I define SATM as a field centred in Latin America, where the largest and best-known examples are located, but with strong cultural and ideological ties to Europe and with a global reach, since El Sistema has served as an inspiration around the world. SATM consists of music education programs with a number of characteristics. They identify social action (or a related term, such as social inclusion) as the primary or at least an important goal. They place large ensembles at the centre of learning—often but not always the orchestra. Classical music originally took pride of place and, while there has been some diversification in terms of repertoire, in many instances it still does. SATM is usually more intensive than most extra-curricular music programs (El Sistema’s intermediate and advanced students often attend daily for several hours or more), and participation is free (or more rarely, at low cost).
In Latin America, programs are often intermediate to large in size, reaching thousands of participants, rather than the millions who might (in theory) be exposed to school music or the dozens or hundreds in a community music program; but SATM programs in the global North are frequently smaller.
The origins of the label SATM are obscure, but it appears to date from the mid-1990s. It was popularized by El Sistema but may have been borrowed from a smaller Brazilian program of the same name (Baker 2014). It is also associated with El Sistema’s funding by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB): it adorns the program’s Caracas headquarters, built with an IDB loan. The term was not widely used in Medellín, but it is an appropriate one for a program that was shaped by El Sistema, was created around the time the label emerged, and prioritized a social objective. Also, the Red, like El Sistema, was supported by the IDB in its first phase.
Musically and pedagogically speaking, SATM owes considerable allegiance to older practices and philosophies of music education of European origin (including ones that date back to the Spanish Conquest), and it shows parallels with the Suzuki method. It therefore sits somewhere between conventional collective music education and newer fields such as community music (CM) and music education for
6 Rethinking Social Action through Music
social change. Its practices are closer to the former, while its aims or claims are similar to the latter.
As such, SATM can be approached from a variety of points of view.
Since its model is similar to that of youth orchestras and bands around the globe, music education research can shed considerable light on its strengths and limitations. I took this approach in my previous book, and as many of the issues are broadly the same across the SATM field, I will not repeat those arguments or the literature on which they are based here. Research on social justice in music education (SJME), which has seen considerable growth in recent years, would seem another logical vantage point. However, SATM occupies an ambiguous, liminal position with respect to this area of research, as with its practice. In terms of social aims, there are apparent points of contact, yet SATM also embodies many conventional practices and aspirations that this field critiques, above all a focus on large ensembles and classical music performance, and so it is far from a favoured model in SJME research. The Oxford Handbook of Social Justice in Music Education (Benedict et al. 2015) devotes just one of its forty-two chapters to El Sistema, and the perspective therein is distinctly ambivalent (Shieh 2015). There are occasional references to the approach and practices that it incarnates in other chapters, but they are strikingly critical (e.g. McCarthy 2015; Kelly-McHale and Abril 2015;
Matthews 2015). Gaztambide-Fernández and Rose (2015) critique the Venezuelan model directly, and their analysis lays bare just how far it lies from contemporary thinking on SJME. This disjuncture is also evident in the terminology: El Sistema does not refer to social justice but rather to social action and social inclusion, which are ideologically distinct.
Both the overlap and the tensions may be illuminated by considering the twin aims of the handbook. The blurb on its dust jacket begins:
Music education has historically had a tense relationship with social justice. On the one hand, educators concerned with music practices have long preoccupied themselves with ideas of open participation and the potentially transformative capacity that musical interaction fosters. On the other hand, they have often done so while promoting and privileging a particular set of musical practices, traditions, and forms of musical knowledge, which has in turn alienated and even excluded many children from music education opportunities.
7 Introduction
The book examines both sides of the equation: it echoes SATM in exploring “social justice in action,” but whereas SATM has historically focused on the end result (social action through music), this handbook is equally concerned with the means (social justice in music), so it also explores “cycles of injustice that might be perpetuated by music pedagogy.” (Indeed, a central implication of the book is that there can be no social justice through music education without social justice in music education.) This twin aim not only distinguishes SJME from SATM, but it also highlights the latter as an ambiguous model: simultaneously a potential route to justice and site of injustice. El Sistema and its practices feature in both sections of the book, evoked as both an example of social justice in action and an object of criticism; Shieh’s chapter alone, even though it appears in the section “Social justice in practice,” raises critical questions about El Sistema’s social justice credentials, going so far as to describe the program’s conception of poverty as “grotesque” (2015, 574). So while one might look at the book’s title and logically conclude that SATM fell either inside or outside this field of study, neither is entirely true: it straddles the boundary, somewhat uncomfortably.
Similarly, there have been some efforts to draw together SATM with the field of community music (CM), but The Oxford Handbook of Community Music (Bartleet and Higgins 2018a) barely mentions El Sistema, and many of the values that CM embodies and upholds run directly contrary to the Venezuelan program. While El Sistema was founded by the conservative politician and economist José Antonio Abreu, a minister of state who was a right-hand man of several presidents, Bartleet and Higgins (2018b) see the roots of CM in the UK counter-culture era of the late 1960s and 1970s, and Price (2018, x) writes of the field’s “punk ethic” in the 1980s. While Abreu consorted with the architects of neoliberalism in Venezuela, CM emerged from the socialist-leaning community arts scene. Boeskov (2019, 114) characterizes CM as non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian, and “operating from outside or on the margins of the established, the authorized, the legitimate and dominant culture”—a description that could hardly be further from El Sistema, which came to operate out of the Office of the President. If CM upholds cultural democracy, SATM embodies the opposing notion of
8 Rethinking Social Action through Music
democratization of culture. SATM looks less like CM’s sibling than its neoliberal alter-ego.3
The picture from the research field is thus somewhat paradoxical. El Sistema is probably the best-known example of socially oriented music education among the general public, and it is the most widely reported in the media, which has frequently presented it as a miracle story; yet it plays only a minor role in cornerstone texts in the academic field and analyses of its approach are often unflattering. More positive accounts of socially oriented music education in such sources are generally focused on practices and values (such as bottom-up, non-formal, or creative) that are strikingly different from SATM.
SATM has spawned its own sub-field of research, running in parallel to—and sometimes blissful ignorance of—the fields cited above. The problematic nature of this sub-field is evident in a literature review (Creech et al. 2016) that is both a valuable resource and a potential minefield: professional, peer-reviewed research is mixed with student dissertations and non-academic advocacy without any sort of quality control, which makes it an excellent starting point for further research in responsible hands but has enabled others to present a distorted vision of relevant scholarship. Nevertheless, there are two broad points that can be derived from this literature review and from surveying more recent publications: firstly, writing on SATM is extremely varied, some would say polarized, embracing positions ranging from fervent advocacy to trenchant criticism; and secondly, there is an increasing amount of peer-reviewed scholarship at the critical end of the spectrum (in addition to the sources above, see e.g. Allan et al. 2010; Baker 2015a; Bull 2016;
Dobson 2016; Rosabal-Coto 2016; Kuuse, Lindgren, and Skåreus 2016;
Baker 2016b; Baker 2016c; Hopkins, Provenzano, and Spencer 2017;
Rimmer 2018; Rimmer 2020). SATM has generally been presented to the world as a stunning success, worthy of extensive emulation; but from the perspective of research, matters look considerably more complicated.
3 See, however, Krönig (2019) for a complicating view of CM.
9 Introduction