This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is OSCA’s role on campus? 

When I think about OSCA’s role on campus, one of the things that first comes to mind is “learning and labor.” I think that Oberlin was built on this notion that learning on its own is not sufficient, that we learn best when we are also getting our hands dirty — the stuff that we will be spending most of our lives outside of school doing. So that’s one of the big things that OSCA provides. The other thing is that there’s a lot of isolation, not just at Oberlin but in the world of secondary education at large. People come to college often with a very specific specialty in mind, a path of study that they’re pursuing, and we have this tendency to kind of silo ourselves, and I think OSCA exists as a counterweight to that. OSCA is around so that we don’t all get stuck doing our own individual thing, focusing on this and that, staying in practice rooms for six hours. You can do that, but then you can also go to a meal with 80 of your best friends afterwards. OSCA’s role is to make sure that we don’t fall into these patterns of siloization. I think it does that for OSCA members, but I also think that it does that for the Oberlin student community at large. Whether you are a guest at a co-op meal or just somebody who’s coming to a jazz party at Tank, I think that having that there is valuable not just to its members but to student life.

How does OSCA function financially?

We pay the College for each bed, around $4,000 a semester, $8,000 a year, whether or not we fill that bed. There’s this imbalanced equation in which OSCA members can join Residence Life at any time, and ResLife members can only join OSCA at the very beginning of the semester. There’s this constant trickling of OSCA students into ResLife, and it’s not reciprocal. This means that we have all of these empty beds all of the time that we’re paying for that could very easily be filled. Due to the rent contract’s insistence that it would be an undue administrative burden on ResLife to let students join OSCA throughout the year, we incur these giant financial losses. It’s a loss in all the obvious ways. We would love to have the people that are excited about being in OSCA be able to actually join. It’d be great for our communities. It’s a loss in the obvious financial sense that we’re paying for these beds, but it’s also a loss for Oberlin in that they are concerned about having enough beds to house their students. They’re building this new $55 million dorm, and we have beds. We would be happy to fill these beds. So it’s weird to be in that situation while there is also a housing shortage amongst Oberlin students. 

Can you talk about OSCA’s sustainability practices?

OSCA has always been committed to sustainable housing and dining. We purchase well over half of our foods from local vendors. I can say that as somebody who worked as an All-OSCA food coordinator, a huge chunk of our food comes from within an hour of Oberlin. We’re also very concerned with food waste — always doing what we can to kind of calibrate the amount of food that we’re cooking to make sure that everybody has as much food as they want while also reducing the amount that we throw away at all times. When you look at the amount of food waste generated by OSCA and the amount generated by Campus Dining Services, OSCA is throwing out so much less food, and the food that we are throwing out is more environmentally sound.

What challenges is OSCA facing? How are you working to counteract negative trends related to enrollment and diversity? 

Right now our focus is on ensuring OSCA’s continued financial viability for the years to come. The rent contract that was renegotiated in 2020 between Oberlin and OSCA that went into effect in 2021 has put a significant financial hardship on OSCA, and it meant that we had to nearly double our prices for room and board. I think now we’re also talking about the value of community and the value of consensus and these kinds of learning opportunities. When OSCA was originally founded, it was founded based on basic economic cooperative principles — if we pool our money, we are able to receive the benefits of economies of scale. And ultimately, people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford an Oberlin College education will be able to afford it. That’s the foundation of OSCA going back 70 years. 

Unfortunately, because of the College’s policies, we’ve had to raise our rates a lot higher than we would like. It affects our ability to maintain cultural diversity in this space when the College reduces students’ financial aid on a dollar-for-dollar basis around the savings that they would incur from being in OSCA. The question of cultural diversity is a super important one that OSCA is trying to reckon with, but I would say that our hands, in a lot of ways, are tied by the College and the kind of financial burden they’ve placed on us. 

Are there any new initiatives that OSCA is currently working on? 

The things that are really exciting right now are a lot of student-led things. We have the revival of the Brown Bag Co-op, which is super exciting. It was around for many years and then went dormant after COVID-19 struck. What excites me about the Brown Bag Co-op is it’s not offering the kind of intense in-person community that a lot of the other co-ops offer, but what it is doing is using OSCA’s relationship with the College to provide more options for students. I know from my individual course of study how important what we eat is to our individual identity formations. When the College imposes these restrictions on what you have access to, how we identify is restricted in this corresponding way. I think that OSCA opening up the alternative for people to eat the way that they want to eat is a big part of the kind of self-actualization that happens in college — the understanding of who you are.

The other thing that we’re really excited about is the potential revival of the Kosher Halal Co-op. The College has been working with us on transferring alumni money that they were once in possession of to us so that we can execute on that fund. That’s really exciting for me. You know, I grew up hearing all sorts of stories about the Kosher Halal Co-op from my dad, my aunt, my cousin, who were all in it. We would hear about Passover seders that they would stay at and talk until they heard the birds chirping; there was this intense spiritual energy going on there. 

You mentioned that you’re an OSCA legacy. What does it mean to be part of that lineage? 

