After I made a short reconnaissance trip to Medellín in 2016, the Red went through a change of leadership. When I arrived in 2017 to begin my fieldwork, the program had a new general director, and it was in a slightly tense state of transition and anticipation. At our first meeting, program leaders articulated a self-critique of the Red’s history and a vision of change. It immediately became clear that there were interesting
21 Introduction
movements under way. Crucially, as my research unfolded, I found that some of the most critical opinions about the Red came from past and present figures at management level. Leading figures were not afraid to reflect critically and at length in meetings and written reports on the program’s shortcomings. In some respects, the Red’s management was closer to the ambivalence of music scholars than to the relentless optimism so commonplace in the SATM field’s public face.
On the one hand, this meant that my critical perspective on SATM found a natural home. As I began my research, I slotted into an institution in which analysis and ambivalence were relatively normal. On the other hand, I soon became less interested in critique than self-critique. My own critical perspective, which had been so necessary when faced with El Sistema’s self-congratulation, could take a back seat when the Red’s employees (and students) offered so many trenchant views of their own.
Boeskov (2019, 9) identifies his research as “part of a burgeoning self-critical movement within the field of community music,” and he suggests that “one of its central tasks is to contribute to moving the field beyond simplistic and romantic views of music’s transforma tive powers, to deal with the complex, contradictory, and ambiguous outcomes of participatory music making.” When such a self-critical movement is articulated in print, it becomes more visible. But when it is not, as in the case of the Red, then it remains largely unknown to the outside world and does not register in public discussion or even academic research. I see my role here primarily as bringing the Red’s self-critiques out into the open and thereby contributing to a self-critical movement within SATM more broadly.
SATM as a potential catalyst of social change is a major topic of this book, but even more central is change within SATM. Continuity is a hallmark of El Sistema, which was led by José Antonio Abreu for its first forty-three years and retained a remarkable consistency of practice over that time. In contrast, the Red has been through five changes of leader in twenty-three years, with accompanying shifts in practice and philosophy, making it an excellent case study of the multiplicity of approaches that may be covered by the label of SATM. Its changes make for much to explore: their nature, their causes, their effects, and the responses they provoked. These changes distanced the Red from El
22 Rethinking Social Action through Music
Sistema, inviting a relational perspective: how did it diverge from the Venezuelan model? What can we learn from this process?
Change is an important yet under-researched topic within SATM.
Studies of SATM have tended to be synchronic and thus to present SATM programs as relatively static and consistent. Evolution over time has not been analysed in any depth. The present book takes a diachronic approach and places the emphasis on transformations and their effects.
In my previous book I argued that El Sistema was riddled with problems and in urgent need of rethinking. A number of years later, there have been signs of movement from some corners of the SATM field. The shift from discussions about adoption versus adaptation to the widespread usage of the label “El Sistema-inspired” (ESI) gestures (if subtly) to a certain distancing from Venezuelan practices. Anecdotally, approaches within this field appear to have diversified; if some programs still venerate the Venezuelan model, others seem to borrow little beyond its name today. El Sistema was created in 1975 and looked back, both practically and ideologically, to earlier centuries. It became internationally fashionable in 2007, but educational thinking had changed significantly in the meantime and its approach has been much questioned since. It was only a matter of time before SATM engaged with more contemporary ideas.
Yet the explicit alignment of so many programs with El Sistema has limited the space for full, open, critical discussion of the fault lines in the Venezuelan model that necessitate change. Many have been willing to discuss how El Sistema might be adapted to other national contexts;
but few have dared to suggest publicly that El Sistema needs to be transformed because it is flawed and out of alignment with current ideas about music education and social change. Institutional alliances and political sensitivities mean that public discussion of change, when it occurs, generally takes the form of offering a solution without naming the problem.
The field thus shows a paradoxical mixture of change and coyness about it, with some programs simultaneously praising El Sistema as a miraculous success and, with rather less fanfare, altering its formula.
If positive transformation of SATM is to flow unimpeded, there is a pressing need for more information, analysis, and open debate around where, how, and why it has changed to date; what the achievements,
23 Introduction
challenges, and failures of such processes have been; and how it might change further in future.
