Before

you turn the page:

Connecting the parallel worlds of Sistema and critical scholarship

Geoff Baker, Royal Holloway, University of London

Coming out of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra’s final London concert at

the Royal Festival Hall in early 2016, the journalist Damian Thompson was

struck by the sight of a Foyles stall selling CDs by Gustavo Dudamel and the SBSO

alongside my book.1 “Subtitled ‘Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth,’ [it] examines

in detail all the charges of sexual abuse, political manoeuvring and musical deceit

levelled against the mysterious ‘system’. One wonders how many members of

the audience, hands raw from clapping, gave it so much as a glance.” This image

provides a nice microcosm of the current situation: two parallel worlds – the

Sistema industry and critical scholarship – sitting side by side, in plain view, yet

with the serious tensions between the two barely registering on the public radar.

I cannot help but wonder why the book was there at all. The concert was a win-

win. The music industry loves El Sistema; audiences love El Sistema. What

possible space could critical research have in this context? How many audience

members would actually be interested in reading such a book? Is it destined just

to sit there on the table, visible and endorsed on the back cover by

internationally renowned experts (Lucy Green and Robert Fink), yet

simultaneously ignored by the wider world?

1 http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/was-barenboim-happy-hiding-inside-a-

provincial-orchestra-from-venezuela/.
 2

What follows are my personal reflections on such questions, and on the

reception of the first (and to date only) academic book on El Sistema, drawing on

a number of years of intensive study of the Venezuelan program.

What to do about Venezuela?

When El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth was published in late 2014,

there was an immediate reaction from journalists and advocates questioning its

accuracy, its arguments, and even my motivations and honesty. Despite the fact

that the book was peer-reviewed and based on extensive research in Venezuela,

and the criticisms came primarily from people with little knowledge of the

country or its music education, the negative responses gained considerable

visibility in the media. 18 months later, the panorama looks rather different. The

claim that the research was theoretically or methodologically unsound has been

dismissed in a string of positive scholarly reviews and endorsements, while the

accuracy of the content has been confirmed both privately and publicly by

Venezuelan musicians, most notably the violinist Luigi Mazzocchi (Scripp 2015).

Subsequent research by other scholars has not only supported but also deepened

and extended the critiques in the book.2 So now the debate must move onto a

different plane, and a fundamental question arises: what to do with this

information about El Sistema? Continue to deny it, ignore it, or face up to it?

2 See the special issue of Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education 15:1

(January 2016), available at http://act.maydaygroup.org/volume-15/; also

Logan 2015a.
 3

A process of differentiation appears to be underway in the international Sistema

sphere. At the more progressive end of the Sistema spectrum, Venezuela has

started to fade from view. The most respected and persuasive voice in that area,

Jonathan Govias, has stated that “the future of Sistema lies outside of

Venezuela.”3 The sense that the debate has moved on, that Sistema people no

longer feel a need to talk about Venezuela, is underlined by the report from the

Sistema Fellows meeting in January 2016 in Boston, which made no mention of

Venezuela, Abreu, or Dudamel, and by the absence of Venezuelan themes and

presenters at the Reframing El Sistema conference in Baltimore in April 2016.4

Here, there seems to be an urge to turn the page on Venezuela. At the other end

of the Sistema spectrum, though, idolisation of the Venezuelan program and its

leaders continues to be much in evidence. In the Sistema Global forum, for

example, some people appear to be in denial over recent revelations about

Venezuela, or have failed or refused to inform themselves; the result is that a

utopian fantasy of El Sistema still looms large. Here we find Abreu and

Dudamel’s public pronouncements treated and repeated like the sayings of a

guru, and the Venezuelan program held up as a model for the world to follow.

