When my
great friend and tutor Charles Cooper (R.I.P.) read the first draft of my
D.Phil. thesis he scribbled many comments in the margins and in the first page
he wrote: "Too many words". Of course, I had to rewrite the text. In
this case, I have to tell Geoffrey Baker the same. Three hundred and sixty two
pages are far more than is necessary to support what he sets out to argue. However,
he has written an important book for whoever is interested in El Sistema.
Baker
explains that he became impressed with the emotional density of the Simon
Bolivar Youth Orchestra concert at The Proms in London in 2007 and that made
him decide to study El Sistema. He
assures that he went to Venezuela for field work as an admirer of its musical
achievements. He was officially received as a guest of honor and it was only
when he began to be “surprised” by being told, privately and confidentially,
information about the conflictual and tortuous process of development of the
institution that he adjusted his academic research program to be able to write
this book. This is not credible. It is hard to believe that Baker thought all
what he argues in the book as a result of his field work in Venezuela.
Firstly,
it is wholly clear that he is a scholar expert on social studies of music and
as such he had quite a solid baggage of theoretical and ideological positions
when he began his Venezuelan journey. Secondly, some of the core points under
his attack were obviously evident even when he happened to attend the 2007 Last
Night at the Proms concert. For instance:
El Sistema emphasis on the symphonic orchestra. The book is more than a
critical analysis of El Sistema as a social and musical entity. It is rather a
wide deployment of Baker´s ideological positions regarding historical relations
of music with society and I should say about socioeconomic development in
general, on the basis of a case study: El Sistema in Venezuela. Anyway, he has
done a thorough academic job for which I offer my compliments.
Based on
a promotional article that Baker published in The Guardian, some people
publicly expressed outright support for his arguments, even before the book became
available. Being politically motivated, they welcomed the book as an attack on
El Sistema and its leaders, José Antonio Abreu and Gustavo Dudamel. However,
after reading the book it becomes clear that Baker´s article was an unjust
deformation of the width, seriousness and honesty of his research perhaps
motivated to promote sales. I admit it misled me. The book is a monumental tour de force of
written hearsay. It´s ethnography, after all. Such is the social research
method that Baker says he applied to acquire the information that allowed him
to write the book.
The
problem is that ethnography researchers are supposed to interact with members
of the community they are studying without discrimination of pre-determined
categories or groups. It seems that Baker had ears only for critics, skeptics,
disgruntled musicians and political adversaries of Abreu and El Sistema. Puzzlingly,
he says: “I met many people who enjoyed being part of El Sistema…” (p.16) but
then no account is made of their appreciations in the following pages.
Actually, he is pretty clear about it stating that “This book focuses on the
narratives that are currently inaudible and the ways they complicate the
official one; it brings out into the open debates that normally take place in
private” (p.17). Since there seems to be some debate and “it takes two
to tango” I suppose we have to wait for perhaps a second book that hopefully
will present the arguments of the other observers and member of the Sistema
community that are missing this time. In the meantime, Baker feels compelled to
clarify that “[His] relationship with El Sistema, however, is neutral.” and
that “What follows may not be the truth but contains some (inconvenient)
truths …” (p.20). The reader remains wondering whether Baker´s neutrality warrants
a clear and impartial understanding of the cultural value of El Sistema and its
real impact on Venezuelan society or it simply serves the reader a chance of peeking
into the minutiae of power plays and the misery of petty quarreling typical of
large organizations.
The first
two chapters, following the Introduction, are dedicated to depict the roles of
Abreu and Dudamel. The explicit aim is to bring to light the true character and
personality traits of these two leaders of El Sistema from behind the public
images that, according to Baker, have been carefully crafted by some professional
and explicitly hired world class PR machinery. The result is the
characterization of Abreu - who “…is a hard man to investigate” (p.27) - as an
authoritarian, ruthless, vengeful, manipulative, arrogant, secretive,
unscrupulous and enormously ambitious politician (and musician) who has also
shown to be intolerant of critics. His conservatism, Catholic religiosity and
elitism are said to explain much of his behavior. His entire professional and
political career is displayed and discussed for the benefit, I suppose, of
foreign readers since all that is presented is well known to any well-informed
Venezuelan. The characterization is based on informants’ accounts and publicly
available reports and press clippings. Several times along the text Baker
points out that he could not verify or confirm the information, which is fair
enough. Again, it´s ethnography he is attempting.
