There is a major current of research that focuses on the positive potential of music, exemplified by Susan Hallam’s (2010) landmark article “The power of music.” I align myself with a different current, one centred on ambivalence about music and the ambiguity of its effects. This is not to question the value of the former but rather to suggest that it only tells part of the story and there is nothing inherently beneficent about music.
The words “ambiguous” and “ambivalent” point to contradictory characteristics, feelings, and interpretations. When applied to music, they evoke conflicting aspects, contrasting effects, and mixed views.
Belfiore and Bennett (2008) demonstrate that for most of the history of Western civilization, music and the arts have been subjected to contradictory interpretations; there are both positive and negative traditions, going back nearly 2500 years. The negative tradition, beginning with Plato, saw the arts as a source of corruption and distraction and as having potentially damaging effects on individuals and society. Belfiore (2012) argues that historically this perspective carried significant weight, and the positive stance arose mainly as a reaction against the influence and popularity of the negative view. For example, Aristotle’s attempt to salvage the mimetic arts was a response to Plato’s condemnation. However, as Belfiore and Bennett note, the negative tradition has been almost entirely displaced by the positive one since the 1980s as the need to argue for arts subsidy in terms of social and economic benefits has taken hold. Invoking the negative tradition today is near heresy. Nevertheless, for most of the last 2500 years, human beings have not regarded the arts as necessarily a positive social force.
There is a growing academic literature that focuses on such ambiguity in music, including in “musical-social work” (Ansdell 2014, 193) like SATM. Hesmondhalgh (2013) centres ambivalence to the extent that his book Why Music Matters is labelled a “manifesto for a more ambivalent music sociology” by Bull (2019, xviii), whose research on class and control in classical music education is another exemplar of this genre.
In CM, Boeskov’s (2019) PhD thesis is subtitled “Exploring ambiguous musical practice in a Palestinian refugee camp,” while Kertz-Welzel (2016, 116) notes: “The ambiguity of community music is a well-known problem.” Matthews (2015, 238) opens his essay on SJME with the
10 Rethinking Social Action through Music
statement: “Music education is far more ambiguous morally than might be thought.” Boia and Boal-Palheiros (2017) highlight ambivalence, complexity, and contradiction in their study of the Portuguese El Sistema-inspired program Orquestra Geração.
If there is a body of work that addresses this topic directly, there is much more that sheds indirect light on it, revealing contradictory processes and effects and illustrating the complexity of practice and research in fields such as SATM (e.g. Sarazin 2017; Rimmer 2018;
Fairbanks 2019), CM (e.g. Krönig 2019; Ansdell et al. 2020), music education (e.g. Bradley 2009; Bull 2019), participatory arts (e.g.
Thompson 2009; Daykin et al. 2020), and cultural policy and planning (e.g. Belfiore 2002, 2009; Belfiore and Bennett 2010; Lees and Melhuish 2015; Stevenson 2017).4 As Bowman (2009a, 11) argues: “Music and music education are not unconditional goods. They can harm as well as heal…. [I]ntended results on one level may be undesirable on another.”
Elsewhere, he writes (2009b, 125–26): “Music’s performative and participatory power has both a potentially dark side and a progressive one.”
Gaztambide-Fernández (2013, 214) argues that “claims about the power of the arts to inspire, to liberate, or to transform tend to obscure both the complexities and the possibilities that lurk within experiences with the arts in education.” Cultural practices
are constituted through that very complexity: the ballet is beautiful not despite but because many young dancers starve themselves to look the part; the orchestra sounds magnificent not despite but because of the militaristic regimes that rule how many musicians are trained; we need to embrace such complexity and foment an understanding of the arts in education through a more robust language that does not require that all worthy experiences involving symbolic creativity be defined a priori as both good and predictable.
If the El Sistema boom has seen classical music touted as a tool for social inclusion, Gioia (2018) explores its exclusionary uses as a deterrent aimed at stigmatized social groups, or
4 A special issue of Music and Arts in Action on contradiction, ambivalence, and complexity in El Sistema and youth orchestras is also in preparation at the time of writing.
11 Introduction
a sonic border fence protecting privileged areas from common crowds.
[…] So our metaphor for music’s power must change from panacea to punishment, from unifying to separating force, as its purpose slips from aesthetic or spiritual ennoblement into economic relocation. Mozart has traded in a career as doctor for the soul to become an eviction agent for the poor.
In the same vein, Cheng (2019, 47) notes that classical music is used in public spaces to repel “the homeless, the would-be criminals, black and brown youths, and other people who are presumably up to no good”—ironically, the same social constituency that SATM is supposed to redeem, according to its official narrative.
The “power of music” ideology has been critiqued from various angles. Clarke (2018) highlights music’s relational character, which sheds doubt on the appropriateness of speaking about music as though it were a thing that possessed power and underlines that its effects can never be taken for granted. In his critique of the “rhetoric of effects,”
Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) argues that “the arts don’t do anything”;
rather, artistic forms are something that people do. Cobo Dorado (2015) and Henley (2018) suggest that in the field of music education, it is pedagogy rather than music that potentially—though not necessarily—
generates desirable social effects. Odendaal et al. (2019) argue that the findings of neuroscientific studies of music’s impact are often exaggerated in their “translation” to mainstream and social media, while Sala and Gobet (2020) roundly refute the dominant argument about the cognitive effects of music education.