The OSCA that my dad was in is very different from the OSCA that I am in. My dad was there for naked mud wrestling at Harkness House. It’s harder to get away with that now. One of the most valuable parts about being in OSCA is that it connects you to this larger lineage of people who’ve been committed to these communities for a long time. We had the OSCA alumni ice cream social this past Saturday on the Tank lawn, and there was a record number of alumni that attended. It’s incredible to hear these old stories. In a lot of ways they’re interesting from a narrative standpoint, but also they help us imagine different ways of organizing our own communities. I think that when I first got to OSCA, a part of me was like, “This is so awesome.” Also, I kind of wish that I was here in the ’80s. But then I realized that having this history is its own luxury. It’s a thing that they didn’t have in the ’80s, this long archive to pull from. It’s this great gift to have that history to lean on when things are difficult. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. This works, and it’s been working for a long time, and people look back on it as the foundational part of their Oberlin experience.

I was confused. I had seen signs all semester launching recycling like it was some big blockbuster movie “coming spring 2023.” Yet no one seemed to know if Oberlin was actually recycling. In fact, if you ask a student today if Oberlin recycles, they would probably say, “I don’t know,” as if recycling on campus is some kind of mythical lore, a promise that students have no way of verifying. 

Oberlin is actually recycling, but students are not completely at fault for their lack of awareness. For three years, students have been using recycling bins as trash cans, and continue to do so. It is my belief that the College did not effectively advertise the reinstatement of recycling, as made evident by the Confusion regarding its existence. Announcements on posters, screens, and in the Campus Digest, and even a new zero waste website meant little to a community that has had no actual practice in communal sustainability since the pandemic. 

I also think the lack of transparency regarding the status and details of the new recycling program have left the student community confused and discouraged. Personally, I have made an effort to learn about the new recycling program — to clean and separate my waste to avoid contamination — and then have watched custodial staff remove a bag from the recycling bin and put it right into the trash bag from a nearby garbage bin. I was made aware that not all buildings on campus have completely adopted the new recycling program which partially explains these discrepancies, and I, by no means, wish to push blame on the people who keep our spaces clean, but if students cannot trust the College to actually ensure the successful operation of recycling, they are left with little incentive to recycle. The misconceptions about the process will continue to embed themselves in our campus culture. 

It is unfair to expect that students coming from all over the world know what to recycle when arriving on campus. Recycling regulations vary from city to city. Similarly, the types of waste students engage with changes when they join a college campus. Did you know that you cannot recycle the cup that you get your daily Azariah’s Café iced latte in? Did you know that you cannot recycle your Umami bowl, sushi box, or DeCafé salad container? This is not intuitive knowledge. In my hometown, these forms of #1 plastics are all easily recyclable. At Oberlin, only #1 and #2 plastics with necks or handles — bottles — can be recycled through Oberlin’s new commingled recycling program in addition to metal and aluminum cans, clean cardboard, and mixed paper. 

Still, Oberlin offers many other useful kinds of recycling on a smaller scale. Glass recycling bins are located behind Harkness House, within the Union Goldsmith housing complex, and in the Wilder Hall parking lot, with additional Terracycling locations in the Wilder lobby for oral care, razors, and Brita products. Oberlin even has a composting program in Dascomb, Kahn, and Barrows. This is all to say that the resources exist, but students generally lack knowledge about their existence and usability. It is my belief that all incoming classes, as well as students already on campus, should be oriented on how to recycle at Oberlin as well as on all of the resources and projects related to sustainability on campus. This communal and required learning would reinspire Oberlin’s culture surrounding sustainable action and impact. 

I understand that a discussion of recycling requires an acknowledgement of the culture of blame within the sustainability movement. I was, and continue to be, a victim of the propaganda surrounding our individual impact on the climate crisis. My bamboo toothbrush and zero waste shampoo bar are nothing but ironic attempts to calm my inner environmental guilt and doom while our world leaders continue to remain complicit in the mass production and consumption of fossil fuels and other ecologically and environmentally damaging projects. Still, I believe firmly in the impact of a community. When almost 3,000 students do not recycle their plastic water bottles every day, it has an impact on our already overflowing landfills. 

The reality is that recycling is not about saving the environment right now, it’s about creating a culture that is prepared for the future and committed to learning, adapting, and acting to ensure our existence on this planet. Oberlin should be training its students to be competent leaders and advocates of sustainability, and that cannot happen without a willingness from students and more educational programming related to systems like recycling.

“The significant changes in this year’s methodology are part of the ongoing evolution to make sure our rankings capture what is most important for students as they compare colleges and select the school that is right for them,”  U.S. News Executive Chairman and CEO Eric J. Gertler said in a statement.

The change in methodology includes the elimination of five factors: class size, the proportion of faculty with the highest degree achievable in a given academic field, high school class rank, alumni giving, and the proportion of graduates with student loans.