When it
comes to Dudamel, Baker´s neutrality is strained. Dudamel´s musical talents are
not discussed. In fact, they are not even mentioned. The conductor´s public
image is the object of Baker´s analysis and his rise to stardom is the target
of the criticism. It is while referring to Dudamel when Baker´s ideology begins
to emerge in the book and his neutrality begins to crack and slip away.
Although Dudamel´s rise is anecdotally reported as a conjunction of Abreu´s
decision to promote him and Gustavo´s decision to submit himself to his authority,
it is the actions of his PR agents that shock Baker. He criticizes strongly that
Dudamel landed a contract to advertise Rolex watches; that he is paid $1,4
million a year by LA Symphony Orchestra; that he got a contract with Deutche
Gramophone; that he gets large fees for
concerts in famous venues, like the Salzburg Festival through the actions of
his world class agents and that he travels with all the paraphernalia typical
of the jet set. However, Baker´s criticism is not limited to the individual
case of Dudamel. Actually, Dudamel is criticized for the wider offence of belonging
to the elite of the world musical industry. The culprits are really “music as
business” and “art as spectacle” which, according to Baker, are precisely major
sins of Abreu´s strategy regarding El Sistema.
I suppose
world class performers such as, Yuja Wang, Katia Buniatishvili, Gabriela
Montero, Riccardo Muti, Baremboim and his WEDO, Berlin Philharmonics, The Belcea
Quartet and the likes will feel alluded by this vision of their disgusting
selfish capitalistic exploitation of the sacred art of music making. Ça va sans dire, that we, classical music
lovers, might also be found guilty for our dependence on the “international
music industry” for listening recorded music and watching video concerts. Baker
denounces that star orchestra conductors are making too much money just like
CEOs in private corporations. He thinks that they are being paid salaries and
bonuses many times above the salary of the average worker/musician and that is
not fair. Thus, he brings the question into the realm of the social inequality
issue being currently discussed in the world. Regarding this issue, it doesn´t
seems fair to challenge the three of four musicians from El Sistema who have
made it to the top for following the trend. It is certainly naïve to criticize
the enormous salaries of music top stars as well as those of baseball or
football players and other show business fees and celebrities earnings on the
grounds of “justice”. You may propose many types of solutions to the inequality
problem but it is simply neither fair nor realistic to criticize an individual star
player for negotiating the highest pay possible. On the other hand, it´s not
hard to understand that the larger the audience the bigger the pay.
Several
times along the text Baker feels ethnography as a straitjacket and breaks away
of its limits. His desire to display his ideological positions is restricted by
the descriptive and diagnostic nature of the method. Therefore, after
describing El Sistema’s features and while propounding a more democratic and
shared style of decision making, he goes ahead and criticizes Abreu’s
management and administrative policies as being authoritarian, hierarchical, centralist,
arbitrary and clientelist corresponding “…snugly to capitalist ideology” and to the ways
of the “… Catholic Church, which ´demands authority, without offering,
accountability´ (Deveney 2013)” (p.76).
Baker is
haunted by the question of authority in music making and in society at large.
He emphasizes the analogy of the hierarchical management situation of
capitalist corporations, which he loathes, with the authoritarian relationships
between the conductor and the musicians of an orchestra. He even goes on to
express general rejection of “orchestral music” because of its need for
conduction. Although it doesn´t become totally clear whether he is more in
favor of “conductor-less” music-making such as soloist playing or chamber music
he presents references of an impressive list of “scholarly” studies concluding
that orchestra musicians everywhere are really an exploited, frustrated,
unfairly paid, and suffering class. They are physically injured by too much
rehearsal, publicly humiliated by conductors and engaged in hopeless careers. Furthermore,
orchestras are not favorable for musical education.
