Until the 1990s, most museums and historic sites in North America avoided “difficult histories.” Instead, they focused on the celebratory, the patriotic, and the artistically significant, narratives that worked to ensure the “comfort” of visitors. Tours of plantations and sites like Colonial Williamsburg talked about architectural details, but not the true experiences of the enslaved. Museums relied on formalist labels that revealed the artifacts’ materials but not their deeper social and cultural impacts.One early notable attempt by a major museum to present a “difficult history” was the proposed 1995 Enola Gay Exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM), which was then led by Martin Harwit. He believed that the museum should take up historic and contemporary controversies, such as debates about the use of atomic bombs. He proposed that the Enola Gay Exhibit marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of WWII include Japanese perspectives about the dropping of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and photos of the aftermath. This led the Air Force Association and other veteran groups to complain, and the U.S. Senate unanimously adopted Resolution 257, which called the exhibition's proposed script “revisionist and offensive to many World War II veterans.”1 This exhibit was ultimately canceled, and Harwit was forced to resign as NASM's Director. In announcing this decision, Smithsonian Secretary I. Michael Heyman stated, “In this important anniversary year, veterans and their families were expecting, and rightly so, that the nation would honor and commemorate their valor and sacrifice. They were not looking for analysis, and, frankly, we did not give enough thought to the intense feelings such an analysis would evoke.”2 In this statement, Heyman argued that there is a time and place for critical thinking, and that major anniversaries do not provide the right context. Because so many major exhibitions mark important dates, one wonders when a good time for serious interpretation at a museum might be.3I present the Enola Gay saga as a cautionary tale for public music studies practitioners. Public discussions about “difficult histories” can benefit audiences in a variety of ways, but to be successful, we must learn how to negotiate the needs of different stakeholders, share or surrender authority in different situations, and help our audiences become open to what we have to offer. These are skills that are not taught in most of our academic training. Happily, public history research and practice have changed over the past quarter century, and, over the past decade, interpreting “difficult histories” has become one of the most important topics of discussion. There is a significant body of literature that can aid the work of public music studies practitioners. In this article, I focus on one “difficult history” theory: the 5Rs of Commemorative Museum Pedagogy (CMP) developed by Julia Rose. This framework can be applied to a wide variety of projects, from performances to workshops, and from exhibits to long-form writing pieces. Rose's theory can serve as a tool for analyzing existing exhibits, programs, podcasts, and performances to determine what works, what needs to be improved, and what can be applied to future projects. It can also be an excellent tool for planning. I will first present a summary of this framework and then uses it to analyze Turbine, a musical happening about water justice by composer Byron Au Yong and choreographer Leah Stein. This work can be a model for site-specific public music studies projects. Afterward, I will discuss how I use the framework to develop a podcast episode about the experiences of transnational Korean adoptee musicians.Julia Rose developed CMP during her years creating and implementing tour and educational materials about the enslaved at Magnolia Mound Plantation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. CMP's “psychoanalytic framework” is particularly relevant to this article. To successfully persuade people about alternative ways of thinking—especially on topics with deeply held beliefs like race relations—Rose argues that cultural workers must understand why people resist the difficult narratives we are presenting. Specifically, we need to recognize that the knowledge we offer can cause significant anxiety, threaten the learner's self-identity, and lead to a sense of loss and melancholia. Importantly, she adds: A learning crisis is stressful for the learner and is also the moment when learning can happen. In the learner's unconscious mind, the learner's stable ego is faced with dissonant knowledge that is destabilizing. In a state of crisis, the learner's ego defends its position toward the new knowledge: “That is not true! I don't believe that!” At the conscious level, at stake are the learner's understanding of truth and morality, and at risk is the learner's willingness to continue to learn.4Rose argues that cultural workers need to understand this psychological framework, observe learners’ verbal expressions and visual cues, and empower them to work through resistances in order to be effective. Only then can audiences be convinced by the evidence and narratives that we are offering. Rose states that learners go through five cognitive phases when they encounter new knowledge that conflicts with their existing ways of understanding, and she calls them the 5Rs: reception, resistance, repetition, reflection, and reconsideration. Rose emphasizes that the process is nonlinear: Individual learners will start at any of the five phases and move among the phases in unpredictable sequences and spend varying amount of time in those phases. Most learners do not move directly from reception through reconsideration. Instead, the learning is recursive and tangled with pauses, as the learner works on recalling and retracting memories and understandings.5Reception refers to learners’ curiosities and willingness to encounter subjects that can be