A miracle. An inspiration. The saviour of classical music. These are the breathless terms used to describe El Sistema, the Venezuelan programme of musical and social education that is now being imitated the world over. We’re told that it has rescued untold thousands of poor children from a life of crime on the streets, by enrolling them in a network of music schools and orchestras across the entire country. It’s grown from tiny beginning over almost 40 years, thanks to the incredible energy and devotion of its founder José Antonio Abreu, who is often described as a saint. The symphony orchestra that forms the cream of El Sistema regularly tours the world, and is greeted with wild enthusiasm wherever it appears. The most famous alumnus of the system, Gustavo Dudamel, now leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and has become one of the faces of Rolex watches.
Now Geoffrey Baker, an academic at Royal Holloway College, University of London, has published an in-depth study which claims to reveal a very different picture. Like many of us, Baker was seduced by the choreographed joyousness of El Sistema concerts, and Abreu’s inspirational mantras about the transformative social effects of playing in orchestras. But he noticed the lack of any hard evidence for these effects, and wanted to find out whether the reality matched the rhetoric.
Over several years Baker travelled around Venezuela and interviewed dozens of ex-members of El Sistema. What they say makes for fascinating and disturbing reading. Some praise the organisation, but many more paint a picture of "discrimination, nepotism, favouritism, bullying, poor pay and working conditions, strife between management and teachers, and exploitation of staff and children.”
How was all this so effectively hidden from the outside world? Partly, says Baker, because foreign observers were too easily seduced by the spectacles laid on for their benefit by the organisation’s slick PR department. Also Abreu is a vastly powerful figure, who in Baker’s books comes over as a combination of old-style South American dictator and Jesuit priest. He has a fine line in flowery phrases, such as the one that says that a poor child who is given a violin is no longer poor. “History affords many examples of poor musicians”, comments Baker tartly.
Abreu’s somewhat Fascist obsession with spectacle has skewed the organisation’s priorities, says Baker. Some $350million has been spent on the swanky Caracas headquarters of El Sistema and on foreign tours, while the much-touted nucleos (regional schools) are starved of resources. These nucleos, as described by disenchanted members, are more like boot-camps than educational facilities. Rigid obedience and total dedication are demanded, and middle-class children are favoured because they fall in with these demands.
Baker rightly points the finger at journalists (including myself) who were too easily seduced by the official narrative. But I wonder whether in his efforts to fight off one set of preconceptions, Baker hasn’t fallen victim to another. Baker disapproves of the fact that classical music dominates the music-making in El Sistema, but concedes that “classical music has emancipatory potential and an important part to play in music education, if taught in ethically and educatively sound ways.”
One has to ask: “ethically and educatively sound” by whose criteria? Baker objects to the drilling and discipline of El Sistema, but the uncomfortable truth is that classical music, particularly orchestral music, has always relied on these things. Why did Mozart admire the orchestra at Mannheim so much? Because it was as disciplined as an army.
Like many music academics, Baker is embarrassed by the historical realities of classical music. He’d seemingly like to clean it up and make it fit for polite company, by stressing the aspects of freedom and creativity. But much of the world takes a different view. The reason classical music is booming in China is surely that it offers a top-down model of social cohesion. This may be unpalatable to Western liberal academics, but unfortunately it reflects something very real in classical music itself.
Another thing which bothers Baker is that classical music is an alien import. “Venezuela’s devotion of huge resources to a musical culture implanted by colonialism cannot continue to be brushed under the carpet,” he says in another finger-wagging moment. Again one has to ask – says who? Is this a genuine worry of Venezuelans, or is it Dr Baker bringing his own post-colonial guilt into the picture? My impression of visiting a nucleo is that the kids enjoyed playing Bizet every bit as much as playing arrangements of Venezuelan pop songs. But Baker is suspicious of such enjoyment, comparing it to the pleasure of eating junk food. One catches a whiff of puritanism, determined to root out forms of musical enjoyment that are ideologically unsound.
The most revealing moment in Baker’s book comes early on, in this sentence: “El Sistema has produced some impressive achievements, but the question remains: could it have achieved more had it adopted a more inclusive, forward-looking organisational philosophy, and had it not been defined so closely by Abreu’s personality and preferences?” What Baker seems to be saying is: if only El Sistema had been born in a nice social democracy like Denmark. But it wasn’t. It was born in Venezuela, and had to adapt to the circumstances at hand. If Abreu had adopted the philosophy and methods of a European Western liberal back in 1975, he would have been laughed out of court, and El Sistema wouldn’t exist at all.
One has to ask whether that would be a better result than having El Sistema as it now exists, with all its faults. If the organisation is to move in a more liberal, enlightened direction, it can only be because Venezuelans (all of them, not just the disgruntled ex-members of El Sistema) actually want it to change in that way. Trying to wish it on the organisation from outside is simply colonialism in a different guise.
