Dominant discourses promote El Sistema and Sistema-inspired music education programmes as positively transforming young lives through social inclusion and musical excellence. However, critics have raised concerns that the El Sistema model has little support from objective, evidence-based research. To address this issue, the authors conducted a…

Professional development can help to ensure teaching artists have the requisite knowledge and skills to lead effective instruction. However, the specific format of professional development can vary. One organization that provides professional development for their teaching artists is the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) program, which is an El…

Between 2007 and 2017, El Sistema -- Venezuela's national system of youth orchestras -- enjoyed a seemingly unexplainable meteoric rise, followed by an equally spectacular sunset. Although it would be easy to dismiss this Sistema decade as being no more than a peculiar aberration of music education history, I assert that El Sistema more accurately…

Pearson explored the relationship between the use of Sistema COC with learner outcomes like students' achievement in the simulated national assessments. Pearson conducted a study comparing results on the SimENEM, a practice exam, for students in Sistema COC schools with similar students in public and private schools not using Sistema COC. The…

Within the growing field of publications on El Sistema and Sistema-inspired programmes around the world, a marked divide can be observed between the findings of critical academic studies and commissioned evaluations. Using evaluations of El Sistema in Venezuela and Aotearoa New Zealand as our principal case studies, we argue that this gulf can be…

Sistema COC is a learning system for Brazilian private school students attending kindergarten through 12th grade. Its mission is to prepare students for assessments administered by the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (INEP) of the Brazilian Ministry of Education. The most important of these assessments is the Exame Nacional…

El Sistema music programmes have blossomed over the past decade, with the aim of fostering social development through intensive orchestral music instruction. Many scholars agree that creative music making can facilitate student agency development, increase a sense of belonging and promote creative expression by allowing students to bring their…

In this article, I visualize the relationship between tonewood exploitation and the import of musical instruments for Venezuela's El Sistema, with the participation of the Venezuelan State, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and manufacturing companies from China and the Global North. My basis…

El Sistema is a Venezuelan program of social change that has inspired a worldwide movement in music education. El Sistema inspires social transformation and musical excellence to occur simultaneously and symbiotically. This study examines: What does El Sistema look like within the context of a public school partnership in the United States? How do…

Over the last years, "El Sistema" has been enthusiastically received around the world and has inspired several proposals aiming to transplant it to different contexts in different countries. It would seem, then, that "El Sistema" constitutes a renewed approach that allows a place for inclusive music education within the…

A powerful and eulogistic narrative has evolved around the Venezuelan National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras, better known as El Sistema. Recently, however, critical perspectives have begun to emerge from the academic sphere. Nevertheless, researchers have faced an acute shortage of documentary resources relating to the programme's…

The study focuses on how preschool and musical school teachers experience working with El Sistema-inspired activity at two municipal preschools in a multicultural district in a medium-sized Swedish town. What, according to the educators,is the most significant aspect of working with El Sistema-inspired activities? The theoretical point of…

Music called to future conductor, Gustavo Dudamel, at an early age. Though his family could not afford music lessons, Dudamel did what thousands of children in Venezuela do. He went to one of the hundreds of music schools of the National System of Children and Youth Orchestras of Venezuela. Founded in the 1970s by pioneering musician and economist…

In this article, we present part of the results from a wide-ranging research study addressing "Orquestra Geração" (OG), a "Sistema"-like project set up in Portugal in 2007. "Orquestra Geração" strives to bring about, through collective musical practices, the social inclusion and social mobility of children and…

El Sistema orchestras may be "transformative" and produce positive changes in the lives of young participants, but there are also negative aspects to discipline and authority that may lead to exclusion. This article positions itself within the current debate on Sistema by treating symmetrically its potentially positive and negative…