Although I am much more sympathetic to the positions of the progressive wing,

I am concerned that at neither end of the spectrum is there open and honest

debate about the flaws as well as the achievements of El Sistema, or the position

that the Sistema-inspired field might take with regard to them. I would argue

that the urge to move forwards needs to be balanced by looking backwards as

3 http://jonathangovias.com/2015/11/08/what-next-for-sistema/.
4 http://sistemafellows.typepad.com/my-blog/2016/02/looking-to-the-

future.html.
 4

well, otherwise constructiveness and optimism can slip into denial and

whitewash, and the possibilities for learning from mistakes are diminished. At

present, at least in public discourse, the flaws are largely missing (Jonathan

Govias’s blog being almost the only exception), along with detailed discussion of

research that examines them – and this approach raises both ethical and

pragmatic questions.

For example, I have yet to see any public discussion of the glaring gender

imbalances at the top of El Sistema, such as the 80:20 male/female split of the

Simón Bolívar orchestra or the lack of female conductors or directors. Similarly,

the issue of sexual relations between teachers (usually male) and students

(usually female) has been glossed over. Luigi Mazzocchi confirmed to Larry

Scripp (2015) that this practice was normalized within El Sistema, as I had

discovered in my research. There has been almost total silence from the Sistema

sphere on this serious matter. The Sistema-inspired field has also failed to

grapple with the contradiction between its progressive claims and the fact that

its founder figure, José Antonio Abreu, is a staunch conservative and arch-

disciplinarian with past associations with some very dubious right-wing

politicians. It is claimed that his project forms citizens, yet it lacks any of the

democratic structures or processes that are central to citizenship (Baker

forthcoming), and it rests on the exploitation (low pay, minimal benefits or

employment rights) of much of its workforce. Are such topics really of no

interest or importance to progressive members of the Sistema-inspired field?

One might still ask, though, whether the Sistema-inspired sphere needs to

engage with these issues. Why shouldn’t it turn the page? After all, these are

Venezuelan problems: do non-Venezuelans really need to get into this

discussion?

In one sense, the answer is no. There is very little external pressure on the

Sistema sphere to broach such topics. The media, the music industry,

development banks, and governments are enamoured of El Sistema. It is not in

the interest of institutions and individuals who have already pegged their

colours to the Sistema mast, and even poured large sums of money into the

program, to encourage or publicize critical debate that might undermine their

own actions and beliefs. In the sense that critical thinking holds little appeal for

the most powerful players, academic research can be safely ignored, and this is

largely what is happening at present at an institutional level.

Yet Venezuela is not just far away, “over there” – it is also regularly “over here,”

in the form of visits by the top Sistema orchestras, in particular the Simón

Bolívar. Testimony from current and former members of this orchestra point to

significant question marks over its operation.5 Should the problems just be

ignored, and the orchestra welcomed like royalty wherever it goes? Are people

who have reached the top of this intensely competitive, authoritarian system,

ruled by palanca (string-pulling), jalando bolas (sucking up), and zero tolerance

for criticism, really ideal models to hold up to children in North America and

5 See http://tocarypensar.com/blog/inside-the-simn-bolvar-symphony-

orchestra; also Baker 2014, Scripp 2015.

 6

Europe? The willingness of the Sistema sphere to ignore the uncomfortable

truths about the orchestra and the program behind it sends an unequivocal

message, even if few are actually listening: forget “social action through music,”

this is just about music.

However, there are also ethical reasons why we should not simply forget about

Venezuela, whether or not it is “over here.” The pursuit of social justice demands

the clear identification of social injustice, wherever it may take place, for the sake

of those who have suffered it, and those who have not but are at risk of doing so.

Every day of silence that passes is a day wasted when it comes to improving

safeguards for El Sistema’s children. El Sistema shows no signs of acknowledging

or tackling the sorts of problems that are allegedly rife within the program, so

the international Sistema sphere could potentially play an important role here,

encouraging, or even putting pressure on it, to do so. Also, the issues that El

Sistema manifests are far from unique to it, and highlighting problems of

discrimination, oppression, and harassment in music education has the potential

to help future music students far away from, as well as within, Venezuela.