uncomfortable to explore. Since most people who go to museums, listen to podcasts, and visit history websites do so voluntarily, cultural workers can usually expect some desire for serious engagement with the narratives we offer. Here, our job is to enhance our audience's interest through signage, artifacts, and conversation that signal the difficult nature of what they will encounter. In doing this, it is important to emphasize not just the pain embedded in our narratives, but also the agency of those who have to deal with the trauma. This approach accords with the findings of the Demos study discussed in the forum's introduction, which urges us to be explicit about the intersection of key identity markers. Public musicologists can enhance our audience's curiosity by including musical works from the communities affected by the topics we discuss. This can help to humanize the narratives we offer.When most people encounter difficult narratives that are triggering or challenge their established ways of thinking, initially they will likely resist. This struggle is manifested through verbal expressions, attempts at humor, body language, or refusal (e.g., texting instead of reading exhibit labels, leaving an event, stopping a podcast). Rose argues that this phase is crucial for learning because resistance “can be a likely indication that the difficult knowledge is impacting that learner in new ways.”6 For cultural workers, the keys are attending to audiences’ anxieties, and developing techniques that help learners turn resistance into moments of real learning. One way to accomplish this is to ask our audiences probing questions about how they developed their existing knowledge frameworks. Sometimes, resistance stems from the learner's inability to empathize with people who were impacted by certain historical traumas. In these situations, we might use artifacts such as diaries or letters, songs, or photos to help our audiences develop a more human relationship with historical Others.When learners are experiencing a learning crisis, they often ask for information to be repeated. Rose explains, “As part of the labor of mourning, the learner must work through his or her loss by repeating a story again and again, asking repetitive questions, viewing an image over and over, or reading a label multiple times. The learner is considering how the new information can be tied to his or her internal psychic reality.”7 Public historians and music studies practitioners can employ a variety of strategies to facilitate this repetition. In physical exhibits, we can make it easy for visitors to go backward so that they can read a panel or see an artifact that they encountered earlier. In online exhibits, we can include an exhibit map on each page that makes navigation simple. Alternatively, we can reinforce our most controversial points throughout the exhibit with different artifacts. If we are working with podcasts, we can provide multiple examples that reinforce broader points.The fourth R is reflection. Many learners need time to reflect on the difficult narratives they are encountering. They might need quiet time alone, or time to explore further by reading, surfing the internet, or talking to docents. This is why many museums have gardens and reading rooms. When we put on events or create podcasts, it is important to build in breaks, such as musical interludes. The final R is reconsideration. This occurs when learners start to grasp the truthfulness of the narratives we are presenting and begin adopting at least parts of them into their cognitive framework. Because no podcast series or visit to a historic site can be comprehensive—and because learners can move into a resistance or repetition phase at any moment—Rose warns that reconsideration should be seen not as an endpoint in our learners’ journey. Instead, she argues that it is best to view reconsideration as a fresh beginning, a time for further exploration and hopefully action. She elaborates: Keep in mind, however, that the idea that learners will need to find peace or resolutions in their understandings about a difficult history is not a goal for CMP. Rather, the tensions felt by learners in the experience of learning about oppression and injustice is necessary for learners to feel empathy, to demand to know more, to come to value that history, and to be moved to action.8To demonstrate how this framework can be used as a tool of analysis, I examine Turbine, a 2015 work for moving choir and dancers. This work provided space for attendees to go through Rose's five cognitive phases, and it successfully deepened and changed many attendees’ views (including mine) about both water justice and the history of Philadelphia. The work can also serve as a model for many public musicology projects. A powerful way to spur action is to bring people to a specific site and have them experience a performance, do a walking tour, or participate in a discussion that pertains to that space.In the late eighteenth century, a series of yellow fever epidemics hit Philadelphia. Believed to be caused largely by unclean drinking water from the Delaware River, the local government set up a “Watering Committee,” which commissioned the construction of the Fairmount Water Works to bring water from the Schuylkill River to the city. Combining state-of-the-art technology, monumental architecture, scenic paths, and recreational spaces, the complex not only supplied water to Philadelphia for almost a century but also served as a major tourist attraction. An 1835 engraving by W.H. Bartlett (Figure 1) shows how this site combined the best of recreation (see the hikers and the woman on the boat on the right), human civilization (the Greek revival architecture), and modern science (the reservoir beneath the hill in the background). When the Water Works closed in 1909, the city first repurposed it as an aquarium and then as an indoor swimming pool. Since the late 1970s, Philadelphia has marketed the site as an historical