Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community, by Kenneth J. Gergen, is a major work of scholarship in social psychology. It has a lot to offer the field of social action through music (SATM), despite saying nothing about it directly. In this essay, I’m going to put the two together.

First, a few disclaimers. This will be a limited exercise: there will be no attempt to synthesize wider literatures on either relationality or music. That might come later. For now, I’m going to focus on one book and one field, tying them together with my own research.

Also, this is not a new book; in fact it’s 15 years old. I’m writing about it because I’ve just read it, rather than because it offers a brand new vision.

Finally, I’m well aware that much of what I write below may feel familiar to many community musicians, whether or not they’ve read this book. But I’m not writing about community music, but rather SATM, which is centred in Latin America and classical music culture. One conclusion may simply be that SATM has a lot to learn from community music. Still, community musicians might be interested to read ideas from social psychology that support their work.

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Relational Being is an exhaustive working-out of a very simple idea: that the fundamental element of life is not the individual but rather relations. In fact, the individual is constituted by relations and has no reality outside them (an idea that has a long history in Buddhism). Gergen proposes a conceptual shift from “bounded being” to “relational being,” and argues that human institutions, organizations, and processes such as education should be reoriented to promote “the flowering of relational practices.” It would be hard to exaggerate the scope or ambition of this book, which is nothing less than a manifesto for humanity. Behind its grand mission “to stimulate transformation in our practices of living” lies the claim that “the future well-being of the planet depends significantly on the extent to which we can nourish and protect not individuals, or even groups, but the generative processes of relating.”

SATM might look like a good solution, given its emphasis on collective rather than individual music making. But it turns out that Gergen sees collectivity as part of the problem, as his subtitle indicates (“beyond self and community”). Not only does the formation of bonded “in-groups” or communities often reproduce the problems of self or bounded being, simply on a larger scale, but it can even exacerbate them. Collective activity, such as playing in a musical ensemble, is therefore no guarantee of relational being; it may even reinforce its opposite.

The forging of deep bonds is thus ambiguous and paradoxical. To be sure, a shift from “I” to “we” can have positive effects; the problems of individualism may start to recede. “However, once bonding is secured, there is an important sense in which the ravages of individualism once again return, and with a vengeance. Essentially, the process of bonding creates yet a new form of bounded entity. It is not “you” versus “me,” but “us” now separated from “them.” […] The bonded relationship simply replaces one form of bounded being with another. This enlargement of bounded being not only opens a new range of hazards, but dangerously intensifies shortcomings inhering in the individualist tradition.”

Individualism generates alienation, competition, and disparagement of others. Yet “these tendencies are dramatically intensified in the case of bonded relations. Why is this so? In large part it is because bonded relations are extremely effective in creating, enchanting, and enforcing a singular account of the real and the good. Participants are in continuous communication, and through the co-active process give continuous support to ‘our way of life’ and its attendant realities and values. Deviant voices are suppressed, and with them essential voices of doubt. In contrast, the lone individual may dwell in ambiguity.”

Group bonding may thus act as an enemy of ambiguity. In my book Rethinking Social Action Through Music, I identified ambiguity as an inherent feature of this field and ambivalence as an important conceptual lens. Gergen’s account fleshes out a point that my research has revealed repeatedly: in many cases, SATM simultaneously generates ambiguity and suppresses the voicing of ambivalence.

So what are the solutions that Gergen offers for moving beyond self and community? Above all, dialogue and collaboration. At its best, dialogue is a process of productive “relational coordination.” Gergen provides many examples of dialogue and collaboration, across a variety of domains of human life and activity, that shift the dial from bounded to relational being.

Education

Of particular relevance to SATM is the chapter on education. Gergen proposes that we see education as (potentially) a means of “enhancing participation in relational process.” He accords great importance to this topic: “education in a relational key is critical to the global future. Owing to the profound technological transformations of the past century, we confront increasing numbers of people, from differing locales, for differing purposes. Everywhere there is a need for collaboration, teamwork, networks, and negotiation.”

