Interviews
Conversations with university faculty on the intersection of music and identity.
Dr. Yoko Suzuki - University of Pittsburgh
The first serious interview I ever did was with Dr. Yoko Suzuki. I thank her for letting me bombard her with words while nervously fidgeting with my hair and trying to stay a step ahead with each question so the conversation wouldn’t lull—it was daunting to interview for the first time someone so smart and devoted to music, something I was so deeply fascinated with. When I opened the Zoom link that I had sent her, my heart was racing and my left leg was bouncing at speeds foreign to me outside of final exams and important performances.
She joined the meeting and I quickly launched into an overeager explanation of why I was interviewing her and what my background was, but after my spiel was over she stopped me and simply asked if my name, Emi, was Asian. This instantaneously alleviated a huge amount of pressure from my shoulders; I smiled comfortably and told her that my mother was Japanese and had chosen that name for me, and the Zoom meeting suddenly felt more like a living room and less like an office.
With a newly established sense of community between us, she explained her music career and experience to me as I listened intently. Similarly to me, she started listening to jazz after the influence of her male family members, and played jazz throughout high school. Also similarly to me, she has faced and continues to face a number of discriminatory struggles as a female and non-white musician. When I asked her to speak on this, she told me…
“Now thinking back, I think that I wasn’t really taken seriously for a long time, because I am a woman and I’m not American…When I was experiencing it, and still I sometimes encounter that, you know, they don’t think I’m a musician, or assume I’m a singer, or that I’m the wife of somebody…I thought those things happened because I’m not good enough. Now I think, just looking back, I had so many internalized ideas I wasn’t even aware of. I wish I were a little bit more confident.”
Every point she made mirrored my own experience; I found myself both excited and satisfied by this similarity and disappointed that someone that I perceived as so proficient and admirable still dealt with the same issues I felt. It was incredibly validating to hear someone explain the struggles thrown their way and cite the examples I always noticed myself as evidence.
I grimace and produce a tight smile when people ceaselessly ask if I came to sing or watch a male in the band who, to seemingly every onlooker, must be my boyfriend, yet when I sit back and reflect on these experiences on a larger scale, it becomes hard to not dismiss such brief interactions as my own overthinking. To have Dr. Suzuki voice her own frustrations with the way in which people treated her with bias instantly turned my uncertainty into credibility.
On the other hand, it was hard to fathom that she continued to be looked down upon because of her race and gender even in more prolific and respectable music spaces; I think some part of me wanted to believe my own dissatisfaction with my fellow musicians was only a product of their inexperience and ensuing immaturity.
All these thoughts were unfolding in my head as she continued to speak, and I decided to focus on the question I would next ask Dr. Suzuki—after all, it was still her interview, and I felt a little guilty for becoming so centered on my own pensiveness. Remembering that she had credited her original interest in jazz music to her older brother, I thought briefly about the lack of other girls I knew who were curious about jazz.
“I’ve noticed that many of my female friends don’t listen to jazz, or fusion, or anything along that line. Do you think there’s any kind of social boundary holding women and girls back from listening to jazz?” I asked, hoping the question would produce in her some revelational answer.
“Because performers are predominantly men, I think that makes audiences predominantly men. It’s an interesting thing to think about,” Dr. Suzuki said, and I nodded along over the webcam. “Stereotypically, jazz is kind of complex, or so-called ‘intellectual music,’ and in that sense it is stereotypically masculine. Masculine types of music attract masculine types of people.”
She went on to explain that women have existed since the beginning of music, and issues arise not in their presence but in their documentation and exposure. I’m not sure to what extent I completely agree—women have been held back from even learning instruments and entering the music world for ages—but it was fascinating to think about the masculinity of jazz itself, especially considering its origins. During the Jazz Age, jazz performers made an active effort to conform to stereotypes of a Black, refined masculine fantasy to appeal to a larger white audience still skeptical of what they called “savage” music. Since then, jazz has morphed into an art perceived by society as sophisticated and particularly masculine, contributing to the disparities of numbers of certain minorities involved in the scene.
