Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education

I S S N 1 5 4 5 - 4 5 1 7

A refereed journal of the

Action for Change in Music Education

Volume 15 Number 1
January 2016

Special Issue: El Sistema

Geoffrey Baker, Guest Editor

Vincent C. Bates, Editor

Brent C. Talbot, Associate Editor

Resurrection Symphony:
El Sistema as Ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles

Robert Fink

© Robert Fink. 2016. The content of this article is the sole responsibility of the authors. The ACT
Journal and the Mayday Group are not liable for any legal actions that may arise involving the article's
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Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 33

Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as Ideology in

Venezuela and Los Angeles

Robert Fink
University of California, Berkeley

The explosive growth of Venezuela’s El Sistema is rewriting the agenda of musical

education in the West. Many commentators from the world of classical music react
to the spectacle of dedicated young colonial musicians playing European
masterworks as a kind of “miracle,” accepting Sistema founder José Antonio
Abreu’s claim that, in Venezuela, “material poverty is being overcome by spiritual
affluence.” This essay attempts to clarify the epistemological slippage inherent in
such talk, which deliberately conflates old-fashioned idealist notions of classical
music’s spiritual power with utilitarian justifications of music education as social
engineering. In Los Angeles, Abreu’s slippery rhetoric has been of great use to the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, which under the canny leadership of chief executive
Deborah Borda and Abreu protégé Gustavo Dudamel has turned El Sistema’s
rhetoric of social justice (“music is a fundamental human right”) into a hip
consumer brand.

Keywords: music education, social justice, musical canon, harmony ideology,

colonialism, neoliberalism, Venezuela

Harmony suffers the same fate in late Beethoven as religion in bourgeois society:
it continues to exist, but is forgotten. (Notebooks of Theodore Adorno, [1939]
1998, 158).

A
specter is haunting music education: it is the specter of El Sistema.
Admittedly, the situation today is quite opposite from that described by
Karl Marx in 1848; the reigning musical institutions of Europe and
America seek not to “exorcise” the revolutionary ghost, but to embrace it, to master
the arcane political spells by which more such specters might be conjured.
Appropriating the collectivist model and social goals of the Venezuelan state system
of youth orchestras, they hope thereby to ensure the future of European classical
music, which is precisely what Western observers from the leader of the Berlin

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 34

Philharmonic to the investigative journalists of the news program 60 Minutes have

seen in it. But, like Marx, I consider that most discussions of the controversial new
social form exhibit the credulity of the nursery. They fail to recognize that what El
Sistema proffers to music educators and audiences is not spectacular images of an
egalitarian, unrealized future for European concert music, but faded spirit pictures
from its colonialist past.
Even the material form El Sistema takes, a network of large youth ensembles
reading European music from written parts, ought to give us pause. One American
observer calls the persistence of the large ensemble model the “elephant in the room”
of music education: the authoritarian style and curricular rigidity of this late
Victorian innovation, with its emphasis on formal concerts that depend on large
numbers of passive students learning a narrow range of “school music” disconnected
from the vibrant and diverse musical culture outside the classroom, have caused
enrollments in secondary-school music classes to fall steadily over the last thirty
years, thus reducing access to musical instruction (Williams 2011, 51–3). As he
points out, progressive systems of music education in (notably) England, Scotland,
and Sweden have spent decades exploring alternatives to the large ensemble model
that emphasize individual creativity, improvisation, and direct engagement with
contemporary musical life. In this context, the reappearance of the (very) large
ensemble model in the guise of El Sistema seems like an unwelcome — and
unpromising — visit from the ghost of public-school orchestra rooms past.
Although I am not a specialist in music education, but a musicologist concerned
with the state of contemporary Western art music, I think I know something about
what it is to be haunted by this particular ghost. In a turn-of-the-century manifesto
about the so-called “death of classical music,” I took on the canonic specter directly,
perhaps over-confidently:
Boosters are right to point out the tenacity of classical music institutions, and the
often-heroic struggles by individual musicians and scholars to uphold their
constructions of the “classical”; but no amount of material struggle can
resurrect the epistemological power of a dead canon. (Fink 1998, 144;
emphasis added)

What I did not know when I wrote those words was that a very determined and
powerful man was, even then, already working on an immense scale to test my

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 35

proposition about the power of material struggle to revive and repurpose the ideals
of classical music. Under the slogan Tocar y Luchar (“to play, and to struggle”), José
Antonio Abreu had already built a single youth orchestra into a massive state
network of orchestras enrolling tens of thousands of children and adolescents. By
the time I penned that quote, the State Foundation for the System of National Youth
and Children’s Orchestras (FESNOJIV) was formally established in Venezuela’s
Ministry of Family, Health, and Sports, its budget already dwarfing all other arts
spending in the country.1
A decade ago, Abreu’s project, long familiar to global advocates for education
and the fight against poverty, burst onto the Western musical consciousness when
his protégé, conductor Gustavo Dudamel, won the inaugural 2004 Gustav Mahler
Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany. Later that year, Berlin Philharmonic
Music Director Simon Rattle traveled to Caracas to conduct a massive El Sistema
youth orchestra and chorus in a performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, a piece
whose subtitle, “the Resurrection,” was thematized in Rattle’s press conference
encomium to the Venezuelan system and its creator: “If anybody asked me, where is
there something really important going on for the future of classical music, I would
simply have to say here, in Venezuela… These days I say I have seen the future of
music in Venezuela, and that is — resurrection” (Arvelo 2006).
In the intervening decade, El Sistema has come under the direct patronage of the
Bolivarian Revolutionary government in Venezuela and spread across the globe, with
full-fledged programs in other Latin American countries and trial núcleos springing
up across Europe and North America. Evidently it was correct to hypothesize in 1998
that European classical music must have died — else why would it need to be brought
back to life in Venezuela by Abreu and his followers? On the other hand, I appear to
have underestimated the appeal of Abreu’s long struggle to do the (as it seemed to
me) impossible, that is, to reverse the decay of Western art music into ideological
irrelevance by convincing those who control the material wealth of society to support
it once more, and that so lavishly that it seems to rise from the dead. By what magic
was this feat accomplished?