Unflinching examination of sexual abuses within El Sistema, for example, could

contribute to a nascent international movement to make specialised, intensive

music education safer for girls and young women,6 and to longer-standing efforts

6 See for example https://ianpace.wordpress.com and “Workshop on music

education and abuse of children and young people: historical and sociological
perspectives,” 15 September 2015, Institute of Musical Research, London.
 7

to understand and improve the problematic power dynamics that have

historically been found in many specialist music education institutions.7

The Sistema sphere has an ethical responsibility here, then, and it is one that it is

currently shying away from by refusing to acknowledge or call out injustices. At

the moment this sphere is promoting the Sistema brand and, through its public

silences, implicitly endorsing everything that goes with it. In this sense, the

international Sistema field is complicit with the social injustices perpetrated in

Venezuela, and turning the page without discussing those problems simply

perpetuates this guilt by association.

This field says that it is “inspired” by El Sistema, and it has happily taken the

Sistema name and philosophy and the publicity and funding that go with them. It

cannot then turn a blind eye to problems within the parent program. It cannot

ignore the fact that participants in El Sistema likened Abreu not to Mahatma

Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, as the newspapers would have it, but to Adolf Hitler.

In a recent email, a teacher at one of Venezuela’s best-known núcleos compared

the program to the Hitler Youth. Luigi Mazzocchi’s musician friends warned him

that he would never work in Venezuela again if he allowed Larry Scripp to

publish his real name. Mazzocchi talks about the “excommunication” of

musicians who did not obey Abreu, and at the RIME conference in 2015, one

researcher spoke about “Sistema refugees” overseas. These are quite

extraordinary revelations in the context of a music education program. We need

7 The bibliography on this topic is extensive: see Baker 2014 for further

information.
 8

to call a spade a spade here: the “social action through music” that El Sistema

promotes is a form of social and cultural fascism. This kind of inconvenient truth

is too big to be overlooked by the international Sistema sphere, which cannot

declare a dedication to social justice while operating under a banner that

signifies social oppression.

There are also good pragmatic reasons for the Sistema field not to turn the page

too quickly on Venezuela. The international Sistema sphere is like a city sitting

on fault line. At first, people didn’t realise there was a fault line because it wasn’t

visible on the surface, so they started to build. A few years later, though, a

geologist came along and said, “you’re sitting on a fault line.” Most of the

residents replied, “I can’t see any fault line, you’re imagining it,” and they carried

on building. Then a number of other geologists came along and said, “no, you’re

really sitting on a fault line.” This is where the Sistema field is today. Put simply,

it has two choices. It can continue to ignore the warnings and carry on as before;

or it can heed the warnings and rethink what and how it’s constructing, in order

to create something robust enough to withstand a significant tremor.

Of course, no one knows when the tremor will come or how big it will be, and

some may say it will never come. But if an urban planner took this approach, they

would be taking a big risk, and in the event of a sizeable tremor they would be

professionally discredited at the very least, and possibly criminally culpable.

The key question I want to raise is not then whether or how to tweak the

conservative Venezuelan model into a more progressive European or North

 9

American shape; it’s what you are going to do about the fact you’re sitting on a

fault line. Are you going to shoot the geologists? Or are you going to quake-proof

your city?

Learning from El Sistema’s mistakes

As the urban planning metaphor suggests, it would be a mistake to see critical

research as negative. It can lead to positive outcomes if used properly. Much can

be learnt from observing carefully what has gone wrong in Venezuela. To take a

different analogy, it is through the minute examination of plane crashes that air

travel has become so extraordinarily safe – not through endless statements

praising pilots. Critical research may then be seen as not just beneficial but

essential.

Thinking critically about El Sistema allows us to explore the weaknesses as well

as the strengths of top-down, authoritarian, personality-driven institutional

structures. Examining its practices and values opens up important debates about

pedagogy, curriculum, discipline, social inclusion, and democracy. By confronting

the many problems that arise in the Sistema context, we are pushed to think how

to avoid them and where to look for solutions. It encourages us to ask: what are

the best means of promoting solidarity, creativity, and social justice through

music education?