Unsurprisingly, this means a shift away from conventional approaches to teaching, a shift that the author (a university professor) undertook himself:

“I no longer teach in this way. The classroom is no longer my ship; I am no longer its commander. I have shed the traditional vision of individual minds, of the knowing teacher and ignorant student, of teaching as a cause of learning.”

Now Gergen is interested in “educational practices that reflect, sustain, and advance productive forms of relational being.” He states that “the primary aim of education is to enhance the potentials for participating in relational processes — from the local to the global.” This last point is particularly important. Relations within the classroom (among students, and between teachers and students) are crucial – but so too are those between the classroom and its local and global contexts. “A relationally effective education would also consider the potentials for productive participation in families, communities, the political process, the arts, diverse cultural traditions, nature, and more.” Gergen thus identifies four key domains for relational education: “the teacher and student, relations among classmates, and the relation of the class both to the immediate environment and to the global context.”

Gergen’s vision poses a challenge to the conventions of large-ensemble music education, which are often upheld in SATM, where the conductor generally operates as a commander and the ensemble as his ship. One convention that has been clung to with fervour by El Sistema and its admirers is a focus on excellence. In the SATM world, excellence is usually conceived in sonic (or more broadly, presentational) terms. But for Gergen, excellence in education is a more complex matter – one bound up with process and not just product – and just as important is excellence in relationship. “Interest shifts from the excellence of a bounded unit, to the potentials inherent in coordination.” This kind of relational excellence has been given little attention in actual practice (i.e. in curriculum and pedagogy, as opposed to discourse) in SATM’s largest programs. It is simply assumed to flow automatically from musical excellence (despite abundant evidence to the contrary).

Looking at SATM, we can see three other ways in which the field’s dominant model jars with “education in a relational key.” The first is a tendency to prioritize the first two domains (internal relations) and relatively neglect the second two (local and global contexts). This issue of tribalism and the music school as a “bubble” is one I address in both my books on SATM. “The walls of the school are misleading. They suggest a separation between the school and its surrounds; they suggest that the success of the educational process depends on what takes place within the walls. Yet, as [is] increasingly clear, what takes place in the classroom can never be separated from the family life of the students, local politics, the economy, and so on.” This is something that the Red de Escuelas de Música de Medellín came to acknowledge, and during my fieldwork I observed it striving to overcome this separation between “us in here” and “them out there” and connect the music schools to their surrounding communities.

The second is the field’s history of reinforcing cultural hierarchies through its affiliation to classical music and its marginalization and even denigration of some other musics, particularly reggaetón (also discussed in my book on the Red). Genre affiliation works against relational being because it encourages musicians to bond with some peers and distance themselves from others – and relational being entails the opposite of this kind of discrimination. SATM has done well in connecting likeminded people, but less so in fostering solidarity and positive relationships between groups that are quite different, which is precisely what relational being points towards.

“Informal relations at school—at lunch, in the gym, after school, and so on—permit students to remain in familiar and comfortable relationships, thus fostering thick friendships, cliques, and ethnic enclaves. All too often the result is in-group/out-group conflict, along with its distancing and antipathies. In contrast, a teacher can organize the classroom in such a way that more generative relations are achieved. Classroom discussion groups, working partners, laboratory research groups, and the like can cut across these informal boundaries.”

A symphony orchestra may cut across existing boundaries, throwing young people together in new formations; but it can also simply create new enclaves (such as instrument groups or section principals), and my research in Venezuela and Colombia revealed that this was the case in large SATM programs. Without more imaginative ways to foster generative relations, the large ensemble model may simply offer a reconfigured version of an old problem of in-group/out-group division.

Musical practices that forge a tight-knit community (around an ensemble or a genre) may therefore be a mixed blessing. While some individuals suffer exclusion and may therefore benefit from such connection, in-group bonding is not something that humans generally struggle with. Tribalism (or conflict with out-groups) is a much bigger issue at societal level. Musical organizations that promote bubbles and tribal affiliations may therefore generate positive feelings at a micro scale while reinforcing tendencies towards bounded being at a macro scale.