Dr. Suzuki also named the media as a large contributor and propagator of this mysterious masculine jazz identity, saying that journalists and jazz historians only wrote about people who they “wanted to write about” and who they “thought were important,” and rarely women. However, she continued, social media offers musicians an unprecedented platform; they have the option to present themselves. This is a new opportunity for exposure and offers potential for musicians to flip the pretentious narrative of jazz and open it to a still larger audience.
When our time was drawing to a close, I asked Dr. Suzuki: “What is your final message to people like me who are starting their journey in music?”
She thought for a beat and answered honestly:
“I really think that, and I still have this issue now, that it’s very hard for me to be confident. And I still have this idea of, you know, what does it mean for me to play jazz? I’m not even American— jazz is American, specifically African American music. You know, I’m an outsider, would I be able to play jazz authentically?
“For a long time, I internalized the idea that I could never really be successful as a musician, and I hope that young people never think that. If you are passionate about music, really, you can do it.”
I let her words linger and thanked her for her time, before ending the call, scribbling down my final notes, and sighing in relief to have had such a fascinating and successful interview. I spent a long time after that thinking about her; how she still seemed to struggle with confidence and belonging, how she was clearly excited to see a young woman engaged with her and music in general, and how she was so vulnerably honest about her own experiences and insecurities. My initial respect for Dr. Suzuki after reading her credentials and accomplishments grew immeasurably with her open attitude and willingness to share her life with me. I will certainly not forget the first interview I conducted for this project and the lessons it bestowed upon me.
Dr. Carlos Chirinos - New York University
My interview with Dr. Carlos Chirinos began at 3:00 pm on a Wednesday. I remember this detail in particular because I had to rush out of my Spanish class and into the clustered practice rooms of my school early, sent off with a snarky remark from my teacher. There were no tables in any of the rooms and the music stands had a deceptively strong appearance and would not bear the weight of my computer. I ended up crashing my computer unceremoniously on the piano, accompanied by the sound of an ugly and muddy chord, as I clicked on the link and joined the Zoom meeting. His little video box sat nicely and cleanly in the corner of the screen, and his office was full of.
I introduced myself as I was starting to become used to (student interested in the intersection of music and society, etc) and we chatted for a little while, before I reached my broad opening question: “How has your social identity impacted your experience in your music journey and career?”
“It’s not an advantage, but I think socially, men are less criticized than perhaps women or non-binary or LGBTQ people, for example,” he answered, with a careful precision that signaled to me he was very aware of both his own identity and mine, and the way in which it changed the power dynamic of our conversation. “On one hand, there is a stigma about musicians, and the privilege of being in a male-dominated field, which is wrong, opens up certain opportunities for me, but I know it closes doors for other people. Especially for women and girls in music, there are a lot more barriers.”
I was satisfied with his answer—it was a good beginning, and I could tell he knew I, as a female high schooler sitting before a male professor, was curious to hear what his own opinions would be on the matter yet rather cognizant of our differences. I continued by asking him about the stigma society seems to hold against musicians, and his answer was surprisingly practical and realistic.
“On one hand there is the image of the celebrity, but on the other hand there is the image of the musician or the artist who is perceived to not be successful, because they don’t have a full-time job.”
I had never thought about music’s differentiation from other professions in terms of hours, so I nodded and made a mental note to make sure I listened back to this part of the interview after it finished.
“And that goes back to the same stigma we were talking about. With little fame comes a lack of money, which means little access to things like insurance. I think that the most oppressing issue for musicians is the lack of employment for professional musicians means the lack of access to certain basics like health insurance. Things that affect their ability to live a normal life, you know, getting money from banks or getting a mortgage is difficult for a musician who does not have a full-time job.”
This was a facet of music and society that I had truly overlooked in all my exploration of identity in musicians, yet it seemed so obvious. Of course the daily lives of musicians would be heavily impacted by their occupation—even the most successful musician can still be a freelancer, who, as Dr. Chirinos went on to say, are certainly not favored by bankers. In this case, being a musician, of any ethnicity, gender, or orientation, already makes it more difficult to live and operate within the corporate and economic constraints of our country.