attraction and recreational space. By then, however, highways on the west bank of the Schuylkill River had replaced the trees and trails one saw in the engraving, and the roar of traffic had eclipsed the sounds of the river.To celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the Fairmount Water Works’ opening and the tenure of Artistic Director Alan Harler, the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia commissioned composer Byron Au Yong and dancer Leah Stein to create a site-specific work entitled Turbine. Over the course of an hour, four dozen gesturing singers and eight dancers led the audience from the grass area next to the Water Works’ parking area, to the edge of the river at the entrance of the complex, to the roof of the New Mill House, and to the walkways around the Old Mill House (see Figure 2). Afterward, the performers and audience returned to the roof of the New Mill House, where the audience could see a solo soprano singing on a boat on the lower side of the dam. The performance concluded with everyone walking around the roof and shaking hands. The work—a complex series of snapshots of the history and politics of human water usage—is part soundwalk, part public history and musicology, part environmental activism, part modern dance concert, and part spiritual journey. It invites audience members to go through Rose's five cognitive phases in various orders. Moreover, it provides space for them to think critically, alter their beliefs, and, ultimately, act.The task of encouraging audience members to reflect and reconsider began early. Months before the performances, the Mendelssohn Club's marketing pointed potential audiences to a series of short videos about the commission and the history of the Water Works and organized a roundtable with artists, archivists, city workers, and educators. Perhaps most importantly, the chorus made Michael Moore's extensive program notes available weeks before the performances. These notes end with an extended quotation by the composer that crystalizes the work's social justice aims: “According to the World Health Organization, a child dies from a water-related disease every minute. More than twice the population lives without access to safe water. How can we turn despair and rage into wisdom?” In the final paragraph, Au Yong explains how music can be an important part of the process and ends with a call to action:Singing and listening to a river in the middle of a city is a step towards “justice journeying to harbor.” A turbine takes turbulence and transforms it into potential energy. Together we can find ways to ensure that the 750 million people around the world who lack access to safe water are given a chance to survive.9By bringing the audience to the river and having them contemplate water justice and innovative solutions we have used in the past, he hopes the work will cause a learning crisis that will lead audience members to reflect, reconsider, and help push for and implement solutions that work. This is a methodology that we can apply to public music studies projects that deal with neighborhoods, gentrification and segregation, key historical events, and many other topics.The first movement, entitled “Prelude,” was a soundwalk that introduced the Schuylkill River and the Water Works site. It is literally an Introit, a procession toward a ritualistic space. As such, the emphasis is on reception. Ushers led audiences to a shaded area, where they saw a few people dressed in bright orange, who turned out to be the dancers. The gathering crowd inevitably piques the interest of people who were just picnicking, playing games, or strolling in the park. Shortly after the announced start time, two dancers led everyone toward the river. Meanwhile, choir members—who were interspersed among the audience—began chanting, without coordination, adjectives, verbs, or short phrases combed from the late eighteenth-century writings of some-time Philadelphian John Penn, Jr. The result was a light cloud of sound through which one can occasionally hear individual words and melodic fragments. The amorphous singing and isolated words helped audiences leave their everyday world. This prepared them to engage with the unusual space they are in and the company with whom they walked.Later in the first movement, we moved away from the reception phase and toward resistance, reflection, and reconsideration. As the two dancers and ushers began leading the audience toward the Water Works, three dancers situated near the river became visible. Their languorous poses on the benches and the railing recalled paintings of water nymphs and alerted the audience that water was a major protagonist in Turbine (Figure 3). As the audience stepped onto the Water Works structure, the sounds of the flowing water became quite loud, not only because of the river's proximity but also because there was a dam nearby. This dam represents the second major protagonist in Turbine: technology. The remainder of the work was largely the story of the relationship between these two protagonists; water and technology worked together at times and were in conflict at other times. A throat-singing choir member symbolized this complex relationship. Here, he was not imitating unadulterated nature the way traditional Tuvan singers might. Instead, he interacted with the sounds of a river transformed by human technology. What made this opening movement so effective as a work of persuasion was its lack of didacticism. It refused to provide a set of solutions that audience members could immediately reject. Instead, it gave them space to consider their own perspectives. This is an important lesson for public music studies practitioners.The next three movements presented different effects that technology has had on water and people. The second and third movements celebrated humanity's ability to harness water for good through technology. The second movement began with the choir intoning early travelers’ cheerful accounts of the