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 36

Sleights of hand (material vs. ideal in post-canonic classical music)

In this theoretical discussion, I do not pretend to a definitive evaluation of El
Sistema’s material efficacy as a social welfare program. Nor is my work based on
first-hand ethnography, like Geoffrey Baker’s (2014) closely-reported indictment of
the way El Sistema “orchestrates” Venezuela’s youth. Instead, I want to focus
attention not so much on what Abreu has done, but on the way he thinks. I am
interested here in the way material and ideal notions of “the power” of music have
come to interpenetrate each other in the post-canonic discourse of Western art music.
(I now see my earlier formulation is problematic precisely because it assumed that
material and epistemological forms of power could be analyzed in isolation from
each other.) In particular, twenty-first-century discussions by and about José
Antonio Abreu and El Sistema feature a consistent slippage, an unwitting intellectual
“sleight-of-hand,” between material and ideal formulations of classical music. Since
one of the major goals of my essay is to dramatize how confusing these sleights-of-
hand can be, and how multiple passes between the material and ideal registers of
thought eventually become for Abreu a style of intellectual misdirection, I will label
each moment of epistemological mystification, and use the sequence of “passes” to
organize my argument below.2
My tale will unfold in three sections: first, I’ll analyze the early history of El
Sistema in Venezuela as an unusual kind of spiritual welfare program, based in a pre-
modern “harmony ideology” first brought to Latin America by European
missionaries. Second, I’ll consider the System’s early twenty-first-century re-
encounter with Europe, in which its assumed material social effects are mythologized
through filmed propaganda and accepted as a “miracle” by Western observers. I’ll
suggest that the “miracle” is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Abreu’s
belief system, and has more to do with a desire to hold on to Western art music’s
cultural centrality and absolute “goodness” in a post-canonic musical world. Finally,
I will explore some of the paradoxes attendant on classical music’s remapping as a
mode of social justice in the developed world, a complex relationship now reduced to
the claim, available for purchase on a stylish black T-shirt in the Los Angeles
Philharmonic’s gift shop, that “music is a fundamental human right.” Gustavo
Dudamel, the most famous alumnus of El Sistema, is at the same time an agent of

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 37

aesthetic reaction at the Philharmonic and a faux-progressive symbol for canonic

classical music as a privileged social mediator in a fragmented metropolis still
stubbornly segregated by race, class, and citizenship status.3 In this way, a fantasy of
music appreciation as social justice functions as a powerful marketing tool for an
institution whose audience is socially and politically liberal, but whose own
organizational and business practices are those of the neoliberal elite.

1. Harmony as Ideology (El Sistema in Venezuela)

FIRST PASS: A Youth Orchestra can be a Social Welfare Project

Gustavo Dudamel once remarked to a Venezuelan interviewer that “the most
beautiful thing about El Sistema is that it is also a social project” (Llorente 2006).
José Antonio Abreu’s first trick was his most daring, a piece of political sleight-of-
hand still admired with a striking lack of critical reflection in the linked worlds of
classical music and arts education: He convinced the Venezuelan government to fund
his personal mission to spread classical orchestral music by reinterpreting its often
fuzzy idealism as the concrete material basis for a politically engaged social welfare
project. Was this just misdirection? A question that is almost impossible to answer
is just how many of Venezuela’s poorest children the System reaches, and what
material benefit it actually provides (Baker 2014, 263–76). The simplest facts are
difficult to discern through the scrim of emotionality that surrounds Abreu’s work.
First-world encounters with El Sistema often transmit cultural stereotypes in spite of
themselves, as when education researcher Diana Hollinger attempted to pin down
some details of the life story of Juan de Jesús Pérez, a núcleo leader in Mérida:
Jesús is a temperate, gentle individual. Humble, a bit round and inelegant, he
smiles easily, and his eyes are deep, dark, and sincere. “I was one of them,” he
informs me earnestly. “I was one of the children of the barrio.” … Trying to be a
careful and meticulous researcher, I sought to reconfirm facts and milestones
with him. “I already told you everything there is to tell!” he exclaims. “I was one
of the barrio children, and now I am not.” He conveys this with great emotion,
tears pooling in his round, coffee-colored eyes. (Hollinger 2006, 104)

Seeking some verifiable truth behind El Sistema’s social claims, Hollinger

appears, by her own account, to be letting a deliberately evasive informant off the
hook. One can hardly blame her: as she presents herself, she is neither a trained

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 38

ethnographer nor an investigative journalist. In politically sensitive situations —

and, as Baker (2014) argues, the answer to even the simplest “factual” question about
El Sistema in Venezuela is shot through with hidden relations of power — the
challenge of ethnographic writing is to avoid both cultural insensitivity that
invalidates difference (you’re lying to me!) and colonialist sentimentality that
condescends while colluding (you poor/noble man!). Hollinger may have been out of
her depth in trying, but no more than, to take a famously equivocal example from the
anthropological literature, E.E. Evans-Pritchard attempting to get even the most
basic information about names and lineages from suspicious Nuer tribesman in the
British-controlled Sudan of the 1930s.4
What a relief it must have been for Hollinger to talk frankly with Maestro Abreu,
who is in her telling anything but evasive about the social benefits of El Sistema. He
gives a satisfying, direct, articulate answer, one that sweeps all questions of fact
before it:

“Have you seen it transform their lives?” I query.

“Yes. Absolutely! Music attacks material poverty because it transforms the

whole child.” He continues in earnest. “This transformation makes the child
special, rich. As the child’s mind improves, his aspirations, his ideas also change.
He is no longer a poor child. The material poverty is overcome.” (Hollinger
2006, 127)

SECOND PASS: Material Poverty can be relieved by Spiritual Affluence

Abreu’s formulation is extremely eloquent, but also sleight-of-hand number two,
perhaps the crucial intellectual slippage in the entire discourse around El Sistema.
The System justifies itself as a classical music social program that provides material
benefits to poor children and adolescents; but it defines those benefits in ideal terms,
as beneficial changes of mental state induced by the encounter with classical music
itself. The material struggle turns out to be a spiritual one. As Abreu proclaimed to
the world when he accepted the 2001 UNESCO Right Livelihood Award, in El
Sistema’s Venezuela, “material poverty is being overcome by spiritual affluence.” His
foundation continues to make the epistemological slip from “physical poverty” to
“spiritual richness” a basic enabling fiction today:

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 39

§ Physical Poverty is Overcome by the Spiritual Richness that Music Provides

Academic music is no longer a privilege when it becomes part of the individual’s
life. When that happens, it is possible to see kids playing the violin at their
humble homes, others playing the clarinet at their father’s repair shop, attending
classes and rehearsals, and participating in concerts in poor neighborhoods….
Spiritual richness provides the state of mind, ethical principles, and intellectual
and emotional skills conducive to overcome physical poverty. (Fundación
Musical Simón Bolívar 2013).

