Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools by Geoffrey BakerKim BoeskovGeoffrey Baker: Rethinking Social Action through Music: The Search for Coexistence and Citizenship in Medellín’s Music Schools (Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021)If indeed there exists, as Geir Johansen has proposed,1 a self-critical movement within the field of music education, Geoffrey Baker is undoubtedly one of its leading figures. According to Johansen, the self-critical turn is characterized by an increasing number of music educators directing criticism toward music education itself by denouncing overly romantic visions of “the power of music” and scrutinizing how music educational practices are implicated in the propulsion of problematic social forces of inequality, oppression, and injustice. Baker’s widely read book from 2014, El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth,2 thoroughly denounced the globally acclaimed Venezuelan ‘musical miracle’ as a myth. Based on extensive field work in Venezuela, Baker painstakingly dissected El Sistema as an archaic, morally, and pedagogically flawed model of music education veiled in the empty rhetoric of music as a tool of social redemption and documented how such models are ripe with opportunities for abuse, in every sad sense of the word.The continuation of Baker’s critical project is published in the form of a four-hundred-page book, entitled Rethinking Social Action Through Music. Baker presents the text as “a ‘post-El Sistema’ project”3 as it constitutes a departure [End Page 92] from his preoccupation with ‘The System’ toward potential alternatives to the Venezuelan model. He finds such an alternative in the Red (Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín), a network of music schools in the Colombian city of Medellín, which figures as the center of attention in Baker’s institutional ethnography. However, even as the Colombian institution is invoked as a counterexample to its Venezuelan sibling, the Red is not held up for its ability to enact social change or display of innovative pedagogical principles. What Baker finds exemplary and worthy of investigation is the willingness he locates within the administrative layer of the Red to continuously engage in reflective work with regards to the tensions, conflicts, and pitfalls, as well as potentials of musical-social work. Particularly, Baker’s attention is directed to the decision-making processes and discussions among the leaders of the institution; how senior staff members adopt self-critical stances, how needs for institutional change are recognized, the recurring frictions between musical staff and members of the institution’s social team, and tensions between public statements expressing confidence in the program’s efficacy and internal conversations full of ambivalence and doubt.It is with reference to the reflexive processes of the Red that Baker conducts insightful and well-informed discussions of a range of themes relevant to music educators and scholars. Baker situates his analysis within the wider landscape of SATM (Social Action Through Music), which can roughly be understood as the field of musical practice emanating from the large socio-musical orchestral programs conceived in Latin America in the last decades of the 20th century and subsequently spread as ‘Sistema-inspired’ offspring throughout the globe in the beginning of the 21st century. Yet, the discussions found in this book are easily connected to pertinent themes of the philosophy and sociology of music education, such as the notion of artistic citizenship, decolonization, the political nature of music education, ‘the social’ in music education, to name a few. One of the striking qualities of this book is its ability to identify important issues in the local context of Medellín, extract the underlying mechanisms and through empirical examples unfold a much broader discussion of what social justice and social change might mean in the field of music education. Baker, originally educated as an ethnomusicologist, reflects on these topics with depth and nuance, underscoring the relevance of approaching these complex issues through ethnographic work, rather than basing such discussions solely on conceptual exploration.Appearing as a red line throughout the book is Baker’s insistence on foregrounding the ambiguity and ambivalence of musical-social work. In fact, his critical encounter with the field...