A CULTURAL HISTORY OF

WESTERN MUSIC

IN THE
MODERN AGE
VOLUME 6

Edited by
William Cheng and Danielle Fosler-Lussier

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 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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 CONTENTS

L ist of I llustrations  vii

S eries P reface  x

Introduction: The Stories We Hope to Share  1

William Cheng

1 Society: Global Trajectories and the Universal-Particular Paradox  25

Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang

2 Philosophies: Theosophy and Esoteric Musical Modernism  49

Anna Gawboy

3 Politics: Music, Nation-States, and the “Small World” in the Long

Twentieth Century  79
Danielle Fosler-Lussier

4 Exchange: Modernist Approaches across Oceans and Borders  105

Marysol Quevedo

5 Education: Children’s Music and Visions of Citizenship  133

Anicia Chung Timberlake

6 Popular Culture: Musical Performance as Cultural Activism  157

Ellie M. Hisama

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 vi CONTENTS

7 Performance: The Changing Norms of Musical Practice in

Everyday Life  181
Stephanie Jensen-Moulton

8 Technologies: Media, Myths, and Movements  205

Penny Brandt and Rob Deemer

N otes  230
B ibliography  239
N otes on C ontributors  265
I ndex  268

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 CHAPTER FIVE

Education
Children’s Music and Visions of Citizenship

ANICIA CHUNG TIMBERLAKE

This chapter explores music education in the modern age by examining three
well-known methods for introducing children to Western art music. These are
the Orff Schulwerk (first developed in the early 1930s in Munich, Germany),
which teaches “musicality” through percussion-based improvisation on
instruments designed specifically for children; the Suzuki method (Matsumoto,
Japan, 1945), which aims to “immerse” children in a musical environment by
having them listen to and practice a set of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
works; and El Sistema (Caracas, Venezuela, 1975), an orchestral education
program and social mission that trains children collectively in daily intensive
group rehearsals to perform in a standard symphony orchestra. All three
methods remain in use across the globe as of this writing.
These methods offer both political and musical education: they attempt
to cultivate young citizens through the act of teaching music. In each case,
learning a musical skill is believed to contribute to learning an essential
personal trait, be that joyous bodily experience, a “noble” heart (Suzuki 1969:
25), or the ability to turn away from violence and poverty. All were designed
specifically for children, who have—since the age of Rousseau in the eighteenth
century—been viewed as tiny, unspoiled reflections of human nature. Children
have therefore represented the tremendous potential of a future citizenry and,
simultaneously, a tremendous responsibility for the adults in charge of them
(even as children themselves tended to remain low-status and powerless). Each

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 134 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC IN THE MODERN AGE

pedagogical method offers a different blueprint for how this potential might be
realized: how children might grow from naive, untutored beings to full-fledged
musical citizens, and what the relationship between music and social life should
ultimately look like.
Although these methods envision citizenship differently, they share a
concern for equality. Each system is designed to teach music to all children, and
each rejects the notion that inborn talent determines successful music-making.
Thus each method assumes that all children are essentially similar, regardless
of differences in identity, class background, or national origin. Yet “similarity”
means different things for each pedagogy. The percussion-based approach of
the Orff Schulwerk posits that rhythmic play is intrinsic to all children. The
premise of the Suzuki method is that innate talent does not exist in the first
place: children are born blank slates (tabulae rasae), and any child can learn
to be remarkable given the correct upbringing. And El Sistema presumes that
a structured orchestral education can provide all children with the social and
personal competencies to succeed economically. Taken together, these methods
represent a faith in the universal that is at odds with inherited principles of
professional music education and with twentieth-century educational trends
more generally (see also Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang’s “Society” chapter in
this volume).
Since the Romantic era, Western classical music has relied on the idea of
the exceptional “genius”—a person whose abilities are natural and God-given
rather than learned. In the realm of music, it was mostly composers who were
deemed geniuses, but performers and even listeners were sometimes thought to
be particularly gifted as well, possessing a sensibility that cannot be taught (Bonds
2017). This idea of natural gifts has underpinned much of professional music
education in the modern age. Throughout the twentieth century, most prominent
performers and composers were trained at selective music conservatories. As
the ethnomusicologist Henry Kingsbury has argued, the idea of innate talent is
central to these institutions. Having “talent” is the precursor to acceptance at
a conservatory, and it is also the condition for successful learning. The word
“talent,” however, can refer both to a pre-existing ability (which, because it
is already there, doesn’t need to be taught) and the potential to acquire that
ability: in his words, “Musical talent is that which can’t be taught to the few
who can be taught it” (Kingsbury 1988: 82). Kingsbury suggested that talent is
a socially acceptable way of establishing and naturalizing differences between
people, for it “contributes significantly to the reproduction of a structure of
inequality in social power” (1988: 79). Accordingly, professional education
is concerned not only with training performers but also with establishing and
reifying hierarchies among them. Such differentiation has increased across the
twentieth century, with a growing number of professional musicians seeking (and
paying for) postgraduate degrees, and ever more jobs requiring such degrees.

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 EDUCATION 135

In the anglophone university system, performers can earn bachelor’s, master’s,

and doctoral degrees in music performance, as well as an array of “certificates.”
The formalizing of music education emerged alongside an explosion in new
standardized testing for general education. These testing strategies—such as the
IQ tests devised in 1911 by the French experimental psychologist Alfred Binet
(1857–1911), and the university readiness tests administered across the United
States—were intended to allocate resources and future political power among
children by assessing their intrinsic worthiness (Garrison 2009), meaning that
the satirically intended concept of “meritocracy” is now being taken literally
(Young 1958). Against the backdrop of general educational trends towards
differentiation and hierarchy, any rejection of the notion of talent is, in itself,
a radical move.