Having read his blurb on the NYU staff directory and seen that he works with music and social change, I was eager to hear his thoughts: Dr. Chirinos has published extensively on the use of popular songs in health education, and works in the NYU Steinhardt Music Business program. So I asked him simply what social change meant to him.
He thought to himself then said, “You cannot pinpoint social change in time. Social change happens over time. But one factor that is really necessary for social change to happen is a change in narratives. Narratives are what people talk about, industries, and how that influences policy making. The reality is, ‘social change’ is a nice word, it’s a nice term, but social change doesn’t happen until a policy is changed or erected.”
The way in which he answered was again elegant and scholarly, and it aligned with what I had previously learned about social change. History has shown countless times that shifts in public opinion need to be underscored by legislation for real change to occur, and it was clear that he understood and fought for justice on a deeper institutional level than simply empowering the masses. I then asked him about the influence and power of music specifically over social change, and I could tell immediately that he was used to and excited to answer this question.
“What music does…is music helps in the changing of that narrative through social movements…there is a new emerging genre of music that talks about specific issues that affect society. In 2017 and 2023, I found a number of songs that were specifically about feminism, about anti-racism, about support for LGBTQ communities, about support for mental health, about body positivity, and about the environment.
“What I found was that the cluster of songs that were released for certain topics, for example feminism, were predecessors of the MeToo movement. The songs were happening before the MeToo movement. The same with the Black Lives Matter movement.”
This was fascinating to me. I had entered the interview with the expectation of getting the perspective of a new person and experience on the intersection of music and identity to them personally, but I was now getting a lesson in music business and music’s power in society. His unique understanding of movements was something I again had never before considered, and I will admit I was a little surprised to hear that topical songs preceded movements as large and influential as Black Lives Matter. This only deepened my understanding of the connection between music and society: music motivates people, gives people a sense of identity, empowers people, and motivates people to act.
Dr. Chirinos’s extensive experience in the intersection of music and social change combined with his real-life knowledge on the lesser-known struggles of musicians provided a gritty and novel perspective to society and its relation to music that freshened my own knowledge with a new dimension of comprehension.
Cedric McCoy - Yale University
There is so much breadth to the study of the intersections of music and society that I cannot even begin to estimate the range of topics scholars study. I see this as an opportunity to gather data and opinions from wide corners of the musicology world and compare them to my own thoughts on my experience as a musician and, of course, member of society. One particularly eye-opening and fascinating interviewee who encapsulated the diversity of the study of music was Cedric McCoy, a PhD student in Music and African American Studies at Yale.
Cedric was the first non-professor I reached out to; I was excited to hear from a younger person who could perhaps be more relatable to me than the highly experienced and thoroughly researched people I had previously spoken with. The question I opened with was some variation of my usual so how did you get into music and he responded by saying that he started college believing he would pursue a career as a music educator, but plans changed with political policies.
“I grew up in a red state, where my certification would have been, and I watched a lot of my friends who had graduated in the years past see their department budgets slashed, have their jobs become more and more difficult, because, you know, arts funding really tends to dry up in those kinds of places—so I shifted to this music scholarship thing so I could still teach music, but at a different level. That’s how I ended up where I am.”
I had been made aware in the past that many arts departments were being cut from schools after drops in budget and funding, and was appropriately astounded and upset, but this was before my interest in studying music truly began. The resurfacing and reality of this information surprised me and was a good reminder that not everyone gives music the same weight of importance as me and the people I interview. It was almost like an electric shock; I was not completely speechless at the fact that his peers had struggled with cuts to their departments, but it felt so incredibly real to hear his story and raw emotion paired with these distant-seeming policies. Trying to gather more interesting information from him, I asked him to explain a surprising detail about the way that race, gender, and music interact that he had discovered in his research. He answered, “I think I’ll add one dimension to your question and that would be location.
