. I once read [in] Agnes Callard’s article that “a university is a place of heterodidacticism.”²⁹ Learning is something that happens through others (not autodidactic). I think this course concretized what Callard meant. Honestly, [it was] the only course throughout my four-year undergrad that effectively embraced this idea.

APPENDIX 1: COAUTHORED VOLUME SCAFFOLDING ASSIGNMENTS

Scaffolding Assignment 1: Book Chapter Proposal

Our volume will include several kinds of chapters, each doing a specific kind of scholarly work. This week, you’re choosing which kind of chapter you want to write. For the assignment, you will suggest two topics: one that you design yourself, and one that you choose from a list. Spend some time with the topics list, and then proceed to the assignment.

This is a flexible brainstorming assignment designed to help me understand where you are as a learner, what your curiosity is, and how you see your strengths—and to allow me to figure out a volume design that works as a whole. You will propose two possible chapter concepts that you could imagine developing over the term, and reflect briefly on your preferences and openness to revision. You will only write one chapter eventually!

Part A: For each of your two proposed chapter ideas, provide the following:

1. Provisional Chapter Title: A working title (12–15 words maximum). This does not need to be polished.

2. Chapter Type: Indicate which kind of chapter this would be, for example:
   • Conceptual
   • Thinker‑Focused
   • Genre or Practice
   • Institution or Space
   • Focused Case Study

3. Your Interests and Strengths: What would this chapter do? What problem would it investigate, or what claim might it make? This does not need to be fully argued. You can also reflect on your particular interests or strengths as a junior scholar. What have you done well in the past, and what research or writing projects have you enjoyed?

4. Anchor Source: Name one specific source you know exists and could ground the project.

Part B: Preference and Flexibility Statement

Reflect briefly (ca. 100 words) on the following:

• Which of the two chapter ideas are you more interested in pursuing, and why?
• What skills, interests, or prior coursework does this project draw on for you?
• How flexible are you in changing your preferred topic if it overlaps with another student’s work?

Please be explicit about flexibility (e.g., very flexible / somewhat flexible / prefer not to switch but open to revision). This will help me design the volume fairly and coherently.

Evaluation Criteria

Originality and polish are not the focus at this stage. This assignment will be assessed lightly, based on completion of all components, reasonable and workable scope, engagement with course concepts, and identification of at least one source per proposed topic.

What Happens Next

After I read these portfolios, I will identify areas of overlap, help distribute and refine topics, and propose a draft structure for the imagined edited volume. You will have opportunities to revise or redirect your chapter focus before making a final commitment.

Scaffolding Assignment 2: Annotated Bibliography and Source Dossier

For your chapter in our edited volume, please compile a dossier that includes (a) five secondary sources, (b) 4–5 primary-source passages (either score excerpts or textual quotations), and (c) 1–2 images relevant to your argument. Each item should be formatted according to The Chicago Manual of Style and annotated as follows:

1. Secondary Sources
   • Provide a full Chicago-style bibliographic entry
   • Include a brief prose summary outlining the source’s argument, methodology, and relevance to your chapter
   • Follow the summary with at least one page of notes (these may include key quotations, points of engagement or disagreement, and ideas for how you will use the source)
2. Primary Sources
   • Provide a full Chicago-style bibliographic entry, including:
     • Author/composer
     • Title
     • Publisher
     • Year of original publication
     • Year of the edition you are using
     • Page/measure numbers as relevant
   • Include a short annotation (2–3 sentences) describing the significance of the passage for your chapter
3. Images
   • Provide attribution and source/location of the image (museum, archive, database, URL if applicable)
   • Add a brief description (2–4 sentences) explaining the image’s relevance to your chapter’s argument

Scaffolding Assignment 3: Draft

Your draft (minimum 3,000 words) should present your argument in a coherent, fully developed form, with all major sections in place. Footnotes may remain abbreviated at this stage, but the draft should include all quotations, musical examples, and images you intend to use, clearly marked and integrated into the prose. The purpose of this draft is to prepare the chapter for internal peer review, so aim for a version that is as close as possible to what you imagine submitting for the final edited volume.