According to an article published by U.S. News detailing the new calculations for this year’s list, measurements indicating a college’s success “at enrolling, retaining and graduating students from different backgrounds with manageable debt and post-graduate success” make up more than 50 percent of their score. A few measures increased in scoring weight: graduation rates of students with Pell grants, the average amount of student loan debt accumulated by borrowing money at the time of graduation, and income comparisons between federal loan recipients and high-school graduates four years after earning their respective degrees

This new factor sparked rebuttal from the Oberlin administration. In a written statement to the Oberlin community on Monday, President Carmen Twillie Ambar addressed the new methodology.

“U.S. News added an emphasis on graduate earnings in its rankings this year,” President Ambar wrote. “But this one data point misses the bigger picture when understanding the excellent outcomes of Oberlin graduates, who have gone on to earn more research doctorates than the graduates of any other baccalaureate college in the nation, and place Oberlin in the top three doctorate-producing baccalaureate colleges in the nation over the past five years. … This year’s methodology actively punishes the choices our graduates make to work in fields such as art and music, where money is not a top objective.”

The College also cites that many other liberal arts colleges, including those without conservatories, saw drastic ranking drops: 31 percent of the colleges within the National Liberal Arts ranking changed rank by more than 10 positions. In contrast, top ranking universities both in the National Universities and National Liberal Arts Colleges categories saw little to no movement since last year.

While parents and prospective students may use the U.S. News rankings to help inform their decisions about which schools to apply to or ultimately enroll at, Oberlin students themselves have differing opinions on the importance of the ranking. College fourth-year and Student Body President Chudi Martin Jr. finds the ranking irrelevant.

“As far as ranking goes, I think it’s important to look at how the definition of the best is very objective,” Martin said. “The school could be listed as ranking 70, 100 or one; it doesn’t matter. As long as you think that’s your number one school. I would say Oberlin’s the right choice: that’s my number-one school.”

College third-year Amelie Fournier explains that Oberlin’s ranking and general prestige matters especially considering the cost of attendance.

“Rankings 100 percent affected my decision to go to Oberlin,” Fournier said. “Part of why I put so much effort into creating my application for this school specifically was because it was the school I applied to that had the lowest acceptance rate and that was doing really well. When I looked it up, it said it was a hidden Ivy and more. I think they need to acknowledge and understand that students are paying tens of thousands, almost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to go here. And part of what makes it worth it versus going to a community college that has quite frankly the same level of education, is the fact that there is that name recognition. People thinking of our school as a good school helps us get hired in the future.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is the Oberlin Alumni Magazine? How do you curate content for each issue? 

In a nutshell the Alumni Magazine comes out three times a year. It’s basically a magazine that is sent to every single Oberlin alum, as the name implies, and is a mix of news — things going on at Oberlin, profiles, and news on alumni which is curated by us in the Communications department. 

I’ve been at this job for a little over six months — since March. I’m still sort of getting used to the rhythm of everything. I work in conjunction with various people to think about the best stories to tell and the best things to profile and highlight. One of the biggest sections is actually driven by alumni: our class notes section. It’s basically everyone submitting their exciting news, like “I put out a book,” or “I had a reunion with a bunch of Obies,” or “I performed in this really cool concert.” And then we also have obituaries, which is a very important part of the magazine, but it’s also sad. It’s telling stories about people who have passed on. So, the magazine is celebrating Oberlin as it is now and celebrating everybody’s achievements after Oberlin, too. 

You’ve had a really exciting career, both as a journalist and as an author, with published essays and biographies about pop stars like Duran Duran, Lady Gaga, and P!nk. How do you view your new role as the Oberlin Alumni Magazine editor within the greater context of your career? What similarities and differences exist? 

You know, it’s interesting: the job at the Alumni Magazine, in a very surprising sense, brings together many threads of things that I’ve done throughout my career. I’ve published essays and biographies about pop stars and that was a lot of research — that was a lot of writing and editing and working with various publishers on getting a book into the market. There’s a lot of moving parts. It’s very similar to putting out a magazine, in a sense, because you are working together with a lot of different people to produce something tangible that people can hold in their hands. Having to learn how to work with so many different people was really good preparation for my Alumni Magazine job. I’ve also had staff jobs at a weekly newspaper and a magazine where  you have to work with an art department; you have to work with writers; you have to work with marketing departments. That’s all very similar to what I do with the Alumni Magazine as well.

My through line throughout my entire career has been writing and reporting. I’m a very rigorous fact checker, and I edit myself almost harder than I do other people. Quality writing is very important to me, and that’s something that is important for me to bring to the Alumni Magazine as well, both on my own and then also helping writers and freelancers. In terms of differences, I’ve had several jobs, but I’ve actually never worked at a college before. So, that’s been really exciting because I went to a liberal arts college, so I’m very used to liberal arts colleges, and I’m a big fan of them. I like going to work every day. It’s exciting driving to campus; it’s all the fun of college, but I don’t have to study. I just have to go to my job.

How has your career prepared you for your work at Oberlin and with Oberlin alumni?  

What’s one of the more interesting things about my career is that I’ve written a lot about music, but I’ve done a lot of non-music stuff as well. I’ve written about business, I’ve written about startups, I’ve written about healthcare. And in all of those jobs, I’ve interacted with and written about a wide variety of people. I’ve interviewed everyone from CEOs of companies to young people starting companies. I’m working with alumni, and it’s a very similar thing. I’ll get phone calls from people — I got a phone call yesterday from someone who graduated in the class of ’59, but then I’m talking to people who graduated last year. It’s a total variety.

