News

If Ethnomusicology aims to open itself to the culture of the Other by being in situ experiencing the music and the sounds it produces, my work has a paradox: I go to meet the Other to study the way they learn and play a genre and music set up that has European origins (supposedly). This is the case of the musical education programs El Sistema in Venezuela and Neojiba in Brazil when they use the teaching of orchestral music as a tool for education, emancipation, and citizenship with young people in disadvantaged socioeconomic contexts (Sarrouy, 2022). But each territory has its idiosyncratic way of teaching and playing musical genres. Students' culture has a strong impact on the way they learn and make music. The orchestral repertoire itself goes far beyond the composers who nurtured it over centuries in the Global North. The Global South is full of composers, performers and pedagogues who continue to influence the entire art-worlds of music. The connection between so-called “popular music” and “classical music” is profound (i.e.: Bartók, Manuel de Falla, Arturo Marquez, Villa Lobos…).

On the other hand, the discipline with which I approached the various fields of study in Europe and Latin America was primarily the Sociology of Music. With a strong anthropological base and applying dense ethnography methods, attentive to the micro-sociologies of everyday life, I propose to return to the basis that are the various “actors of music education”: students, teachers, assistants, directors, guardians... and objects too! In what contexts do social interactions develop and how are they affected by them?

Finally, I would like to end the seminar by referring to my most recent research titled “YOUSOUND – Music education as an inclusive tool for underage refugees in Europe” (www.yousound.eu). This concerns other encounters: this time the Other has been “forced” to migrate to Europe and there they may learn orchestral music, contributing to their social inclusion/integration. As we will see, the most important thing is not the musical genre, but rather the nature, quality and durability of the contexts of social interactions where Human Beings resonate.