If recognition of music’s ambiguity has led to considerable ambivalence on the part of scholars, the same is not true of the music sector, or at least of its public face. As Belfiore and Bennett (2008, 192–93) note,
“understanding the claims for the power of the arts involves the engagement with some highly complex intellectual issues. However, public pronouncements about the value or impact of the arts rarely reflect this complexity and tend to fall back instead on a somewhat ritualistic use of the ‘rhetoric of transformation.’” Cheng’s (2019) study offers one explanation: the “musical mystique,” as he calls it, which has an enduring hold, even over those who should know better. We should be tired of correlations between a love of classical music and ethical personhood, he suggests, but the regularity with which the trump card of classical-music-loving Nazis has to be brought out underlines the pervasiveness and persistence of the fantasy of music as an ennobling force. Cheng argues that this is not a simple matter of knowledge or ignorance: rather, the musical mystique is enticing—a siren song.
SATM illustrates Belfiore and Bennett’s point, and its rhetoric of transformation undoubtedly reflects Cheng’s “musical mystique,” but it also has more expedient roots. The concept of SATM was seized upon in Venezuela in the mid-1990s because of its utility as a funding lever;
it was the key to El Sistema’s expansion. As Spruce (2017, 721) notes,
“discourses are not always as they seem—self-evident and neutral—but function as the means by which hegemonic groups sustain their influence and interests.” El Sistema’s international diffusion at least partly reflects these origins. If it has attracted idealists, it has also become—in some hands—a business, a professional lifeline, or a marketing strategy.
Fairbanks (2019, 13), former director of a US Sistema program, has written about his growing doubts over “whether Sistema programmes were truly about empowering marginalised youth, or whether they might be more accurately described as ventures in musical entrepreneurship, with ‘social justice’ being exploited as means for obtaining vast amounts
15 Introduction
of funding.”7 An artist management agency run by former El Sistema employees promises: “WE WILL MAKE A SOCIAL IMPACT ON EVERY PLACE OUR ARTISTS PERFORM.”8 Such a statement is an absurdity from the perspective of research on the social impact of the arts, but it makes sense from the point of view of distinguishing one’s product in a crowded marketplace. The rhetoric of transformation is a currency, and the stronger and simpler its message, the more it is worth.
There are other pressures and incentives that lead away from complex questions and towards over-simplification. In the UK, at least, arts practitioners—like academics—are increasingly ruled by a social impact agenda when it comes to securing funding, which hardly favours modesty. Many of us are obliged to play a game that rewards over-claiming with respect to impact, and many of us need a simplified sales pitch to explain to others the value of what we do.
Then there is the “ideas industry” (Drezner 2017), in which public intellectuals have been displaced by “thought leaders” with an evangelical desire to proselytize their views and change the world. Simple “big ideas” are the most valuable commodity in this
“marketplace of ideas,” while criticism and complexity—the bedrocks of academic research—are a lesser currency. What sells are often ideas that appear true because they cohere with the way people expect the world to be—simple, predictable, linear. SATM rests on the idea that the orchestra is, in Gustavo Dudamel’s words, “a model for an ideal global society” (Lee 2012). In reality the professional orchestral world is no bed of roses. Were collective music-making as powerful and beneficial as is sometimes claimed, one would expect orchestral musicians to be some of the happiest and healthiest people on earth, but there is a body of academic research and anecdotal evidence to suggest otherwise (see Baker 2014; Dickenson 2019). Nevertheless, the youth orchestra as a model of social harmony and inclusion is one of these “big ideas” that feels right, and it was consolidated by the heart of the ideas industry: TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design). Abreu was awarded a TED prize
7 Spruce (2017, 720) also raises concerns that the term social justice “is reached for by groups and organisations as a means of justifying and promoting their approaches to music education and to gain political approbation and consequently privileged access to funding.”
8 Quatre Klammer, “About Us”, https://www.quatreklammer.com/aboutus.
16 Rethinking Social Action through Music
in 2009; his talk on El Sistema was watched by over a million viewers;
and he spent his prize on El Sistema advocacy in the US, founding the Abreu Fellows Program at the New England Conservatory.9
Celebrities, journalists, and documentary makers, too, have brought SATM to a wide and avid audience. El Sistema has been promoted by the likes of Simon Rattle, Plácido Domingo, and Claudio Abbado, and eulogized in widely disseminated films such as Tocar y Luchar (2006) and El Sistema: Music to Change Life (2009). But such parties are usually more interested in dramatic stories of salvation and redemption through the power of music than in digging into more complex realities. The simplified “rhetoric of transformation” provides much better copy for books, articles, films, liner notes, and concert programs than the practical and philosophical challenges of music and social change that many researchers know so well.