“For me, I mentioned that I kind of grew up as a band kid, I was a total marching band geek through high school. And for context, I grew up in northern Indiana, just about an hour east of Chicago. Marching bands in the North have a very specific type of practice: they have their half-time shows, it’s all very military drills, you know, we kind of trace our tradition back to Ohio State, Indiana University, that kind of sphere of marching band.”
As soon as he mentioned marching bands in the North I knew where this was going; other styles of music have followed similar patterns with drastic shifts from North to South as a result of the South’s long history of institutional and casual racism.
He continued: “So I was watching marching band, watching DCI if you’re familiar—Drum Corps International, a professional marching band—and suddenly this channel appears called Jukebox of the South. It was a compilation channel of Southern marching bands. And the way they do marching band is so different. Same instruments, same uniforms, but the way they move, the way they dance, the different types of songs they play, even down to their brass technique, they have this blasting kind of sound.
“Where I’m going with this is that the types of music traditions that people are raised in or that they see modeled for them are the same types of traditions that they themselves replicate, or they themselves perform within. So even though we have this common ancestor of the military band, the southern marching bands, which are overwhelmingly Black men and Black women, versus northern marching bands, which are overwhelmingly white men and white women, play this music in totally different ways. That’s one way that place and identity shape the way that we experience music.”
The North and South have always had distinct musical identities—the emergence of the Jazz Age in the South combined with different levels of racial tolerance and understanding catalyzed vast differences in the types of music popularized and enjoyed by people of either part of the country, and this can be seen especially in traditional forms of performance such as marching band. As Cedric had articulated, it is important to keep in mind the impact of location on music and society.
On the topic of location, I next asked Cedric:
“For me, in the DMV, a lot of people, even my friends, who don’t really understand music, will…I get a lot of negative comments about how I play music, so has that been a similar experience for you and why do you think music is not more socially acceptable in high school?”
I knew he would understand my grievances about being a musician surrounded by non-musician friends, as he had mentioned being a “marching band geek” and clearly identified strongly with music in his high school years.
“My perspective, I think, even though I grew up in a mostly rural town, there was definitely the jock, kind of ‘football is our main export’ attitude that you would see in any Americana 1970s high school film,” Cedric said. “ I would say a lot of stigma around being in music is still around, I happened to grow up in a town that had a lively arts scene so we were supported in a lot of other ways, but I guess I would say, and this comes back to your question of identity, I think that especially in our modern age, since we’ve drifted away from what the Greeks or Romans thought of theatre, we’ve kind of feminized a lot of performance. Theatre performance, music performance, choir performance, we think of the show choir girl, right, in popular culture. Society tends to associate things that are feminized as negative, as weak, as bad.”
This was a compelling contrast to Dr. Suzuki’s earlier commentary on jazz and its relationship with masculinity; she, as a woman, felt pushed out from the culture by its association with the male gender, yet Cedric felt the broader criticisms of society in the form of music being considered “too feminine.”
He went on: “I think there is this negative association with things that allow you to be emotive, or tap into a specific kind of experience that is expressive or vulnerable, and that comes as a result of how we feminize things in society. So I think when we think of the band nerd, we think of this weak and frail person who can’t manage their own, they’re a nerd, etc etc. And I think that’s probably where a lot of that stigma comes from, is that feminization of performance.”
So the social rejection of musicians came from an insecurity in expression and vulnerability. I have always thought of music as an intimate part of someone’s identity—to hear someone hum along to a song or see what they listen to when no one else is around is one of the most personal things I think I have experienced. With this in mind, it makes sense that society would be averse to musicians, as they tap into the more unprotected, deeply personal aspects of themselves without the same fear that their non-musician peers do.
Though Cedric and I are vastly different in our own musical backgrounds and personal identities, everything we have each studied is related: my research into the evolution of jazz as a reaction to social perception clearly connects to his findings on the perceived femininity of music performance. My biggest takeaway was that misbelonging doesn’t belong to any one identity or type of person: just as I can feel pushed away by the masculinity of jazz, many male players are simultaneously shunned for taking part in a “feminine” art.
