Abuse in El Sistema is not only sexual

william osborne says:

Yes, as we know, in most other impoverished Latin American countries, the students get much better educations in music theory and have shorter rehearsals in their world renowned orchestral training systems. And most of all, they are evil socialists.

Sam McElroy says:

I can’t express how great it feels to see that finally, finally, finally, the abused are beginning to speak out. It has been exhausting and heartbreaking reading thousands of complaints in private over the past decade, but being powerless to do anything in the face of an industry hypnotised by this cult and the pre-packaged riches it brought with it. It has to stop. Let’s go back to making music for the sake of its inherent, needless-to-qualify-or-quantify beauty, depth, poetry and – therefore – self-evident advantage to all.

Let’s remove the burden from today’s music institutions that they also have to be social workers. Achieving social cohesion is not music’s job; participating in musical activities undoubtably bestows benefits, as does participation in any number of other activities, like sports. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that all forms of art, culture, and cognitive stimulus are good for you, and those who participate in them will derive personal advantage from that participation. But we shouldn’t need to thrash the fake “saviour” narrative to death in order to raise money to make art. Or, if we do, our desperation indicates that we’ve already lost the cultural battle.

I say this as someone who was raised in a mining community, in which the volunteer spirit that produced brass bands and choirs on every corner was the fuel that drove the machine of culture across the entire working class. Nobody needed to invent clever marketing terms like “social program” in order organise around community music making. Music just happened, because leaders stood up in communities and made it happen. And from those grass-root endeavours sprouted the seed that led to a steady growth of world class professionals. Working class towns the world over have been famous for producing world class talent, from Siberia to Snowdonia, not because anyone flogged the myth of “social blah blah blah”, but because they organised around the foundational idea that art was self-evidently important as a human pursuit. In football, we can see an equivalency in Brazil, for example, where the same mentality generated the best players in the world from the streets, not from any dictatorial academy structure. Football was about self-expression, and that foundational value flowed through the the veins of the system all the way to the very top.

El Sistema’s mistake is that it is obsessively power hungry. It wants to rule all worlds within the music world, at home and abroad, from the amateur ranks to the education sector to the concert hall to the recording studio. It is a monopoly, in philosophy and structure. In order to achieve that, it needs dizzying sums of money to effectively buy its way past all other music organisations in the world, regardless of their musical superiority. Why would DG, for example, in the digital age of razor-thin margins, hire the Berlin Phil for a recording if it can get the Simon Bolivar for free? Why would a promoter NOT book an orchestra that comes fully loaded with its own oil-funded marketing team, its own press corp, its own travel and hotel budget and – most importantly – its own impossible-to-resist pre-scripted “saviour” narrative? Nobody can compete. But those dizzying amounts of money need to come from a State apparatus that has something to gain from the exchange – ideological propaganda, in Venezuela’s case – and from corporate sponsors who can claim virtue by association with the saviour narrative.

Hence the need to create myth. Myth is the key to the power game. But so, too, is abuse part of the m.o., and coercion, and control and subordination and fear and the dehumanisation of the individual to serve the collective design. It takes an authoritarian structure to fulfil this collective, monopolistic ambition on a global scale.

Now that we are beginning to understand what is going on, we can all decide which value system best suits us, and make our choices. It is heartening to see statements coming from ES franchises – some braver and more principled than others. I, for one, would like to see a return to art for art’s sake, and a return to the community spirit of old which made no claims to virtue, but just got on with it. I would like to see a world in which two ideas can be held aloft at the same time: that access to art ought to be a fundamental, unconditional provision for children across the globe; that the provision of that access to art must not be transactional, hijacked by regimes to serve ideological ends.

John Borstlap says:

There’s a difference between an ideal and its practice. If El Sistema gets it wrong in practice, this does not diminish the ideal: making a difference in society through music making. May the knowledge of the wrongs be instructive for similar music programmes elsewhere, instead of demolishing the idea altogether.