Professor Jennifer Fraser is an ethnomusicologist whose scholarship ranges from music of the Minangkabau people in West Sumatra, Indonesia to digital humanities, community engagement, and decentering colonialist, racist, and sexist legacies in ethnomusicology and academia. She leads a wide array of courses at Oberlin, from teaching Introductory Ethnomusicology to instructing Javanese Gamelan ensemble. Professor Fraser has been awarded the Teaching Excellence Award from Oberlin and the Outstanding Community-based Learning Practitioner Award from the Bonner Center for Service and Learning, and has published frequently on Indonesian musicology.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Have the ethical approaches to your field shifted over the years?
Yes, they have radically changed — or I think they’ve radically changed, and not everyone necessarily would agree with or recognize that. One of the things that I think is really important in my approach is that I want to keep up with where the field is now as much as I can. I recognize that I’m not freshly out of grad school, but I think it’s unethical not to actually shift with the times.
For instance, the class that I call Decolonizing Ethnomusicology, it’s complicated because it’s important not to use it as a metaphorical reference. I use it as something to signal or get students interested. Then, we talk about why it’s a problematic term. I don’t know too many colleagues who teach a course that’s quite the same title, but that course I couldn’t have imagined teaching 10 years ago, for instance.
Has the Trump administration affected how you teach?
Absolutely. The Trump administration restructured my life in some ways. Some of it is tied up with ethical changes in the field, but also tied up with Trump, particularly the first election. I historically did all my research in Indonesia, and at that moment, there was a call that maybe one should be less colonialist. I was also working with some sleazy guys, and I really didn’t want to do that anymore. I finally realized I didn’t have to after I became a full professor.
But at the time, I was like, “Why am I going to do research in some other place far from here? And shouldn’t I work with communities that are more directly affected or will be affected by this upcoming administration?”
That’s when I really shifted into doing community engagement work and doing some music with kids in the city of Lorain. I did that program for a couple of years and then COVID-19 put a damper on that. It was revamped for a semester, but it struggled to get back off the ground. And now I do community engagement with Indigenous communities, which is not musical per se, but it’s still very much tied in with my training and the ethical imperative of the work that I do.
What are some of the biggest lessons you aim for students to walk away with from studying ethnomusicology?
One of the things that has been true since I’ve been here is that context is so important, whether that be historical, social, or cultural context. One cannot study anything in isolation. We’re looking at historical figures who were the main figures before ethnomusicology was actually a named discipline, but we have to consider how they were moving within 19th-century circles, not from our 21st-century perspectives.
Also, all that knowledge is constructed, situational, contingent, and political. It matters what we teach. It matters how we teach. It matters who we put on our syllabus. That doesn’t mean that I avoid the people that I disagree with, but it means I approach them in a particular way, and I let students wrestle with problematic pieces for themselves. I’d like students to go through that process of discovery themselves.
Is there a favorite project that you’ve worked on over the past couple of years, with students in particular?
I would say the current one that I’m doing, actually. I’ve had tremendous fun. We are working on it in Decolonizing Ethnomusicology, and it’s going to change a little bit this semester. In the first module, we’re working with archival materials, particularly these figures who were instrumental in settler collections of native practices. Francis Densmore, who is considered the most prolific collector of the 19th and early 20th centuries, was an Oberlin student. John Comfort Fillmore, who is credited with being the person who harmonized native practices in really egregious ways in his theories — a very social Darwinistic perspective, just horrible looking back at it — he was a student here and then taught. That’s the bigger project: What are these settler collectors doing engaging with Native practices? And what has Oberlin’s role been? Why does Oberlin keep popping up in this history?