I will not grade this draft for content. If it meets the above criteria, you will receive full points.

Scaffolding Assignment 4: Peer Review Worksheet

As a peer reviewer, your role is to help the author see what kind of chapter they’ve written and what would most help it work as a contribution to this volume.

Do not proofread or suggest line edits.

A. Describe the Chapter (No Evaluation)

1. In one short paragraph: What is this chapter about? (Object, place, period, and material—avoid abstract language.)
2. What question does this chapter seem to be asking, even if it isn’t stated explicitly?
3. Where does the main claim or intervention appear right now?

B. What Is Working Well? (Be Specific)

Identify three strengths, each tied to a particular passage or section. (Examples: rich historical detail, conceptual integrity, fascinating material, good use of evidence or reasoning to support claims, strong links to Enlightenment concepts, good use of primary or secondary sources. Make sure to be specific about what passage you’re referring to and how it succeeds.)

C. One Substantial Editorial Question

What is the single most important question this author needs to answer more clearly for the chapter to succeed?

D. Placement in the Volume

This chapter primarily contributes to discussion of:

☐ Sensibility, Genre, and Social Critique (Part I)
☐ Institutions, Markets, and Publics (Part II)
☐ Senses, Science, and Musical Knowledge (Part III)

Is this sufficiently clear? How and where can the chapter make this clearer?

E. One Concrete Revision Move

Suggest one decisive revision action. For example, move X earlier; commit to Y more strongly; replace Z with a historically grounded example.

Scaffolding Assignment 5: Final Editing

For the final editing and reflection, I would like you to do the following:

Take one final pass through your submission’s research apparatus, paying special attention to the footnotes and bibliography and ensuring they are properly formatted in Chicago style, and making sure you have footnotes where you need them. Remember to italicize book and journal titles. Please send the final version to me in both PDF and Word/.docx formats by <DATE>.

APPENDIX 2: A COURSE ON MUSIC IN ENLIGHTENMENT CONTEXTS

My final aim in this special issue is to outline a course on “Music in Enlightenment Contexts” that puts the essays below to further pedagogical use. First, a word on our terms. The Enlightenment is roughly coterminous with (I do not say synonymous with) the eighteenth century. Historians might argue about whether it began with Robert Boyle and his air pump in the 1660s, or with the publication of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690; but as a larger movement encompassing the emergence of a public sphere, a set of shared values, and an infrastructure to support these—anything that might be broad enough to be called a “context” for music making—it becomes relevant only in the early decades of the eighteenth century. I would put its historical terminus around 1800 (though Enlightenment values relating to progress, general education, and the scientific method did not disappear so much as become part of an unnoticed infrastructure of public ethics). As for its geographical scope: The movement we call the Enlightenment began in Europe and was imported to the colonies, where its values gave rise both to positive projects of self-government, religious tolerance, and expansion of public discourse, and to sinister projects of domination and the displacement of local knowledge and peoples. The term “music” in such a course is broadly conceived—in ways that are now typical of musicological pedagogy—to encompass performance, composition, material cultures, publishing, teaching, music theory, and the place of music within aesthetic philosophy.

The essays collected below are designed to serve on the syllabus of a course such as this. At the time of my writing, there is not a great deal of published writing about music in Enlightenment contexts that is suitable to be assigned to undergraduate students. This is reflective of a larger gap in academic writing on Western art music, between the entry-level textbooks of J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Grout and Claude Palisca, Barbara Hanning, Richard Taruskin and Christopher H. Gibbs,³⁰ and recent musicological scholarship, which tends to advance complex arguments and continue disciplinary conversations that run several decades deep, in ways that are difficult for the uninitiated reader to parse.