Dr. Allie Martin - Dartmouth College
In looking for university faculty who I could meaningfully learn from, I was especially excited to speak with Professor Allie Martin simply because her main studies were based in DC, the city I’ve grown up in and around. After going through the usual Zoom checks, I asked her flat-out what her story was: how her relationship with music had evolved, why she became an ethnomusicologist, and how she became focused on gentrification through sound in the DC area.
She went to undergrad for violin and audio production, playing and teaching a lot of music, and then shifted to ethnomusicology in grad school.
“Before the last year of undergrad-ish, I was doing research on go-go and gentrification in DC, and then through that work, I expanded out to think about: what does gentrification sound like? At the time, it was not a question that people were really working with,” said Dr. Martin.
She went on to say that she’s written a book about what gentrification sounds like to Black people, and now teaches hip-hop and Black sound studies at Dartmouth. As someone who was not familiar with Black sound studies, I asked her to elaborate:
Dr. Martin said that her training in musicology, where she was interested in the musical and sonic decisions that people made in their day-to-day lives, was with people who had done a lot of Black music research (one of her advisors was an expert on hip-hop, another on gospel music performance, etc). However, by contrast, she chose not to study music in general, but sound specifically. This looked like studying changes in noise complaints, existence of sound in public space, and how blackness is perceived as a sound.
“This was also listening to sirens. I did a lot of work in Shaw, the Metro PCS Store, listening to sirens, noise legislation, and how people complained,” she said.
I was fascinated—having always looked at ‘sound’ in the context of types of music and instruments, I had never considered how non-musical sounds could paint just as vibrant a portrait of human life in urban areas. I reflected on the sounds in my own life: the sound of the keyboard as I type this reflection, the sound of rush-hour traffic on Wisconsin Avenue as I leave school every day, the sounds of sirens from near and far, even the quiet, muted sound of walking through an empty park. Noise and sound is especially important to study in the context of Black sound studies. Dr. Martin went on to say that “a lot of the time we think about blackness as loud, as noisy, as dangerous, as can get people criminalized, it can get people hurt.” Just as sound can define our societies, society creates harmful stereotypical associations of sound with communities.
“So I’m thinking not just about: here’s a song, here’s a song, here’s a song, but about language, volume, noise complaint, and really the sounds of the city overall, which would be an example of Black sound studies.”
Each person and their language, volume, and how they interact with the city adds to the overall sounds of the city and perhaps its gentrification too—though Dr. Martin warns not to oversimplify gentrification. She explains that it’s not a one-to-one process, rather an amalgamation of different processes that move together in terms of the influx of capital, redevelopment, culture, and even more factors. She looks at gentrification in questions like: what kind of amenities do people like? How do people imagine their neighborhoods looking, sounding, and feeling?
Dr. Martin used go-go music as an example. “As the neighborhoods change, some of the [go-go] clubs that used to be in those neighborhoods closed, or maybe clubs opened in new spaces. People have talked about how a lot of go-go bands are playing in Maryland or Virginia now. They play a little further out.”
Go-go music is a particularly interesting example: originating in Washington, D.C. and designated as the city’s official music, how does it evolve during processes of gentrification? Does the genre’s status as DC-born and driven keep it safe from being pushed away? Dr. Martin doesn’t think so: she asks “who gets arts grants in the city? Are they go-go musicians? It’s not just the venues. It’s not just this. It’s not just that.” The city itself is both a reactor and a product of the continuing equilibrium of sound and identity. It has the potential to further elevate go-go musicians by giving art grants, venues, and other support, yet how many of those efforts have been realized today?
Most importantly, Dr. Martin emphasizes that “gentrification is not a sort of one-dimensional process in which white people move in, Black people get kicked out, and the city gets quieter. It’s not just a question of gentrification, silence, and Black people because that’s the kind of sensationalism I try not to engage in. There’s plenty of Black people in the city and they are making lots of sound all the time.”