Overcoming material poverty through musical idealism is one of the “guiding

principles” of Abreu’s System, a core justification for everything it does. The
equivalence reappears, with a slightly different spin, as part of the ideological
armature of almost all El Sistema-based programs around the globe, as in this
version, from the website of El Sistema USA: “Overcoming poverty and adversity is
best done by strengthening the spirit, creating, as Dr. Abreu puts it, ‘an affluence of
the spirit,’ and investing that affluence as a valued asset in a community endeavor to
create excellence and beauty in music” (El Sistema USA 2015).5 Even the very few
quasi-scientific studies commissioned by the System to validate its approach — the
studies that have often been cited to assure skeptics of its pragmatic social impact —
start by accepting this sleight-of-hand: “We cannot assume that the socio-economic
conditions or the socio-educational level of the participants and their families change
substantially … but we can expect the psychosocial changes to be consolidated and
established” (Torres 2002).6
What, then, is the “spiritual richness” that music provides? José Antonio Abreu
has articulated, again and again, his absolute faith in the unique power of the
classical music canon to transform lives through musical idealism. For him, playing
in a classical orchestra is a spiritual activity like no other, because it combines
exposure to order, beauty, and perfection with collective practice:
Art implies a sense of perfection, therefore of excellence, a road to excellence.
What is it, then that the orchestra has ultimately planted in the souls of its
members? A sense of harmony, a sense of order, implicit in rhythm, a sense of
the aesthetic, of the beautiful [lo bello], of the universal, and the language of the
invisible. That language of the invisible, transmitted invisibly through music.
(Abreu in Arvelo 2006)

Describing this practice, Abreu resorts time and again to a small range of highly
charged words—community, order, universal, soul, spirit, beauty—that index an

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 40

intense strain of very old-fashioned European classical music ideology (Weber 1999,
351–5). The ruling metaphor is harmony, a multivalent term whose ability to signify
in both material and ideal registers allows Abreu to slip discursively between them at
will: “Whoever creates beauty by playing an instrument, and generates musical
harmony, begins to understand from within what essential harmony is, human
harmony…” (Arvelo 2006).
Harmony is, of course, one of the most deeply rooted metaphorical concepts in
the Western tradition, and Abreu, if he wished, could draw on Plato, Augustine,
Boethius, Kircher, Kepler, Kant, Hegel, and a slew of Romantics to support his
position (Spitzer 2004, 142–69). The analogy by which playing one’s part in a
musical ensemble puts society in tune with universal creation was a favorite of
Leibniz, Western philosophy’s most strenuously upbeat apostle of the harmonious
universe:
One of the cardinal [political] metaphors used by Leibniz is that of an orchestra
in which each instrument or group of instruments has its own part to play. The
playing of its part is its whole function; the actualization of its purpose is the
inner principle which, since the days of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have
affected to be able to find in all created and uncreated things. The player plays
better if he “understands” — perceives the pattern — of the part assigned to him
in the cosmic orchestra. He need not, indeed he cannot, hear the totality to
which his activity contributes — only the conductor, only God, can do that.
(Berlin 2014, 123)

But for those of us who live in a post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic aesthetic

world, the Western notion of musical harmony is fundamentally dialectical:
harmony subsumes both consonance and dissonance, and thus the message of
Western music for modernity is that struggle and discord can, up to a point, be
exciting; that the authentic development of the individual is often at odds with the
need for order in society; and that teleological development might lead to complexity
and disorder, but is preferable to simple stasis. This position, while it has profound
political implications, is not simply political; it is based in a dialectical reading of
tonality as a system:
Dissonance is the truth about harmony. If the ideal of harmony is taken strictly,
it proves to be unreachable according to its own concept…. The rejection of the
ideal of classicism is not the result of the alternation of styles, or, indeed, of an
alleged historical temperament; it is, rather, the result of the coefficient of

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 41

friction in harmony itself, which in corporeal form presents what is not

reconciled as reconciled and thereby transgresses the very postulate of the
appearing essence at which the ideal of harmony aims. The emancipation from
this ideal is an aspect of the developing truth content of art. (Adorno [1970]
2013, 151)

In Abreu’s System, on the other hand, harmony is an absolute, non-dialectical

value, functionally equivalent in discourse to something like “the beauty of total
agreement.” In harmony with Leibniz, who argued that when each of us “plays his
part,” we fulfill our deepest purpose, Abreu portrays the classical symphony
orchestra as a mechanism for aestheticizing social unity — in fact, the most perfect
such cultural machine ever created:
What is an orchestra? An orchestra is a community, where the essential and
exclusive characteristic — it is the only one that has this characteristic — is that it
is the only community that comes together with the fundamental objective of
agreeing with itself [concertarse]… To agree on what? To generate pure beauty
[limpieza]. (Arvelo 2006)

Abreu uses the Spanish word concertarse, with its double entendre of orchestral
unison and social consensus, over and over; the term appears to encapsulate his
deepest goals for El Sistema as a social program, the creation, in a totally unified
society, of “solidarity, harmony, [and] mutual compassion” (Arvelo 2006).
In this context, harmony is not just an aesthetic ideal; it is an ideology. Those of
a social-scientific bent will recognize this as akin to the “harmony ideology”
identified by radical anthropologist Laura Nader. Nader, who primarily studies legal
and juridical systems, was moved to conceptualize harmony as ideology after
fieldwork amongst the rural Zapotec of southern Mexico, and she sees it as one of the
primary mechanisms of control in colonial and post-colonial societies. Her historical
perspective identifies the prizing of harmony over all other social modes of
interaction as a legacy of Catholic and specifically Spanish colonialism in the New
World; she has consistently argued against the notion that “traditional” societies are
more naturally harmonious than those of industrialized modernity, preferring to
explore the complex ways that an ideology of social harmony can be imposed from
above as a mode of control (Nader 1990).
Harmony ideology as a mode of control is totally relevant to the work of José
Antonio Abreu, a Jesuit-trained Latin American musical intellectual whose deep

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 42

Catholic faith pervades every corner of the System. The main goal of the System is to
concertarse, so students learn to play their instruments by practicing, together, the
orchestral parts of the pieces their núcleo is working on. The aim of this spiritual
practice appears to be a process of indoctrination into an ideology of harmony as
voluntary, loving submission to an invisible higher power: “Music sublimates the
interior pulse of soul and expresses it in a harmonious way, subtly, invisibly — and
transmits it, without words, to other human beings. It is the art of making wills,
souls, and spirits agree [concertarse]” (Abreu in Arvelo 2006). In this it is not unlike
the famous spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit
order in whose educational footsteps Abreu consciously walks. Foreign visitors and
researchers consistently report how perfectly Abreu’s children have internalized their
lessons in harmony ideology:
I ask the children to tell me what the orchestra means to them, and many of
them eagerly raise their hands…. “Playing in the orchestra teaches us
responsibility, confidence, and discipline.”