Too often, El Sistema’s principles rest on unexamined and problematic beliefs.

For example, many of the social claims that are made in relation to the orchestra
 10

are not supported by research and indeed are contradicted by it. It is regularly

claimed that the orchestra is a motor of teamwork, whereas it is in fact held up

by scholars (and many musicians) as an example of a dysfunctional team (e.g.

Faulkner 1973; Hackman 2002).8 The idea of the orchestra as a model for society

jars with modern ideas about complex adaptive systems, with which a jazz

ensemble, for example, provides a much better fit (Barrett 1998).

Critical research should therefore be important to everyone working in the

Sistema field, pushing practitioners to think more deeply about teamwork and

music education. If you don’t take critical thinking seriously, you risk doing more

harm than good. Critical thinking opens up the realisation that the conventional

symphony orchestra is not “a model for an ideal global society,” as Dudamel

claims (Lee 2012), but may actually be “the most anti-social mode of cultural

expression.”9 It is only from here, and not from Dudamel’s acritical complacency,

that efforts to transform the orchestra into “a vehicle for great potential social

change” may begin.10

It is also essential to face up to El Sistema’s problematic features in order to

avoid reproducing them internationally. For example, it was striking that the

former Sistema Fellow who added some very mild criticisms of El Sistema as the

coda to Scripp’s (2015) report did so anonymously. By denying the fear of

speaking openly that is so prevalent in the Venezuelan program, Sistema

8 See also http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/09/what-im-

really-thinking-orchestral-musician.
9 http://jonathangovias.com/2015/04/05/this-is-where-we-flew/.
10 Ibid.
 11

advocates have reproduced it in North America. An aversion to critical debate

and a willingness to suppress rather than engage with challenging ideas has

become somewhat generalized in the Sistema world, and the appearance of

censorship and self-censorship within the North American Sistema field should

serve as a clear warning signal that this sphere is falling into the same traps as its

Venezuelan parent and that steps urgently need to be taken.11

There are many other constructive dynamics that may arise from critical

scrutiny of El Sistema. For example, there are surely important lessons to learn

from the fact that many serious, thoughtful, and experienced observers have

misunderstood El Sistema and missed a variety of social injustices that it

encompasses. This tells us that social justice in music education is hard even to

identify, let alone produce, and is a complex topic. Even something as simple as

providing poor children with music lessons may be an act of social justice from

one perspective but an act of social injustice from another, if it rests on the

assumption that the children lack culture and are poor as a result, or that

economic justice is an impossible goal and music serves as a form of

compensation (see Bates 2016; Baker 2016). Critical research obliges us to

examine how we look, what we easily miss, and how we might see more acutely;

how we form our opinions on music education, and how our prior beliefs may be

reinforced by institutional propaganda and spectacular display. It appears all too

easy to assume that

11 http://tocarypensar.com/blog/censorship-and-selfcensorship-in-the-sistema-

sphere.
 12

children making music + statements of good intentions = social action through

music

Research suggests that complacency is a danger here: an exaggerated belief in

the power of music making of any kind to have transformational effects on young

people, and the accompanying failure to consider that music education also

potentially brings costs and even harm (Bowman 2009; Gould 2009; Bradley

2015; Matthews 2015). These are all important matters for music educators to

ponder, and the more they are shared and discussed, the greater the chance of

avoiding such mistakes in Sistema-inspired programs and achieving positive

outcomes. What would be deeply negative would be for a field driven by desires

for inclusion or justice to ignore important contemporary debates about

inclusion or justice and thereby repeat mistakes of the past.

What is the future of academic research on El Sistema?