The third is that Gergen places dialogue at the centre of relational education. Relational being depends on horizontal, dialogic relations and rejects vertical, monologic ones. In an educational context, this means exploring practices such as dialogic classrooms, collaborative creation, and service learning. There is a clear dissonance here with conventional large-ensemble practice. Despite the teamwork rhetoric in which it is often wrapped, most large-ensemble training offers limited opportunities to develop skills in collaboration and negotiation. When education centres on the “performance” of a teacher (or conductor), students “are minimally prepared to enter later relationships as effective dialogic partners. They have no experience in offering ideas, responding sensitively to others, or joining with others in creating visions that none could have imagined alone.”

Again, SATM can be deceptive, because its emphasis on collective musical training makes it chime at first sight with relational education. Yet research in Latin America has shown that SATM tends to foster greater concern with individual life projects than with community transformation. A successful musician in the context of El Sistema is one who has followed a solo path, leaving their local orchestra to play in a national one, leaving their community for central Caracas, or leaving Venezuela for study or work overseas. Despite superficial appearances, SATM is an individualizing process, one focused above all on social mobility – and social mobility and relational being might be considered opposing processes, in that the former entails rupturing existing social bonds.

SATM does have many relational angles, of course, but the relations can be quite mixed. Part of the nuance of Gergen’s book is that relations are not necessarily positive, and part of the ambiguity of SATM is that it presents both more and less admirable kinds of relations. In my research, I have seen deep friendships and supportive relationships between adults and young people, but also competition, favouritism, bullying, and abuse. Historically, with their focus on the orchestral model and their disciplinary approach, SATM organizations have tended to valorize and promote vertical, monologic relations, even if some employees and participants have fostered horizontal, dialogic ones alongside.

Organizations

Another topic on which Gergen has much to say is that of organizations. By this point, readers will be unsurprised to know that he takes a dim view of organizational conventions and is enthusiastic about recent shifts:

“The metaphor of the pyramid continues to inform much organizational practice today. Often referred to as ‘command and control,’ the view dominated the organizational sphere for much of the 20th century. However, recent decades have been marked by growing discontent. Possibly influenced by the emerging sensitivity to democracy and diversity in the workplace, there are strong moves toward flattening or decentralizing the contemporary organization. Even within military circles there are doubts about the practical adequacy of command and control.”

Unfortunately, the pyramid model is central to SATM, both to its main tool (the large ensemble) and to its principal organizations (such as El Sistema). In this sense, SATM looks rather out of place in the 21^st century; it models the world of the past rather than the future. There are also distinct echoes of academic studies of the orchestral profession – and of the earlier point about individualization – in Gergen’s critique of this old-fashioned organizational model:

“This flattening of potential is also hastened by the individualist orientation dominating most organizations. Individuals are generally hired to serve a particular function. Like bolts and levers in a machine, their job is defined so as to contribute to the ‘smooth and effective running’ of the organization. A singular, coherent, and knowable individual is the ideal. It is just such individuals who can be trusted in their function. Other passions and potentials are irrelevant or possibly dysfunctional. Yet, as potentials for expression are eliminated, so does vitality wane. Organizational participants are reduced to bland and predictable robots.”

Gergen urges a shift in organizations from monological to collaborative decision-making. Gratifyingly for those of us interested in music, he adopts the metaphor of the polyphonic organization to describe the ideal model of the future. At this point I recalled the words of Chefi Borzacchini, a close confidante of El Sistema’s founder José Antonio Abreu and the official chronicler of his work, who exhorted that in El Sistema, “everyone needs to be fully in tune in order to achieve unison,” and her imagining of a future Venezuela that is “perfectly in tune, with all its citizens joined in a single direction.” North American admirers follow a similar line. Tricia Tunstall writes approvingly that all the directors she met show “a clear and defining internal alignment with Abreu’s principles and worldview.” Eric Booth recounts: “At every núcleo, all the educators and staff can tell you exactly what the goals of El Sistema are—a stunningly unified vision and purpose […], from the national leaders to the local leaders to all the teachers to every janitor.” Through the eyes of its most enthusiastic supporters, El Sistema appears as the epitome of a monophonic organization.