THE ORFF SCHULWERK: A GENTLE BEGINNING

Figure 5.1 shows a group of children playing barred instruments (pitched

percussion struck with mallets) at a Munich dance studio in 1988. The four
seated in the front are playing high-pitched (treble) instruments, and the two
seated in the back are playing bigger, lower-pitched instruments. The children
are focusing intently on their hands, with no notated music in sight. Along the
back wall, seven children stand; some appear to be clapping. The children’s
garb—leotards and tights with soft shoes—signals that they are expecting to
move. It’s likely that in this class they will have been improvising an ostinato
accompaniment (a short pattern, repeated), either to a well-known tune or to
an improvised melody. The instruments show gaps where bars were removed,
such that each instrument is capable of playing only a five-note (pentatonic)
scale. This minimizes the potential for dissonance. Taking breaks between
songs, the children will have engaged in exercises for posture: stretching and
twisting, modeling an exaggerated poor posture and then correcting it.
These children are engaged in the Orff Schulwerk method, based on the
idea that music-making is a natural human instinct continuous with the instinct
to move. To develop this instinct fully, children take the lead in the musical
process while the teacher acts as an unobtrusive guide. Rather than formally
instructing children in scales or triads (often regarded as the building blocks
of music), her task is to encourage children to explore sonically, providing
them with gentle suggestions of familiar songs to sing, chants to intone, short
rhythmic patterns to be clapped and stomped, and instruments such as those
pictured above. The German composer Carl Orff (1895–1982), one of the
method’s inventors, proposed that given this freedom, children in groups will
invent melodies and accompaniments of their own accord, often finding their
way to short ostinatos, for which he believed they had a particular affinity. The

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 136 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC IN THE MODERN AGE

FIGURE 5.1 Children at the Suse Böhm dance studio in Munich play Orff percussion
instruments. (Photo By DEA/A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images.)

child, then, acts a conduit for a musical practice that will unfold naturally out
of her own body through the mechanisms of play. As Orff put it, “Playtime
is the starting point. One should not come to music—it should arise of itself.
What is important is that the child be allowed to play, undisturbed, expressing
the internal externally. Word and sound must arise simultaneously from
improvisatory, rhythmic play” (Orff [1932] 2011b: 68).

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 EDUCATION 137

The Origins of the Schulwerk

The Schulwerk was developed by Orff and the composer and teacher Gunild
Keetman (1904–1990). Published between 1950 and 1954, the five volumes
of the Schulwerk offer sample exercises that encourage children to improvise
percussion accompaniments to familiar tunes, using a host of child-friendly
instruments: recorders, xylophones, metallophones, glockenspiels, timpani,
drums of all sizes, gongs, cymbals, triangles, and rhythm sticks. The published
volumes followed decades of earlier artistic and pedagogical collaborations
at the Günther School, a school for dance and rhythmic gymnastics that
Orff and the dancer Dorothee Günther (1896–1975) founded in 1924, and
where Keetman was a student. Orff, Günther, and Keetman were part of an
experimental “body culture” that flourished in the Weimar Republic from
around 1910 to the early 1930s. According to the historian Karl Toepfer,
this culture displayed a new interest in the expressive and revelatory qualities
of the human body, which took the form of nudism, dance, gymnastics, and
other kinds of performance. The many women—for it was primarily women—
involved in Weimar body culture celebrated the body’s potential to trouble the
traditional division between reason and intuition, and saw bodily performance
as a new way to explore identity under modernity.
At the Günther School, dance and music were twinned impulses, developed
in tandem; indeed, it was customary for dancers and musicians to change roles
during performances. The ultimate goal of this artistic practice was to restore
a “lost” nature to the citizenry. The modern age, Günther contended, had
destroyed the unity of the human self. Instead of obeying the natural rhythms
of the body, the day, and the seasons, people lived according to a strictly
organized time that proceeded at a hectic tempo. An artistic education that
focused on rhythm would produce a “rhythmic person” who, instead of merely
reacting to the order imposed from without, would generate her own (Günther
[1932] 2011a: 78).
Thus energized, the re-rhythmicized populace would create a new and vibrant
amateur music culture. According to Günther and Orff, the supremacy of art
music—much of it virtuosic and difficult to perform—was both a symptom
and a cause of an age that had lost touch with nature. In art music, one person
played while others admired him. This was a passive activity for listeners, and
it dovetailed too well with the passivity already common in the modern age. In
contrast, the new amateur music-making would take place in groups, so that
players would listen and create simultaneously. It too would preserve the unity
of active and passive, of movement and sound. The “elemental” sound of this
music would become, in Orff’s words, the start of a “new spirituality” (Orff
[1932] 2011b: 76).
Orff explained that the music was “elemental” for two reasons: the ostinato
playing style and the instruments themselves. Indeed, the instruments were

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 138 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC IN THE MODERN AGE

of paramount importance. Orff believed that the instinct to play could “only
be released through primitive instruments,” meaning the barred percussion
instruments and drums that he prescribed for his method (Orff [1932] 2011b:
72). On the one hand, he considered these instruments to be simpler and
closer to the origins of human music than “art” instruments like the piano or
violin, whose construction was more complex. On the other, it was sound—
the “primitive demonic [daimonic] world of sound”—that these instruments
created, which encouraged unselfconscious play (Orff [1932] 2011a: 100).
Invoking at once the supernatural and the exotic, Orff drew a stark contrast
with the sounds made by the instruments of Western art music, which, to
him, offered so many timbral possibilities that they actually discouraged free
experimentation.
Orff was first introduced to African and Asian percussion instruments
through museum tours given to him in the early 1920s by the musicologist and
organologist Curt Sachs (1881–1959), who through the end of the decade was
the director of the State Instrument Museum (Staatliche Instrumentensammlung)
in Berlin (Kugler 2000: 178). Sachs had made his name in musicology by co-
inventing (with Austrian ethnomusicologist Erich Moritz von Hornbostel
(1877–1935)) in 1914 a system to classify all known instruments, both Western
and non-Western. The Sachs-Hornbostel system is still widely used today. From
Sachs, Orff and his collaborators also learned about early twentieth-century
comparative musicology (a precursor to ethnomusicology). Comparative
musicologists at the time believed there was an essential difference between
“natural” people (“Naturvölker”) and “cultured” people (“Kulturvölker”).
“Natural” people existed in a state of unity with nature. Like nature itself,
they had not changed over time, and they had therefore not entered “history.”
Their societies were organized into tribes: they had little, if any, commerce;
their writing (if it existed) was rudimentary; and their dance and music were a
“natural” expression of their bodily states. In this line of thinking, which few
would subscribe to today, “natural” people experienced everything as a unity:
word and melody, gesture and music, self and other. Among the “natural” people,
everybody was musical, for music was integrated with the rest of life rather
than being a separate formalized course of study. Comparative musicologists
identified as “natural” primarily Asians, Africans, South Americans, and
Pacific Islanders: in other words, peoples subject to colonial rule. In contrast,
these musicologists thought that “cultured” people (Europeans) had changed
dramatically over time. It seemed to them that complex societies had produced
achievements in art, science, and technology, but these achievements had also
created a sense of alienation. “Cultured” people felt profoundly separated from
other people and also from the instincts and urges of their own bodies. This,
of course, was not a new diagnosis of the modern condition. The difference
was that twentieth-century Germans believed they could back up this belief

