There’s a certain charming simplicity and predictability to the remnants of the Sistema movement, vestigial though they may be. Publish a deliberately hyperbolic polemic on the demise of the word, and you can set your watch to THE RESPONSE.
Granted, there has been some evolution. In the past, THE RESPONSE would have been coordinated angry denunciations and ad hominem attacks. There still were plenty of those, contained largely within the comments section of the click-bait site of music’s undisputed foremost tabloid journalist/troll, a man for whom fact-checking is as alien as both subtlety and proof-reading. (I bear no responsibility for his amplification of my post, and I simultaneously exonerate both the butcher and the candlestick maker.) No, THE RESPONSE from the sector was more sophisticated, although ultimately as ill-considered. My social media feed was inundated with postings from various socio-musical initiatives asserting their continued existence through images of children in massed orchestras under the thumb of a single conductor, or videos of performances. It turns out that still photos, depressing though they were, constituted a better choice strategically. For a sector that made “passion over precision” its watchword, the videos generally had the unintended if ultimately damning effect of revealing a complete absence of either quality in the playing. A rendition of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture comes to mind as particularly infamous in this regard, more so in that it appeared faculty were joining the students in the orchestra for such a tepid offering at this long-established and well-funded program.
And there were those in this sector of my personal acquaintance who wrote me very nice letters, most simply offering the briefest cordial greetings, as their own reassertion of their existence. And finally there were the “whatabouters,” who also wrote (all very cordially as well) to highlight programs they deemed successful.
To all these assertions, in their various forms, I would respond with the same question: What about your work or your program or the program you cite is genuinely taken from and demonstrably original to Venezuela? El Sistema in that country was never a practice, it was simply a rhetorical ideal, verbal whitewashing for what was often the musical equivalent of a salt mine. Nor was the ideal in any way original, just another manifestation of a concept that can be traced backwards across many continents on a continuum passing through the Depression-era WPA, Louis Armstrong, and Antonio Vivaldi, all the way back to the Old Testament and likely even to the Divje Babe flute carved some 50,000 years ago by a Neanderthal. What was original to Venezuela was scale: something that no other program has come close to emulating – and may not even be desirable, given the way it was achieved.
Which brings me to my next questions. If your programs, or the programs you cite, are intended to deliver a social benefit, what is the specific mechanism of that action? What precisely is delivered through which pedagogy to deliver what social benefit? I have yet to receive a response that cannot otherwise be summarized as “well, we throw a lot of music at them, so I guess they become better people.” Within even the much-maligned genre of classical orchestral music, there exist research-validated pedagogies and practices for developing collaborative, collective and creative sensibilities. These practices remain deeply unpopular or marginalized for a single reason: the structures of power and control in music run deep, and most practitioners aren’t just steeped within these structures, they actively aspire to rise within them. Almost all the ensemble teaching I have ever witnessed reinforces the authority of a single central figure for outcomes. How is that “social”?
And what about Roberto Zambrano, they ask, in an effort to make it personal. My extensive experience in Venezuela only reinforced how exceptional his work was there – and how exceptional it continues to be in Dallas where the progress made by students is manifest. Zambrano was never Sistema, he was always Zambrano. I can’t speak quantitatively to the social outcomes of his program (I can and do speak anecdotally), but in the very least his students show tremendous, consistent progress. If nothing else, he’s teaching music. And some of the programs do impart quality music instruction under good leadership. Some may have been inspired by Sistema, but they’re not Sistema in any real sense, so their claim of association to a failed system in a failed state is likely only emotional, not even philosophical, and certainly not praxial.
Forcing 80 children into an orchestra under a conductor’s baton does not make them collaborate. Making them play music does not make them creative. Belief in the power of music to effect social change is eminently reasonable; belief that music instruction of any quality and any pedagogy automatically confers benefits upon the student is willful ignorance. And as far as Sistema goes, my counsel is to retire the word, and divest the extremely problematic baggage it carries.
Jonathan Andrew Govias 