Fairmount Water Works and ended with a quadrille over the cantus firmus “Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine,” the names of the four old Philadelphia streets named after trees. This happy dance was possible only because the Fairmount Water Works enabled Philadelphians, as well as the trees that lined those streets, to have good health and wellbeing.The third movement “repeats” the idea that technology needs to be a key tool in the fight for water justice. While the performers, who were holding old gears from the Fairmount Water Works, sang and gestured facing out from all four sides of the South Entrance Building of the Old Mill House, the audience walked around the building. Here, the choir sang a three-part quasi-medieval-style motet. The slow-moving bass line acted like a medieval tenor, and the top line formed a nice duet with it. Between these two lines, a fast-moving cantus described the function of the Water Works in complete sentences. This was the first passage in Turbine that resembled traditional choral music. Set in a bright major mode, it celebrated the Water Works turbines that enabled the growth of the city. Given their optimistic nature, these two movements were unlikely to cause much of a learning crisis for audiences. Instead, because few Philadelphians understood the fact that the survival of their city depended upon a major technological intervention that delivered clean water, the two movements served a different purpose. They made audience members reflect upon and reconsider just how relevant water justice was and continues to be in their own city.This optimism was questioned in the extended fourth movement. The movement's opening tableau set words and phrases from poems by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler. Here, the political message was rather hidden. To understand the subtext, one needed to turn to Michael Moore's program note: Chandler was a lifelong abolitionist and an early supporter of the “free produce” movement, which fought the institution of slavery by boycotting goods produced by non-free labor.10 According to Moore, the Greek pavilion in the Water Works reminded Au Yong of a Greek forum, where people discussed significant issues; in the 1830s, these topics certainly would have included slavery, an institution that depended on complex irrigation systems built and maintained by unfree labor (Figure 4). Although not obvious from the words and phrases that Au Yong chose for this tableau, a reading of the full text left no doubt that the two poems used here were abolitionist. In “Story-Telling,” two friends gathered on the beautiful bank of a river, and one of them told a story about a heartbroken African woman whose children were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Meanwhile, “Sadness” described a breeze from the “guilty south,” which brought thoughts of the horrific conditions experienced by enslaved peoples to the protagonist's mind and tears to her eyes. This section forces audience members to recognize the dark side of technological solutions; even when they work, they often rely on the misery of and injustice toward laborers. These thoughts might lead some into the resistance phase.To make sure that audience members do not think that all is lost, a sense of optimism returned in the next section, thereby encouraging them to move into other cognitive phases. As all assembled left the pavilion, the choir sang words and phrases from a nostalgic, yet hopeful, Chandler poem entitled “Moonlight.” As the choir sang phrases such as “Star-Spangled Glory” and “Tell What Awaits,” the audience saw that eight dancers had ascended the hill across the driveway holding bowls of water. During a moment of silence from the choir, they poured the water onto the plants beneath them, symbolically giving them new life and cleansing human souls from the guilt of slavery (Figure 5).After this, the singers communed with nature by making whistling sounds that imitated wind and stirred the water in their bowls. Gradually, they started singing words and phrases from Chandler's poetic tribute to the Schuylkill River. Here, the composer intentionally misread the word “flood.” In her poem, Chandler used this word to denote the waters of the Brandywine River system. Au Yong, however, used this single word, which the singers repeated dozens of times as they spilled water from the bowls they were holding, to remind the audience of a recent event that showed the limitations of technology in taming the power of water. In his composer's note, Au Yong wrote, “Appropriately translated as ‘hidden river,’ the Schuylkill turned from peaceful to terrifying when [in spring 2014] the water crested at nearly 14 feet. The May 2014 flood brought a deluge to the Water Works. A place that was historically the source of clean water became filled with debris.”11 In 2021, Hurricane Ida again flooded the Fairmount Water Works, delaying the opening of the highly anticipated “Pool” exhibit by nearly seven months.In the final section of the fourth movement, “Transition,” Au Yong brings the issue of water justice to the fore. Here, the text comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem Astraea, which is the name of the Greek goddess of justice, innocence, and purity, who was forced to flee to become the constellation Virgo to escape human wickedness and will purportedly return to usher in a new golden age. Emerson's poem is not entirely hopeful about a return, but Au Yong combined excerpts of the two final lines to create something much more hopeful: “Justice journeying to harbor.” Unlike the rest of the work, he set this line repeatedly, and in a largely homorhythmic way, making it one of the few phrases that audience members can hear clearly. Within the work itself, Au Yong does not discuss which injustice needs to be rectified, but the context made it clear. The program book and media reports about the work all highlighted the fact that one in three people globally