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 EDUCATION 139

with recent scientific discoveries by archaeologists, anthropologists, and

ethnographers (Zimmerman 2001).
Accordingly, when Orff described his barred percussion instruments as
“primitive,” he was using the word in two senses: to refer to the supposedly
originary qualities of the instruments and their sounds, and also, more
significantly, to indicate the cultures from which the instruments had come. To
Orff, these instruments were primitive because they came from Asia and Africa.
He believed these places were the cradle of humanity, and he thought his
Asian and African contemporaries were analogous to the ancestors of his own
“advanced” European civilization. Through this double meaning of the word
“primitive”—originary but also exotic—Orff and his collaborators saw a way to
restore a lost way of life to the modern age. For, as Günther asserted, children
of all nations and “primitive” people from “natural” places were essentially
similar. Children too experienced music and movement as one, danced without
thinking about it, and experienced an unquestioned sense of belonging in the
world. To restore these unities, then, Orff looked to the material traces of
“natural” cultures: xylophones, drums, rattles. These instruments, which he
believed would be instinctively attractive to children, would permit children
truly to experience their own natures, thereby developing into adults undamaged
by the pressures of modernity. The notion of “primitive” people provided both
a model for children’s education and evidence that that model would work
(Günther [1932] 2011a).
Orff had a mostly successful career during the Third Reich, and the
Schulwerk’s fate paralleled the composer’s. After World War II, Orff would
imply that the method had been banned, but he had in fact done his best to
promote it, petitioning his publisher to put out Schulwerk instructional manuals
for fife and drum, to be played by the Hitler Youth, and for recorder choir, to
be played by the League of German Girls. The Schulwerk’s most public moment
came at the “Youth Festival” that opened the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin.
Dorothee Günther and the dancer Maja Lex (1906–1986) choreographed mass
dances performed by students from the Günther School and four thousand
children (Kater 1995). To accompany the dances, Keetman provided musical
accompaniment, Einzug und Reigen der Kinder (entrance and round dance of the
children) and Einzug und Reigen der Mädchen (entrance and round dance of the
girls).1 The cheery major-mode pieces were built on familiar Schulwerk principles:
ostinato phrases performed by a high-pitched, chiming ensemble of Schulwerk
instruments. They displayed Orff’s twin preoccupations with medieval music
(another type of “originary” music) and with percussion: recorder choir, viola de
gambas, shawms, and guitars played alongside barred instruments (xylophones,
metallophones, glockenspiels), and a full drum complement.
In light of this troubled history, historians would later point out some
common aims between Orff’s own aesthetics (in the Schulwerk and in the works

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 140 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC IN THE MODERN AGE

he composed for adults) and Nazi cultural ideals, such as the veneration of a
better past and of the unique force of the body. For people today, these shared
traits raise important questions about complicity and about the impossibility
of separating art and politics. What they may further underscore for us is the
central role that specifically corporeal ideas of knowledge have played, and
continue to play, across the modern era.

Orff and the Child

According to the records kept by the International Orff-Schulwerk Forum
Salzburg, formally certified Schulwerk associations exist today in thirty-eight
countries (International Orff-Schulwerk Forum Salzburg 2013), and Orff-
inspired teaching likely happens in other places as well. Orff pedagogy has
changed and diversified since the 1930s. The original beliefs that informed this
pedagogy—that children and “primitive” tribes are similar—have largely lost
credibility, especially as anthropologists have turned away from the assumption
that there is an originary human nature to be “discovered” through the study
of non-white people. (Largely, that is, but not entirely: as recently as 2010, the
Orff scholar Michael Kugler wrote that “although the cultural conditions for
the use of the Orff Schulwerk are different than they were at the beginning of
the 1950s, the anthropological constants have not changed”—implying that he
still subscribed to the equation of “natural” people and children (2000: 43).)
Orff teachers, like all teachers, design their approach to fit their communities.
Whereas early practitioners reinscribed a division between white/“cultured”
and non-white/“primitive” by positioning European and Anglo-American
folk songs as the end goal of the instruction, Orff instructors today teach
songs from a variety of cultures. But even as they have left behind the more
troubling anthropological “proof” that originally justified the choice of drums
and xylophones, the belief that these instruments are especially suitable for
children has remained. It is easy to begin playing a drum and to produce a range
of sounds: this instrument offers young children the opportunity to pay close
attention to how they use their hands and fingers. Xylophones, like pianos, are
visual—you can see all the notes laid out before you—although, unlike pianos,
xylophones permit the removal of bars to simplify the array.
Another lingering constant is the notion of an essential child whose qualities
are believed to be biologically determined and therefore universal. Early Orffians
took this particular issue seriously, arguing that universality meant timelessness,
and that children should be taught fairy tales and spared from encountering
machines, or anything that seemed modern rather than ancient (Reusch 1954:
50). These ideas have shifted over the second half of the twentieth century:
few today would claim that fairy-tale narratives are intrinsically appealing to
children. What remains, however, is the idea that there are sounds, movements,

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 EDUCATION 141

and practices that make intuitive sense to the child’s body regardless of when
and where she is raised: joyous, uninhibited spontaneity, an instinctive drive
towards rhythmic play, and a matching fascination for rhythmic music. The
point of the Orff method, then as now, is to train these supposedly natural
gifts, finding ways for children to explore their creative instincts without the
constricting effects of overthinking.
More broadly, then, the method proposes that there is something essentially
human inherent in children. And, because it is predicated on the notion that
we lose a core part of ourselves in growing up, it participates in a fundamental
discourse of modernity—the belief that there is a vast distance between the
past (who we were) and the present (what we have become). Unlike many of
their contemporaries, however, Orff and Günther did not accept this alienation
as the price of historical progress, so they sought instead to stitch up the gap
between then and now, child and adult. A lost paradise seemed just barely out
of reach to them, visible though it remained in contemporary anthropology,
dimly remembered from “the times of our grandparents” (Günther [1962]
2011b: 114). And although their words were often hopeful, Orff and Günther
also conveyed a sense of protective nostalgia, even regret, for our lost pasts. As
a model for citizenship, the method is profoundly backward-looking, offering
a return to (an ill-defined) harmony instead of future knowledge, justice, or
equality. It is a politics based on the keen awareness of loss.

THE SUZUKI METHOD: SLOW PRACTICE

Like Orff and Günther, the violinist Shinichi Suzuki (1898–1998) believed in
the innate goodness of children. Reminiscing about his late teens, Suzuki wrote
in 1969:

I had learned to realize how precious children of four and five were, and
wanted to become as one of them.
They have no thought of self-deception.
They trust people and do not doubt at all.
They know only how to love, and know not how to hate.
They love justice, and scrupulously keep the rules.
They seek joy, and live cheerfully and are full of life.
They know no fear, and live in security.