However, research is not immune to such tendencies. Bartleet and Higgins (2018, 11) allude to “overly sentimentalized notions of community music in the literature [as well as] in broader public advocacy campaigns for musical participation.” Some quantitative evaluations of SATM have relied on future projections of social impact based on simplistic models of human behaviour and optimistic financial calculations (Logan 2015b; Scruggs 2015), or have used questionable methodologies to analyse existing achievements (Baker, Bull, and Taylor 2018), and most avoid more than the most fleeting reference to the growing critical literature on SATM; they appear to be designed more for securing funding than for identifying critical issues.
Qualitative research, meanwhile, can easily go astray if the researcher is insufficiently experienced, fails to ask the right questions or look in the right places, or is not attuned to music’s ambiguity. A particular strength of Cheng’s study is his acknowledgment of “a battle between the sucker and skeptic who dance within each of us” (2019, 39)—scholars such as himself included. He admits, “without shame or guilt, my susceptibility to the musical mystique. I can verbalize […] why this mystique can be problematic and even dangerous. But it hardly means my mind and body are now impenetrable by lines of dangerous thinking” (232). Some research on SATM bears out these words.
9 José Antonio Abreu, “The El Sistema music revolution”, TED 2009, https://www.
ted.com/talks/jose_antonio_abreu_the_el_sistema_music_revolution.
17 Introduction
Over-simplified and exaggerated stories about SATM thus come at us from all sides. Advocacy, marketing, big ideas, media narratives, celebrity endorsements, and program evaluations all have their value and their place in the world, but none of them are a simple mirror of SATM’s realities. Some accounts are shaped to maximize appeal to readers and viewers, while others aim to promote a program, a sector, or an art form.
Most well-known narratives of SATM have their origins in efforts to mobilize support from funders, politicians, institutions, the public, and participants themselves. They project “aspirations, justifications, and claims that help to build external interest and visibility, in particular among potential supporters some distance from the project” (Howell 2017, 240).
Critique
Critical research is important in order to counteract this tendency towards over-simplification and exaggeration and to reveal music’s ambiguity and complexity. This step is necessary for SATM for two reasons:
gaining a more realistic perspective, understanding how SATM actually operates rather than what it aspires to do, will improve knowledge about the field; and highlighting complexity may provoke more discussion, debate, and experimentation, and thus improve practice within the field.
Critical research enables us to understand the past and present of SATM more deeply and to look towards a better future.
Jorgensen (2001) likens the philosopher of music education to a building inspector who evaluates a construction. In other words, critical scrutiny—while it may not always be welcomed or valued by the builders—is a necessary task, and it may also be generative and even emancipatory. Recognizing problems is an essential first step towards searching for solutions in music education (Bates 2018), while critique may support “the larger project of aligning paradigms of cultural activism with their utopic potential” (Ndaliko 2016, 12). The UK’s FailSpace research project focuses on the productive potential of studying failure in the cultural sector, arguing that honesty is important for improvement and “learning from failure should be an integral part of
18 Rethinking Social Action through Music
the process of making and implementing cultural projects and policies.”10 (It also notes that such honesty about failure “is not always welcome in formal evaluation processes, which tend to focus on celebratory facts and figures about a project’s success and conceal or brush-off negative outcomes or issues.”) There may be good reasons to focus on positives (raising the stock of music education, securing funding, boosting self-esteem), but idealistic, sentimental, or kitsch (Kertz-Welzel 2016) portrayals of SATM that exaggerate benefits, elide ambiguities, and minimalize problems increase the probability of an education shaped by illusory beliefs rather than rigorous thinking on socially oriented music education. In this sense, utopian perspectives may actually be counterproductive, by obscuring rather than illuminating the complex issues that SATM raises and thereby slowing down necessary reform.
The history of El Sistema illustrates the deleterious effect of excessive adulation and banishment of criticism.
The value of critique has been grasped more widely in CM than SATM. Bartleet and Higgins (2018b, 7), for example, “recognize the need for deeper and more critical reflection on the underlying processes and assumptions of community music initiatives,” stating that “it is inadequate to simply say ‘something miraculous happens’ in community music.” Dave Camlin concurs: “it’s important that all of us working in the cultural sector are able to look really critically at our practices”
(Camlin et al. 2020, 166).
