Book Review: Assessing El Sistema and the Claims of Social Change through Music Education

A crucial difference between studies emerging from within the discipline of music education and the ethnomusicological or anthropological literature about music education is that the latter has focused on music education programs as a site for the regulation and modeling of child subjects (see Minks, 2002; Bickford, 2017). The expectation that music education can productively instill notions of citizenship and shape future political subjects has made childhood a prime, even naturalized, stage for intervention.

El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth, by Geoff Baker, and Sonorous Worlds: Musical Enchantment in Venezuela, by Yana Stainova, focus on the music education program in Venezuela known as El Sistema.. This program claims to advance inclusive cultural policies by providing free training in Western art music to “at-risk” and economically disadvantaged children mainly through symphony orchestras. It gained international renown and fascination in the late 2000s because of the participation of the Simon Bolívar Youth Orchestra (its main professional ensemble) in the 2008 BBC Prom; its founder’s 2009 TED Prize; its expansion all over Venezuela and the establishment of programs inspired by it in approximately 50 other countries (El Sistema Global, 2022); the advent of conductor Gustavo Dudamel, a pupil of El Sistema, as a Western art music superstar; and the institution’s incredible success in securing generous funding from the Inter-American Development Bank and government agencies. For music educators and scholars, however, its biggest impact is perhaps that it opened the door to a wider conversation about the responsibility and commitment to social justice that music education initiatives should and can realistically have.

Because of my personal involvement in El Sistema for over a decade, I was—at least categorically and implicitly—one of the child subjects for these studies. I entered the program in 2005 as a student at my local núcleo or branch in Miranda state, Venezuela. From 2006 to 2012 I was also a flute and woodwind instructor for child orchestra students and was appointed as teaching intern in El Sistema Colorado in 2013. Given that I was part of the 2010 National Children’s Symphony Orchestra and continued to be an El Sistema student in Venezuela until 2012, my years in the Venezuelan program overlap with Baker’s (2010–2011) and Stainova’s (2011–2015) fieldwork periods. Additionally, I have maintained a research interest in El Sistema throughout my ethnomusicological training. Although my Master’s thesis treated an entirely different topic, I worked under Baker’s guidance. Thus, my shifting positionality in relation to this program gives me a particularly grounded perspective on the experience of growing up socially and musically in these spaces.

Sonorous Worlds addresses the tensions that power generates in Venezuelan barrio youth’s musical practices within and surrounding El Sistema’s formal activities. Stainova especially examines their political activation and negotiations with various forms of systemic social oppression and exclusion in the context of the Bolivarian Revolution (1999–present). El Sistema, however, is the site rather than the object of study, for the analysis is not devoted to the design and workings of the institution. This leaves the reader wondering why she did not seek to include young musicians outside of El Sistema (those focused on traditional or popular music genres, for example). Similarly, she engages not primarily with scholarship on El Sistema but with the core literature and new currents in anthropology. Although her disciplinary audience, background, and scholarly contributions are located in anthropology, she also integrates selected ethnomusicological works on the nonlinguistically mediated meaning and experience of music.

Stainova is in dialogue with an influential scholarly history in Venezuelan studies on the “magical state” (Coronil, 1997) or the “magic of the state” (Taussig, 1997) that examines the impact of modernist policies funded by abundant oil revenues on the consolidation of Venezuelan political, social, and cultural structures. While at the time (roughly the late 1960s to the late 1980s) the Venezuelan petro state was the longest-lasting democracy in Latin America and had positioned itself well in the region’s economic panorama, writers in this vein argued that this was a very fragile façade of stability. The country’s government and elite propped up this false sense of security, much to the detriment of disadvantaged social groups. In the early 1980s the Venezuelan “miraculous” state implemented a neoliberal adjustment as a way of facing declining oil prices, but the social and economic imbalances this furthered among social classes led to the massive protests and riots of El Caracazo in 1989. Many political analysts characterize El Caracazo as the beginning of the widespread social and political discontent that resulted in Venezuela’s eventual shift to socialism under Chávez (1999–2013) and Maduro (2013–present). The trope of illusion and marvel that underlies Coronil’s and Taussig’s earlier analysis has been deployed more recently to describe Chávez’s populist charisma, his social policies (also largely subsidized by oil revenue), and the chavista supporters that have “fallen under the spell.” Instead of advancing a similar argument about how Chávez realizes the magical power of the state through El Sistema (which is the position Baker endorses in his 2014 monograph), Stainova poses collective enchantment as a cultivation of the imagination. Enchantment, then, taps into existing social energy and channels it into a capacity for marginalized Venezuelans to dream of alternative futures and thus effect deeper political change. In other words, Stainova contends that the shared worlds of fantasy consciously produced in and around music making can yield “forms of being and creating that extend beyond an oppressive social reality” (10) rather than solely constituting a cloaked extension of state power. She borrows from a subset of works on affect theory (Spinoza, Stewart, Chen, Hardt, Sedgwick, Mazzarella) and object-oriented ontologies (Bennett, Latour, Tsing) that valorize the human and nonhuman forces and materialities that shape events. By doing so, she joins these scholars in countering Weber’s view that science and secularism made the world both disenchanted and disenchanting.