… Most of these beautiful children would eventually become adults filled

with suspicion, treachery, dishonesty, injustice, hatred, misery, gloom.
Why? Why couldn’t they be brought up to maintain the beauty of their

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 142 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC IN THE MODERN AGE

souls? There must be something wrong with education. That was when I first
began to think along these lines.
(Suzuki 1969: 75)

Suzuki surmised that what caused children to acquire these ugly qualities
was flaws in their environments, and therefore that children, if parented
correctly, would become adults who retain their beautiful souls. Soon he
would also conclude that a person’s self was all nurture and no nature. For
evidence, he drew on his own experience and on stories from the natural
world, marveling at how nightingales learn to sing from other nightingales. He
retold a tale of twin girls brought up by wolves in India. One had developed
a taste for rotten meat; “she was immune to change in temperature and did
not perspire” (Suzuki 1969: 18–21). Consequently Suzuki maintained that
upbringing was everything: “A clever baby can become tone-deaf. It can even
become a wolf. In fact, it can become just about anything according to its
specific environment” (1969: 24).
Born into a family that owned Japan’s first violin factory, Suzuki began to
play the violin at the relatively late age of twenty. (In his family, the instruments
were crafted, not played.) In 1920, he moved to Germany, where he allegedly
studied with the violinist Karl Klinger (1879–1971). Returning to Japan,
Suzuki took up a teaching post at the Imperial Conservatory in Tokyo. Around
this time, he claimed to have had a flash of intuition—“Oh, why Japanese
children can all speak Japanese!”—that would link his belief in nurture with
his occupation as a violin teacher (Suzuki 1969: 9).2 It was immersion in a
Japanese-speaking environment that taught the children. They were not born
with the ability, and none was better at Japanese than the next. Similarly, he
concluded, there must be no such thing as innate musical talent. Instead, just
as every child could learn to speak, every child could learn to play. “Musical
aptitude does not come from within, and is not inherited,” Suzuki stated, “but
occurs through suitable environmental conditions. It is only a question of
sensitivity and adaptive speed” (1969: 24).
These ideas undergird Suzuki’s violin pedagogy, which he named “Talent
Education,” and which he began practicing in 1946 at the Matsumoto Music
School in Japan. It is now known as the Suzuki method. Although the method
originated with violin instruction, it has since expanded to offer training not
only in other string instruments (viola, cello, bass, guitar, and harp) but also in
piano, organ, voice, trumpet, flute, and recorder. In 2007, it was estimated that
400,000 students in thirty-four countries had learned according to the Suzuki
method, though estimates vary wildly (Yoshihara 2007: 38). The approach was
built on the principle of immersion. First, parents were to awaken an ear for
music by playing music for their children from a very young age, often on

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 EDUCATION 143

records. This would prime the baby to be musical, as “inspiration and interest
are acquired involuntarily by an infant from everything he sees and hears, like
a seed that is planted” (Suzuki 1969: 17). Suzuki related a baby’s delighted
reaction to a Vivaldi concerto that her sister had been practicing: “‘See—that’s
my music,’ she unmistakably wanted to tell her mother.” This early start bore
fruit: several years later, that delighted child appeared in his studio and quickly
became one of his most accomplished students (Suzuki 1969: 17). Suzuki often
illustrated his claims with personal anecdotes of this sort. On their own, they
might not be sufficient evidence for the method’s efficacy, but they clearly
reveal Suzuki’s own firm belief in human perfectibility.
In Suzuki’s method, when children are old enough to hold an instrument—
which can be as young as two—they start taking lessons with a private teacher
at regular intervals. The first lessons are spent learning a posture that feels easy
and relaxed. For the violin, an instrument which thwarts bodily symmetry,
this is no small task. Figure 5.2 shows children performing at the 43rd Suzuki
Method Grand Concert in 1997 (a concert presided over by Suzuki himself).
Note how the children face forward, resisting the temptation to turn their
heads even as their eyes slide towards their instruments. Their left hands
curve gently around the fingerboards, remaining light and mobile: it is the
weight of the chin that holds the instrument in place. The fingers of their right

FIGURE 5.2 Young violinists perform at the 43rd Suzuki Method Grand Concert.
(Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images.)

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 144 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC IN THE MODERN AGE

hands are similarly curved in a loose grip, the product of much practice, as the
body’s inclination is to clench the long, unwieldy bow tightly.
After posture is mastered, children start playing a set of rhythmic variations
on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which Suzuki believed to be the best-known
song in the world (Wright 2018: 235). At home, these children continue to
listen to recordings of the pieces, ideally many times a day. They also practice
their instruments daily, repeating isolated physical movements (for instance,
rhythmic patterns with the bow) and small segments of music (sometimes just
a few notes) over and over. Parents attend their children’s lessons, take notes,
and monitor their daily practice—a significant investment of time, and often
challenging for parents without previous musical training. (Some parents report
learning musical skills alongside their children.) Children also attend group
lessons and perform in group concerts. Thus the Suzuki method aims to design
an immersive environment in which every child can slowly master musical skills
(Peak 1996). As Suzuki explained, it was akin to climbing a mountain, step by
step: “Do not hurry … do not rest in your efforts” (1969: 56).
After working through the “Twinkle” variations, students study pieces in a
sequence laid out in a series of ten books (though few students reach the final
volumes). The books present a carefully plotted journey through the Western
art music repertory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Suzuki teachers
emphasize that the core of the method is the approach to repetitive practicing
and listening, rather than just the repertory. Yet the repertory is also essential. In
selecting a musical “language” for children to learn, Suzuki chose the style with
the most regular, pattern-like syntax: the music of the mid- to late-eighteenth
century. The many short exercises that Suzuki himself wrote to train technical
skills teach, essentially, the vocabulary common to that repertory: characteristic
rhythmic patterns such as dactyls (long-short-short) and anapests (short-short-
long), melodic gestures such as arpeggios, and compositional patterns such as
melodic sequences (when a short tune is repeated on a different pitch).
Like Orff, Suzuki saw music education as a means to a social end: he often
said that his aim was not so much to train musicians but rather to train a “fine
and pure heart.” To a parent asking whether their son would “amount to
something,” he replied that the child was on his way to becoming a “noble
person through his violin playing,” a far superior goal (Suzuki 1969: 25).
Suzuki’s own descriptions of his method explain its musical and moral aims as
if they were the same, defining “a true artist” as “a person with beautiful and
fine feelings, thoughts and actions” (1969: 30). Indeed, he argued, refining
the soul should precede the artistry. “If a musician wants to become a fine
artist,” he said, “he must first become a finer person,” which to Suzuki meant
a person who approached life, and the violin, with joyous humility (1969: 95).
These personal qualities would show themselves in beautiful tone. This belief
in the ennobling power of musical playing stems in part from Zen Buddhist

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traditions. Both Zen Buddhism and the Suzuki method focus on slow, repetitive
practice as a way of unfolding the true self by way of eliminating the ego. As the
American musicologist Robert Fink puts it, “the journey was the destination,
the reward of practice not to play better, but to be a better person” (2005:
227). But Suzuki did seem to think that the sounds of music itself, and not just
the act of practicing, had lessons to teach. He described learning from Mozart’s
music to answer the “piercing sadness” of life with overwhelming love (1969:
92). Only love, he concluded, would make a life worth living.