The challenge of creating a syllabus on this topic is also reflective of another pedagogical challenge that is perhaps uniquely musicological, or at least is relatively pronounced in our field: A half-century’s worth of critique of canon ideology, enriched understanding of historical contexts, attenuation of the style concept, postcolonial studies, and busting of historiographic myth has not altered the broad outlines, or even many of the particulars, of the Western art music history survey course. This is because, whatever else they are, and however conceptually flawed, the canon and periodization schemes based on a history of musical style remain tools for organizing knowledge and are already in circulation. One can teach music history without any reference to these, but my own experience with this suggests that the results are likely to be frustrating to all involved. One will discover when grading final exams or end-of-term projects that students have merely imported their prior knowledge of the old period scheme (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, complete with their capital letters), and many are resentful at having to do so, feeling that the teacher did too little to organize the historical knowledge they were meant to be learning.

The historiography of eighteenth-century music offers a vivid glimpse into this problem. Some of the most important and most capacious musicological studies of the last forty years have offered a reinvigorated understanding of eighteenth-century music, particularly in relation to the century’s middle decades. But not much of this work is accessible to students in an undergraduate musicology course in the present day. Robert Gjerdingen’s Music in the Galant Style is a work of music theory, however beautifully its materials are presented.³¹ (This notwithstanding, the preface’s analogy between galant-style composition and figure skating routines is surprisingly effective with students.) Wye J. Allanbrook’s transformative study on Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro requires familiarity with topic theory, opera buffa dramaturgy, and the musical features proper to the many subgenres of eighteenth-century dance.³² Even the magnum opus of Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780, while relatively free of field jargon, assumes an investment in music making in minor European courts, the tastes of aristocratic patrons, and noncanonical eighteenth-century composers that few of our undergraduates have.³³ Music in European Capitals is a desert-island book for me. But each time I have put it on the syllabus of an undergraduate course, students have struggled to see the forest for the trees or (as they put it) “locate the argument.”

An undergraduate course on “Music in Enlightenment Contexts” offers an opportunity to move explicitly beyond the periodization schemes that inevitably form part of the first- and second-year history courses. “Enlightenment” is, of course, not a label used for eras of Western art music; rather, it spans multiple traditional periods, along with some newer ones, in productive ways. It allows students to learn about how the eighteenth-century musical styles they might understand as existing consecutively—learned, galant, empfindsamer, Classical—circulated alongside one another and were deployed in ways that were dependent on genre and context. The coexistence of musical styles in Enlightenment contexts, and the ways that the later historiography of the “Classical style” has been biased toward male composers and large symphonic forms, are addressed in Siri Ducharme-Leblanc’s essay in this special issue.

The Enlightenment framework provides a set of recurring themes that give the course its warp and weft: the advent of public musical culture and the changing relationship between music and commerce (addressed here in essays by Anastacia Zavgorodniy, Lydia Dillenbeck, and Siri Ducharme-Leblanc); the emergence of aesthetic philosophy (see chapters by Zavgorodniy and Charles Zhu); music’s role in education, moral improvement, and the cultivation of empathy (see Vito Park’s chapter, as well as Zavgorodniy’s); the circulation of musical knowledge through print (Park’s and Dillenbeck’s essays); the relationship between musical practice and scientific thought (see Trinity Thai’s essay); the entanglement of European musical cultures with colonial expansion (addressed by Dillenbeck); and the role of the senses in human understanding, judgment, and feeling (addressed here by Zhu and Park). The tensions between the aristocracy and the middle classes, between social status and personal virtue, are addressed in two separate essays about Le nozze di Figaro by Aliya Lynden and Jeremy Lau, the former locating the story, its characters, and their musical languages in a larger history of opera buffa, and the latter advancing an argument about duple versus triple meter and the use of dance tropes over the course of the opera. Such questions cut across stylistic categories and genres and allow students to make connections between repertories that are often taught in isolation.

As a period label, “Enlightenment” is better than many, because it was used by its historical actors. The opening six or seven paragraphs of Kant’s 1784 essay “What is Enlightenment?” make for useful in-class primary-source reading, especially when paired with an excerpt from the introduction to Charles Burney’s Present State of Music in France and Italy, where Burney talks about his determination not to rely on inherited knowledge.³⁴ The philosophical concerns of Enlightenment writers (education for all, progress, the use of reason against accepted authority, the relationship of sensory perception to knowledge) are intuitively legible to many undergraduates. The class can have productive conversations about whether these values extended to everyone (they did not, of course) and about the extent to which these remain shared values today. “Enlightenment” is also a useful heuristic for the limits of period labels because it can be clearly shown to be relevant to music making in some eighteenth-century contexts but not others; because some of the most interesting pieces of eighteenth-century music are clearly ambivalent about Enlightenment discourses (see, for instance, Bach’s Coffee Cantata); and because the label itself implies a positive value judgment about a historical moment that is no longer viewed in entirely positive terms.

