Such tensions and debates were of considerable importance to the program’s actors and ought to be of considerable importance to anyone interested in understanding SATM more deeply. As Ndaliko (2016, 19) argues, taking cultural development work seriously means being willing “to preserve some of the more uncomfortable conversations and negotiations that take place behind the scenes of the polished press releases and websites competing for support.” However, these uncomfortable debates do not define the Red or represent the whole of the program. I offer a realist take on SATM that contrasts with the idealist take of institutional publicity, advocacy, and the music industry, but I do not try to convey everything. My focus is not the Red of routine musical activities and everyday pleasures, but rather the Red of meetings and conversations in the corridors and coffee breaks. There is much else that could be studied and written, but that must be a task for others.
The result is a fieldwork-based critical analysis of key issues rather than a standard descriptive ethnography. It is not an evaluation either; rather, it focuses on a long-term process of self-evaluation. The question driving it is not “is the Red a good thing?” but rather the one that preoccupied many of my interlocutors: “how could it work better?” My primary intention is to share the Red’s experiences with others around the world and shed light on central questions in SATM research and practice. Nevertheless, during my fieldwork, a number of current and former employees expressed interest in my perceptions of the Red. They were keen to know how a foreigner with experience of
26 Rethinking Social Action through Music
studying music and SATM elsewhere perceived their program. Senior figures responded positively to my invitation to read a draft of this text, welcoming an external critical perspective. Consequently, as well as conveying insiders’ views of the Red to the outside world, I also offer an outsider’s perspective on the Red for the consideration of the program itself and the cultural sector in Medellín more broadly, placing the Red’s key issues in the context of academic fields and studies that were not well-known within the program.
Like many of my interlocutors, I could see that all was not rosy with the Red, and I believe that critical discussion is necessary; but, also like them, I feel an emotional attachment to the program and wish it success.
Researching SATM properly requires a healthy dose of scepticism, yet I am not a sceptic in my everyday interactions with the Red, but rather something more like a critical friend. One school director told me: “Everything I do in the Red is because I love this program… that’s why I’m always so agitated.” He was one of the most critical voices in meetings, yet, as he explained in our interview, he criticized because he cared deeply about the program. I can identify with his mixture of attachment and critique and his desire to build the Red up, not pull it down.
The Red was full of pleasures and sociability; the program’s staff undertook important and sometimes challenging work; and there were many moments when I was moved and inspired by the results. If such points take a back seat in this book, it is for two main reasons. Firstly, the training provided by the Red is quite conventional for music education in the Euro-American world, and therefore its positives need no explaining to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of this field. Such positives are widely discussed in the public sphere; the issues and debates, much less so. Secondly, I believe that an examination of the issues that preoccupied the employees and participants of the Red is ultimately more productive (if less comfortable) for the field than the celebration that has dominated public discourse. I am inspired by Ang’s (2011, 790) characterization of “intelligent knowledge” as “bound to be highly selective” if it is to lead to constructive action. My underpinning belief is that debate about SATM’s issues is more fruitful than a Panglossian vision.
Bartleet and Higgins (2018, 8) argue that discomfort and tensions in CM “are quite possibly a sign of health and growth.” Much of what
27 Introduction
I analyse in this book might be thought of as growing pains, with all the contradictions that this term captures. If I am interested in the pains—
the discomfort and the tensions—it is because I am interested in the growth.
Some writers on SATM have advocated for a balanced, neutral, or objective approach. Rather than making such claims (which have been endlessly problematized by scholars), I take inspiration from currents such as emancipatory social science (Erik Olin Wright, cited in Wright 2019) and decolonial music education (Shifres and Rosabal-Coto 2018), in which researchers are not afraid to take a position—indeed, they regard it as positive. As Terry Eagleton (2004) argues, “intellectuals take sides,” because “in all the most pressing political conflicts which confront us, someone is going to have to win and someone to lose.” I also subscribe to musicologist Björn Heile’s (2020, 176) view:
I doubt that we can ever be value-free, neutral, and objective. More importantly, I haven’t got the slightest intention or inclination to be, and the very idea seems to me to misconstrue the nature of scholarship and the public function of musicology. I entered this profession out of my passion for music; renouncing that would amount to a betrayal of what I believe in. […] I also believe that the greatest scholarship and criticism is ultimately driven by passion for its subject—usually love, although sometimes scorn.
The subtitle of Griffiths’s (1998) book on educational research for social justice is indicative: “getting off the fence.” She offers a vision of action-oriented educational research that “is not necessarily research about education or its processes. Rather, it is research which has an effect on education” (67). Accordingly, educational research for social justice is not balanced or neutral, but rather ethically and politically committed and clear about what it aims to achieve: improving the practices of education. Such an approach is commonplace among researchers in fields such as CM and SJME, who frequently “get off the fence.”
Embracing ambiguity, ambivalence, and complexity should therefore not be confused with neutrality or sitting on the fence. It may in fact suggest a more disruptive approach, aimed at dominant but flawed ways of thinking and acting. Ramalingam (2013) provides a good example:
complexity is his central theme, yet he is scathing of the conventional ways of the aid establishment.
28 Rethinking Social Action through Music
In short, this book is intended as a critical contribution to debates that I witnessed and participated in from 2017–19, and I do take sides.
I am concerned by stasis and stagnation in orthodox SATM; I believe in progressive educational change; and I admired those figures in the Red who were willing to ask difficult questions and disrupt established ways of thinking and acting. I was encouraged to see movement around some of SATM’s deep-seated issues, and while, as someone who had taught music or music studies in education institutions for much of my adult life, I could sympathize with those who were unsettled by the process, I broadly supported the shifts that were proposed and attempted. This is a book about change in SATM, and it is a book that is committed to such change.
What follows is therefore a perspective on SATM. It is constructed out of the perspectives of many others—musicians and researchers, in Medellín and around the world—but a central point of this book is that opinions varied considerably even within a single program at a particular moment in time. Thus I am not suggesting that this is the one and only way to view the subject, nor do I expect it to appeal to everyone. Viewing SATM through a critical lens is not to everyone’s taste.
Nevertheless, I hope that this perspective speaks to readers interested in critical thinking about SATM and positive change within the field.