Throughout my career I’ve just loved talking to many different people. I think that that has prepared me for Oberlin. In general, my background is writing and editing and marketing and research and things like that. I never thought I’d find a career where all of my music background and everything else I’ve done could combine and be an asset, but that’s what I found at Oberlin.

Why do you enjoy writing about music and musicians? 

I love that question because I’ve been doing it for so long, and I rarely get a chance to kind of step back and think, “Why do I love doing this?” At heart, musicians are creative people. I talk to a lot of songwriters and they’re all very, very interesting people. They’re all conversationalists. I can count on one hand the number of musicians I’ve interviewed who are just sort of, eh, with one-word answers and things like that. You just don’t really run into people like that. They’re always really fascinating people to talk to.

I like writing about music because it’s a challenge, you know? Writing about music is not easy. It’s kind of an intangible thing, and you have to bring so much into it from lyrical analysis to deep listening to doing research about cultural context. So it’s a very multidisciplinary type of writing. Every album is different. You could love a band and love all their records, and they could release a record that you’re like, “This is not very good. How do I tackle this?” Every new album is sort of a challenge to write about. So it’s never boring. I’ve never been bored when writing about music in my entire career. 

What advice do you have for young writers, journalists, and music critics? 

Be curious, for starters. Always keep your ears open. Listen to as much music as you can. Just having a wide variety of things that you listen to and absorb is really helpful.

For young writers and journalists, I always tell people, just write every day and never be afraid to ask questions. Sometimes people might be like, “I don’t know if this question is something you’ve already answered before,” or “This is a dumb question.” I always say, there are no dumb questions when you’re talking to people. If you’re unsure about something, ask for clarity. I cannot tell you how grateful people are for making sure that they’re understood and making sure that people are conveying the point that they want to get across in a correct way. 

If there are students who are interested in talking about writing or journalism, the Communications Office has opportunities here and there. We are kind of like an open door, so people should feel free to reach out to us.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

How were you introduced to protest music? 

There was always a lot of music around the house growing up. My dad listened to a lot of reggae — a lot of Bob Marley, my namesake. A lot of Bob Marley’s music is protest music, so I was aware of it at a young age. Also, growing up biracial, my identity wasn’t something that was ignored. I knew I was Black, I knew I was born Black, I knew I was staying Black. My dad was like, “Life is unfair. You are going to get used to it.” So that was also kind of around me from a young age, and then I think it started getting incorporated into my music. I realized I had a knack for finding more obscure songs about these things that I related to in some way. Nina Simone was also played a lot in my house growing up, and she also performed a lot of protest music. She and Billie Holiday, who sang “Strange Fruit,” which is about the lynching of Black people in the South, really got me into jazz — or Black American Music, the more correct term. It wasn’t until I was about 17 or 18 when I started to experience very harsh or blatant racism, sexism, misogyny, and harm in ways that I hadn’t experienced growing up. So then I really dove into protest music, and I found a lot of power in listening to it and singing it. 

How do you go about incorporating activism or protest music into your art and performances? 

I feel fortunate to be here at Oberlin because you don’t get much pushback. I feel very fortunate to be in the position where I can sing a lot of protest music right now, and no one’s gonna tell me no. So really, it’s just finding the songs that I really connect with or think could be really powerful. It’s a lot of listening — it’ll be three o’clock in the morning, and I’m just listening to song after song from just this one person’s discography, and then it’s like, “Oh, I found something.” It’s not like I look up “best protest songs to sing” or anything like that. With visual art, it’s a slightly different relationship, because I feel like all of my art is inherently political, not that it’s always protesting something, but I think it’s political for me to put Black bodies on an art piece. I don’t draw a lot of white people. It’s just not something I’ve really been interested in doing. I think we’ve all seen enough white people in art, and I’m sure there will be enough people making white people in art. Especially growing up, I don’t think I saw Black people or Black representation in visual art. I also sometimes use text from songs in my art. Sometimes I’ll write things and put it into my art. Sometimes I have a hard time writing because I have so many things I wanna cover. It’s really just a matter of picking the issue and then being like, “Okay, I’m gonna do it and I don’t care what anyone thinks.”

What topics or themes do you discuss in your art? 

Generally, I talk about womanhood and what that has looked like for me as a Black woman; mental health and having PTSD, anxiety, and depression; sexual harm and harassment. I can’t make or write about anything I haven’t experienced, so everything that I make is coming from a brutally honest perspective. These are the things that have happened to me and that I’m dealing with, and sometimes they are not pretty or cool. It’s a way of processing, I think. 

Can you talk about the statement you made at Jazz Forum last Friday? 