There appear to be two broad strands of research on El Sistema at present. One

is primarily qualitative and considers broad questions – social, political,

economic, cultural – though also working through close observation of practices

and discourses. The other is more quantitative and leans towards a focus on

academic and psychosocial outcomes (e.g. Osborne et al. 2015). Both have a

valuable role to play, and the most ambitious research includes both approaches,

but there are two concerns that I would like to highlight here. One is that the

Sistema advocacy movement and its institutional partners tend to ignore the
 13

former strand and only discuss the latter. The other is that these two strands of

research risk talking past (rather than to) each other.

It is important to note that the primary claims of the Venezuelan Sistema are of

the broader kind: they are made largely on ethical, spiritual, and macro-social

planes, and concern values and character. They also focus specifically on the

power of music to defeat poverty. El Sistema’s mission is officially “the

pedagogical, occupational, and ethical salvation of children and young people, via

the instruction and collective practice of music, [and] dedicated to the training,

protection, and inclusion of the most vulnerable groups in the country.”12

According to its Vision, the program focuses on the “comprehensive

development of human beings,” and cultivates “transcendental values that

influence the transformation of children, youths, and the family environment,”

offering “an opportunity for personal development on intellectual, spiritual,

social, and professional levels, rescuing children and young people from an

empty, disorientated, and deviant youth.”13 Thus academic studies need also to

engage on this level (though not only on this level) and test these claims, which

form the basis for the program’s global fame, and indeed this is precisely where

qualitative research has been focused and the principal challenges are located. It

is certainly valuable and interesting to know whether El Sistema has positive

effects in other areas, but this is not the terrain staked out by El Sistema and

disputed by its critics. The strongest academic critiques of the program are not

about whether learning music boosts individuals’ cognitive ability or academic

12 http://fundamusical.org.ve/category/el-sistema/mision-y-

vision/#.Vw7eVavW1ps.
13 Ibid.
 14

performance, but about issues of politics and ethics – class, neoliberalism,

neocolonialism – and whether music education should be seen in salvationist

terms, providing, as Abreu claims, a spiritual richness that overcomes material

poverty.

Comprehensive assessment of El Sistema cannot, then, be reduced to

measurement of student attainment or even enthusiasm, but must also take into

account broader structural and political issues. To take a different but related

example, the debate over private schooling does not pivot around whether

private schools benefit or satisfy those who attend them. Or consider the Third

Wave, an experiment carried out at a California high school in 1967 by a history

teacher named Ron Jones (2008). The experiment produced immediate

improvements in discipline, motivation, and academic achievement. Why then

was it not rolled out more widely? Because it was an experiment in fascism.

Researching the Third Wave solely through quantitative methods would lead to

advocacy for fascist-style education. Educational outcomes cannot therefore be

considered in isolation from social, political, and ethical questions.

For example, can the creation and maintenance of such expensive programs be

justified in contexts in which funding for other forms of music education and for

social services is being cut, sometimes dramatically? Are government-funded

Sistema programs such as those in the UK serving as an attractive smokescreen

or “veil of culture” (Logan 2016) to distract attention from the state’s steady

withdrawal from social and educational provision under the pretext of austerity?

Is El Sistema, with its unproven and frankly improbable claims of miraculous

 15

effects on poverty (Fink 2016), actually diverting resources away from more

reliable anti-poverty measures and obscuring rather than resolving structural

social problems with highly selective but media-friendly amelioration projects?

A key question is not therefore whether music education is good for children

(something that no one disputes), but whether Sistema music education – which

is based on distinctly old-fashioned ideas and methods of classical music training

– is the best model for children and for wider society, and what associated costs

it brings at micro- and macro-social levels. At a micro level, it is essential to

consider how the specific features of El Sistema – as opposed to other forms of

musical learning – may impact on outcomes. For example, the cognitive benefits

of learning music are widely accepted, and yet, as Levine and Levine (1996)

demonstrate, lack of control may lead orchestral musicians to experience high

levels of stress, which may lead to a reduction in cognitive skills. The orchestral

setting may therefore cancel out some of the benefits of music learning, making it

an inefficient means of pursuing cognitive goals.

