ABSTRACT
Teachers of music history often use instructional devices to simplify complicated information for our students or to provide them with mnemonic devices. Unfortunately, they also engender myths or fallacies in the minds of the students. This type of fallacy goes by the wonderful name prosopopoiea, and fall into it when one use a particular individual to represent a general and widespread musical phenomenon. The case of Leonirt and Perotin can provide a detailed example of prosopopoiea. Myth becomes hagiography when the actions of the individual become superhuman. Another example of prosopopoiea is the so-called Landini cadence. Students encounter this term in a wide variety of reliable secondary sources, and they come away with the idea that Landini invented the cadence. A more limited version of this myth maintains that women were forbidden to perform on the operatic stage, and this situation, in some vague way, is related to the rise of the castrato.
