El Sistema – Music Education for Social Sustainability

The second case is located in Sweden’s most multicultural city, Malmö. In spite of numerous reach out activities, the municipal music school has had great difficulties attracting students from non-Swedish families. However, with the implementation of El Sistema, the situation has radically changed and now includes children from all backgrounds in targeted public schools.

El Sistema is a system for music education that originated in Venezuela in the 1970s, where it started with the purpose of combatting poverty through extensive training in Western classical music. It is now spreading throughout the world and takes on different shapes as it lands in different educational contexts. In Malmö, the implementation of El Sistema serves as a laboratory to explore the understanding of music education as a tool for integration. To the municipal music school it also serves as a catalyst for change and innovation, since El Sistema forces all involved – the symphony orchestra, the music teachers, the school leaders -to rethink the “taken for granted” discourses on music in schools.

This presentation rests on the results from fieldwork during the first semester of El Sistema in Malmö, inspired by sensuous scholarship and a theoretical framework with roots in ethnomusicology and music education. In Malmö, the El Sistema children and music teachers are all part of a larger initiative to promote a sustainable city, and to prevent the socio-economic gap from growing wider. To the music teachers this new framing of their music teaching has contributed to increased agency and increased awareness of the possibilities for meaningful music education in times of rapid social change.