lacked access to clean drinking water. Water justice was also a regular topic in my conversations with several performers both before and after performances.As audiences returned to the roof of the Old Mill Building at the start of the final movement, they saw a boat in which a soprano sang excerpts of travelogues through an acoustic megaphone (Figure 6). Her words eventually passed to a soloist and the choir on the plaza. Turbine concluded with the entire choir chanting, without coordination, the word “water” and mingling with the audience; eventually, the performers began shaking hands with everyone, symbolically creating a community committed to working for water justice. When the last sounds of human singing faded away, a group of dancers, holding bowls, poured water back into the Schuylkill River (Figure 7).By bringing audiences to a site that solved the problem of polluted water in their hometown (at least temporarily), Turbine informed them that this health issue is not just an abstract problem with little relevance to their own lives. It was a crisis that their ancestors, or at least the former residents of their city, had to solve. The creators of Turbine had no illusions about the work's limitations as a political tool. They understood that it was more about art and entertainment than about the fight for clean water. That said, we can see this work, at least in part, as a model for how public music studies can use the 5Rs to create relevant social justice-oriented projects by bringing historical context into the consciousness of audience members and partnering with artists.To show how the 5Rs can serve as a planning tool, I discuss a podcast series I am creating with a small team at the Music of Asian America Research Center called “Who Is an Immigrant?” Our goal is to help listeners gain a more complete understanding of Asian immigration to the United States. This means, following Tuck and Yang's “R-Words: Refusing Research,” that we are very conscious of allowing Asian Americans to speak not just their trauma but also their resistance, resilience, successes, and everyday joys.12 It also means that we amplify the narratives and solutions that our communities have developed to deal with the problems we are encountering. Additionally, we challenge and complicate problematic narratives that continue to be reinforced in popular culture, newscasts, textbooks, and politicians’ speeches. These include stories casting Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners” who can never fully be American, as desirable and submissive “Madama Butterflies,” and as robotic, hard-working, and unquestioning “model minorities.”13 Our target audiences are Asian Americans who are coming to terms with identity issues, and educators (middle and high school, college) who are seeking alternative narratives and materials for their classrooms. In particular, we will reach out to teachers in states that have recently passed legislation requiring Asian American Studies in their K-12 curricula. At the time of writing, these states are Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. We hope more states will join this list soon.Three key narratives inform the contents of the series. The first contends that the most common approach to teaching immigration—the push/pull theory—is inadequate. Proposed by Everett Lee in 1966, the theory outlines the factors that “push” people from their homelands (e.g., war, religious prosecution, poverty, environmental disaster) and “pull” people to new places (e.g., economic and educational opportunities, political freedom, healthier environmental conditions). In recent decades, many scholars have critiqued Lee's theory and pointed out its many limitations, but it continues to be used frequently in classrooms.14 For us, the biggest problems with this theory are: (1) it downplays the tremendous influence of American businesses and racial hierarchies in immigration policy, and (2) it erases the many Asian immigrants who did not come (completely) voluntarily. To remedy this erasure of involuntary migration, four episodes of our series focus on two groups: the over one million Asians who entered the United States as refugees, and the hundreds of thousands of Asian children who arrived as transnational adoptees. Following Ibram X. Kendi, our second narrative is that assimilationist ideas, which continue to be promoted as ideals by many government policies, social service programs, and curricula, are White supremacist ideas.15 They suggest that there is something wrong with Asian immigrants, and that they need to change in order to fit in. Put another way, they need to be Americanized, which—as Mitch McConnell's recent verbal separation of “African Americans” and “Americans” demonstrates—is often a code word for the values of Christian White Americans.16 The situation of Asian Americans is even more complex. In the series, we explore how, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States government denied Asians the right to immigrate and naturalize based on the notion that they were incapable of assimilating. In contrast, since the 1970s, Asian Americans have often been described as model minorities, a stereotype that promotes the idea that Asian Americans are able to achieve the American Dream because they assimilate, work hard, and do not complain. In addition to erasing the many Asian Americans who struggle economically, this label enables people to deny the existence of systemic racism and helps to drive a wedge between Asian Americans and other racial minorities. The final narrative is that family separation has been a central element of much U.S. immigration policy since the beginning. In the series, we discuss the 1875 Page Act, which effectively prohibited the entry of Chinese women to the United States; the effects of the various Chinese and Asian Exclusion Laws; and the strategies the U.S. government used for refugee resettlement.We decided on these narratives for three key reasons. Firs