My hope is that the essays below will be read first and foremost as contributions to our understanding of music in Enlightenment contexts. At the same time, because they originated as undergraduate research projects, they may also serve as useful points of reference for other junior scholars undertaking substantial research and writing projects of their own. The essays make visible many of the constituent parts of scholarly argumentation: the framing of a research question, engagement with prior scholarship, the selection and interpretation of evidence, the management of scope, and the development of a distinctive scholarly voice. In this sense, they may be read for the ways they model the process of crafting a finite and well-structured research project. Instructors who choose to assign one or more of these essays might invite students to attend not only to what the authors argue, but also to the scholarly decisions that shape the argument. What question is the essay trying to answer? How does it position itself in relation to previous scholarship? What kinds of evidence does the author draw upon, and how are those sources used? How is the argument structured, and to what extent do the section divisions contribute to its development? What seems to have been the author’s most important decision regarding scope, emphasis, or method? Finally, where does the author’s own voice emerge most clearly? Such questions encourage students to read these chapters as examples of junior scholars making consequential choices about evidence, interpretation, and communication.

The coauthored volume has three sections:

I: Sensibility, Genre, and Social Critique

• Aliya Lynden, “Figaro’s Social Reversals: Genre Poetics and How Comedy Works”
• Jeremy Lau, “Enlightenment Dance Styles in Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro”
• Vito Park, “Sensibility in Print: C. P. E. Bach’s Gellert Lieder and the Ideals of Civic Cultivation”

II: Institutions, Markets, and Publics

• Anastacia Zavgorodniy, “Lowly Art, Booming Market: Music’s Commercial Paradox”
• Lydia Dillenbeck, “Le graduel romain and the Intersections of Religion, Politics, and Music Printing”
• Siri Ducharme-Leblanc, “Marianna Martines: A Forgotten Composer of the Enlightenment”

III: Senses, Science, and Musical Knowledge

• Trinity Thai, “The Herschel Household: Musical Labor and Domestic Science”
• Charles Zhu, “On the Verge of Sublimity: Where Does Music Belong in Kantian Aesthetic Judgment?”

In preparation for these readings, or a selection thereof, I suggest assigning students the following foundational texts:

• Thomas Christensen, “Music,” in Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, edited by Alan Charles Kors (Oxford University Press, 2002).
• Mary Sue Morrow, “What Does Instrumental Music Mean?,” in German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Melanie Lowe, “Difference and Enlightenment in Haydn’s Instrumental Music,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, edited by Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• Cynthia Verba, “Music and the Enlightenment,” in The Enlightenment World, edited by Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf, and Iain McCalman (Routledge, 2004).
• Maria Semi, “Introduction” and “Music and History,” in Music as a Science of Mankind in Eighteenth-Century Britain, trans. Timothy Keates (Routledge, 2012).
• Rebecca Cypess, “Sensuality, Sociability, and Sympathy: Musical Salon Practices as Enactments of Enlightenment,” in Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

