Sistema is dead – a post mortem

As author of what has been labeled “the original blog” on Sistema, I reluctantly accept the responsibility of writing its obituary. Where to begin…

Sistema was born in the 1970s as a conventional elitist youth orchestra, founded by a career civil servant with conducting ambitions…

Or:

Sistema was born in the late 1990s in Venezuela as a strategy of dubious ethics to elicit government funds earmarked for social purposes for what was really an initiative of unconcealed cultural colonization entirely contrary to the historic roots and modern ambitions of the nation...

Or perhaps:

Sistema was born in 2007 when the top tier of a joint human-artistic pyramid scheme was publicly deployed in mass media broadcast for the first time, promising musical riches and international fame to a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of participants standing on the shoulders of hundreds of thousands…

If the doubt over the actual inception of el Sistema, as it was conceptually communicated to the public, isn’t telling enough, the most damning measure of its current irrelevance is the indeterminacy over the date and time of death. Its passing was not noticed, nor was it mourned, a level of ignominy a step beyond reading an eulogy for a long-retired actor and realizing with some surprise that until recently, the subject was still alive at all. That was the sum of my experience at the annual American String Teachers Association conference in March when it became manifestly clear that a full generation of string educators had since entered the workforce with absolutely no knowledge of the phrase “El Sistema” or any of its historical, praxial, or philosophical implications. (No, I did not go around introducing myself as a “Sistema person”, lest I be deemed a practitioner of some gnostic, arcane or esoteric tradition. Nor am I a Sistema person in any sense of the word anymore.) Sistema is well and truly dead, joining the Mozart Effect as a footnote in a history of music education fads.

An obituary is not a post-mortem, you would be correct to mention. The point of the autopsy is primarily to determine cause of death, not biographize or eulogize the deceased. The exercise of the latter has served only to establish the impossibility of properly identifying the remains and/or ascertaining time of passing. In short, we don’t really know what died or when, a sorry state for something that at one point was internationally famous.

But die it did, the victim of an international coalition with the best intentions, and the poorest – or most selfish – or most myopic – decision making imaginable.

Venezuela, specifically the Fundamusical Simon Bolivar bears much of the responsibility. Far from the Emperor having no clothes, it eventually and inevitably emerged that the clothes had no emperor. The concept of social action through music was ultimately expressed rhetorically alone, with program leadership drastically shifting the goalposts of their once-lofty social objectives based on negative IADB reports; research that exposed a culture of anti-social (read: abusive) instructional modes; and domestic government demands for more accountability. Eventually only two of many most noble goals (remember “raising millions our of poverty”?) remained: improving access and producing conductors. The former is no example to follow in the more northern climes where music education is delivered over large networks by trained practitioners. And as for producing conductors, Venezuela’s domestic record is that of over-promoted and undereducated (if not functionally illiterate) dictators of the baton. Internationally, there are (count them) four Sistema graduates of any consequence: Dudamel, Payare, Vasquez, and Matheuz. Four out of a claimed enrollment exceeding 300,000 is 0.00133%. No further discussion is necessary.

Sistema might have survived outside of Venezuela, had its practitioners established a meaningful, unique identity and practice for it. But unlike its formal in-school counterpart, (but exactly like its Venezuelan inspiration) it over-promised and under-delivered, unsurprisingly since its entire premise was (exactly like its Venezuelan inspiration) to produce more socially-elevated results with noteably underqualified practitioners. Its promotional modus operandi was to denigrate existing networks by implying the instruction there was joyless, bereft of passion, thus immediately alienating the one group that could have been their strongest, most fervent allies. This process of deliberate estrangement continues through the Teaching Artist movement, an initiative with the barely concealed agenda to create a parallel and far less comprehensive form of instructional certification for underemployed performers. As problematic as the music educator certification process is today in the US (committing the obvious sin of believing a university can teach a student everything they need to know about being an educator within 128 credits), it represents the best efforts of a wide cross-section of experts, not the self-serving interests of a small group of consultants.

New England Conservatory does not escape unscathed in this. The idea to re-orient a music industry around service starting with the Abreu Fellows program was visionary (Credit to the then-president Tony Woodcock). The implementation of the Fellows program was less elevated. It degenerated, inevitably, into squabbles over power and control. The dean primarily responsible was released barely a year in, and three different administrators ran the program in the space of five years – forget program evolution, program continuity wasn’t even a possibility. And in privileging the most narrow of objectives (starting programs), the Fellows program guaranteed its failure to achieve it. The program was essentially forced to rename as the Sistema Fellows when acrimonious fighting between factions at (or formerly at) NEC caused Jose Antonio Abreu to decline to meet with the second group of Fellows entirely.

Venezuela could have changed its practice, rather than its PR. The international community could have embraced any number of progressive, research validated teaching models instead of claiming innovation in regressive instruction. NEC can be somewhat absolved for having attempted something in unexplored territory, deficiencies of personnel notwithstanding, but the implementation of the vision was so controlled at the outset, growth was suppressed, not guided.

Having established cause(s) of death, we return to the obituary and the traditional practice of ennumerating those offspring that managed to survive the deceased. In this case, the family tree has become deliberately obscured. Organizations like AMP in Atlanta, Orkidstra in Ottawa, Kim Noltemy Young Musicians Program in Dallas – all may have been inspired by El Sistema in Venezuela, but none use the name. Sistema England is essentially defunct, having been merged with a group called Nucleo, a word sufficiently removed from the public impression of Sistema to make the popular connection tenuous at best. A vestige of the NEC program lives on in the hubristically-named “Global Leaders Program”, which in conjunction with the “Teaching Artists” movement reflects the sector’s obsession with inflated titles more than the delivery of best-practices in music education. (This is not an original observation: Sistema seems to have served its proponents more than its constituents.) Sistema also leaves a number of estranged sons and daughters, yours truly included, people who lament only its unfulfilled potential, not its passing.