Gergen, in contrast, proposes a much messier view of a relational organization as embracing multiple – and even contradictory – logics, views, and values. “Collaborative decision-making thrives on polyphonic participation. Ideally this means opening decision-making to as many participants as practicable, and encouraging participants to share the richness of their multi-being.” This could not be further from El Sistema’s unison singing.

The relational approach connects with the learning organization movement. “As Peter Senge and his colleagues propose, ‘A learning organization is a dynamic organization of cooperating human beings in a state of continuous transformation.’ In learning organizations, the continuous collection and exchange of information, opinion, and value means that all assumptions are subject to continuous challenge.” While El Sistema is the very opposite – Abreu’s tenets remain carved in stone and absolutely incontestable, even after his death, making El Sistema more like a religious sect than an educational institution – the Red in Medellín serves as an example of a dynamic learning organization. My book traces its continual changes since 2005 and the exchanges and challenges that have underpinned them.

A relational approach also challenges mainstream accounts of leadership. “From the classical ‘great man’ theories, to recent accounts of the traits of great leaders and successful managers, most theories presume that leadership potential resides within the individual person.” Yet contemporary conditions “give rise to new visions of leadership,” with “increasing emphasis on collaboration, empowerment, dialogue, horizontal decision-making, sharing, distribution, networking, continuous learning, and connectivity.” Gergen thus proposes that “we may usefully replace the concept of leadership with that of relational leading. […] It is not the single individual who is prized, but animated relations. If significant movement is to take place within an organization, it will emerge from the generative interchange among the participants.” Once again, SATM’s macrocosm (top-down organizations like El Sistema, which venerate their leader) and microcosm (top-down ensembles like the orchestra, which revolve around their conductor) are significantly challenged by this relational approach to leadership.

One of the many paradoxes in orthodox SATM is the rhetorical emphasis on social inclusion and yet the practical devotion to auditions, which in Venezuela have always been gruelling and fiercely competitive – a survival of the fittest. (The documentary Children of Las Brisas gives a revealing glimpse of this reality.) Yet, as Gergen argues, “traditional evaluative practices are detrimental to organizational health,” and they represent the opposite of a relational approach: “performance evaluation essentially derives from the presumption of bounded being.” He proposes replacing evaluation with valuation. “To value another is to lend significance to their voice; it is to affirm their contribution to the relationships from which the vitality of the organization is derived” – rather than to weed them out because someone else plays better.

Finally, Gergen frames this chapter on organizations as “the precarious balance.” An organization needs to cohere – a process of ordering is essential and inevitable. Yet in cohering and becoming a bounded entity, it can generate all sorts of unintended consequences:

“For each organization there is a privileged domain of the ‘in here’ separated from ‘out there.’ In these everyday commonplaces we are again immersed in the logic of bounded being. It is not individual persons in this instance, but independent organizations. And when we construct the organizational world in this way we invite many of the same illnesses that beset the individualization of society. We exist within the walls, and they without. Once the separation has been struck, those within the organization confront the outside with three major options: they are with us, against us, or irrelevant.”

This can lead to a form of organizational narcissism: “‘We exist in order to strengthen and expand ourselves.’ Nothing beyond the organizational well-being counts.”

During my research, it became apparent that these kinds of problematic relations with the outside world abounded in El Sistema. At times it felt as though the primary purpose of El Sistema was to perpetuate itself. “We exist in order to strengthen and expand ourselves” could have been its motto. Its leaders made claims (almost certainly exaggerated) and projections about its size in every speech and interview. The showcase school at Montalbán was as much as a shop window as an educational institution. Growth was an institutional obsession.

