Music in Medellin: Citizenship, Social Development, and Urban Renewal

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The field of "social action through music" (SATM), a term popularised by Venezuela's youth orchestra program El Sistema, currently faces two problems: a paucity of rigorous research, and a disconnect between that research and the practice and policy spheres. My proposed project is intended not just to augment that research base but also to inform, and ultimately impact on, practitioners and policy makers. Focusing on Medellin, Colombia, it will explore how musical practices shape and are shaped by conceptions of citizenship, which is central to SATM, and consider the impact of music education programs on social development and urban renewal. It will entail a year of ethnographic fieldwork, and build on my previous research on El Sistema, music education and citizenship, music and the city, hip hop, and cultural policy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Medellin was considered the murder capital of the world. In 1997, aiming to reverse the city's fortunes, the city government adopted a strategic development plan labelled "social urbanism" for its emphasis on education, culture, and citizenship. A key initiative was the creation of a network of 27 music schools in poorer neighbourhoods. An important hip hop scene also arose around this time, and gave rise to a number of educational projects. The result is a city with a remarkable concentration of music education activity, particularly on the urban margins, in which issues of citizenship and social development play a prominent role.My project will take a comparative, relational approach, exploring the different managerial regimes that organise musical activity in Medellin and focusing in particular on (1) the Network of Music Schools (predominantly classical music); (2) Cultura y Libertad (hip hop schools); and (3) Canto Alegre (Colombian popular music). My primary research questions are:1. How is citizenship conceptualised in different institutional contexts and musical genres? And how do conceptions of citizenship relate to actual practices of music making and learning? My initial hypothesis is that the Network imagines the personally responsible citizen, whereas Cultura y Libertad focuses on the justice-oriented citizen (Westheimer & Kahne, "What kind of citizen?"). Canto Alegre is chosen because, in contrast, it targets the upper-middle class, from which the city's future leaders are likely to come, and thus approaches the questions of citizenship and social development very differently. I will focus primarily on education, but also consider music making and listening more broadly as potentially fostering "intimate citizenship" (Stokes, The Republic of Love).2. In what ways does music education serve as a form of social development? Heightened publicity surrounding El Sistema has led to an upsurge of interest in the potential of music education to ameliorate a range of problems in disadvantaged sectors of society. Youth orchestras, in particular, have been a central focus, because of the presumed benefits that they bring in terms of teamwork, discipline, solidarity, and inclusion. However, my book El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela's Youth (OUP, 2014) revealed that such benefits were neither fully conceptualised nor (in many cases) realised in the Venezuelan context. Further research on the theory and practice of SATM in other contexts is thus a high priority.3. What roles have music policies played in processes of urban renewal?Music education plays a prominent role in "social urbanism," Medellin's strategic development plan. The city government has also embraced the "creative city" paradigm as part of its urban renewal strategy, and Medellin was recently designated as a City of Music within UNESCO's Creative Cities Network. The use of music and education in the city's reimaging attracts national and international investment, yet inequality is rising. Music may therefore play ambiguous, even contradictory, roles in broader urban processes.