Kathryn Metz, director of Musical Studies, Mellon Mays Undergraduate Research Fellowship administrative coordinator, and senior lecturer, is an ethnomusicologist who works with popular music. She has conducted research on popular music in Peru’s urban Amazon and worked as an educator at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She continues to explore popular music’s capabilities for education equity and social justice in her work at Oberlin and elsewhere.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you become interested in researching popular music?
It was a confluence of factors. When I was an undergraduate at Bowling Green State University, I was a research assistant for my ethnomusicology professor and advisor, David Harnish, who was working on summer Head Start programs for temporary migrant kids whose parents came in certain seasons to work. The kids were pretty obsessed with a lot of music that I also enjoyed. I was interested in what it would mean for them to have better access to Head Start, to music, and to music therapy.
When I was in grad school at The University of Texas at Austin, I ended up in the urban Amazon in Peru working on pop music. I was surprised by the lengths to which people would go to access this music — for example, in rural areas with no electricity. I ended up writing my dissertation about it. Whatever people are listening to, I want to know why, and how that’s shaping their space, and how they’re shaping it.
Can you give an overview of your research?
My dissertation research was on popular music in the urban Amazon of Peru, and this particular kind of popular music called Tecnocumbia, which isn’t like Detroit techno. It’s basically chicha music, which is this Amazonian version of Cumbia. I looked at the music and what it had to do with the changing economy there. The Amazon is really isolated. You can only get to the city of Iquitos, Peru, by boat or by plane. There are stereotypes nationwide about it being kind of “backwoods.” They fight hard against that, and their music has become nationally acclaimed. I wondered: “What is this music that has this national impact? How is it generating economic stability or upward mobility for any of these musicians or the surrounding community?”
What other kinds of projects have you worked on?
Popular music pedagogy has been a passion of mine. I worked at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for a long time in the education department. I taught K–12 students, as well as adults, in a lot of subject areas — the science of sound, technological innovations, social studies, financial literacy, all using popular music as the driving force while meeting and exceeding the academic content standards for the Ohio Department of Education as well as the U.S. Department of Education. As community programs manager, I worked with the pre-literacy, pre-numeracy Head Start program.
Which of your findings in your educational work and in your research have been the most exciting or troubling to you?
With pop music and pedagogy, it frustrates me that education equity is not the goal of everyone. Public education in the U.S. is a socialized system, but it’s deployed incredibly unevenly. But it’s also been rewarding to think about the ways in which people are trying to be innovative in education.
Something that we’re always uncovering in popular music is that popular music is almost always an appropriation of a marginalized class of sound — Tango in Argentina, Tecnocumbia in Peru, rock and roll in the U.S. In Peru, Tecnocumbia is a dominant voice of the working class. That gives me hope that there might be equity somewhere about something, even if it’s a genre that not a lot of people outside of Peru know.
What are the challenges of researching in ethnomusicology?
It has colonialist and imperialist foundations, but we also have to remember intent versus impact. I would like to be both gracious toward and critical of the founders of the field, because it’s been a very extractive field. It’s challenging to figure out how to frame and conduct fieldwork, how to do the research without being extractive, and while considering the communities’ needs first and foremost, [like] if you’re even wanted or needed there. How can ethnomusicology be a mutually beneficial partnership — or maybe not even beneficial to the researcher, but to the researched?
In what ways does ethnomusicology work benefit communities?
There’s the repatriation of sounds. There have been a lot of sounds that have been recorded in the last century and a half in Indigenous communities. There are ethnomusicologists who are taking those recordings from their archives and not even keeping their own copies of them, and instead repatriating them to people, so they can hear the voices of their grandparents or great-grandparents for the first time, and they get to be the stewards of those sounds.
It’s been proven how well music pairs with literacy. Thinking about what ethnomusicology can do, there’s educating kids. We can use music to help them remember multiplication tables or analyze historical artifacts. Oliver Sacks, the neuropsychologist, along with other people, discovered all these different connections that music helps make. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be used in education.
What projects are you working on right now?
I’m working on a chapter for an edited volume on applied ethnomusicology — specifically, on pop music pedagogy and access in school settings. I’m co-writing it with an Oberlin alum, one of my former students, whose research is thinking about education equity and access, using music as a tool. I’ve also been working on a pop music pedagogy textbook and workbook.
What have you observed about the role of popular music in our culture today?
I feel like AI and politics have had an outsized influence in the conversation, but aside from that, I think about protests. Protests don’t happen without sound and music.
One of the wonderful things about Zoom during the pandemic was the collaboration of artists across time and space. That’s really opened up these generative spaces for music. Just being in community and building resilience through something that pretty much everybody loves is so powerful and crucial. When we take care of our bodies and our souls, we can be better resources for other people, and so I have hope in the generative community of music now, in relation to everything.