When at the peak of his political power, Abreu had no compunction about shifting funds from other musical expressions and other arts in order to make his own program the dominant force in the Venezuelan cultural scene. Many musicians had been on the wrong end of Abreu’s Manichean “with us or against us” worldview, and many small organizations felt the pinch of being considered competing or irrelevant. Abreu’s all-consuming desire to strengthen his own organization left many others weakened. Indeed, El Sistema’s Venezuelan critics have argued that Abreu, by aligning himself with Maduro as the country’s crisis deepened from 2014, put the fortunes of El Sistema above those of the nation. The hyperbolic praise of this problematic institution by Dudamel and other conductors in media interviews, their refusal to engage in any form of critical self-reflection, are another manifestation of this organizational narcissism.

One reason that El Sistema has been so poorly understood, including by most researchers, is that few have bothered to investigate how it is regarded by those outside it – in other words, its relational aspects. Interviewing current staff and students is an easier route, but it leads to incomplete understanding. Gergen points to the importance of seeing any organization as embedded in a web of relations, which may be tense or conflictual if it has not found “the precarious balance.”

Social change

In many ways, this book may be read as a manifesto for social change. It does not touch directly on music, but Gergen holds up an interesting example from the wider artistic field: Brinton Lykes’s photographic work with women in rural Guatemala.

“These women had suffered greatly as a result of the civil wars raging over their lands, and their villages and families had been ravaged by enemy troops. Both as a research endeavor, and as a means to heal and create solidarity among the women, Lykes gave each of the women cameras. They were asked if they would join in sharing photos of the destruction and violence in their areas. She then arranged for the women to share the photographs with each other and to talk about the implications for their lives. Conversations about the photographs lead to a deeper, more complex understanding of events. Women who would not ordinarily have a chance to express their visions of life and the future were able to do so as a result of the photographs. This sharing helped to develop the solidarity and inspiration to rebuild community together.”

In Gergen’s account, this project eschews simplistic ideas about art changing people or society in favour of a more nuanced vision of art helping to create the conditions that allow people to take action to change themselves and their community if they so choose. This is art as a potential catalyst for social action, rather than as social action. What generates social change is self-expression, conversation, solidarity, and action, not photography. Art that does not foster self-expression, conversation, solidarity, and action may have aesthetic and personal value, but it is unlikely to change anything at a societal level.

We see something similar when Gergen discusses the work of Paulo Freire. As is well known, Freire argued that education should foster a critical consciousness (“conscientization”) of students’ economic and political situation. “As students come to see themselves as agents of the future, reasoned Freire, they will also be encouraged to join in movements for social change. The importance of the phrase ‘to join’ should be underscored in this case, as Freire believed that change can emerge only from collective action.”

Gergen’s attention to joining in movements for social change is salutary. Again, we see a challenge to the dominant philosophy of SATM, espoused by Abreu and his followers, which sees social change as happening to young people as a consequence of pursuing musical excellence or mastery. From a Freirean perspective, however, meaningful social change requires collective social action by students and, at a broader level, social movements. In most SATM, collective music making serves as a metaphor for social action rather than the real thing, because it is disconnected from collective social action or social movements outside the walls of the music school, and because it is imagined as something done to students (reform) rather than by them (action). El Sistema’s widely copied model is too intensive and inward-looking to allow for real social action – it was designed precisely to occupy young people’s free time; and the ultra-conservative Abreu would have abhorred his students joining in movements for social change, as El Sistema’s recent history illustrates.

Of the many elements of relational being that appeal to me, a key one is that it is not deficit-based. One of SATM’s least appealing features is its explicit framing of social change as “rescuing,” disciplining, and correcting young people, and particularly those from lower socio-economic groups, based on the idea that they are deficient and deviant. Relational Being calls for a shift in how we all understand the world; it doesn’t presume that poorer people are more in need of relational thinking than richer ones; and it doesn’t position people in a hierarchical relationship (rescuers and rescued). For Gergen, charity is not relational being, but rather “a narrative in which the giver is the privileged one. It is ‘I’ who gives, and who is therefore blessed.” Charity “is a not a story about relationship, but a hero story of the self” – an accurate description of the many media accounts of SATM that revolve around saviours (usually white and male).