“What else?” I prompt them, letting my eyes sweep across the room.

A serious, wide-eyed girl of about eleven responds this time. “We learn to work
together in the orchestra.” Many others nod in agreement.

“It is like a family here,” one dark-eyed boy, perhaps ten years of age, says boldly.

“It changes our hearts,” states another child, so quickly I do not even see where
the voice comes from.

“Playing music changes our souls,” asserts a girl in the violin section…
(Hollinger 2006, 119)

As Nader is careful to note, harmony ideology can cut both ways: it can be a
strategy of resistance, a way of keeping outsiders from intervening in local disputes, a
defense against imperial claims of the law. But it always involves the “redistribution
of power” (Nader 1997, 714); we thus always need to ask who controls, and who is
being controlled, when it comes to changing the hearts and minds of the children of
Venezuela — and now the world.

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 43

2. “If just one percent of this is true, then it is really a miracle” (El
Sistema in Europe)

THIRD PASS: Talented Young Performers are signs of a (State-Sponsored) Miracle

José Antonio Abreu’s achievement in Venezuela, impressive though it is, has
been almost entirely misunderstood by European and North American musical
observers. The word outsiders use that crystallizes their failure to “get it” is a
religious term, but from a quite different register than the sober language of the
harmony ideology: as one musical visitor from Germany, just landed in Caracas to
experience Abreu’s System for herself, put it, excitedly, “if just one percent of this is
true, then it really is a miracle!” (Arvelo 2006). Such “miracles” happen when
visiting Europeans are shown one thing — carefully honed displays, often involving
the best orchestras, schools, or students, especially the immensely talented
conservatory-level students in the top Caracas orchestras — and, through a little
harmless misdirection, are allowed to assume that the same thing is going on all over
Venezuela.
In presenting El Sistema as a state-sponsored miracle, Abreu is following the
cultural style of the Venezuelan petro-elite. Well before the government of Hugo
Chavez made redistributive theater a cornerstone of the Bolivarian “revolution,”
Venezuelan-born anthropologist Fernando Coronil had analyzed in detail how the
state’s use of oil wealth to underwrite a simulation of development led inevitably to a
“culture of miracles,” each shiny new development project fading unaccountably into
an ever-growing welter of corruption and mutual recrimination (Coronil 1997, 317).
Coronil used the metaphor of “prestidigitation” — that is, sleight-of-hand — to
describe the way the “magical state” spectacularized its redistributive power while
obscuring the weakness of its institutions. He noted that his home country had
developed its taste for spectacle and mystification during the colonial past: “In this
respect, like the Spanish imperial state analyzed by José Antonio Maravall (1986),
the Venezuelan state has been constituted as a unifying force by producing fantasies
of collective integration into centralized political institutions. As the heir of the
culture of the Baroque, the state in Venezuela ‘captivates minds’” (Coronil 1997, 4).
Substitute Sistema for state, and musical for political, and the project of El Sistema
is recognizable as characteristically Venezuelan.

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
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Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 44

To document this “magical” cultural style first hand, allow me to present a close
reading of the spectacular 2006 documentary film Tocar y Luchar, whose mise-en-
scène, by Arturo Arvelo, a graduate of El Sistema, is replete with visual and aural
prestidigitation. It is a truism of film studies that no documentary is ever a
transparent recording of events, but Tocar y Luchar is, by anyone’s standards, an
extraordinarily artificial construction, especially where its musical soundtrack is
concerned. Strikingly for a film about music education, Tocar y Luchar largely
withholds the sounds of rehearsal: we often see young musicians playing in rural
settings, but usually we do not hear what they are playing. Often what we hear
instead is Mahler’s Second Symphony, whose 2004 performance under Rattle in
Caracas is a key through line of the film. A favorite editing trick of the film is to
begin with visuals of núcleo rehearsals or rustic performances; strip them of sound,
then sneak in the audio of the Mahler underneath; and, finally, cut to synchronized
audio and video footage of the gala performance in thunderous progress. The
clearest example of this cinematic sleight-of-hand comes at the climax of the film,
where, in a montage of stunning mendacity, the heaven-storming final cadence of the
Resurrection Symphony, played by the elite Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, is
superimposed on completely different, grainy archival video footage of an outdoor
concert in Rome. The children’s orchestra which was actually playing has been
silenced, its diligent but ordinary sound unable to provide the necessary spectacular
climax. A master stroke of musical misdirection — look at those tiny kids … hey,
presto, listen to that amazing symphony! — is then cinematically sutured to the
approving gaze of Pope John Paul II, the one man on Earth most able, for Abreu, to
validate an actual miracle.7
It’s understandable that foreigners are initially overwhelmed by the spectacle of
El Sistema. The elite young players in the top orchestras are very, very skilled at
what they do — and their ebullience is real, since they’ve climbed, often at great
personal sacrifice, to the top of a very large heap.8 The System’s graduates, like all
post-colonial subjects, are also aware of the power of harmony ideology: Abreu’s star
pupils and teachers are unlikely to do anything to mar the illusion of unity and joy,
no matter how much they happen to dislike their stand partner, or when they tire (as

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
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Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 45

they do) of juggling their instruments and shaking their bodies during a Sistema
warhorse like Bernstein’s “Mambo.”
Some European musicians, though, have reacted to the encounter with El
Sistema at a much deeper cultural level than simply enjoying the ensemble and élan
for its own sake. They slip, so easily, from the possible social power of group music
making, to an old fantasy about the social power that a sufficiently elevated “music”
possesses in itself. Here’s Simon Rattle again, from Arvelo’s film:
It’s so clear that the orchestra, and the work that’s being done in music here is
not only enriching lives, but saving lives. I think it’s a matter … that we have to
remember that music is always about something, it is not just itself. I think a
part of the reason that the audiences get these profound emotions from these
musicians is that, clearly, it is the most important thing in the world to all of
these kids, and that comes over loud and clear (Arvelo 2006; emphasis in
original speech text).

