The history of music education as a whole is essentially one of excellent outcomes for a chosen few being achieved through manifestly anti-social if not unethical means.
To describe Sistema’s fall as inevitable is an abdication of responsibility: the failure of the movement must be viewed as an opportunity (perhaps the best in history) we were simply incapable of leveraging through our own pedagogical paralysis.
Being nice, being friendly, being polite is so alien to group music making that apparently it looks like praxial innovation.
There’s a study circulating which purports to show that El Sistema-style/inspired music interventions at three separate US-based programs had no discernable impact.
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.
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 … Continue reading Sistema is dead – a post mortem
There’s much less now to say about Sistema except perhaps “requiescat in pace.”
I’m tired of being stomped like a foot-action player piano and then being told I’m empowered and improvising.
Whither (wither?) the Sistema Special Interest Group?
Didn't make it to Glasgow? Here's some of the stuff you might have missed.
Jonathan Andrew Govias 