I finished the interview by asking her specifically about her experience in the music scene as a function of her identity, sharing my own as a girl in jazz music. She told me that as a classically trained violinist, she was often the only Black classically trained musician in the room. “[This identity] definitely plays a role because people put expectations on you that may or may not be true, about who you are and how you got to be there,” she finished.
Her commentary further fueled what I had already begun to learn from the other professors: there is no singular specific identity shunned from the music scene, rather a myriad of expectations based on preconceptions. Perhaps this persistence of biases in different music communities is what contributes to the relationship between gentrification, race, and sound.
Professor Kelli Smith-Biwer - Ohio University
The Zoom call began late after a series of disastrous inconveniences on Professor Smith-Biwer’s end, which similarly to Dr. Suzuki made me feel more at ease and honest when I was speaking with her. I gave my introduction then told her candidly: “I’m gonna be honest, I literally just looked up ‘universities with people who research music, gender, and race’ and then your profile came up, and it said that you are currently working on 1950s home audio culture and masculinity, so I just wanted to start by asking if you could expand on that a little bit.”
She laughed when I said this and made some comment about how her bio wasn’t necessarily deeply accurate, to which I blanched slightly, then answered my question.
“I am knee-deep in music technology and masculinity, specifically. So what I look at is historical magazines, like 1950s magazines that are targeted specifically at home audio buyers. In the 1950s it was really, really popular, the idea of home audio had just exploded after World War II, and this kind of home audio that was really high end and had really good sound was called hi-fi: high fidelity home audio. The advertising was mostly targeted at men. As you could probably imagine, most of the historical research on music technology that we have now doesn’t really talk about gender.
“My question was, I feel like we’re asking the wrong questions when we are doing this work. Instead of asking where are the women, we should ask, why did the hi-fi industry specifically target men? What was it about technology and sound and these really peculiar home devices that were becoming more and more popular for the home in the 50s, what was it about these that made advertisers think “we should target this product at men?” Because now when I think of high-end home audio, or home theaters, I tend to think of, well, dads! Dads’ hobbies, and things that they like to kind of poke around with on the weekends. It hasn’t always been that way—before World War II, phonographs and radios were mostly advertised towards mothers, as a way to educate or entertain little kids. It wasn’t until after World War II that this very active, masculinized market exploded. So there was at some point a very conscious decision on the parts of manufacturers and advertisers to pinpoint that particular market. That’s what my research is on.”
Every one of these interviews I do, I go into with a few general questions: how did you get into music, how does your identity impact music, what factors into the relationship between race, gender, and music, et cetera. However, after Professor Smith-Biwer explained to me her work, I got the feeling that I wouldn’t need to pigeonhole her into the same exceedingly broad questions. Instead, I listened as she explained the effects of the Cold War on gender in the United States—something I had never even thought about— and the divisions between manufacturers who targeted men and women. She even pulled up her dissertation to show me the authentic images from 1950s magazines that she had studied extensively, and though I had never before been familiar with home audio systems, she led me through her evidence to the same conclusions she’d drawn out with years of research. This concept of advertisers purposefully nitpicking which identities are affiliated with which product reminded me of my junior research paper: there is power in consciously deciding what associations you want with a certain object or idea. I’m still not quite sure what made advertisers change their target audience from women to men, but it certainly plays on the same themes of how sound and identity interact in society decades ago and today.
The lessons I learned from Professor Smith-Biwer was to not judge a book by its cover—that is, a dissertation by its topic. I never would’ve thought I would be interested in home audio systems of the 50s, yet her approach and analysis made the complex audio systems and relevant politics of the time accessible to me despite my lack of prior information. Her work helped me to better understand the impact of marketing and different types of music product industries on the way we consume and create music. There are seemingly infinite factors that go into how we are exposed to music, which I strongly believe is a foundation for music taste and ensuing involvement in music. By learning to understand how we are shown certain kinds of music or audio products based on our identity, we can operate more consciously as consumers and even just as members of society.