Whose (musical) life is being saved here? As a culturally-oriented musicologist, I

am not at all nostalgic for the era when serving “the music itself,” a Romantic
ideological construct if ever there was one, was a sufficient goal for those who aspired
to mastery of Western art music. But one did imagine that the chief conductor of the
Berlin Phiharmonic still believed in it. The struggle of El Sistema may be social in its
home country, but for a certain class of Western pilgrim, the real battle is
epistemological, against the cultural emptiness of a dead ideology that once
championed “absolute” music precisely because it was not about anything in this
world except its own tonal forms in autotelic motion. Does it really take an
assemblage of dark-eyed, third-world youths, radiating boundless energy and
unanimity of purpose as they tackle the great works of the Western canon, to remind
Sir Simon Rattle that classical music was not always “just itself,” that it used to be
“about something”? If pressed on this “something,” Rattle would doubtless respond
tautologically, along deeply inscribed lines of Western idealism, noting that it has
long been assumed by European philosophers, musicians, and educators that deep
immersion in musical harmony can lead to life-changing epiphanies of the individual
spirit. If El Sistema could take even a fraction of its alleged 700,000 participants on
that intellectual journey, it truly would be a kind of miracle.

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
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Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 46

FOURTH PASS: (Their) Being in Harmony can revive the Meaning of Harmony
(for Us)
But that is not Abreu’s project. Rattle perceives — and there’s no reason to doubt
him — that, for the kids of El Sistema, “it is the most important thing in the world.”
The unanswered question: what is “it”? Climbing out of poverty? Becoming part of a
community in which everyone is in agreement? Understanding for oneself the
meaning of great works of art? The latter two cultural goals are not identical; they
may well be antithetical. The “miracle” turns out to be another sleight-of-hand, this
one highly dependent on a Western audience that actively wants to be fooled. If we,
like Simon Rattle, misidentify Abreu’s non-dialectical concept of musical harmony
with our own, we might well mistake their display of collective happiness at being in
harmony for the individual meaningfulness we derive from harmony. If the trick
works, our emotional reaction to the classical orchestra repertoire in Venezuelan
hands — the “profound emotions” we feel when watching harmony ideology in
spectacular action — will be proof that the System works: not just “for them,” but,
perhaps more importantly, for us.

3. El Sistema as Simulation (Report from Los Angeles)

The problematics of this tautological, sleight-of-hand linkage can be summed up in
the misuse of a slogan that has traveled from Abreu’s Venezuela to Dudamel’s Los
Angeles: “music is a fundamental human right.”9 Let that phrase, printed on an
expensive T-shirt, stand as a sign of the commodification of Abreu’s “miracle” by an
arts organization — the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association — that has mastered
its environment as thoroughly as Abreu once mastered the redistributive politics of
the Venezuelan oil ministry. El Sistema’s confounding of classical music ideals with
the material struggle for social justice allows alert arts marketers to use it to entice
audiences into a form of “hip consumerism” (Frank 1997), a veneer of progressive
politics disguising the retrograde nature of the luxury cultural goods on display.

FIFTH PASS: Art as Social Justice enables Social Justice as Marketing

El Sistema functions in Los Angeles as a simulacrum of itself, as almost pure
image-making. The Philharmonic helps fund the three núcleos that collectively make

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Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 47

up the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA) at a modest level, spending on them a
small fraction of its approximately $100 million budget.10 The orchestra is thus able
to rebrand itself as a “forward-looking” agent of social change, a marketing goal
about which Deborah Borda, the Philharmonic’s president, is refreshingly candid. At
a March 2013 symposium on the future of music education at the Barbican in
London, she replayed a key moment from a press conference just past, with the
satisfaction of a conjurer recounting the details of a particularly successful piece of
misdirection. She and Gustavo Dudamel had just announced the details of the 2013–
14 orchestra season:
But at the end of the conference, when we opened up for questions, the focus was
literally all about YOLA. Questions poured in in Spanish and English…
Imaginations were clearly fired up by this program.

Yes, the LA Philharmonic’s identity has been changed, and, to a significant

extent, reoriented.

This is not by accident. (Borda 2013)

Borda has consistently positioned YOLA as a form of disruptive innovation,

which “turns the traditional middle-class youth orchestra program upside down.”
But this superficial radicalism can misdirect us from the increasingly classist reality
over which Borda presides: in a city ever-more stratified by wealth, she has leveraged
the Philharmonic Association’s rentier position as landlord of the Hollywood Bowl to
quadruple the orchestra’s endowment while still paying the highest musician salaries
in the business. Still, the orchestra in front of which Gustavo Dudamel stands has
but a single Latino musician on staff, while Borda has been credited with
supercharging the Philharmonic Association’s Board of Directors, where the financial
commitment only begins with $60,000 in annual dues, into an international
“billionaires club” (Fleischmann 2015).
As of this writing, that club has one very new, very prominent Latina member:
Adriana Cisneros, heir to the most powerful media and branding conglomerate in
South America, the Grupo Cisneros, which built Venevisión, Venezuela’s oldest and
largest television network, into a global media, branding, and real estate empire that
controls, among other properties, the glitzy Miss Venezuela pageant and a significant
percentage of the entire hemisphere’s telenovela market. The Cisneros family, one of

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
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Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 48

the richest in Latin America, was also deeply implicated in both the spectacular
politics of the Venezuelan petro-boom and its collapse into corruption, consolidating
power and then moving assets offshore during the 1990s, the country’s most floridly
neoliberal period.11 In this context, YOLA’s social mission seems like Venezuelan-
themed window dressing, not fundamental change. Offering free orchestral
education to a small slice of Southern California’s underrepresented and
underprivileged may make our own large ensemble seem politically progressive —
but under Borda’s leadership, the Los Angeles Philharmonic has allied itself not with
(Latin) America’s poor immigrants and workers, but with the same old class of
entrenched oligarchs who have manipulated their world for so long.

SIXTH (AND FINAL) PASS: Marketing “Change” while programming The Same
Old Stuff
YOLA also misdirects us from the growing aesthetic conservatism of the
Philharmonic’s concert programming in the era of Gustavo Dudamel, a
fundamentally provincial musician who developed his view of the canon under the
arch-traditionalist Abreu. Perceptive American critics have not forgotten the
equivocation with which Dudamel took over the mantle of musical progress from
Essa-Pekka Salonen, who had worked tirelessly to make it the basis of the
Philharmonic’s brand identity. What once read as charming modesty on the part of
the incoming music director, eight years later, looks more like Jesuitical evasion:
At the press conference, when Salonen introduced him with an
uncharacteristically florid fanfare — “We are interested in the future. We are not
trying to re-create the glories of the past, like so many other symphony
orchestras” — Dudamel got a laugh by advancing to the microphone, pausing for
a long moment, and saying, “So-o-o-o…” The art of understatement isn’t dead at
Walt Disney Concert Hall. (Ross 2007)