Suzuki in the United States

When the Suzuki method was exported from Japan to the United States—first
to Oberlin Conservatory in 1958 through a short video of children playing,
and then through a 1964 U.S. tour that Suzuki took with ten students—it was
the repetition, not the moral transformation, that would stick in the American
imagination. Indeed, repetition became the nexus for a number of concerns
that reverberated around the United States in the subsequent decades. These
concerns pertained not only to the method’s efficacy but also to maintaining
the status of purportedly Western values in Western art music.
The first concern is a loss of creativity. In Fink’s diagnosis, part of the
discomfort that (white) U.S.-American parents experienced with the method
in its early days was its expectation that the child would listen repeatedly to a
recording and emulate it. American children also learned to play popular music
styles by imitating recordings, so the idea was not new. But Fink suggests that
the practice touched a nerve for Western classical music, an ideology of which
holds that the job of the performer is to “interpret” the musical score such
that the performer’s creativity is displayed even as the composer’s intention is
realized accurately. To imitate the sounds of recordings rather than working
from a written text might take the element of personal creation out of the
picture. Fink argued that parents and others feared the child would learn
to imitate without understanding. He illustrated the point with a linguistic
hypothetical: “The use of recordings shifts Suzuki’s naturalized ‘mother tongue’
instruction toward something much more rigidly mechanical …. One can
hardly imagine a child learning to speak idiomatic English through phonetic
drill and repeated viewings of Hamlet on videotape … Of course, she might
be able to recite, perfectly yet uncomprehendingly, the part of Ophelia—even
at age four” (2005: 222). The theme of imitation destroying creativity runs
through American discussions of the method across its sixty-year history in
the United States, as Lindsay Wright has shown. In 2014, for instance, the
American fiddle player and teacher Mark O’Connor wrote that “the Suzuki
Method basically develops technique by way of massive amounts of repetition
along with obedience-based learning (follow my hand, do as I do, I am always

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right and you are always wrong approach) that has spawned the least creative
50-year era in violin history” (quoted in Wright 2018: 219).
At the same time, these concerns about the method’s results—that repetition
and imitation harm creative playing—mirror a wider set of racist stereotypes
about players. Musicians of Asian descent are often described as being
inherently imitative rather than creative, conformist rather than individualist,
technical (“robotic”) rather than emotive (Yoshihara 2007; Wang 2014). These
descriptions slip effortlessly between referring to the performance and referring
to the performer’s body and self. (The similarity between the accusations leveled
against the Suzuki method—from Japan—and the accusations still leveled against
ethnically Korean, Chinese, and Japanese performers underscores the reductive
stereotyping underlying both.) And such tropes can be found everywhere, from
YouTube comments about skilled young performers to formal reports on the
state of concert music. A 2014 Newsweek article about prodigies pointed out
that most competition-winning pianists were from China, made a reference
to “tiger parenting” (U.S.-American shorthand for strict Chinese parenting
made part of the public lexicon by Amy Chua’s 2011 book Battle Hymn of the
Tiger Mother), bemoaned the loss of “true prodigies” who married “promising
artistry” with technical skill, and quoted a (non-Asian) pianist who worried
that “the danger is that we’re creating machines that can play any piece at any
speed.” The article was accompanied by an image that reinforced the idea of
Chinese conformity, an aerial shot of repeating rows of young Chinese pianists
seated at identical upright pianos (Figure 5.3). The camera angle obscured their
faces, emphasizing instead the patterns created by their matching white shirts
and the backs of the pianos, arranged in concentric circles (Braw 2014).
Suzuki would have rejected all of these concerns. For him, the point of talent
education was that all skills, including creativity, were learnable by all people
given a conducive environment. Thus a person of any ethnic background could
learn any music, and indeed any language. While this notion is orthodox in
linguistic circles, it is more contested in discourse about music performance and
especially about violin playing. Violinists traditionally divide aspects of their
technique into national “schools,” which have both characteristic technical
qualities and also characteristic sounds. Suzuki’s students in Figure 5.2 were
using a “Franco-Belgian” bow hold, in which all fingers are curved and the
index finger meets the bow between the middle and upper joint; other violinists
might use a “Russian” bow hold, in which the wrist is pronated, the pinky is
almost straight, and the index finger meets the bow near the base of the finger.
These habits, and the sounds they produce, are clearly products of training.
A non-Russian violinist trained by a member of the Russian school will have a
“Russian sound.” At the same time, however, musicians often describe sound as
if it were the product of genetic predisposition. For instance, the Swiss violinist
Alberto Bachmann (1875–1963) wrote in his Encyclopedia of the Violin that “it

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FIGURE 5.3 An aerial photograph of pianists performing outdoors in Hangzhou

accompanied a 2014 Newsweek article that argued, among other things, that most
prodigies displayed technical perfection but lacked artistry. (Photo by STR/AFP/Getty
Images.)

might be said that the violinist of every race presents in his playing something
of the character, the defects and the qualities of the people of which he is a
member.” He continued: “The further north one goes, the more temperament
the violinists seem to have, the Russians in particular, and the Slav in general,
offering the most noticeable proof of this contention … The Germans cultivate
a style of playing far more severe and studied than do the Slav peoples; yet as a
rule they are less gifted” (1925: 167).
These words are nearly a hundred years old. But metaphors of blood and
language, of innate and learned behavior, continue to mix freely even in music-
educational discourse of the recent past. A 2007 New York Times video about
Chinese-born students at the elite Juilliard Pre-College program featured a
piano instructor marveling, in a way that recalled Suzuki’s own preoccupation
with environment, at her students’ skill at understanding Western music despite
their having been raised with the sounds of “Asian music.” But she described
her first impressions of a (then-ten-year-old) Chinese student’s performance
of Rachmaninov in terms of nature, not nurture: “My God, the kid must have
Russian blood in him.” “But he didn’t,” she continued, “yet he understood
the music intrinsically. So there is something that crosses the borders when
it comes to Western music” (McDonald and Wakin: 2007). As Grace Wang,