Stainova’s commitment to this line of thinking has notable repercussions for the project’s ethics, methodological orientation, and writing style. Although she has experience investigating the intersection of music, social change, and politics in Latin America (7–8), one of her goals in Sonorous Worlds is to resist the demystification of her interlocutors’ “experiences by translating them into familiar categories of sociopolitical analysis” (10). What is at stake here is the sanitizing of research subjects’ complex lived experience into convenient pieces of evidence to corroborate a theoretical argument or, in the worst case, the disenchanted intention to show that the Others’ “unreasonable” beliefs are part of a macro social arrangement that they lack the intellectual ability to recognize. Methodologically speaking, Stainova centers ethnographic encounters while teaching flute at a núcleo, observing youth orchestras’ rehearsals and activities in Caracas and a town anonymized under the name Sarare, accompanying some of the ensembles during international tours, and conducting interviews with El Sistema teachers, participants, and their families. She is attentive to the stories they tell about music, music making, and everyday sounds, as well as to these practices’ sensorial excess. For example, this orientation causes her to expand upon her interlocutors’ ideas on superación (getting ahead) or chispa (spark).

Considering the physical and affective (sometimes unverbalizable) characteristics of sound allows Stainova to conceptualize music as more than an aesthetic object or a political act. Likewise, her affect-oriented approach to writing is meant to “create a feeling” through the use of “language whose form—such as rhythm and sound—is inseparable from, and at moments takes priority over, content” (25). The result is a style that suspends the authoritative voice of much academic writing and reflects her intention to blur the dividing line between emotion and reason.

Baker argues, however, that scholars who embrace enchantment and emotionality are complicit in furthering fabulous fictions that might be damaging to young learners. In fact, El Sistema has commonly been referred to as “the Venezuelan musical miracle,” and Baker’s earlier work is an effort to balance the overwhelmingly rosy and overly optimistic appraisals about the program— writings by Tricia Tunstall (2012) and Eric Booth (Tunstall and Booth, 2016) and films like Alberto Arvelo’s Tocar y luchar (2006). Baker’s primary concern, then, is the impacts that music education programs’ designs, implementation, and narratives have on their participants and the broader context in which they function. This was the case for his study of El Sistema in Venezuela in 2014 and for his 2021 publication on the Red de Escuelas de Música (Network of Music Schools) in Colombia entitled Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence in Medellín’s Music Schools. While previously he claimed to have an “entirely neutral” relationship to El Sistema (2014: 20), he now argues that “educational research for social justice is not balanced or neutral, but rather ethically and politically committed” and that “embracing ambiguity, ambivalence, and complexity should therefore not be confused with neutrality” (2021: 27). Although Stainova similarly seeks to fully and ethically consider the intricacies of her subjects’ experience, Baker (2017) has been publicly critical of the concept of enchantment and her use of it in relation to El Sistema, asking, “Is the enchanted researcher one who has connected more deeply with their subjects, or one who has been put under a spell or deluded, or both at once?” Stainova replies that “Baker’s portrayal of enchantment idealizes a rationalistic belief in immunity to influence and the autonomy of the individual” (100) as opposed to “the possibility that people might consciously choose to be enchanted . . . as a need and desire to experience worlds and ways of being foreclosed by an oppressive social reality” (101). Despite this impasse between them, their investment in responsive and engaged modes of academic work is undeniably shared, and so is their recognition of enchantment as an element of El Sistema, Social Action through Music (SATM) programs, and musical experience more broadly. Perhaps we could find ways to benefit from both their insights regarding the deployment of enchantment as a concept and its critique depending on who/what is enchanting, who its subjects are, and what its ambitions are. At its plainest, enchantment is influence (whether deceptive or agentively cultivated), and as such it can be harnessed in pursuit of many aims, which renders both arguments about our supposed insusceptibility and a categorical support or disdain for the concept moot.

Much like Baker’s research on El Sistema, Rethinking Social Action through Music is a diagnosis of the Red as an institution: its history, self-assessment methods, teaching practices, and relationships with other important organizations such as the Universidad de Antioquia and the city government. The project seeks alternatives that might be applicable to SATM programs more generally without prescribing firm solutions and draws extensively from the literature of various subareas or sister disciplines of music education such as Social Justice in Music Education, community music, and participatory arts, as well as from cultural policy and citizenship education.

Methodologically, this book relies on the examination of the Red’s written materials and a “fieldwork-based critical analysis of key issues rather than a standard descriptive ethnography” (25). The ideological and political motivations of SATM programs’ interventions are most apparent in the materials that music programs generate themselves, from mission and vision statements, grant applications and reports, and pedagogical philosophies to specifications of target populations, choices of repertoire, and concepts for performances. Additionally, ethnography often adds necessary nuance to quantitative metrics and institutional narratives and can reveal discrepancies between programs’ written self-representations and the lived experiences of teachers, administrators, children, and families. Baker notes that while SATM programs in the Global North tend to emphasize quantitative methodologies (IQ and test scores, school performance, or cognitive development indicators, for example), the Red’s strategies were largely shaped by debates about cultural politics, “issues such as identity, diversity, participation, agency, and citizenship” (300). He finds it encouraging that at a time when seemingly divergent music education programs worldwide are adopting terms like “social justice,” “social action,” “social change,” and “cultural democracy” to describe their goals, the Red seeks to imbue the process of learning with those values. A couple of notable examples are its view of social contexts outside of the program as engagement zones rather than problematic areas from which children need to be rescued, the implementation of labs that prioritize processual over goal-oriented learning, the inclusion of a social team that works in tandem with music-specialized teaching staff, and the dignifying results of encouraging students’ decision making rather than instrumentalizing them in favor of the institution through revictimization.

In conclusion, Baker’s and Stainova’s examinations of music education programs in Venezuela and Colombia are welcome contributions to long-standing debates on music education programs’ potential for both disciplinary and revolutionary action and the extent to which aesthetic and political sensibilities can effectively overlap in such settings.