The Philharmonic has become deeply involved with the glories of the musical
past in recent years: the centerpiece of its 2013–14 season was a festival devoted —
and it doesn’t get more retrograde than this — to the orchestral music of Tchaikovsky.
The sales pitch was precisely calibrated to deliver the promise of what we might dub
the “Rattle effect”: “To experience Gustavo Dudamel leading the music of
Tchaikovsky is to hear favorite masterpieces as if for the first time” (Los Angeles

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Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 49

Philharmonic 2013; emphasis mine). The life-giving passion for music transmitted
through Dudamel, the Sistema kid from Venezuela turned international superstar,
could rejuvenate even the most overplayed warhorses, making their familiar
pleasures feel new and “progressive.” Dudamel did not have to deliver this miracle
all by himself: as with the previous year’s Mahler symphony cycle, the Philharmonic
brought the flagship Venezuelan Sistema ensemble, the Simón Bolívar Symphony
Orchestra, to Los Angeles to play half the concerts. A cynical observer might see this
as a form of outsourcing, diluting the cost of unionized orchestral labor by importing
Third World workers to do the job for less. Dudamel reserved Tchaikovsky’s
“canonical” final pair of symphonies for his adult professionals, leaving the Bolivars
with less demanding repertoire — and less demand for tickets.
Meanwhile, back in Venezuela, decades of poorly thought out import
substitution, populist subsidies, and overt corruption in governments of the right
and left, have strained the economy to the breaking point. Hyperinflation, shortages
of basic consumer goods, and devaluation of the currency are decimating the very
middle class into which the graduates of El Sistema are supposed to ascend (Kronick
2014). In 2014, thousands of students took to the streets, protesting against the
government of Nicholas Maduro, and were met with gunfire and mass arrests. Some
of them, doubtless, were graduates of El Sistema’s musical courses in harmony
and/as social unity, but they seem not to have learned their lessons.
It is truly striking, in the context of violent street protests and increasingly
heavy-handed repression from the government of Nicholas Maduro, how doggedly
both native and foreign commentators have clung to the ideology of harmony. It is
completely unsurprising that Gustavo Dudamel, challenged in early 2014 to justify
his close relationship to what increasingly appeared as an authoritarian regime, took
refuge behind an idealized notion of harmony:
It is a difficult time in my country. I can say first of all that I believe in the right
of people to protest because this is a right… I condemn violence — from wherever
it is coming from. We will not solve our problems with violence… Music is my
instrument. When we play for an audience, in my country, they think differently.
The people in the audience have different social positions, different religions, but
when we are playing, they are united. The Sistema in Venezuela is a symbol of
this unity. (Dudamel 2014)

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But when Rubén Blades, a Latin American cultural icon with no ties to either
Abreu or Maduro, in an open letter to Venezuela harshly critical of what he called the
“sterile polarization” of political discourse, used El Sistema as a symbol of non-
partisan pragmatism, as a success that both government and opposition could agree
on, and that rebellious students should strive to emulate, one had to stop and take
notice:
With the love and respect I have for this country, I venture to suggest that the
young people present their arguments with objectivity, that they set themselves
the task of convincing their parents and neighbors all across Venezuela, that they
organize their arguments outside of the sterile divisions created by the
government and the opposition, and make them public. Kids, you need to act
with the maturity and capability demonstrated by the musicians of El Sistema.
(Blades 2014a)

This is how the harmony ideology works: the call is not for justice and freedom
(utopian, disruptive values, however they might be defined), but for “maturity” and
“capability.” Learn to follow the beat, kids.
Need it be pointed out that Venezuela in the waning days of chavismo is one of
the most in-harmonious places on Earth, with decaying industrial infrastructure,
skyrocketing rates of street crime and inflation, an openly paranoid style of official
diplomacy, and regular shortages of basic consumer goods that socialist and
capitalist factions can only explain by accusing each other of sabotage? The motto of
El Sistema, the title of Arvelo’s film, is “tocar y luchar” — to play and to fight — but it
may be time to stop playing around in the fantasy utopia of classical music, and start
fighting in the real world.
Meanwhile, like his mentor, Gustavo Dudamel continues to trade in classical
music festivals as spectacular stagings of harmony ideology. This was how he began
his tenure in Los Angeles, taking a page from the El Sistema playbook and folding a
well-drilled group of disadvantaged young musicians into a free performance — at
the Hollywood Bowl, the Philharmonic’s celebrity venue and cash nexus — of
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the single most canonic attempt in the West at a
musical statement of harmony ideology. Then came the festivals devoted to Mahler
and Tchaikovsky, both Sistema staples. Under the sign of pan-Americanism,
Dudamel brought Rubén Blades himself to Los Angeles, attempting to recreate the

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excitement that had, for a night, united his compatriots, when the Simón Bolívar
Orchestra brought a long-lost orchestral salsa masterpiece, Maestra Vida, back to
vivid life in front of 200,000 spectators at an airfield outside Caracas. But in
Hollywood, the Latin-themed summer concert did not even fill the Bowl, leaving
critics musing about the role of the Philharmonic’s trained musicians in a confusing
spectacle mostly “lost in translation” (Swed 2014). Blades himself, though fiercely
defensive of the cross-cultural, cross-genre impulse, admitted he’d felt out of place:
“many of those in the ‘picnic area’ in front of the stage gave me the impression that
we were a part of some sort of National Geographic-type of evening. Most of them
seemed to have no clue about what was going on” (Blades 2014b). Gustavo Dudamel
is doubtless sincere in his desire to unify Latino and Anglo Los Angeles through
music. But sometimes the multicultural sleight-of-hand does not come off; no
amount of good will and idealism around the YOLA program can change the material
fact that the musicians, management, and audience of the Los Angeles Philharmonic
remain overwhelmingly white, upper-middle class, and strongly committed to a
Eurocentric view of the musical classics.
Meanwhile, challenged in early 2015 by local critic Mark Swed to take a position
on the discordant material reality of contemporary Venezuela — and El Sistema’s
increasingly tricky financial and political position within it — Dudamel fell back one
more time on José Antonio Abreu’s ideal of harmony:
Despite criticism at home for not taking sides in a divided country, he said he is
doubling down his efforts to keep Venezuela’s El Sistema education system out of
politics.