Other academic fields provide further reasons not to assume the efficacy of any social intervention. Ambivalence over the theories, practices, and effects of development have long been standard fare among scholars (e.g. Ferguson 1994; Escobar 1995). Easterly (2006) critiques utopianism in development, while Cornwall and Eade (2010) display a healthy scepticism towards the field’s “buzzwords and fuzzwords.”
Ramalingam’s (2013) milestone book on development and complexity theory, Aid on the Edge of Chaos, serves as a valuable example, particularly since much music-making, too, exists “on the edge of chaos” and might be thought of as a complex adaptive system. As such, it can have varied effects and produce unintended consequences, which makes either predicting or proving its social impact very difficult. As Ramalingam
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argues, blueprints and “best practices” may work at some times and places but not others. “Obvious” solutions can turn out to be counter-productive in practice. The question of whether foreign aid really works has proven unanswerable, but, in some cases, it has made matters worse for the poor and vulnerable. Ramalingam describes it as “less a global welfare system and more a global postcode lottery with few handpicked winners and many, many more losers” (8). His insistence on complexity serves as a warning against the over-simplification of music’s social effects.
Scholarship on public art and cultural policy, too, reveals scepticism and fully-fledged debates about the potential of artistic interventions—
even the best intentioned—to have mixed or downright negative impacts and problematic unintended consequences. There has been much discussion of “artwashing”—projects that may have laudable elements, but which are conceived as cover for other (usually economic) objectives and may contribute to problematic dynamics such as gentrification.
Some argue that culture has become a favoured area for sticking-plaster solutions to the damaging social and economic effects of neoliberal policies (e.g. Logan 2016).
Of particular relevance to SATM, scholarship on after-school programs reveals an equally ambiguous picture. It might be assumed that such programs have a positive impact on youth outcomes, but many studies have found no or even negative effects (e.g. Gottfredson et al. 2010; Taheri and Welsh 2015; Bernatzky and Cid 2018). Urban cultural planning generates feel-good language and there is widespread belief in its value, but the evidence for its efficacy is mixed and it rarely achieves the ambitions set for it (Stevenson 2017). In short, many experts in a range of fields adjacent to SATM take nothing for granted and approach common assumptions about the impact of social and artistic interventions with some scepticism.
An ambivalent approach to music may derive from any number of sources, including scholarship and personal experience. In my case, it comes primarily from my own historical and ethnographic research.
I spent many years studying Latin American musicians (past and present) as liminal figures, embroiled in complex negotiations over power (Baker 2008; 2011). I have also undertaken two years of fieldwork on SATM, as well as a decade of complementary and online research,
13 Introduction
giving me ample opportunity to witness its complexity first-hand. In Medellín, many people expressed a mixture of fondness and concern about the Red. I witnessed elation and arguments, tears of joy and tears of sadness. In El Sistema and among the first generation of Red students (who were overseen by Venezuelans), I repeatedly encountered a love-hate relationship with music education: as Cheng (2019) puts it, quite a few loved music till it hurt. The intensity of these programs led to intense experiences for participants at a formative and impressionable age. Yet alongside the stories of socializing and enjoyment were others about excessively long hours, authoritarian conductors, and abrasive teachers. For some, SATM was both magical and abusive at the same time. As Gaztambide-Fernández writes, joy and suffering were bound up together in a mutually constitutive relationship.
However, one does not need to do fieldwork or pore over archives or scholarly tomes to question the positive narrative about music. There is plenty of evidence closer to hand. While there is an impressive body of research on music’s beneficial effects on health and wellbeing, the music profession is also associated with a high incidence of mental and physical health problems.5 Precarity, low pay, and overwork are commonplace in the performing arts professions.6 Classical music is often the focus of exalted claims about its ennobling powers, and SATM rests on a narrative about classical music education as a route to personal salvation, yet such stories elide pervasive allegations of endemic sexual harassment and abuse in specialist music schools and conservatoires (e.g. Pace 2015; Krafeld 2017; Newey 2020) and revelations about the misdeeds of some of the field’s most illustrious figures. Teraud (2018) notes that “classical music has always enabled bad behaviour,” while Lebrecht’s (2018) article on “sex, lies and conductors” examines “the sordid underbelly of conducting where sex is considered a perk of the job.” As such articles imply, contradiction is nothing new: Reverend Haweis extolled the uplifting effects of great music in his enormously popular 1871 book Music and Morals; he also had an illegitimate daughter by one of his parishioners (Bull 2019). As Geir Johansen asked at the
5 On the music profession and poor mental and physical health, see “HMUK” (2017) and Lebrecht (2017); on the orchestral profession and performance-related injuries, see “Los músicos salen” (2019).
6 On poor pay and precarity, see “ArtsPay” (2019); Loar (2019).
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Social Impact of Making Music conference in London in 2017, tongue only partly in cheek: if music is so transformative, how come musicians aren’t better people?