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Mari Yoshihara, and Mina Yang have all shown, reactions of this sort—and
they are common—persist despite the fact that Western classical music has been
widespread in East Asia since at least the latter half of the nineteenth century
(Yang 2007; Yoshihara 2007; Wang 2015). Many musicians in East Asia and
across the world grow up immersed in European art music. Such music is not a
foreign language. But this teacher attributed the student’s skill not to his own
ability to learn, or even to the East Asian history of performing Western art
music, but rather to the music itself: it had been universal enough to reach him.
Ultimately, what these more problematic stereotypes share with Suzuki’s
own ideas is a conviction that characteristics of the self come out in musical
performance. For Suzuki, who believed children were blank slates, this meant
that playing style could diagnose issues of temperament and, even more
importantly, solve them: a timid person could become confident through
practicing an assertive sound (Peak 1996: 363). For other teachers, the
connection between self and playing was significant not because it promised
students an opportunity to improve their character, but because it could reveal
traits or bodily predispositions believed to be immutable. That these traits
often ended up overlapping handily with assumptions about race or “national
character” is discomfiting, though perhaps not surprising. Although Suzuki
embraced contemporary ideas about language, insisting that music training,
like language acquisition, depended on the environment and not the individual,
the fact remains that music is something played by bodies. It is in our ideas of
the body that the oldest, stubbornest ways of understanding others are stored,
and it is therefore in the body that notions of human perfectibility run aground.

EL SISTEMA: BECOMING SPIRITUALLY RICH

The twin issues of Western music as moral betterment and as a universally

accessible repertory would also inform the most powerful educational
movement of the late twentieth century, the orchestra training program
El Sistema. El Sistema was founded in February 1975 in Venezuela by José
Antonio Abreu (1939–2018), a Venezuelan orchestral conductor. Its origin
story, told and retold, promises that passion and struggle will be rewarded.
Abreu, frustrated that orchestral jobs in Venezuela were going to musicians
from other countries, started his own ensemble, which began with eleven
players in a garage. The ensemble grew quickly. It gave its first concert in April
of 1975 for the Venezuelan government, which eventually agreed to fund
a nationwide youth orchestra education system, now officially known as El
Sistema Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela,
Fundación Musical Simón Bolivar, or El Sistema for short (Tunstall and Booth
2016). Initially aiming only to train young musicians to play classical music,

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El Sistema broadened its focus in the late 1990s to include social reforms,
such as alleviating poverty and preventing violence (Baker 2014: 163–7).
As of the late 2010s, it defines its mission as enacting social change through
musical training, namely the “pedagogical, occupational, and ethical rescuing
of children and youth through the instruction and collective practice of music
dedicated to the training, prevention, and recuperation of the most vulnerable
groups in the country” (Stainova 2019: 892).
El Sistema’s innovation is not its instructional method, as with the Orff
Schulwerk or the Suzuki method, but rather its institutional structure.3 In
Venezuela, the system consists of a network of 443 núcleos (music centers)
across the country that provide instruments and lessons to all children who
wish to join, mostly free of charge. No auditions are required. Children spend
their after-school hours at the núcleo, as well as some hours on weekends;
it becomes a de facto childcare center. Teachers mostly instruct children in
group settings as opposed to individually, drilling them in the rudiments of
musicianship (counting, playing together) as they simultaneously rehearse
canonical works of the orchestral repertory. As students improve, they can
audition for higher-ranked orchestras, some of which offer paid positions.
The highest of these is Venezuela’s most famous orchestra, the Simón Bolívar
Orchestra (formerly the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra; it is no longer only
for youth). Led by the conductor Gustavo Dudamel (born 1981), El Sistema’s
best-known alumnus and the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic,
the Simón Bolívar Orchestra has toured the world to extremely positive press—
one commenter, in assembling a 2008 “World Cup” of professional orchestras,
ranked the ensemble, then still a youth orchestra, fourth in the world (Tunstall
and Booth 2016: 10). According to the most recently available official data,
about 1,012,000 children were enrolled in El Sistema in Venezuela (Sistema
Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela 2016).
“When you train musicians, you train better citizens,” Abreu has said,
seeming to echo Suzuki (Baker 2014: 163). Venezuela’s El Sistema has inspired
a now-global set of programs built on that idea. The American teachers and
advocates Tricia Tunstall and Eric Booth have identified at least 360 Sistema-
inspired programs in sixty-nine countries, a number that shot up around 2009
and has been steadily increasing since. “Sistema-inspired programs,” according
to Tunstall and Booth, are programs that focus on “social goals” (using music
education as a means to achieve social outcomes), advocate inclusion (they do
not require audition or prior preparation), and use time-intensive ensemble
learning. Further criteria involve creating a supportive learning environment
and fostering mentorship relationships (Tunstall and Booth 2016: 359–83).
What these programs do not share with Venezuela’s El Sistema is an extensive
network of state-funded núcleos, which are mostly local. As such, they adapt to
local needs, and Tunstall and Booth cite examples of programs offering music

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education in styles and repertories other than the Western orchestral canon.
Venezuela’s El Sistema, however, still largely prioritizes Western art music.
El Sistema is uniquely beloved. Its concerts garner visibly enthusiastic
reactions uncommon for symphony orchestras. At a 2007 New Year’s Eve
concert in Caracas, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra performed one of its
showpieces, the “Mambo” from Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 musical West Side
Story. A video from the event shows the orchestra members dancing onstage,
with the trumpet players spinning their instruments. The audience members,
many of whom are standing, clap and cheer, shouting “Mambo!” along with
the orchestra; some onlookers laugh with joy. The musicians are laughing, too
(Mambo! New Year’s Eve Concert 2007 from Caracas, UmbrellaClassical 2008).
Aside from the high-quality, high-energy performances visible across the world,
the program’s mission, publicized in documentaries, laudatory reporting, and
a TED talk, is emotionally affecting. A 2009 documentary, Music to Change
Life, dramatizes the children’s personal and musical growth, interspersing shots
of the youngest practicing on homemade paper violins with scenes of older
children playing difficult orchestral repertory (Smaczny and Stodtmeier 2009).
Viewers are invited to trace a line from shy make-believe to confidence. The
documentary also weaves in explanations of the dangers of Venezuelan city life,
making an argument that the social program really works. “Hands that have
touched a musical instrument will never again hold a gun,” a music teacher
told the anthropologist Yana Stainova (2019: 892). In 2008, the conductor Sir
Simon Rattle (born 1955) called for Abreu to receive a Nobel Peace Prize.
Although the program is compelling, it is also controversial. The British
musicologist Geoff Baker, who claims to be the first scholar to do research
on the “everyday realities” of El Sistema beyond its widely known success
stories, has concluded that such stories are exceptions within an otherwise
dysfunctional, even harmful, system. The failures are kept secret through
sleight-of-hand: outsiders, including documentary crews, are shown a few
successful núcleos in which many of the children are from middle-class, not
lower-income, families. Meanwhile, the vast disparities and abuses across the
system are hidden by closed archives and repressive policies that discourage
members from criticizing the system. Baker reports that funding across núcleos
is unequal, that nepotism and corruption are common, and that sexual abuse
goes unchecked. Musically speaking, Baker argues that many children are not
learning to play individually or read music. Instead, the orchestral sections drill
small portions of pieces over and over again, an inefficient rehearsal process
that consumes many hours a day. Moreover, there is little evidence that the
program leads to social betterment. As Baker puts it, El Sistema operates under
the notion that “playing orchestral music automatically produces positive
social action” (Baker 2014: 169; emphasis in original). Provide the music, and
the rest will work itself out. Lastly, as several other scholars have indicated,