A recent article about music and empathy (Rabinowitch 2012) shows that music

learning can boost empathy, but crucially, not just any music learning: rather, a

specially designed program of musical group interaction, consisting of musical

games and tasks.14 In other words, the kinds of experiences that come out of

musical learning are likely to be related to the kinds of values that go into it. El

Sistema does not talk about empathy – it talks about discipline, obedience, and

good behaviour. Here we can see one of the risks, then, of transposing El Sistema

14 This article was highlighted by Jonathan Govias.
 16

from Venezuela to other contexts: it is a model designed, above all, to inculcate

specific social values broadly related to conformity, and if other social values are

more important in the new context – such as empathy, or creativity, or autonomy

– then it may be the wrong model. It is worth noting that this empathy

experiment “emphasise[d] repeatedly that there was no goal to accomplish in the

interactions except for playing together and enjoying the interaction.” El Sistema,

in contrast, is extraordinarily goal-oriented, indeed that is one of its unique

selling points. In Venezuela, it is always all about the concert. So if empathy or

creativity is a key desired outcome, why choose El Sistema and not another form

of music education?15

Another important step for researchers in this area is greater critical

engagement with other research as well as with Sistema programs. A topic that

particularly requires further attention is evaluations by consultancies, which are

a distinct genre from academic research. As Logan (2015b) argues, official

evaluations of Sistema programs raise as many questions as they answer.16 An

important task that lies ahead is to delve more deeply into the gap between

academic research and consultancy evaluations, evident, for example, in a

comparison between studies by Allan et al. (2010), Borchert (2012), Rimmer,

Street, and Phillips (2014), Logan (2015a; 2016), and Bull (2016), which portray

a distinctly mixed picture of UK Sistema-inspired programs, and laudatory

official reports such as “Evaluation of Big Noise” (2011). Why have all of the

15 See for example Laurence 2008.
16 See also Baker 2014, Chapter 11.
 17

academic studies pointed to significant caveats, yet none of the official

evaluations have done the same?

To take a more recent example, December 2015 saw the publication of an

evaluation of Sistema Aotearoa that was prepared for the Ministry for Culture

and Heritage and Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra by a research evaluation

consultancy (McKegg et al. 2015). This report was warmly received by those

involved and the wider international Sistema sphere, but one wonders how

many people looked carefully at the methodology section.

The report states that “an adapted success case approach (Brinkerhoff, 2003),

using appreciative inquiry (Preskill & Catsambas, 2006), was used” (ibid., 9).

In other words, only the most successful students were included the study –

those who were identified by program leaders and teachers as being particularly

active or committed, or showing the greatest musical or social improvement –

and the research focused on their most positive experiences.

This is a borderline research method. It is not mentioned in the most important

text on methodologies in this area, Robert K. Yin’s (2009) Case Study Research. It

is discussed briefly by Stufflebeam and Coryn (2014), who note that it has

certain strengths, such as identifying what works well, reassuring funders, and

boosting morale, and it is also quick and cheap. However, it has obvious

weaknesses: it is narrow rather than comprehensive, and short-term in outlook.

“This narrowness is considered a weakness only if a study employing the Success

Case Method is misrepresented as a comprehensive assessment of a program’s

 18

merit and worth” (ibid., 142-3) – something that was all but inevitable as the

report hit the Sistema advocacy sphere, and the methodological nuance was

ironed out in sweeping declarations about the program’s success.

There are other, more commonplace issues that the report itself flags up, such as

a lack of baseline data, which meant that “it is possible that the difference we

have identified is because the higher achieving students are more likely to stay

engaged with the programme” (a conclusion that would in fact chime with

Rimmer, Street, and Phillips’s (2014) study of In Harmony Sistema England). The

study relies on “overall teacher judgment,” which it acknowledges is partly

subjective, and it does not account for students who dropped out of the program

(a common lacuna in evaluations of Sistema programs). There are various

reasons, then, for a degree of caution. But the key issue is that the report, while

possibly a useful tool for various stakeholders, is not a comprehensive evaluation

of the program.