“It is something beautiful that works, that gives hope,” Dudamel explained. “It is
the symbol of union that we need so much in our time.” (Swed 2015)

And, heading back to Ground Zero of the orchestral canon, he promised Los Angeles
another hemisphere-straddling spectacle, a Beethoven symphony festival in which
the culminating statement, thundered out by hundreds of musicians from Los
Angeles and Caracas, would be the old familiar refrain of social unity, “alle Menschen
werden Brüder.”
It may have been churlish of me, but I did not embrace the Beethoven-Fest. Not
because I didn’t think Gustavo Dudamel could lead technically satisfying

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Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 52

performances of these canonical works; or even because I am tired of the works

themselves (although it did irk me to be told again how Dudamel and the Bolivars
would make me hear them “as if for the first time”). I recoiled from the prospect
because I hear in the works of Beethoven an unresolved dialectical tension — a
tension that was long ago banished, as if by sleight-of-hand, from El Sistema’s
translation of the “great” works of orchestral music. In this, I am a follower of
Theodore Adorno, not José Antonio Abreu. If you ask me to choose between music
making as a specter of social justice and actual social justice, I’m going to choose
real-world dissonance over idealized harmony every time.
I don’t believe in ghosts.

Sic ista sine noxa decipiunt quomodo praestigiatorum

acetabula et calculi, in quibus me fallacia ipsa delectat.
Effice ut quomodo fiat intellegam: perdidi lusum.
Such quibbles are just as harmlessly deceptive as the
juggler’s cup and dice, in which it is the very trickery that
pleases me. But show me how the trick is done, and I
have lost my interest therein.
– Seneca, 45th Epistle to Lucilius

References
Adorno, Theodore. (1970) 2013. Aesthetic theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf
Tiedemann. Translated and with and introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor.
London: Bloomsbury.

Adorno, Theodore. (1939) 1998. Beethoven: The philosophy of music. Edited by

Rolf Tiedeman. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.

Arvelo, Alberto, dir. 2006. Tocar y Luchar. [Motion picture on DVD]. Kingston,
NY: Explorart Films.

Baker, Geoffrey. 2014. El Sistema. Orchestrating Venezuela’s youth. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Berlin, Isaiah. 2014. Political ideas in the Romantic Age: Their rise and influence
on modern thought (Flexner Lectures, 1952). Edited by Henry Hardy.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Blades, Rubén. 2014a. Una carta abierta a Venezuela. February 18.

http://rubenblades.com/rb/2014/2/18/venezuela.html.

———. 2014b. A comment on the July 29th concert with Gustavo Dudamel and the
L.A. Philharmonic Orchestra. August 1. http://rubenblades.com/rb/2014
/8/1/a-comment-on-the-july-29th-concert-with-gustavo-dudamel-and.html.

Borda, Deborah. 2013. Keynote speech at “Future Play” conference on Music

Education. London. Transcribed by the author.

Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing culture: The poetics and
politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Coronil, Fernando. 1997. The magical state: Nature, money, and modernity in
Venezuela. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Dudamel, Gustavo. 2014. Statement during New York Times TimesTalks event with
John Adams, March 15. Transcribed by the author.

El Sistema USA. 2015. Elsistemausa.org. Accessed June 2015.

Fink, Robert. 1998. Elvis everywhere: Musicology and popular music at the twilight
of the canon. American Music 16 (2): 135–79.

Fleischmann, Jeffrey. 2015. Deborah Borda: The woman who runs the L.A.
Philharmonic. The Los Angeles Times, February 8.

Frank, Thomas. 1997. The conquest of cool. Business culture, counterculture, and
the rise of hip consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fundación Musical Simón Bolívar. 2013. Fundamusical.org.ve. Accessed March–

April 2013. (The content on this website has changed, and material in English
from 2013 is no longer accessible.)

Hollinger, Diana Marie. 2006. Instrument of social reform: A case study of the
Venezuelan system of youth orchestras. Doctoral dissertation: Arizona State
University.

Kronick, Dorothy. 2014. Why only half of Venezuelans are in the streets.
Fivethirtyeight.com, March 17.

Los Angeles Philharmonic Association. 2015. laphil.org.

Llorente, Juan Antonio. 2006. Entrevista a Gustavo Dudamel: “Quiero seguir

luchando por cambiar la sociedad.” Scherzo 212.

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Nader, Laura. 1990. Harmony ideology. Justice and control in a Zapotec mountain
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———. 1997. Controlling processes — Tracing the dynamic components of power.

Current Anthropology 38 (5): 711–37.

Peterson, Marina. 2010. Sound, space, and the city. Civic performance in
downtown Los Angeles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Economic, social, and cultural rights as basic human rights. In Giving meaning
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Oosterveld, 39–51. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Renato Rosaldo. 1986. From the door of His tent. In Writing culture: The poetics
and politics of ethnography, eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 91–7.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ross, Alex. 2007. The Anti-Maestro. The New Yorker, April 30.

Scott, Allen J. 2000. The cultural economy of cities. London: Sage.

Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-
imagined places. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Spitzer, Mark. 2004. Metaphor in musical thought. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Swed, Mark. 2014. Rubén Blades, Gustavo Dudamel can’t quite connect with Bowl.
Los Angeles Times, July 30.

Swed, Mark. 2015. Gustavo Dudamel ‘very happy’ with decision to stay in L.A. The
Los Angeles Times, March 30.

Torres, L. E. 2002. Final report on the monitoring and evaluation of the impact of
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Tunstall, Tricia. 2012. Changing lives. Gustavo Dudamel, El Sistema, and the
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Williams, David A. 2011. The elephant in the room. Music Educators Journal 98
(1): 51–7.

Notes

1The history of El Sistema is both contested and extremely difficult to research. The
Fundación Musical Simón Bolívar actively seeks to mystify its own origins. Given the
“off the books” nature of Abreu’s maneuvering during decades as both a government
official and arts philanthropist, and the pervasive politicization of almost every fact
about Venezuela since the advent of Hugo Chávez, a researcher has no choice but to
triangulate between the official, quasi-hagiographic narrative (Tunstall 2012, 52–96),
and much darker stories of institutional cooptation and outright corruption laid out
in Baker 2014, 63–91.

2 The “pass” is the fundamental move in any exhibition of sleight-of-hand; originally,

it was literally the ability to pass balls from hand to hand while juggling them with
cups (“faire passer la coupe”). Later it was generalized to any hidden “pass” from one
hand to another, especially involving coins or playing cards; cf. Guyot, Nouvelles
Récréations, 1769, III, 224: “Pour être en état d’exécuter cessortes de Récréations, il
faut savoire faire passer la coupe…” In English, when prestidigitators “make the
pass,” they rely on dexterity, choreography, and misdirection. Often a series of
passes is necessary to set up a complex illusion.

3 The literature on the spatial reality of racial and class segregation in Los Angeles is
voluminous. To get a sense of the situation of cultural industries and the city’s
cultural center(s) within this landscape, fundamental theoretical texts like Soja 1996
can be supplemented by quantitative research (Scott 2000) and ethnographic
fieldwork (Peterson 2010). Sadly, the raw outrage over the concretized injustice of
Los Angeles’ built environment in Davis 1990 is still ethically relevant.