I wrote all the words we ever said and sang at that Forum. I was in a vocal quartet, so there were a lot of amazing musicians and we all helped pick the songs. I feel like I see a lot of white men playing Black American Music, which in and of itself is fine. This music is so important to me and the history of it is so important to me, but sometimes I feel like other people don’t care as much about the history of it, which is sad to watch. It can be really draining week after week to watch that, and so I think when we talked about making a statement, we wanted to say “We are here; we are taking up space.” When is there a chance to really say that to this group of people? There really is no other moment. I guess the statement of the piece and poem is, at least in my life, the people that have helped me get through the most difficult things in my life have mostly been not men — they’ve been women, nonbinary, and trans people that have said, “Okay, we got you.” I wanted to honor that and show that when we are together, we can dismantle things and create a more peaceful place. That’s protest music. We had the band members walk off the stage while we were still speaking the poem, and we put the mics down and kept going with the repeated line. It was a statement. I wanted to make sure everyone was listening. 

Why is activism important to your art? 

I think we have a society that’s constantly in a capitalist, workaholic state that dampers people’s creativity. Some people’s brains don’t work like that — my brain does not work like that. So I feel like to make art, you are inherently protesting society in that way. I also think protest in art is so important because if no one’s talking about something, you feel like you’re alone when that’s really not the case. If you’re experiencing it, so is the person five feet away from you. And I don’t think it’s meant for everyone to do, but I need to talk about why I am constantly being objectified or hypersexualized, or about sexual assault and how it has impacted me, or how racism has affected me as a mixed person, or how I feel like I am not accepted in any space because of my identity, or my mental health and PTSD. There was once a point in my life where I was like, “Why is no one else talking about it?” It’s so nice to see someone make art about these issues. You feel seen as an individual. I think what’s important to me in my art is that other people see themselves in it.

Nathaniel Dett, OC 1908, the Society’s namesake, was the first Black student to graduate from Oberlin Conservatory with a double major in Piano Performance and Composition. Dett arranged a number of Black concert spirituals and worked as a choral conductor at the Hampton Institute, whose performance tradition inspires the pedagogy of the Society.

Conservatory second-year Daesean Lawson founded the Society only a couple of weeks ago, though he has been passionate about Black choral pedagogues like Dett and the musicology of Black music institutions since high school.

“I felt that there was no proper recognition of Black classical literature on campus,” Lawson said. “I also felt the performance of this music was not what it should be, by both student groups and academic groups led by professors. The production of this music I found insulting, and the steadfastness of people who are in my line of work and relationship with the Negro folk idiom is to correct all false doctrine that may be spread in relation to the performance of this music. There is a style — how to do it — and that style should be respected.”

He also expressed that this lack of historical accuracy in performance extends beyond Oberlin’s campus — that it is a broader collegiate issue.

“I believe that in common practice today, in both the predominantly white institution and the Historically Black College and University, the attention to performance styles and pedagogues of this period have fallen,” Lawson said. “I believe that it is of the utmost importance that these traditions from this time are not forgotten and that they are preserved and they are recognized as full bodied traditions and period performance. Whether it be choral literature, vocal solo literature, or instrumental literature, the emphasis is on the research and the most historically accurate performance.”

Given Lawson’s concerns, the purpose of the Society is to provide an educational resource for Oberlin students, both in the College and Conservatory, and community members of all racial identities who want to perform Black classical music in the most historically accurate way.

“We hope to offer accredited courses, ExCo courses, in the spring semester of the upcoming year,” Lawson said. “We hope to get the Society accredited as well so that there is a strong impact on the education of this music, because that is what the purpose of this group is.”

In addition to the Society choir and ExCo, the Society plans to sponsor lectures and provide private coachings for students working on a piece of Black musical literature, whether instrumental or vocal.

“They can bring their spiritual or their Negro arts song or their character piece to us, and we can discuss some of the stylistic interpretations unique to that period,” Lawson said. “If you are interested in the pedagogy behind that piece, we can explain the historical thought processes of how it may have been done. The way one breathes is taught differently in the Negro practice. The diction that one uses [and] the idiomatic phrasing is different.”

The Society had its first choir rehearsal Tuesday night in Fairchild Chapel. Students and community members of all backgrounds were encouraged to come, as long as they came with an open mind and willingness to learn. Double-degree second-year Tia Leung attended the rehearsal, where they worked on one of Dett’s spiritual arrangements in the style of the Hampton Singers.

“Learning about the style of conducting used to perform spirituals was a bit difficult to pick up at first, but once we got over the learning curve as an ensemble, we really did make beautiful music,” Leung said.

This reflection seems to epitomize Lawson’s aspiration for the future of the Society.

“What I hope to do with this Society is to make beautiful music, to educate, and to warm one’s heart with the sound, the ideas, and the philosophy of Negro folk music,” Lawson said. “It’s been something that has been very dear to me, so to then share it and make it so that one can go and do that same work by themselves is the greatest gift that this Society can produce. 

The Crimson Collective, officially the Oberlin Femininity in Black American Music Collective, is a student organization that centers the voices of gender minorities who perform Black American Music both in the Oberlin Jazz department and in the professional world.

“Our mission is to make a safer space for gender minorities in Black American Music,” Conservatory second-year and Crimson Collective co-president and co-founder Gabi Allemana said. “That’s what this discussion is doing. It’s shining a light on what happens to us all the time and how we can change things so we can feel encouraged to stay in this industry.”