The community musician and scholar Gillian Howell has emphasized that, within the field of music and peace-building, the order of good intentions is usually an illusion that gives way in practice to disjunctures and unexpected complexities.11 For example, she examines (together with Solveig Korum) a long-term Norwegian project for peace and reconciliation in Sri Lanka in which a large investment in music produced a disappointing return, since idealistic intentions and optimistic rhetoric were underpinned by vague, uncritical ideas about the inherent power of music to transform society rather than a detailed, articulated, evidenced theory of change (Korum and Howell 2020). The gaps between official accounts of the cultural sector and what really
10 FailSpace, “About”, https://failspaceproject.co.uk/about/.
11 Keynote address, 4th SIMM-posium on the Social Impact of Making Music, Bogotá, 26 July 2019.
19 Introduction
takes place is also a central focus of FailSpace, which emphasizes the value of acknowledging such gaps in order to foster improvement.
Public portrayals of SATM, however, are unduly shaped by the illusory narrative of order and tend to avoid the disjunctures. The gaps are not hidden: take the example of Jonathan Govias, who has documented his journey from guru of the El Sistema-inspired field to arch-critic (“apostle to apostate,” as he puts it) in great detail on his widely-read blog.12 Or the Venezuelan violinist Luigi Mazzocchi, whose somewhat similar trajectory and painstaking critique of El Sistema, his alma mater, were documented by the music education researcher Lawrence Scripp (2016a, 2016b). Yet the public defection of such prominent figures has failed to shift the dominant narrative of SATM in North America.
Ambiguity, ambivalence, and complexity are widespread in this sector, but they are rarely countenanced in public discourse.
Indeed, an ambivalent stance often raises hackles in the mission-driven SATM field. In development studies, in which there is a much longer and wider tradition of critical thinking, ambivalence is more of a mainstream position. Ndaliko’s (2016, 10) statement that “beneath the utopic idealism of charity as a selfless act of service, doing good is in fact an industry […] in dire need of scrutiny” would raise few eyebrows in the fields of development or aid. The arts, however, often form an exception, as Ndaliko goes on to argue:
the universalist humanist appeal of art and creativity allows otherwise rational organizations and individuals to endorse […] projects whose equivalents would be ludicrous if proposed in the fields of economics, governance, or medicine. But because it is about creativity rather than more quantifiable matters, the whistleblowers join the cheerleaders in celebrating “art” as a set of inherently positive practices and products.
(15)
Ndaliko notes that it is particularly hard to acknowledge the value of critical thinking on culture in challenging contexts because art “often becomes a kind of moral oasis that shifts focus away from critical scrutiny of the conditions of its production to sentimental celebration of its very existence” (12). But if we truly believe that music is a potential driver of social change and deserves to be taken seriously as such, then we
12 Jonathan Andrew Govias, https://jonathangovias.com/.
20 Rethinking Social Action through Music
need to be willing to apply “the same level of rigor to studying cultural activities as is routinely applied to issues of economics, government, development, and structural aid” (15). As decades of research on development have shown, it is not enough for one’s heart to be in the right place.
This does not just mean evaluating policies in order to determine their effectiveness; it also means broader and deeper critique. It is not enough to know whether a program achieves certain goals; it is also necessary to interrogate the validity of those goals and consider cultural, political, philosophical, and ethical questions that they raise (see Belfiore and Bennett 2010; Baker, Bull, and Taylor 2018). As Bartleet and Higgins (2018, 7) argue, we need a “more nuanced approach [that]
focuses on understanding the changes that are taking place rather than simply proving them; the latter can so often happen in advocacy-driven research or in evaluative research undertaken to respond to funding-body requirements.”
The urgency of critical thinking in the SATM field is in part a reflection of the zeal with which it has been avoided by El Sistema. SATM’s figurehead program has always been action-focused and had little time for reflection, self-criticism, or debate. Its founder’s catchphrases—“rest comes with eternal rest”; “double rehearsal today”—illustrate his driven character. Foreign visitors to Venezuela who tried to probe more deeply met evasiveness (Agrech 2018) or a brick wall. As Marco Frei (2011) noted, “anyone who asks critical questions of El Sistema in Venezuela will make no friends. If you ask the creative director and founder Abreu to talk about problems in El Sistema, he looks irritated. ‘Problems?’ he asked with a questioning glance through thick glasses. ‘We grow, grow, grow.’”