Returning to Gergen’s summary of Freire, one could argue for continuing the current socio-economic focus, but with a different rationale and a different method. Because social change usually comes not from top-down correction but rather from grassroots collective activity, relational education in disadvantaged communities could serve as an empowering catalyst for transformation. In this vision, it is not the deficits but rather the assets of such communities – their potential to galvanize social change – that take centre stage.

Conclusion

The origins of SATM lie in providing intensive training to classical music students to enable them to enter the orchestral profession. This is what El Sistema was set up to offer in the 1970s, as numerous documents and personal accounts attest. Over time, a social dimension emerged, and however it has been framed discursively, underneath it lies the idea of social mobility. Through musical training and entering the music profession, the individual will have the chance to “ascend” socially and economically. The key to mobility is musical skill, so SATM focuses (logically) on technique and repertoire. Individual musicians are embedded in multiple relations through large ensembles, but the relational comes second. The relational is not a priority in most classical music training. It is the individual, not the ensemble, that aspires to mobility and that moves when the opportunity arises.

Relational Being sheds critical light on a number of defining features of SATM and argues for an educational and organizational future that looks quite different.If we take seriously Gergen’s argument that “the future well-being of the planet depends significantly on the extent to which we can nourish and protect not individuals, or even groups, but the generative processes of relating,” then there is a good case for rethinking the norms of SATM and taking a more relational approach – and this case is even stronger given that SATM is usually presented (and funded) as a field that prioritizes the social over the musical. The “social” in SATM has tended to be ambiguous and loosely defined, but in the field’s largest programs, it has revolved around ideas of correction and mobility, both of which are individualizing processes. Gergen’s book encourages us to reimagine this work – and turbocharge its social potential – by placing relational being at its heart.

A relational approach would entail something quite different. It would make relationship the highest priority, and technical training would be secondary – of interest mainly insofar as it bolstered the former. More attention would be paid to the quality of the relationships formed than to the quality of the sounds produced. It would emphasize community development over individual career trajectories. (Note that this is a question of rebalancing, not eliminating concern with sounds, technique, or careers.)

A genre-agnostic method might be advantageous. As Gergen writes: “To nourish relational process among students is to bring multiple worlds into coordination, and to replace divisive hierarchies with mutual appreciation. Students also acquire potentials to become border-crossers in an ever-splintering world of meaning.” There is no room here for a classical music superiority complex or a demonization of reggaetón, both of which are quite common in this field. Relational being requires fostering openness, tolerance, and empathy towards musical differences, rather than solidifying social separation around genre allegiances.

It would make sense for the field to give much more priority to musical traditions and formats in which the relational plays a more important part than in large ensembles and classical training. Informal and non-formal music education, small ensembles, and Indigenous and Afro-diasporic traditions hold more potential for nourishing “collaborative skills for worlds to come.” To take just one of many possible examples, the Brazilian circle-song method Música do Círculo prioritizes the relational in practice as well as theory; there is no obvious individual path or application of the method; it only works collectively, it only works when good relationships are forged, and when good relationships are forged it works.

Would such a thing be possible in SATM? My most recent book revolves around this question so I won’t go into it here, but in short, I would say a cautious yes. “Education in a relational key” – notions such as the dialogic classroom, collaborative creation, and service learning – will by now be familiar to many progressive music educators, so a shift is not beyond the bounds of reason. Reform is possible and desirable, as the history of the Red and some other SATM programs reveals; the main impediment is a continued allegiance to the field’s traditions and dominant model – the “bounded being” of Sistema – rather than the impossibility of doing things differently.

Relational Being is a call to arms and a manifesto for a different way of being, acting, and organizing. In my view, it is one that those interested in music, education, and social change should not ignore.