When referring to “jazz” as an idiom and industry, the Crimson Collective prefers to use the term Black American Music which encompasses ‘jazz’ and other music created by Black people in America.

“We use the term Black American Music instead of ‘jazz’ because the word ‘jazz’ has a racist history, and we feel that Black American Music honors the history of this music more appropriately without confining it,” Conservatory third-year and Crimson Collective co-president and co-founder Marley Howard said.

Last spring, Crimson organized a roundtable similar to the one scheduled for Sunday. Allemana emphasized the need for the roundtable tradition to continue annually as the dynamics within the Jazz department change.

“I think it’s important to keep the conversation going as people come in and out of the department,” Allemana said. “These issues don’t go away after one talk.”

Last year, Howard and Allemana presented personal statements describing their experiences as gender minorities in Black American Music performance spaces.

“It was honestly pretty nerve-wracking,” Allemana said. “We were making ourselves very vulnerable from the start. It was a really hard thing to do.”

Rather than putting the spotlight on gender minorities within the department  — a spotlight with potentially traumatic repercussions — the Crimson board wants the roundtable to be more of a conversation.

“I think we want to emphasize that this year’s roundtable is all about hearing everyone’s ideas,” Allemana said. “Even if you’re not a gender minority, you’re not just indifferent, neutral, you’re part of the conversation.”

Howard also pointed out the significance of the roundtable as a medium of discussion.

“Everyone and anyone is encouraged to speak,” Howard said. “This is an opportunity for us to all sit down and for every single one of us to hear what each other are thinking, an opportunity that we don’t get anywhere else. We are in-person, and we have to look everyone in the eye. They’re not easy conversations, but I think they’re really necessary for us to grow as a community and as a department.”

While the discussion will mainly focus on experiences specifically within the Oberlin Jazz department, Howard, Allemana, and College Liaison of the Collective Olive Badrinath all commented on how the intended audience of this event extends outside of the Jazz department.

“I work a lot of jazz events at the Cat [in the Cream] and have not been treated well at times,” Badrinath said. “It’s hard to know people and then also be disrespected by those people or have them disrespect the space. … I think there are a lot of other people who are part of the Oberlin jazz community peripherally who help put on these shows, who keep people performing and playing music, and this roundtable is important for them too.”

This conversation also pertains to the wider Conservatory community, as issues of gender justice exist in musical spaces outside of the Jazz department.

“I think that even the problems we have in this community, the Oberlin ‘Jazz’ department, are pretty prominent in every other music field too,” Allemana said. “It might be a little different from what the classical department experience is because they have more of a gender diverse program, but these problems are everywhere.”

Howard also acknowledged that not all students who engage with Black American Music major in Jazz Studies and that this conversation still applies to them.

“I think if you care about this music — if you appreciate or perform Black American Music, you should be going,” Howard said.

Ultimately, the Crimson Collective roundtable is a learning opportunity. Through the discussion, the Collective hopes to educate the Oberlin Black American Music community about the reality of gendered power dynamics in the field and on how to improve the reality for gender minorities.

“We want everyone to leave with the tactics necessary to approach any situation involving gender in the ‘jazz’ world,” Allemana  said. “This is just as important as your jazz music theory class. You have to learn how to interact with people in an equitable way.”

The church choirs within this network vary in commitment, distance from campus, and size, allowing students to pick which church works best for them. Some students, like double-degree second-year Ava Paul and the four other paid members of her church, travel as far as Cleveland for their gig.

“My church pays more than other churches in the area, and that comes with a lot more of a time commitment,” Paul said. “On Thursday nights, I leave campus at 6:30 p.m., and we drive 50 minutes into Cleveland. We rehearse for two hours, and then we drive back to campus. On Sunday morning, we leave campus at 8:00 a.m., drive to church, rehearse for an hour, and then have church service from 10–11:30 a.m. Then we drive back. It’s about four hours of rehearsal per week and four hours of driving per week.”

This week, Paul’s church scheduled additional rehearsals on Tuesday night and Saturday morning to accommodate the more than tripled amount of repertoire programmed for its Maundy Thursday service and extended Easter Sunday service.

“Easter and all of Holy Week is, I would say, the biggest week in the church scene, at least for my church,” Paul said.

Other students simply walk across campus to get to their church or rehearse in a Bibbins Hall classroom. Conservatory fourth-year Jared Cohen is the music director at Birmingham Methodist Church, located about 15 minutes outside of Oberlin. As a music director, his responsibilities include curating the music for each service and organizing rehearsals.

“We meet Wednesday nights in Bibbins to rehearse for an hour, and then we have the service on Sunday,” Cohen said. “The time commitment is really only like three hours a week. It’s not that bad.”

Conservatory fourth-year Nathan Romero directs the choir at First United Methodist Church of Oberlin, right next to Robertson Hall. For Romero’s choir, students dedicate their Sunday mornings to both a rehearsal and service, eliminating the weekday commitment. Romero’s choir also consists of community members who volunteer their time to make music for the congregation.