The two
chapters dedicated to musical education are very informative and I should say,
pedagogical. I learned a lot reading them. However, as a classical music lover
I remained worried. According to Baker, orchestral music is, to say the least,
“questionable”. He writes: “If orchestras
were widely considered to be positive social and professional environments, then
there would be some basis for El Sistema’s position; but its claims founder on
the numerous accounts by orchestral musicians and experts that reveal large
classical ensembles to be permeated by social dysfunction, questionable
ideologies and pedagogical flaws. The symphony orchestra appears to be a
problematic institution, in Venezuela and elsewhere, leaving El Sistema’s core
idea looking rather threadbare.” (p.132)… this sounds quite ominous to me. I
wonder how the members of the great American and European symphony orchestras
can nowadays resist the pressure of the dysfunctions and keep playing. Why do
they not quit? They live in free countries. I suppose this must be similar to
medical doctors, nurses, soldiers, ballet dancers, cooks and so many other “suffering”
professions. They just love what they do.
The other
chapter is just a sorrowful description of El Sistema music teaching being
another quite familiar “Venezuelan hell”: “there are not enough teachers”; “the
teacher did not come today”; “the salaries have not been paid for months”; “the
spare strings for the violins have not arrived”; “the strings arrived but now
the reeds for the clarinets are delayed”; “you cannot attend class because
there is rehearsal now”; “administration used the money for salaries to pay for
travel costs”; and etc. etc. etc. You know!!! … A good ethnography like this
one would be interesting to be done on PDVSA, the judicial system, the army, the
public schools, the hospitals, the “misiones’ and so many other institutions of
XXI century Venezuela. I wouldn’t single out El Sistema.
This is
the main weakness of Baker’s effort. He doesn’t seem to understand the
historical period Venezuela is currently going through. There is not even one
sentence mentioning the terrible destruction that the 15 years of the chavista
dictatorship has brought to the country. That is perhaps why some people
consider El Sistema as a “miracle”. Whatever it has come to be, it looks like
an exception in the mid of that mess. Half the book is dedicated to dismantle Abreu’s
claim of social action without acknowledging that such claim was just an
indispensable fundraising stratagem to keep El Sistema growing in chavista
times. There was no philosophy, no music
teaching theory, no social development thinking behind Abreu’s approach and
later strategy. It was just political, as well as Chavez’s response. Baker is (“wasting
his gunpowder on vultures” / gastando
pólvora en zamuros) wasting his time demonstrating El Sistema´s failure to
have a significant social impact on “inclusion” of poor children. At least in
Venezuela, that is not the point. Perhaps, Baker´s arguments are useful to open
the eyes of people in other countries but in Venezuela nobody is expecting that
poor children will improve their lives because of the actions of El Sistema.
The
question of sexual abuse figured prominently in Baker’s promotional article
about his book and was subsequently expanded by other British commentator in
another newspaper. Actually, Baker writes that he just heard rumors and hearsay
about sexual activity amongst the youthful community of El Sistema. For a
country having 16 years as the legal age for consent and being well known by
its high statistical number of under-15 pregnancies, his account is hardly
surprising. He found no concrete evidence of sexual abuse apart from
gossips and suspicions expressed by some anonymous informants. However, the
lack of specific references compels him to call for investigation of the matter
because “Power imbalances are at the core
of sexual abuse,”(p.232), “… El Sistema is no exception, since reports of abuse
(psychological as well as sexual) from Venezuela suggest that endemic,
problematic features of classical music education are being reproduced rather
than revolutionized [there].”(p.231) “At
present, the allegations and suspicions [of sexual abuse] that circulate around El Sistema are no more
than that. However, events in the United Kingdom illustrated that even
world-renowned institutions had skeletons in their closets. … The fact that
this problem has not emerged publicly in Venezuela does not therefore mean that
it is insignificant there.”(p.232) In other words, Baker thinks that since
El Sistema plays classical music, since symphonic orchestras are imbalanced
power instances, since there have been abuse in classical music institutions in
the UK, and since there are some monkey business among teachers and
pupils, … there must be some of that in
El Sistema. We better investigate and take measures.