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there is an unsettling colonialist, elitist logic to the idea that South American
children should be pulled out of poverty by the Western classical canon. “El
Sistema breaks the vicious cycle [of poverty] because a child with a violin starts
to become spiritually rich,” said Abreu. “When he has three years of musical
education behind him, he is playing Mozart, Haydn, he watches an opera: this
child no longer accepts his poverty, he aspires to leave it behind and ends up
defeating it” (Baker 2016: 17). To assume that Mozart and Haydn inspire poor
children in a unique way is to assume that people who are materially poor must
also be culturally and spiritually poor—and to assume that what is keeping
them in poverty is a lack of individual imagination, rather than a series of state
policy choices (Bates 2016).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, discourse about El Sistema is polarized. There
is little middle ground to be found between Baker’s exposés, publicized in
multiple newspaper articles and also on a blog, and a more common tradition
of hagiography. This chapter does not attempt to create that middle ground.
Instead, I wish to ask why we are so willing to believe that programs in Western
art music might be effective social interventions, and what we might learn about
musical citizenship in the modern age from the particular set of emotions and
beliefs on which El Sistema relies.
The idea that art can defeat social ills such as violence and poverty is moving.
It is also the fulfillment of an old promise. One expression of this ideal came from
the German philosopher Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who in 1795 offered a
theory that traced political dysfunction to imbalances within the individual. He
proposed that people are born with two opposing ways of interacting with the
world: a “sense drive,” which perceives and seeks to satisfy need (hunger, desire,
etc.), and a “form drive,” which seeks to organize the world into recognizable
patterns. Both drives are natural and necessary. Both also have drawbacks if
overused. A person who obeys the sense drive is ruled by their desires, whereas
someone who obeys the form drive seeks to rule others. In apprehending
beautiful art, however, one could combine these instincts into a “play drive,”
experiencing simultaneously the art’s sensuous pull and the appeal of its logical
organization. (For more on Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education, see
Adrian Daub’s chapter “Popular Culture” in Volume 5.) Schiller believed that
this combination, if enacted by many individuals throughout a society, could
create a state ruled by moral principles which could also recognize the unique
humanity of each person. By apprehending art correctly—seeing the beautiful
object as an end in itself—the citizen could practice treating other people as
ends rather than means (Schiller [1795] 2014).
Schiller’s idea that art matters for good governance and citizenship has
animated a number of public art initiatives, not least the institution of the
museum. Beyond El Sistema, many twentieth-century pedagogical programs
linked music education with social betterment in ways that recall the belief

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that art melds mind and body, intellect and sentiment. At mid-century, for
instance, one could observe numerous efforts at making “high” art accessible:
British educational media programming, East German factory choirs, Leonard
Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (Guthrie 2014; Kopfstein-Penk 2015).
Such efforts were supposed to train the mindset required to truly appreciate
“serious” music. Engaging with this repertory was meant to temper the
purportedly negative effects of popular music on habits and morals. In a
related example, an American psychologist determined in 1993 that a group
of students performed better on a spatial reasoning test in the ten to fifteen
minutes after they had heard a Mozart sonata. The study’s modest claims were
quickly misinterpreted as proof that the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(1756–1791), specifically, would raise children’s IQ. This “Mozart Effect”
went on to inspire decades of arts programming and parenting advice. In 1998,
for instance, the governor of the state of Georgia (US) earmarked $105,000
to distribute CDs of classical music to parents of newborns. (According to
the New York Times, “during his budget address on Tuesday, Mr. Miller [the
governor] played a bit of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ on a tape recorder and then
asked the lawmakers, ‘Now don’t you feel smarter already? Smart enough to
vote for this budget item, I hope’” (Sack 1998).) Even my own undergraduate
students have reported that their California high schools played them Mozart
during standardized tests. The same logic arose in Venezuela, when, in 2015, El
Sistema began offering a program in which music was played to fetuses in utero
to forestall children turning to a life of violence (Logan 2016: 67). That so
many people latched onto the Mozart study suggests that it confirmed a belief
that they had held all along.
Social betterment is an open sign. The notion can be interpreted in wildly
different ways. Across the twentieth century, classical music’s supposed power
to improve the individual was harnessed to a range of ends, all of which
reflect the desires and anxieties of a particular moment. Some people aimed to
improve taste and morals; others wanted to increase intelligence. Abreu, for his
part, believed music could teach children to make good choices by balancing
their reasons and emotion:

Music plays a part in shaping one’s personality, which is a key aspect of

education. Not only must we help children develop their intellect and
acquire factual knowledge, we must also help them develop their emotional
awareness, the aesthetic potential that all children and young people possess.
This will enable us to open up new horizons for them and help us protect
them from any dangers and temptations they may face.
(Quoted in Smaczny and Stodtmeier 2009)

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All of these examples echo Schiller’s hope. They focus on cultivating the
individual citizen’s self, trusting that each person’s small improvements will
automatically create larger social progress through a kind of ripple effect.
Such pedagogies therefore place the responsibility for political change on
the individual. This notion can be problematic. As critics of El Sistema have
pointed out, issues that Venezuelan youth face, such as systemic violence,
state-sanctioned crime, and poverty, are large-scale problems that can only be
addressed by structural solutions. To posit that poverty, for instance, can be
transcended by individuals, in Baker’s words, “may actually stabilize an unequal
distribution of social and economic opportunities” (2016: 17).
A second issue shadows this and other Schillerian pedagogies. Venezuela’s El
Sistema is set up to train citizens on an individual level, but it remains agnostic
about the larger political structures—economic systems, legal institutions,
states—in which these citizens are embedded. This has always been true,
and it became especially apparent in 2014 and 2015, when large numbers of
Venezuelans protested against the recently elected president Nicolás Maduro
(born 1962), demanding more security, an end to corruption, and fairer prices.
The state response was swift and violent. Dudamel, called upon to take a side,
refused to do so. In an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, he wrote:

