Geoffrey Baker explores the career of its founder, José Antonio Abreu,
and the ideology and organizational dynamics of his institution. Drawing
on a year of fieldwork in Venezuela and interviews with Venezuelan
musicians and cultural figures, Baker examines El Sistema's program of
"social action through music," reassessing widespread beliefs about the
system as a force for positive social change. Abreu, a Nobel Peace Prize
nominee, emerges as a complex and controversial figure, whose project
is shaped by his religious education, economics training, and political
apprenticeship. Claims for the symphony orchestra as a progressive
pedagogical tool and motor of social justice are questioned, and
assertions that the program prioritizes social over musical goals and
promotes civic values such as democracy, meritocracy, and teamwork are
also challenged.
Placing El Sistema in historical and comparative perspective, Baker
reveals that it is far from the revolutionary social program of
contemporary imagination, representing less the future of classical
music than a step backwards into its past.
Geoff Baker is a Reader in the Music
Department at Royal Holloway, University of
London. He specialises in music in Latin America, and he has published
extensively on colonial Peru. His book Imposing Harmony: Music and
Society in Colonial Cuzco (Duke University Press, 2008) won the American
Musicological Society's Robert Stevenson Award in 2010, and a Spanish
translation is due to be published in Peru. He co-edited Music and Urban
Society in Colonial Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
with Tess Knighton, and he has contributed essays to several journals
and collected volumes.
Recently, he has been focusing on childhood musical learning and
music education in Cuba and Venezuela. He was co-investigator on the
three-year project "Growing into music," funded through the AHRC's
Beyond Text scheme, and made a series of documentaries and short films
about young musicians in Cuba and Venezuela. This project culminated in
festivals in Bamako (Mali) and Havana in early 2012. He also held a
British Academy Research Development Award in 2010-11 and undertook a
year of fieldwork in Venezuela on the country's famous orchestral music
education program, El Sistema. He is in the later stages of writing a
book on the topic.
www.city.ac.uk/arts-social-sciences/music