We must
ask then, why do people still support El Sistema? Including myself, for example? My answer is, first of all, because it has
given us good classical, European and Latin-American, old and contemporary
orchestral music of the kind we love and also because it has increased the
social appreciation of classical music in Venezuela and elsewhere; it has
augmented somehow the quality and the quantity of musicians and music making in
our country; it has snatched a few precious resources away from dilapidation
and corruption and it has given us a little pride of being Venezuelans. All
this is emotional all right but I sustain these are valid reasons. Some people think the cost has been too large
but, as per Baker´s estimate, at least 170.000 youngsters are learning music in
EL Sistema and we have now some infrastructure and an organization that can
certainly be changed for the better in the future.
A key
point of my disagreement with Baker stems from his implied ideological position
regarding the appropriate strategy that should be implemented in a country like
ours. Important social and economic
scholars have argued in the past that underdeveloped countries should adopt a
strategy that avoids competing with developed countries by not trying to enter
into the frontiers of advanced technological competition among the dominant
economic powers of the world. Such approach implies that it is hopeless and wasteful
to enter into a race for a place in the key ranges of world economy. In this
paradigm E. F. Schumacher wrote his book “Small is Beautiful” in the 1970s.
According to that view underdeveloped countries would be better off by trying
to apply production technologies that could be more adapted to their abundance
of labor, their scarcity of capital and their low level of social organization
and governance. This sort of arguments is still part of a truly paternalistic
ideology that permeates wide sectors of the western academic community.
However, as anybody can see, it hides the belief that underdevelopment is going
to be a permanent trait of the world forever and that it is preferable to
capitalist development (ref. p. 104).
Contrastingly,
I believe that without attempting to advance through jump starting innovations
and efforts, underdeveloped countries will have no hope to catch up. I also think
that it is just not morally valid to propose developing a separate world for the
poorest countries isolating them from the global advances of humanity even if
these were historically originated in The West. Thus, when these thinkers criticize
(ref. p.187) the focus on classical, orchestral and performance-oriented music-making
in countries like Venezuela on the grounds that it is an elitist European
centered strategy, reminiscent of the colonial past, I have to reject it as
well because I want my country to be aiming to be culturally wealthy and strong
and not left behind. We must be able to compete in any field: economic,
scientific, artistic, political and whatever. I want my people to play and
enjoy our folk music and the music of our composers but also that of the
greatest geniuses of history.
The last
chapter is an effort to look constructive after all. Baker sets out to explore
ways to make good use of some of El Sistema´s “illusions”, “practices” and “ideals”
that have remained in “lip service” status. By doing so he finally but
implicitly acknowledges that there have been some benefits of Abreu´s endeavor.
However, he says that it is the way that El Sistema is being interpreted,
followed and adapted in the other 70 countries (he presents the cases of
Scotland, Brazil, Colombia, USA and Australia) where it is being more or less reproduced,
that seems to be pointing in the right direction, not because the Venezuelan
Sistema has shown the way. Emphasis on including needy children, on community
relationships, on professional teaching of music, on promoting of creativity
and diversity, and other policies of the sort, leads him to express hope that
the whole idea could be socially beneficially. “´Social action through music´
is an important idea that deserves careful consideration” he says… after all!
Trying hard
I could summarize Baker´s interpretation, in the last chapter, of the underlying
political soup as follows (ref p.309): El Sistema has been always conservative
and traditionalist and as such it had the support of conservative groups in Venezuela.
Abreu decided to give it a leftist “social” façade in order to get money from
Chavez. Then the conservative sectors rejected the Sistema because, for them, it
became chavista while the cultural left in the UK supported it because it
sounded “social” which, as shown, it is not and since El Sistema is based on
the authoritative, exploitative and anti-democratic XIX century symphony
orchestra they should not support it. Then everybody is wrong and Abreu and
Dudamel are the only ones profiting. How about that?
His comparative
analysis leads him to propose a series of measures aimed at improving the
social impact of El Sistema in Venezuela. He is right on that point, of course.
For instance, in regional terms El Sistema could be managed better. His remarks
about the need to reinforce regional “nucleos” vis-a-vis the ones in
Caracas are truly valid. His comments about the excessive scale and cost of
performing infrastructure (auditoriums) in detriment of basic resources like
instruments and accessories are obviously correct, to say the least, and so on.
After
reading the book one remains with the impression that in spite of its inexplicable
overkill of Abreu, Dudamel, the symphony orchestra and classical music
education, it is a useful academic study for future research and action in
Venezuela and elsewhere.