1. They write: “Our results suggest that reforms should be implemented at the discipline level, as each discipline combines distinct learning goals, assessment traditions, and ways in which GenAI can support or substitute for student work. This work may be best coordinated not by individual universities acting alone, but by disciplinary societies, accreditors, and other field-level organizations that can develop shared guidance and examples for local adaptation.” Igor Chirikov, Ivan Smirnov, and René F. Kizilcec, “Generative AI Use and Misuse Call for Assessment Reform in Higher Education,” Science 392, no. 6800 (2026): 819. ↗
2. Email communication about event sent to music employees listserv on October 7, 2025, and January 1, 2026. The text quoted from the email for the event can also be found on the home page for the University of Toronto’s AI Task Force. See “Governance and Strategy,” AI Task Force, accessed September 17, 2026, https://ai.utoronto.ca/u-of-t-ai-task-force/.↗
3. “Generative Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom: FAQ’s [sic],” Office of the Vice-Provost, Teaching & Learning, University of Toronto, last modified June 18, 2025, https://www.vptl.utoronto.ca/teaching-initiatives/generative-artificial-intelligence/.↗
4. Weixin Liang et al., “GPT Detectors Are Biased Against Non-Native English Writers,” Patterns 4, no. 7 (2023).↗
5. Barthes’s offending claim was that “the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of text.” Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (Blackwell, 1974), 4. Will Oremus recently wrote, “If Julius Caesar had debuted this year, William Shakespeare might have been accused of writing it with AI. A certain suspicious rhetorical device appears again and again in the play. It’s in Act I, Scene ii: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ In Act III, Scene ii: ‘Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.’ And later in that same scene: ‘I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.’” Oremus notes that, unlike previous tics of AI-generated writing like the em dash and an overuse of “delves,” its love of the contrastive frame shows no signs of abating, perhaps because it reveals something essential about how genAI thinks. Will Oremus, “The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious: Why Chatbots Love ‘It’s Not X, It’s Y,” The Atlantic, July 12, 2026, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/ai-chatbot-writing-tic-negative-parallelism/687892/.↗
6. Grammarly’s “Paraphraser tool” describes itself as an “agent” who “helps you rewrite with clarity and confidence,” protecting “academic and professional integrity.” On Grammarly’s online platform, one needs to scroll past the paraphrase tool itself, multiple prompts to pay for the product, an educational menu teaching how to paraphrase, a segment on “Why people love Grammarly,” and well down the list of “frequently asked questions” at the bottom of the page, before finding the question, “How does Grammarly’s paraphrasing tool work?” The answer comes complete with contrastive frame: “Grammarly’s free Paraphraser tool uses AI to rewrite your text while keeping the meaning accurate and original. It analyzes your writing to suggest alternative phrasing that fits your style, tone, and audience. The goal is to help you learn how to express ideas more effectively, not to copy someone else’s work.” “Free Paraphrasing Tool,” Grammarly, accessed July 20, 2026, https://www.grammarly.com/paraphrasing-tool.↗
7. Beth McMurtrie, “Cheating Has Become Normal,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2024, https://www.chronicle.com/article/cheating-has-become-normal.↗
8. Quoted in Emma Whitford, “Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat,” Inside Higher Ed, July 8 2026, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/learning-assessment/2026/07/08/brown-professor-suspects-most-his-class-used-ai-cheat. The average grade on Serrano’s midterm was 96 percent, and on the final exam, 48.6 percent.↗
9. Donald L. McCabe, Kenneth D. Butterfield, and Linda K. Treviño, Cheating in College: Why Students Do It and What Educators Can Do About It (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 7.↗
10. Elizabeth Felski, “Have Students’ Perceptions of Cheating Changed Post-Pandemic?” Studies in Higher Education 50, no. 12 (2025): 2894.↗
11. Sam Kriss, “If You Let AI Do Your Writing, I Will Come to Your House and Kill You,” Numb at the Lodge (blog), May 25, 2026, https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writing-i-will (emphasis original). Kriss is referring to Hanania’s “I Didn’t Use AI to Write This. But So What If I Had?,” Boston Globe, last modified April 14, 2026, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/14/opinion/the-case-for-allowing-ai-llm-writing/.↗
12. Personal communication, June 2026. I appreciated the prospective student’s honesty about their motivations to use genAI tools, and have omitted their name from this essay for obvious reasons.↗
13. On changing employment prospects for early-career workers, see Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts About the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence,” Working Paper, last modified August 12, 2026, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/canaries-in-the-coal-mine-six-facts-about-the-recent-employment-effects-of-artificial-intelligence/.↗
14. Christopher W. White, “Music’s AI Problem, AI’s Music Problem,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 78, no. 3 (2025): 856–83.↗
15. For instance, in an April 2026 video, Phi Nguyen (account name Father_Phi) played a sound clip to ChatGPT, comprising about thirty seconds of “grotesque flatulence.” See “ChatGPT Rates the Song I Made,” YouTube Short, uploaded by Father_Phi, April 10, 2026, https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JqvDLHshTtI. The following conversation ensued:

    Nguyen: What do you think of my new song?

