In this article, I draw on my experience as an instrumental tutor with a music program inspired by and explicitly linked to El Sistema, to explore new perspectives on Sistema-based pedagogy and management. Detailed ethnographic description of an orchestral session provides a first-hand account of the program's pedagogy, which I then contextualize within an analysis of the written directives and conversations that shaped and constrained practice. I argue that this program, a deliberate attempt to replicate the El Sistema model, recapitulates authoritarian, teacher-centered modes that marginalize the potential for children's creativity and agency, while obscuring these dynamics within an ideologically incoherent and ambivalent discourse that employs tropes of progressive education. I also demonstrate how tensions concerning the autocratic nature of the management structure and the program's instrumentalism and high ambition play themselves out in the written record, analyzing the discursive strategies which authorize the program's methods and the points at which they are vulnerable.