Regardless of the varied experiences, the value of a church gig is undisputed among Voice majors. For Romero, who will study Conducting next year at the Conservatory of Music at the University of Redlands, his church job and the experience from leading a choir at a professional level was invaluable to his graduate school application process.

“I think being a director at a church did help with my resume, since most undergraduate students specifically don’t graduate saying they’ve been the music director at a church,” Romero said.

Paul, over the course of four semesters at her church choir, has seen an improvement in her skills as a musician, ultimately benefiting her coursework.

“My sight reading has gotten a lot better while working at a church where we are going through quite a bit of music every week,” Paul said. “I’ve definitely noticed a difference in my Oberlin College Choir experience.”

Cohen also commented on the importance of the church job in a singer’s career after Oberlin.

“I never had any experience with church because I’m Jewish, so it was weird adjusting when I first got to Oberlin and heard people talk about how it’s so standard for singers to have church jobs,” Cohen said. “But now, I think it is very important for singers to get the experience they can working at churches, because there’s no church that doesn’t need singers every Sunday. I think that it’s such an easy and convenient way to pick up money and experience as a singer.”

But maybe what speaks most to the popularity of the church gig is the fact that a majority of Voice students dedicate their time to singing in these choirs.

“There’s a ton of churches around, and I would say that most Voice majors have church jobs,” Cohen said. “It can be very difficult if you’re missing a service to find a sub for that reason, because everyone already has a job. They’re already working Sunday morning. It’s very standard practice to have a church job, and I don’t think that that’s just the culture here. I think that that’s everywhere.”

Since COVID-19 struck right after the 2020 audition season, the Conservatory’s auditions and interviews have been held virtually through Zoom or by recording. Though the January admissions event marked the return of in-person auditions, the pandemic still had a lasting effect. According to Acting Director of Conservatory Admissions Josh Teaster, around 40 percent of students offered auditions this year chose to submit recordings rather than travel to campus. Regardless, almost 500 students participated in the January audition event.

“Pre-pandemic, the percentage of students coming to campus was usually a little higher, like 65 to 70 percent, so weʼre not quite back, but it was a really strong showing of students wanting to come,” Teaster said.

The Conservatory Admissions Office made a few more changes to the audition process in addition to the switch from all-virtual auditions to an in-person option. Prior to the pandemic, in-person auditions took place over five weekends in February and March. Oberlin also used to provide regional auditions, where representatives would go to hear students audition in cities like New York and Los Angeles in an effort to be more accessible and convenient. Right before COVID-19 began, Admissions had already decided to shift the on-campus auditions to the last week of Winter Term because it wanted more time to evaluate applicants and make thoughtful decisions by mid-March. In addition, admissions found that regional auditions actually discouraged families from visiting campus, which is why Oberlin no longer offers them.

“The reason we stopped doing regional auditions is because, most of the time, although I do think we were being accessible to some students, we were talking to families that did have the opportunity or means to visit campus but chose not to because we gave them an easier outlet,” Teaster said.

At Oberlin, campus visits play a particularly important role in student yield. According to Teaster, students choosing not to come to campus for an audition because an alternative location existed posed a threat to enrollment.

“Students are much more likely to choose to enroll here if they have visited campus at some point in time,” Teaster said. “I don’t know if that’s true or as true of other institutions, but I know that itʼs really important here.”

To combat the loss of the regional auditions’ accessibility, the Conservatory implemented the Conservatory Audition Travel Fund three years ago. For the first time this January, the Conservatory fully funded 16 students to come to campus for their auditions. The Admissions Office hopes to continue the travel fund next year.

Because the campus visit is so important to Oberlin’s enrollment, admissions worried about welcoming students to audition during Winter Term rather than in February because of the potential lack of students and performances. Despite their concerns, many students had returned to campus in preparation for the start of the semester. Admissions filled the audition days to the brim with events, including a welcome from President Carmen Twillie Ambar and Dean of the Conservatory William Quillen as well as student performances showcasing each division within the Conservatory.

“The audition experience itself is really an opportunity to show students what the Oberlin community is like,” Teaster said. “Through holding events, through offering tours, through giving them the opportunity … to have informal conversation with other students [and] with faculty members, the idea is that you can come for a component of your application, something youʼre required to do, but what you get out of it is a view of Oberlin and the community and the program.”

Third-year Vocal Performance major Elizabeth Hanje sat on panels and gave tours during the audition days. She also debuted the role of Lyra in the Winter Term opera Alice Tierney, which coincided with the last two days of auditions.

“It was cool to meet students and parents and talk about the work I do at Oberlin, and then actually get to show them that work,” Hanje said.

Oberlin Improv Fest will feature four guest artists: flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell; electronic musician Kojiro Umezaki, who also plays the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute; multi-instrumentalist Aurora Nealand, OC ’01; and jazz pianist Luis Perdomo. Events on Saturday, March 4 will include a keyboard improvisation workshop; an information session for the new Improvisation minor; a Soundpainting workshop; a student showcase concert with performances from Oberlin College Taiko, Silent Film Ensemble, Oberlin Creative Music Lab, and Oberlin Percussion Group; and a concert from the Performance and Improvisation Ensembles with Luis Perdomo.