The willingness of Sistema advocates to celebrate a report that focuses only on

the positives raises an interesting question with regard to the reception of my

book, since a number of figures in that field dismissed my study, even claiming

that it did not constitute research at all, on the basis that it was “unbalanced” and

that rigorous research had to be balanced. Yet as the authors of the Sistema

Aotearoa report note:

It has been well documented (Brinkerhoff, 2003) that it is possible to

learn a considerable amount about a programme by focusing on either

 19

cases of success or failure – ie, the more extreme cases. These more

extreme cases throw up unique findings and lessons that can be applied

to more typical aspects of a programme or service.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If a report based on cases of

success is permissible, then so is one based on failures. The only “rule” is that the

methodology should be openly stated and the resulting picture not claimed to be

comprehensive; and as I wrote on p.20:

This book is not, therefore, a comprehensive or conclusive narrative but

rather a critical, informed analysis of some of El Sistema’s key actors and

core claims, pointing to existing questions and debates around Abreu and

his program.

Can the parallel worlds draw closer?

The justification for further research is clear, but just as important is greater

engagement with the research that already exists. There is already more than

enough published research to start some serious debates, yet those debates are

generally muted or non-existent, at least in the public realm. This scenario raises

some difficult questions about the space for critical research in the Sistema

sphere and the value of conducting it.

El Sistema is tied to major commercial and institutional interests. It provides an

essential building block for the brands of Dudamel, the SBSO, the LA
 20

Philharmonic, the Southbank Centre, and so on. So any discussion about the pros

and cons of the education program is always at risk of being overshadowed by

promotion, PR, and commercial concerns. Large institutions and lobbies that

have committed themselves to the Sistema model appear more interested in

arguments to justify a position they have already taken than in research per se.

Furthermore, the media may divert or smother the conversation at any point.

The unusual degree of media interest (for a music education story) has brought

loud public voices into the debate, yet ones that frequently show a limited grasp

of the topic. Fundamental misunderstandings, whether accidental or deliberate,

have been enshrined as truths, and many significant findings have been simply

ignored. Journalists who have eulogised El Sistema in the past are rarely open to

findings that undermine their publicly stated opinion.

This is not an encouraging panorama for a critical scholar. Working as a

researcher in the middle of such forces is like being a flea on the hide of an

elephant. Indeed, the question arises of whether it is even possible to have

meaningful, serious debate, informed by research, in such a context, in which

there is already a strongly rooted, longstanding narrative that is accepted by

institutions and passionately believed in by many people. Critical research is

always vulnerable to the “miracle story” trump card, one that is more digestible

and memorable than research and that programs, brands, and audiences are all

happy to see played. Is there any chance for dissenting research to be recognised

and have an impact in this context, outside of the academic realm, or is such a

hope futile?

 21

The problem is not just the constricted space for critical scholarship, though, but

also the gulf between such scholarship and the Sistema industry and its boosters.

This chasm is illustrated by the responses to my book. The reviews on Amazon

can be taken as indicative: every single one of them is either five stars (the

maximum) or one star (the minimum). Nothing in between. This dramatic

bifurcation has been reproduced in reviews in print and on social media, which

have seen a high-profile journalists and Sistema advocates drawing radically

opposing conclusions to internationally renowned scholars. My work has been

described as “dangerously flawed” by journalist Mark Swed, and “the music book

of our times” by music education expert Randall Everett Allsup. Nicholas Kenyon,

the director of the Barbican, called it “deeply unconvincing”; Luigi Mazzocchi, a

former Sistema star, said it was “dead on.” (As an aside, it’s fascinating to read

that the experiences of Venezuelan musicians seem “deeply unconvincing” to

someone who knows little about Venezuela. Sometimes fiction is easier to

believe than the truth.) There are many more such examples, and they point to

much more than run-of-the-mill differences of opinion; there is a chasm here

between deeply held views about music, education, and society – between two

distant parallel worlds.

