A great deal has been written about El Sistema [ES], the music education programme originating in Venezuela in 1975, but American music educator and writer Tricia Tunstall's Changing Lives is the first English language book on the topic. It is a timely publication, given the spread of projects modelled on ES in the USA and beyond; Tunstall claims there were at least 30 such projects in the USA by 2011. The volume's content is based on the author's own visits to ES programmes in Caracas and the USA, interviews with organizers, teachers, students and others, and illustrated by 28 black and white photographs. She begins by introducing ES's most famous graduate, the charismatic Gustavo Dudamel, presently conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, then charts the development of the organisation since its creation, interviewing founder José Antonio Abreu. The final chapters tell the story of how ES has been transplanted to communities in the USA.
Changing Lives is, as the jacket says, ‘part history, part reportage’, and does not attempt to offer any critical appraisal of the claim that ES ‘represents the most significant innovation in arts learning in our lifetimes’ (Booth & Tunstall, Reference BOOTH and TUNSTALL2011). Despite the wide international publicity ES has received, however, there remains a lack of qualitative study of the programme (Uy, Reference UY2012, p. 7, but see Majno, Reference MAJNO2012 for a good overview). Some research has encountered a reluctance from ES supporters to look too closely at the work which apparently has an ‘almost magical capacity to inspire’ (Tunstall, xvi), and where terms like ‘faith’ and ‘mission’ (Sistema Scotland) are used to express the zeal of those involved (Allan et al., Reference ALLAN, MORAN, DUFFY and LOENING2010, pp. 17–18). Richard Holloway, Director of Sistema Scotland, says of this publication ‘Read the book. Join the movement. Change the world’. But as another champion, Eric Booth (senior adviser to El Sistema USA), points out, it is no ‘miracle’: there are many hours of highly structured and disciplined teacher-student contact each week, over several years, regular opportunities for group playing and performing (Booth, Reference BOOTH2009). What music-maker would not thrive in this environment?
For music educators in the UK, this book's focus on the adoption of the ES method in the USA is perhaps of limited interest; the ES-inspired ‘Big Noise’ in Stirling, Scotland, has been going since 2008, and ‘In Harmony’ projects in England since 2009. These have generated much publicity and some fairly detailed research. I find it surprising that these and other worldwide examples get barely a mention from Tunstall, despite that fact that as early as 1976 Abreu took his youth orchestra to the International Festival of Youth Orchestras in Aberdeen, a trip which influenced the Venezuelan government's decision to support the orchestra directly (pp. 67–69). This want of a wider context in Tunstall's book is also demonstrated by the lack of a bibliography.
However, Changing Lives offers a useful descriptive account and chronology of the growth of ES in the Americas: its contribution is to bring to life for the reader what it is to be part of El Sistema – as learner, teacher, conductor, fundraiser, parent – and to remind us of music's potential for doing great things in all our lives. A recurrent message throughout this book is that ES is first and foremost a ‘social programme’. Many involved in community arts in the UK have been working in this sphere for decades, and the orchestral model is by no means the only way of making music together. This is not the place to debate whether El Sistema is the best means to bring the ‘transformative power of music’ into the lives of communities, but significant challenges include sustaining the work at a time when many arts projects are drawing on limited funding. Indeed, outside Venezuela the system is currently still in the early years of its development. Changing Lives helps to open up the subject for a more critical engagement with the material.
