Description
In scholarship on El Sistema (Baker 2014; Verhagen, Panigada, and Morales 2016) and El Sistema-inspired programs (Bull 2016, Baker 2022), little attention has been paid to the opinions of the young participants in the programs. Yet children and teenagers have ideas about the musical repertoire assigned, which in many cases contrast with the music they listen to in domestic and non-program-related social environments. This paper examines the voices of participants in the SOMOS Música program, an alternative, government-funded music education initiative in Santa Fe (Argentina), designed to promote social change and democratize music education in marginalized communities. In Santa Fe (pop. 400,000), which exhibits geographically embedded social inequalities, SOMOS operates orchestras in low-income neighborhoods. SOMOS prioritizes the “Orchestra-School” method, emphasizing not just ensemble performance but also social skills such as discipline and teamwork. This paper is an autoethnographic narrative and analysis of my experiences working in SOMOS from 2019 to 2024. Informed by document analysis, as well as theories of coloniality (Mignolo and Walsh 2018; Quijano 2007), cultural diversity and hybridization (Bhabha 1988), my paper critically examines the program’s official repertoire, comparing this with young participants’ own preferences and choices. I conclude that SOMOS’s foundational structure fosters cultural tensions by reinforcing colonial hierarchies. In consistently positioning Western European music as “superior” to that preferred by the children and teenage participants, SOMOS ignores their complex musical identities, shaped by their engagement with popular and “folk” music alongside western classical music.
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