I think the part I enjoyed most about my thesis was writing the introduction. This is an (edited) version:
One problem with using universals as a guide to discovering the origins of music is the difficulty in defining music in a way that is equally valid for all cultures, and valid as well in the eyes of different societies of humans. The world’s cultures vary (and varied in the past) in the degree to which they have the concept of music and in the value and function they assign to it.
Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music
I am writing this introduction after completing the rest of the chapters of this work, and I am writing it in the first person to reflect what this research and the Whiplash project represent: a reflection of my life as a musician and educator.
From a very young age—without knowing everything that step would later entail—I began playing the piano, and almost by inertia, I ended up in the conservatory. This relationship with music stretched on for many years, splitting my life between what I did in the mornings and what I did in the afternoons: the life of school and the life of the conservatory. Multiplication tables in the morning and a Bach fugue in the afternoon. I belonged to two distinct worlds, and as Nettl defines it, each had its own structure, its own social hierarchy, and its own rules.
There came a point where I decided to pursue music professionally and entered the conservatorio superior. Upon arrival, I met many people like me, who had childhoods filled with multiplying in the morning and playing Bach in the afternoon. I also realized that the conservatory continued to constitute that type of musical society where—continuing with the analogy of Nettl’s work—there was an Olympus of composers who were revered, where we all shared similar habits, where there was a hierarchy among instruments and instrumentalists, and where the performer sat at the top of the chain. Although I belonged to the jazz department, the society within it remained the same; it’s just that my new god was Coltrane instead of Bach. In short, it was a society with established, immovable values and structures.
After finishing my undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to continue my education in the US, to be part of a university that was a benchmark in jazz education, to experience the tradition of this genre firsthand, and to take classes from some of the most renowned educators in the field. The experience was very different and very similar at the same time: while the center and the teachers were different, the values of the «society of musicians» Nettl spoke of remained the same.
After this long process, my mind was shaped exactly as dictated by the values of the societies I had been part of—absolute and immovable values. When I finished my time as a student, I got a job at a university in Quito, Ecuador, thus beginning my work as a teacher. This task seemed, a priori, simple, as I would only have to repeat the patterns I had observed in the educational institutions I had attended. Because Bach and Coltrane would always remain the benchmark composers and, surely, all my students would have multiplied in the morning and played Bach in the afternoon. In short, everyone was going to understand how to integrate into that musical society without any problem, just as I had.
However, the experience in Quito showed me that those musical values I had considered immovable were no such thing, and that multiple realities exist depending on the people who make up different musical societies—especially non-Western ones. In this way, I realized that studying music taught me to learn from great artists, while practicing music education taught me to learn from people and their different ways of making and understanding art. I realized that during my training as a musician (during my membership in the society of Western conservatories), I was in a constant search for the absolute: the best musical phrase, the best album, the best performance, the best composer; how to be the best performer, how to be the definitive concert artist. However, teaching experience has taught me that there are many absolutes, many «best» phrases, many «best» albums, and many «best» performances. From the perspective of an educator, I have learned that music, like people, has different analyses, interpretations, and viewpoints—always conditioned, precisely, by the people and the music itself.
The Whiplash project was established, precisely, as that union of the person and the music. After several semesters as a university professor, those values I considered immovable began to crumble bit by bit. What was supposedly essential to learn—and undoubtedly effective in pedagogical terms—turned out not to be. The imported model did not fit; it did not yield results. The differentiating factor was none other than the people who were part of the university and how they related to music. Thus, together with one of my colleagues, we started a project through which we intended to address the need we had detected, trying to bring back into the classroom what we felt had been lost in the intricacies of the system. In other words, we aimed to incorporate into the project those experiences that had marked us during our own academic training—those in which the teacher was most personally involved, spoke from experience, and made music with us.
The Whiplash project ultimately yielded results where, today, the participants are people who have received musical training aligned with their professional needs, rather than a generic training that wouldn’t allow them to develop musically. And I say all this, I repeat, in the first person, because it is my reflection on this experience—my way of seeing it now that time has passed and I have a bit more perspective. I say the project reflects my life as a musician and educator because both of those professional facets appear within it. It contains the musician from Nettl’s musical society and the educator who adapts to the needs and idiosyncrasies of the students. The project represents the process of ideological deconstruction I underwent to leave my previous musical society behind in order to adapt to the challenge presented to me in Quito. In fact, the university system itself had to be deconstructed through the Whiplash project to obtain optimal results based on its specific situation.
This situation was that of a society which, like other Latin American countries, had lived in a state of constant educational colonization—a colonization led by various educational systems that arrived and established themselves throughout history. These systems had always been alien, foreign, and consequently did not take into account the local context, the people, or their needs. As an educator, I was faced with a situation where we had to teach what jazz was, what rock was, what a sonata was, Bach, and Coltrane—teaching people who had not had a background like mine, who had not multiplied in the morning and played Bach in the afternoon. In short, we had to teach people who were entering a musical society that was completely new to them and based on values totally foreign to their reality.
There is a parallelism between the situation described above and the one experienced by jazz during its process of insertion into formal education. As will be seen later in this work, jazz underwent a transformation aimed at being accepted within the academy, meeting the requirements of the canon imposed by European conservatories. As part of this process, many of the musical practices that characterized jazz were decontextualized, effectively inserting one musical reality into a completely different one. As a result, two of the main actors in this work are the evolution of music education in the countries where jazz was born (the United States) and where the project was carried out (Ecuador). However, I do not wish to provide a single approach to the subject. Following the same philosophy as Whiplash, I intend to provide different viewpoints, especially including the vision of the jazz musician who teaches while simultaneously performing, following the line of authors such as Prouty, Ake, or Nettl. Likewise, I include aspects from other disciplines such as historical research, international politics, and psychology.
The justification for this work lies in the relevance of rethinking music education from a standpoint where established standards are deconstructed. This is based on the idea that the world is shaped by a set of different realities that do not have to be governed by a single pattern—especially in artistic subjects where the multiplicity of individualities enriches the discipline itself. To this end, the Whiplash project represents an approach to music education centered on the importance of the individual and their unique perception of art, aiming to adapt an imported educational system to a situation where the students’ idiosyncrasies are vastly different from those for whom the system was originally created.