‘Producing musicians like sausages’: new perspectives on the history and historiography of Venezuela's El Sistema

ABSTRACT

A powerful and eulogistic narrative has evolved around the Venezuelan National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras, better known as El Sistema. Recently, however, critical perspectives have begun to emerge from the academic sphere. Nevertheless, researchers have faced an acute shortage of documentary resources relating to the programme's history. The reappearance of a collection of documents from 1996 to 97 thus represents an important development. The sources, which include four external evaluations, relate to El Sistema's efforts to secure funding from the Inter-American Development Bank. In this article, these documents are examined in chronological order and then analysed in comparative perspective. They shed light on both the history of El Sistema and polarised present-day debates about this famous organisation, corroborating recent academic studies and further questioning the dominant institutional and advocacy narrative about a socially transformative programme aimed primarily at the poor.

KEYWORDS:

• El Sistema
• Inter-American Development Bank
• Venezuela
• evaluation
• history
• documents

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey Baker is a Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Imposing Harmony: Music and Society in Colonial Cuzco (Duke, 2008); 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 (http://growingintomusic.co.uk). He guest-edited a special issue of Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education (15:1, 2016) on El Sistema. Further information: http://geoffbakermusic.wordpress.com.

Ana Lucía Frega is a researcher at the Instituto Investigación, Universidad UADE, Buenos Aires. She is the author of more than 60 books in Spanish and English. She has chapters in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and French in a variety of publications, with a focus on the history of music education and creativity in music education. She is an Honorary Life Member of ISME, an Honorary Member of the Consejo Argentino de la Música, and an Honorary Member of the Asociación de Docentes de Música de la República Argentina.

Notes

1 A longer version of this article was published in Spanish in Epistemus: Revista de Estudios en Música, Cognición y Cultura 4 (2), 2016.

2 Since Frega's study was not a personal research project but rather a commissioned report, she did not publish on this topic at the time. It was only after witnessing the considerable interest in El Sistema at ISME 2014 in Porto Alegre, where she met and began corresponding with the author, that the idea of publishing some of these findings first arose.

3 Further details of the debate can be found at https://geoffbakermusic.wordpress.com/el-sistema-the-system/el-sistema-blog/.

4 This reference is to Garmendia's second report.

5 The final sentence of El Sistema's official Vision statement (http://fundamusical.org.ve/category/el-sistema/mision-y-vision/) can be found verbatim on this page of Hernández and Urreiztieta's report.

6 The definition of ‘rescue’ within the Sistema context is not clear or consistent. It sometimes has a moral flavour, as above (rescuing from a ‘deviant youth’), while at others more of a socio-economic character (the programme's mission statement refers to the ‘rescue of the most vulnerable groups in the country’). In this context, the key point is that the evaluators’ claims do not match their interviewees’ stated personal experiences.

7 See Baker (2014) and Fink (2016) on El Sistema and harmony.

8 Another document in Frega's archive (‘Observaciones’ n.d.), which is anonymous but probably written by an employee of the IDB, criticises Garmendia's reports for failing to analyse El Sistema's educational method or identify its shortcomings; to offer a solid proposal for institutional strengthening; to formulate proposals for monitoring and evaluating the programme; or to identify the risks of the IDB's operation. It concludes that the consultant's focus on the musical rather than social aspects of El Sistema reduced the chances of IDB funding. Garmendia's reports were thus recognised as problematic at the time.

9 Estrada sought out interviewees from a number of different cities, in order to ensure that her sample was geographically diverse. However, she notes that a limitation on her research was the difficulty she found in identifying, locating, and interviewing informants. Seven of the former Sistema musicians that she approached declined to be interviewed and three more did not respond (possibly a telling detail, considering the size of her sample). The current Sistema musicians were hard to pin down and on three occasions did not show up for the interview. The sample is thus to a degree self-selecting, though there is no reason to suppose that this makes it unrepresentative.

10 All quotations from Estrada's interviewees are taken from the transcriptions in the appendix to her report. The pagination of the appendix begins again at 1.

11 This section appears in Appendix II of Frega’s (1997) report, which does not have page numbers. It is a copy of a testimony collected by Estrada (the original is missing).

12 This section appears in Appendix II of Frega’s (1997) report.

13 This section appears in Appendix II of Frega’s (1997) report.

14 Relevant academic studies of orchestras include Faulkner (1973), Levine and Levine (1996), and Cottrell (2004). More anecdotally, see also http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/09/what-im-really-thinking-orchestral-musician.

15 Frega had a long meeting with Estrada and incorporated ten of Estrada's interviews as Appendix 2. She confirmed that the two consultants shared similar visions of El Sistema.

16 On the shift in El Sistema's discourse from a musical to a social focus, see Baker (2014) and https://geoffbakermusic.wordpress.com/el-sistema-older-posts/professionalization-or-rescuing-the-poor-the-origins-of-el-sistema-in-abreus-own-words/.

17 This division between vision and practice has precedents in music education: see for example Gramit (2002).

18 Additionally, Frega backed up Estrada's research, while Larry Scripp (2015) verified Baker's conclusions via extensive interviews with the former Sistema violinist Luigi Mazzocchi.

19 Although there have been periodic attempts to ground this rhetoric in evidence, they are all flawed and have been deemed unsatisfactory by the IDB: see Baker (2014).

20 It is impossible to determine with any certainty why the IDB decided to fund El Sistema in spite of the 1997 reports. However, a clue may be found in the fact that at no point does Estrada argue for or against funding the programme. Furthermore, the focal point of her conclusions is a set of proposals about rethinking, revising, modifying, developing, and so on. Frega's report, too, centres on suggestions for improving the programme. The nature of these evaluations implies that the decision to fund El Sistema had already been taken. When the document ‘Observaciones’ (n.d.), discussed above, is also taken into account, it appears that the purpose of commissioning the 1997 reports was to rectify the lack of critical perspectives and consequent proposals in their predecessors, not to adjudicate a decision that hung in the balance. It is also possible that these reports were more a bureaucratic requirement than a genuine consultative exercise (a view supported by the IDB's apparent indifference to the realisation of the proposals: it provided El Sistema with a much larger loan in 2007 despite the fact that many of the recommendations in the evaluations had not been put into practice and key goals of the first loan had not been achieved). Nevertheless, such explanations remain speculative in the absence of further evidence.

21 In 2011, fourteen years after Frega's proposals, El Sistema finally created the Venezuelan traditional music programme Alma Llanera. Nevertheless, it took the form of a separate programme, rather than part of the training offered to all Sistema students.

22 ‘Program to Support the Centro de Acción Social PorLa Música, Phase II.’ 2007. VE-L1017. Inter-American Development Bank. https://elsistemausa.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/iadbevaluation.pdf.

23 This critical reassessment is already well under way in the academic sphere: see for example Allan et al. 2010; Borchert 2012; Rimmer, Street, and Phillips 2014; Logan 2015, 2016; Bull 2016; Dobson 2016; Fink 2016; Rosabal-Coto 2016. However, such studies have been largely ignored by the fields of practice and policy.

24 See Baker, Bull, and Taylor (forthcoming) for a critical analysis of this report.

25 This picture supports Baker’s (2014, 93–95) earlier contention, based on qualitative research, that the majority of children could be described as middle- or lower-middle-class rather than deeply deprived or Venezuela's poorest.

26 Baker, Bull, and Taylor (forthcoming) argue that even the minimal positive findings probably exaggerate the effects of the programme during the experiment, because of the statistical methods used.

27 https://www.isme.org/our-work/special-interest-groups/el-sistema.