The inspiration for Improv Fest came to Dana Jessen, associate professor of Contemporary Music and Improvisation and chair of the Improvisation minor, and Aurie Hsu, associate professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts in the TIMARA program, because of the importance of improvisation to Oberlin’s musical culture.

“Improvisation is deeply rooted in our campus, both in the curricular, faculty-led sense and in the student-led sense,” Jessen said. “We wanted to draw attention [to] and celebrate all of the different types of improvisation that are happening on campus.”

This festival also functions as a kind of inauguration of the new Improvisation minor. Launched by the Conservatory last semester, the minor came to fruition because of the student demand for improvisatory music spaces.

“The inspiration came from the students,” Jessen said. “We saw that there was a lot of student interest — a lot of students already kind of going down this pathway — and so we wanted to formalize it for them.”

The minor is genreless, mimicking the nature of improvisation itself, and includes classes from the TIMARA and Historical Performance departments, creative music and free improvisation classes, and PI Ensembles.

“The minor is great because it doesn’t exist in one department; it’s very broad, and we did that intentionally because we wanted students to be able to design their own aesthetic pathway,” Jessen said. “We’re hoping that students will be inspired to get out of their department and experience different types of improvisation.”

The festival will feature a number of diverse, College- and Conservatory-based, student-led groups in a student showcase concert Saturday from 4:30–6:30 p.m. in Wilder Hall.

“There are always going to be student-led initiatives,” Jessen said. “We want to support that, we want them to remain student-led, but, through this festival, we also want to recognize that community is an important part of improvisation. The rationale in picking these ensembles was really just that they all exist and represent a diverse range of what improvisation can look like.”

The Music Quintet, a student-led creative music ensemble within the Jazz department, is one of the many groups on campus that practice improvisational music and will be featured in Improv Fest. The Quintet will play two of Nicole Mitchell’s compositions at her concert tonight at 8 p.m. at the Birenbaum.

Third-year Jazz Studies major Coleman Rose has played the alto saxophone for the Music Quintet since its founding last spring. He explained that the group gravitated toward creative music when they started playing their own original compositions and experimenting with graphic scores, a form of musical notation that incorporates multiple mediums.

“I personally think of creative music as an improvisational music that really values the importance of spontaneity, listening to each other, exploring different sonic spaces, and experimenting with making people feel uncomfortable or making people feel extremely comfortable — really trying to explore every end of the spectrum,” Rose said.

The Oberlin Creative Music Lab, which will perform at the student showcase on Saturday among other student ensembles, is another group that practices this kind of improvisation. The group experiments with group sound production on members’ instruments of choice. Jessen, who leads the ensemble, also encourages students to create their own creative music compositions. First-year TIMARA and Jazz Voice major Fae Ordaz joined the group this semester with little experience in improvisation and creative music.

“It is a very safe space to explore improvisation and sound and maybe use those techniques where in jazz there is less freedom to use,” Ordaz said. “I like what’s happening with all of this programming and with improv at Oberlin. I like that it’s becoming less scary, because when I think of improv in my head, it’s a terrifying concept.”

Rose agreed with the sentiment that improvisation can be daunting, having to generate music from within yourself, but acknowledged the benefit of taking a risk.

“It’s super vulnerable sometimes, and that’s a real emotion that comes with it, but I would hope that that fear doesn’t hold people back from experimenting with this music, because it’s beautiful,” Rose said.

The fact that students may fear improvisation was something Jessen and Hsu had in mind when they created the festival. They wanted to bring interdisciplinary artists to campus and program events that would provide a space for all students, regardless of musical background or experience with improvisation.

“If anyone is feeling a little wary that they don’t know how to improvise, there are so many entryways that they can take part in through this festival,” Jessen said.

Hsu expressed her desire for the festival to inspire students to experiment with improvisation.

“I want students to come away from the festival with an emboldened sense and permission to explore using whatever methods of improvisation speak to them,” Hsu said. “I want students to find that sense of play and the sense of spontaneity that can happen when living in a moment of music-making. And it’s better to try improvisation here in a supportive, nurturing environment than be thrown into a situation in the real world that you’ve never been [in] before.”

At the heart of the organization of this festival is a belief in the importance of improvisation for the musician.

“You’re creating things — generating material,” Jessen said. “Improvisation provides a different way of knowing your instrument and your craft. As improvisers you are often discovering material, which is very different than a teacher saying, ‘I need you to do these things.’ You have a different relationship to that knowledge and understanding, and that can help you grow as an artist and can be very empowering. So for me, I think improvisation is really crucial as part of a student’s education.”

Rose echoed the value of improvisation as a practice of community and artistry — something that deserves this festival celebration.

“I see improvisation as an extension of who I am as a person, and it allows me to express myself in ways that I don’t think are possible with words,” Rose said. “It’s a beautiful experience to go through with other people because it’s a communal experience, not only within the band but with the audience too. It brings us all together and it’s why I wake up every morning and get to it.”