What hope is there of bridging this divide? Can research and writing have any

impact on this picture? Indeed, who will read this article that I am writing right

now? Is there any chance that it will even be noticed, let alone considered, on

that distant shore?

 22

To put it another way, what would it take for Swed, Kenyon, and the Sistema

advocacy lobby to change an opinion that they have stated so strongly and so

publicly? After all, there is evidence that “[w]hen people are misinformed, giving

them facts to correct those errors only makes them cling to their beliefs more

tenaciously.”17 The climate change debate is a prime example, though so too is

the unwavering support for Donald Trump. As Thomas L. Friedman noted

recently, most voters in the US decide on the basis of gut feelings, not details or

facts.18 The Sistema sphere seems to have elements in common, and for this

reason I cannot see a clear reason for continuing to work on El Sistema. There

has been no significant challenge to my book from inside academia, so there is

little need to accumulate extra evidence or make my case further within this

sphere; and the resistance from outside academia is unlikely to change whatever

facts or details or arguments I provide.

Nevertheless, I still hold out hope that the parallel worlds may draw closer.

When I have had the opportunity to interact with people at the middle and lower

levels of the Sistema-inspired field – music teachers, administrators, Sistema

Fellows – I’ve found friendly and open-minded people, up for discussion and

debate, and I’ve felt like there was a real exchange of opinions and experiences.

I’m not talking about a big sample, and the fact that most such meetings have

taken place at academic conferences suggests that it may not be representative;

17 http://www.alternet.org/media/most-depressing-discovery-about-brain-

ever. For a more academic perspective, see

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295478583_Making_The_Truth_Stic
k_and_The_Myths_Fade_Lessons_from_Cognitive_Psychology.
18 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/09/opinion/only-trump-can-trump-

trump.html.
 23

but it has led me to believe that, behind the high-profile, take-no-prisoners

battles in newspapers and magazines, there is a productive dialogue to be had

between Sistema and critical scholarship, though it is currently hampered by a

few blinkered figures of authority. Attending the Reframing El Sistema

conference reaffirmed this belief, as I found myself drawn into stimulating

conversations with a number of Sistema teachers, researchers, and program

leaders.

I also take hope from the fact that the director of a Sistema-inspired project – one

of the strongest critics of my book, when it was published a year ago – has

subsequently engaged with me and my research in an open-minded way, and we

have developed a friendly and productive relationship. We do not think alike, but

the differences have become constructive rather than destructive. This shift, I

should underline, did not result from me changing my views or sugar-coating my

message. It resulted from my interlocutor sitting down to read and think about

my book properly. This experience underlines my view that scholars do not need

to sweet-talk practitioners in order for a dialogue to take place, any more than

practitioners need to go soliciting to the academic world. And it leads me to

conclude that the parallel worlds of Sistema and critical scholarship not only

could but also should intersect. This would be a much more productive and

ethically sound move for the international Sistema field than either continuing

its blind eulogy of Venezuela or turning the page.

 24

Geoff Baker is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London and

Director of the Institute of Musical Research. His books include Imposing
Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Duke, 2008), which won the
American Musicological Society's Robert Stevenson Award; Buena Vista in the
Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana (Duke, 2011); and El Sistema:
Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth (OUP, 2014). He was co-investigator on the
AHRC Beyond Text project “Growing Into Music,” for which he made a series of
films about childhood music learning in Cuba and Venezuela, and he was a
research associate on the ERC project “Music, Digitisation, Mediation: Towards
Interdisciplinary Music Studies.”

Further information:

http://tocarypensar.com (El Sistema blog)
http://geoffbakermusic.wordpress.com (general website)

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