4This example comes from a key document of the “literary turn” in anthropology,
James Clifford’s and George E. Marcus’s 1986 collection Writing Culture: The
Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. See the account of Evans-Pritchard and the
evasive Nuer in Renato Rosaldo, “From the Door of His Tent,” 91–7.

5This language also appears, word for word, as a “core principle” in a planning
document available for download from the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Youth
Orchestra of Los Angeles website (http://www.laphil.com/sites/default/files/media
/pdfs/shared/education/yola/el_sis_fundamentals_jan_2013.pdf, accessed June
2015). One of YOLA’s núcleo sites is officially a member of El Sistema USA, and
primary authorship of the YOLA document is assigned to Mark Churchill, the
Director of El Sistema USA, who was himself introduced to the Venezuelan system
while guiding Sistema Fellows at the New England Conservatory ca. 2009–10.

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6 The most thorough-going evaluation of the possible social benefits of an El

Sistema-style program to date has recently been released by a consortium of Scottish
educational researchers and government auditors. Evaluating Sistema Scotland:
Initial Findings Report, jointly released in June 2015 by the Glasgow Center for
Population Health, Education Scotland, Audit Scotland, and Glasgow Caledonian
University, is a quite guarded document. Most of the research is avowedly
qualitative, relying heavily on self-reporting from teachers and parents, and the
skilled interpretation of drawings and structured conversations with small children.
A multimodal logic model by which Big Noise might cause beneficial social outcomes
is hypothesized, but, as the report itself notes, correlation is not causation: “Future
work needs to develop an understanding of the specific ways in which the Big Noise
programs ‘cause’ the range of ‘effects’ outlined in this evaluation” (78). Researchers
qualify their generally positive assessment by noting that it is still too soon to provide
quantitative data on life outcomes of students in the program, categorizing those as
“long term” effects whose existence can at present, only be hypothesized: “The
outcomes described as long term within the logic models are projected into the
future and are thus theorized, not based on the Big Noise evaluation evidence” (43;
emphasis in original).

7The cultishly religious atmosphere of El Sistema is well-known, and at least one U.S.
press account has compared Abreu’s recent public appearances to those of a secular
pope: “For a correspondent who covered a number of Pope John Paul II’s trips
abroad in his later years, it was an uncannily familiar scene: the charisma, the need
to touch, the patient greeting of the people, special solicitousness for the
handicapped” (Wakin 2012). As Geoffrey Baker notes early on in his carefully
shaded portrait of Abreu, the Maestro, a deeply conservative Catholic layman, is seen
by many to be angling for some level of beatification after death (2014, 25). The
climactic scene of Tocar y Luchar is, in this context, readable as an eloquent and
carefully aimed piece of auto-hagiography.

8They are often not as young as they are assumed to be. In a sleight-of-hand that
would have been familiar to Leopold Mozart and Joseph von Beethoven, the top
“youth” orchestras of El Sistema tend to have a significant contingent of experienced
players who have reached legal majority.

9 It is outside the scope of this essay to follow up the interesting divergence between
this Los Angeles formulation and the original claim, made by proponents of El
Sistema, that in Venezuela, “music is a social right.” Abreu, so slippery in other
regards, has always been clear about this: for him, the right to music is no different
than any other social right guaranteed in the Venezuelan constitution. It is
fundamentally an economic right tied to a guarantee of material well-being,
requiring massive state intervention and control. This view of classical music has
proven totally compatible with Bolivarian socialism; when Chávez threw his support
behind El Sistema and several years later declared it the foundation of his Misión
Música, he was simply folding Abreu’s project into a larger set of governmental
“missions” devoted to other constitutional social rights, including housing (Misión

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15(1) 57

Habitat), literacy (Misión Robinson), medical care (Misión Barrio Adentro), and
food (Misión Mercal). But in the West, cold war liberals have never liked the sound
of “social rights,” preferring to champion “human rights” instead. Rights theorists
note that this implies a negative, individualistic, rather than a positive, collectivist
ethics (Puta-Chekwe and Flood 2011, 41-43): rights are protected when the
government refrains from, to take some familiar American examples, making any law
that abridges freedom of speech, or restricts the right to bear arms, or establishes a
state religion. Thus it is not quite clear what it means, outside of his native
Venezuela, for Gustavo Dudamel to claim music as a “fundamental human right.”

10YOLA claims to serve “over 600” students at three locations in South and Central
Los Angeles (LA Philharmonic website, 2015). The program is growing, and has
recently begun to partner with local educational institutions like the Los Angeles
County High School for the Arts, a somewhat underutilized facility just east of the
downtown fine arts district along Grand Avenue. It has cast its net of “stakeholders”
very widely, committing a phalanx of diverse local arts organizations (including,
unbeknownst to me, my own university!) to “identify and secure resources on local,
regional, statewide, and national levels — in both the public and private sectors — to
support and sustain the success of Youth Orchestra LA.” The Statement of Common
Cause (http://www.laphil.com/sites/default/files/media/pdfs/shared/education
/yola/yola_stakeholder_statement_of_common_cause.pdf) which LA stakeholders
are required to sign is superficially inclusive of multiple traditions, but, like El
Sistema — and the Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall — places Western art
music at the center: “Los Angeles County is home to musical traditions from every
part of the globe, and we believe in the value of each of them. We also believe that
training in classical music is not only intrinsically valuable but also serves as the best
foundation for any other musical endeavor a child might wish to pursue.”

11Coronil notes the close relationship between the Cisneros group and the ill-fated
second administration of Carlos Andrès Pérez, and Baker points out that Jose
Antonio Abreu’s own brother was tangentially caught up in the web of elite
corruption that brought the President down (2014, 44–5). Coronil’s description of
mid-1990s Venezuela seems sadly apropos of Los Angeles in 2015: “The crisis of the
protectionist state and the opening up of the economy have split the nation into two:
an internationally connected upper class and its local associates (about many of
whom it could be said that ‘money is their country’), and an impoverished majority
that includes a shrinking middle class” (1996, 381–3).

About the Author

Robert Fink is Professor of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music,
and Chair of the Minor Program in Music Industry Studies. His research interests
include the politics of contemporary music, classical music and canonic ideology, and
the analysis and criticism of popular music. He is a lover of orchestral music and a
long-time subscriber to the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Fink, Robert. 2016. Resurrection Symphony: El Sistema as ideology in Venezuela and Los Angeles.
Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 15 (1): 33–57. act.maydaygroup.org/articles
/Fink15_1.pdf