This book is predicated on the idea that change is taking place in some quarters of SATM, but information is limited; processes of reform have been insufficiently documented, analysed, and discussed in public.
Its contribution is firstly to examine a specific case study of change in detail (in Part I), and secondly to consider the question of change in SATM more broadly (in Part II). I am not suggesting that the Red is the most advanced example of SATM; processes of reform have gone further in some places, though they have barely begun in others. I thus treat the Red as neither unique nor a model to simply follow (or avoid), but rather as a case study that illuminates the past and present of the SATM field and points to possible directions for its future. I believe its journey offers lessons—positive, negative, and everything in between—
for others. In other words, I hold up the Red not as an example of the
“right” way to do SATM, but rather as an example of rethinking SATM, of a constant search for renewal—and there is much we can learn from observing this process, whatever the results. This book is intended to serve as a catalyst for thinking and talking publicly about change and thereby to contribute to growth in SATM. The field’s shifts, however large or small they may be, need to be made more visible, audible, and comprehensible. At present public discourse revolves much less around new developments than around the triumph and supposed success of the old model, and this does not help the process or pace of change.
The Red repays close attention as an example of a SATM organization that has rethought and renewed its practices repeatedly in order to give greater priority to its social objective and adapt to a changing context. It is also an example of a “middle-aged” program in Latin America: younger than the venerable El Sistema, but older than its offshoots in the global North. It has been running for long enough to have had to confront the issue of change, and it may be instructive for more recent ESI programs around the world to learn in detail about an older example of SATM’s development outside of Venezuela. During my time in Medellín, the Red pursued a sufficiently distinct line that it might be considered an alternative to El Sistema, or at least an alternative-in-progress.
The problems and limitations of the Venezuelan model are now well known within the research field, so while this book adds to this critical
24 Rethinking Social Action through Music
literature, it is more focused on advances and transformations. I finished my previous book turning outwards from El Sistema’s problems to consider wider lessons and possible solutions, and that search lies at the heart of this book.
When I was in the later stages of writing, COVID-19 struck, followed shortly afterwards by the resurgence of Black Lives Matter.
Since my fieldwork was completed and the book’s outline already in place, I decided not to scatter references to these major developments throughout the text but rather to return to them in the Afterword, which brings the book up to date at the end of 2020. Yet 2020 moved change towards the top of the agenda in many areas of human life, including music education and SATM, and so it added a new degree of urgency to much of what is described and analyzed in these pages. I believe that fewer people will need convincing of the need for a serious discussion of change today than when I sat down to write in 2019.
Self-critique and change, two central themes of this book, are bound up together. Changes in personnel since 2005 have led to internal critiques of the Red, to changes in (or attempts to change) the program, and to critiques of the (attempted) changes. This cyclical process has led, perhaps inevitably, to internal frictions and conflict. Indeed, it was only a matter of days after my arrival in Medellín to begin my fieldwork before the first clouds began to intrude on my sunny picture of the program. By the time I returned for a post-fieldwork follow-up visit two years later, the Red was in full crisis mode. Over this period, the processes of critical reflection and change that the program was undergoing provoked escalating tensions, debates, and disputes, and my focus on these processes led me also to explore their complex effects.
Like change, internal critique and conflict have not been a focus of academic research on SATM. There are illuminating studies by former employees of ESI programs who have gone on to write critically about their experiences after they left (e.g. Dobson 2016; Godwin 2020).
Fairbanks (2019), the former Sistema director, offers an in-depth account of his journey from enthusiasm and advocacy to significant doubts about his own work and the field more broadly. However, open critiques and self-critiques by current employees, and the tensions and debates they occasion within a program, are terra incognita in SATM scholarship. Yet they can be very revealing. Close scrutiny of these dynamics within the
25 Introduction
Red sees a somewhat monolithic, romantic view of SATM programs as harmonious and unified break down. The Red reveals itself as a multi-faceted, internally differentiated field, in which contrasting philosophies and practices coexist but also compete, and as a set of different and, at times, opposing constituencies (management, school directors, ensemble conductors, teachers, students, parents, administrators, researchers), which articulated different and sometimes opposing views. The picture that emerges is more complex than the standard narrative of SATM and it illuminates some of the choices available to such programs and the possible consequences of those choices.