    ChatGPT: It’s got great energy with an anthemic feel. Lyrically it’s confident though it might be a bit cliché in parts. . . .

    Nguyen: What was your favorite part?

    ChatGPT: For me, it was that bridge section, it just had that really unexpected chord change.↗

16. Tom Williams, “Class Attendance Plummets Post-Covid,” Times Higher Education, last modified October 24, 2022, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/class-attendance-plummets-post-covid. More recently, see Tom Lowe et al., “Why Are Students Not Attending In-Person Classes Post-COVID-19? An Explorative Study in Student Engagement,” Active Learning in Higher Education (September 19, 2025).↗
17. Park Soowon, “Goal Contents as Predictors of Academic Cheating in College Students,” Ethics & Behavior 30 no. 8 (2020): 628–39.↗
18. Thomas Corbin, Margaret Bearman, David Boud, and Phillip Dawson, “The Wicked Problem of AI and Assessment,” Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 50, no. 4 (2025): 748.↗
19. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), International Students in Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Trends, Challenges and Policy Responses in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom (Higher Education, OECD Publishing, 2026), https://doi.org/10.1787/005ff28d-en.↗
20. Felski, “Students’ Perceptions of Cheating.”↗
21. Maria Navarro, “Contextualizing Undergraduate Research: A Within-Subject Comparison of Student Learning Gains,” Journal of Higher Education (March 2026): 1.↗
22. “Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education,” American Historical Association, August 5, 2025, https://www.historians.org/resource/guiding-principles-for-artificial-intelligence-in-history-education/. See especially appendix 2.↗
23. Nataliya Kosmyna et al., “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” preprint, arXiv, June 10, 2025, https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/.↗
24. Felski, “Students’ Perceptions of Cheating,” 2881, 2895.↗
25. See, for instance, Helen Hazen, “Use of Oral Examinations to Assess Student Learning in the Social Sciences,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education 44, no. 4 (2020): 592–607; and Catherine Hartmann, “Oral Exams for a Generative AI World: Managing Concerns and Logistics for Undergraduate Humanities Instruction,” College Teaching (2025): 1–10.↗
26. Melissa J. Buehler and Laura U. Schneider, “Speak Up! Oral Examinations and Political Science,” Journal of Political Science Education 5 no. 4 (2009): 315–31.↗
27. This and the other student responses cited in this introduction have been anonymized. The quotations are drawn from the reflections students completed at the end of HMU430 “Music in Enlightenment Contexts,” in which they were invited to offer feedback on the coauthored-volume process and suggest ways it might be improved in future iterations. Because these reflections were not anonymous, they should not be treated as equivalent to anonymous course evaluations. However, the views expressed in them were consistent with those reported in the anonymous course evaluations, which were similarly positive about the course and the collaborative project.↗
28. The high-impact educational practice was defined in George D. Kuh, High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter (Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2008).↗
29. The student is referring to Agnes Callard, “The Real College Scandal,” The Point 25 (August 15, 2021), https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-real-college-scandal/.↗
30. J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 10th ed. (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018); Barbara Russano Hanning, Concise History of Western Music, 5th ed., anthology update (W. W. Norton & Co., 2019); Richard Taruskin and Christopher H. Gibbs, The Oxford History of Western Music, college ed. (Oxford University Press, 2012).↗
31. Robert Gjerdingen, Music in the Galant Style (Oxford University Press, 2007).↗
32. Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro & Don Giovanni (University of Chicago Press, 1984).↗
33. Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style 1720–1780 (W. W. Norton & Co., 2003).↗
34. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Hackett, 1983); Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (Becket & Co., 1771), 1–8.↗