If I aligned myself with one political philosophy or another, then, by

extension, I could also politicize El Sistema. That might turn a revered and
successful program into a political punching bag and make it much more
vulnerable to political whims. El Sistema is far too important to subject to
everyday political discourse and battles. It must remain above the fray. To
those who believe I have been silent too long, I say this: Do not mistake my
lack of political posturing for a lack of compassion or beliefs.
(Dudamel 2015)

These remarks encapsulate the tension inherent in El Sistema. The project

promises “better” citizens who will reject violence and rise out of poverty.
This is a political vision, but it takes place in the abstract. The minute that the
enterprise is confronted with the specific, urgent questions of actual violence
and poverty, its leaders retreat, asking to “remain above the fray.” In essence,
then, El Sistema aims to train citizens, but at the same time is designed to
stop short of teaching the regular activities of citizenship—advocacy, protest,
choosing a side. Dudamel’s comments were entirely consistent with El Sistema’s
own brand of politics: idealize the generalized social good without advocating
for the transformation of policies or statecraft.
Of course, as many commentators have pointed out, El Sistema has always
been “politicized” in other ways. It is the beneficiary of considerable state money.

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FIGURE 5.4 El Sistema musicians pose for a picture with Emine Erdoğan and Cilia
Flores. (Photo by Murat Kula/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

Its orchestras are frequently called upon to perform symbolic diplomatic roles.
Figure 5.4, for instance, shows a youth orchestra, in Venezuelan flag jackets,
posing for a picture with Cilia Flores (born 1956), the wife of Nicolás Maduro,
and Emine Erdoğan (born 1955), the wife of Turkish president Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan (born 1954), as they visited El Sistema in Caracas in 2018. Tensions
in El Sistema’s philosophy are clearly evident to many orchestra members. Yana
Stainova describes attending anti-government protests in 2014 with musicians
who had been required to play at state functions. Other members remain on
the sidelines; a parent with whom Stainova spoke expressed misgivings that the
musicians receiving salaries and expensive instruments on loan would protest
against the state that provided them.
On May 3, 2017, Armando Cañizales, an eighteen-year-old El Sistema
violist, was killed at a protest. Dudamel issued a statement against the repressive
policies of the Venezuelan government, writing:

Democracy cannot be built to fit the needs of a particular government

or otherwise it would cease to be a democracy …. I urgently call on the
President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen
to the voice of the Venezuelan people. Times cannot be defined by the blood

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of our people. We owe our youth a hopeful world, a country where we can
walk freely in dissent, in respect, in tolerance, in dialogue and in which
dreams have room to build the Venezuela we all yearn for. It is time to listen
to the people. Enough is enough.
(Cooper 2017a)

In response, Maduro canceled a tour of the United States that Dudamel was
going to take with the National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. “Welcome to
politics, Gustavo Dudamel,” Maduro said in an address, adding, “don’t let
yourself be deceived into attacking the architects of this beautiful movement of
young boys and girls” (Cooper 2017b). Maduro thereby made his own claim
for the orchestra’s political purpose: its very existence proved the righteousness
of his governance. Maduro’s move highlights the open-endedness of so many
pedagogies that seek to harness the political force of music. Because the
citizenship values being put forth are so broad and so effortlessly acceptable as
“good,” they can easily be co-opted by any state and any ideology.

CONCLUSION: BACK TO UNIVERSALS

The universal aspirations of the Orff Schulwerk, the Suzuki method, and El
Sistema cut across the grain of many major political developments of the last
century. It seems out of pace with postwar decolonization and increasing
national self-determination to assume that all children can or should be taught in
the same way. Yet bold transnational ideas are a hallmark of the long twentieth
century, when people imagined humanity’s problems could best be solved by
global efforts (Esperanto, the League of Nations, the Paris Climate Accords,
corporate power). Indeed, it is the widespread success of these pedagogies that
makes their ambitious universalism visible in the first place. It is one thing to
claim that a method will be useful for all children, and quite another to actually
have the method practiced on six continents. Familiar political tensions reappear
and become magnified in global practices of elementary music pedagogy.
The fact that two dominant strands of music education in the Western
tradition originate outside of what is typically called the “West” may remind
us that the learning and practice of Western music has never been restricted to
the geographic West. The globe has always been musically connected in ways
that both bow to and buck Western-dominant structures of political power. For
example, British colonialists exported a piano certification system to Malaysia,
and Cuban violinists trained by Soviet teachers emigrated to teach in the United
States (Kok 2006; Hardan forthcoming). El Sistema and the Suzuki method

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 156 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC IN THE MODERN AGE

merely make the connections more visible, revealing the co-ownership and co-
creation of Western musical traditions.
Yet as Deborah Bradley (2014) has argued, a pedagogical belief in universal
values is itself colonial. And universalism is central to the mythology of Western
art music, especially as articulated by earlier German philosophers and critics:
the music is supposed to be timeless and universally valid, and to reflect human
truths that transcend history, nation, and language. In the global spread of
Western pedagogy, we see the triumph of this colonial ideal. The three
pedagogies I have examined posit Western musical styles as being foundational
and unmarked “basic skills.” Orff, for one, believed that his method taught
children fundamentals that, because they were rooted in a shared set of human
instincts, could be brought to bear on any other musical tradition. However, the
Schulwerk uses five- and seven-note scales, duple and triple meters, and straight
rather than syncopated rhythms, all of which are common to Western music
but not to many non-Western traditions. Similarly, many El Sistema-inspired
programs across the globe justify using Western classical music as primary
education by arguing that the skills taught will be a “universal gateway” to
other forms of music-making (Logan 2016: 86). This claim is inaccurate, for a
canonical education in orchestral music teaches ensemble performance but not
complementary skills such as improvisation or composition.
Universalism, then, cuts both ways. The hopeful notions of global belonging
that inspired pedagogues such as Orff and Suzuki to declare a common basis
to humanity are the same notions that too easily become totalities, mistaking
historically contingent visions of utopia for timeless and culturally neutral
truths. And because these pedagogies seek to solve modernity’s problems
by invoking the aspects of human experience commonly thought to resist
rational analysis—play, creativity, beauty, the body itself—it is perhaps no
surprise that they can preserve long-outdated, inegalitarian beliefs about
those same bodies along with genuinely held convictions about individual
perfectibility.
People have long believed in music’s extraordinary powers to affect
interior life precisely because music supposedly meshes so well with irrational
experience. What is striking about these three methods is how they link
interior, spiritual betterment with exterior, material change. In doing so, they
reproduce the tensions of twentieth-century Western citizenship writ large,
illuminating how the modern era’s faith in self-improvement as the key to
a better society jostles uncomfortably with the increasingly unavoidable
knowledge that individual betterment alone cannot solve the problems facing
a globalized world.

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