There has been a lot in my social media recently about the inglorious ways that the classical music sector has historically dealt with open secrets and concrete allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. The same themes keep coming up: a focus on protecting institutional reputations; trying whenever possible to keep offending teachers in place and move students on; complicity, protection, or silence from other musicians who were well aware of the open secrets; shooting the messenger when someone goes public with their own or someone else’s allegation; threats of legal action when things get a little hot; and so on. In short, a lot of work has gone into minimizing knowledge and corrective action.

An article by Olivia Giovetti in 2023 reconsidered Blair Tindall’s Mozart in the Jungle (published in 2005) in the light of the later #MeToo movement. As Giovetti notes, responses at the time of the book’s publication were somewhat dismissive and focused particularly on delegitimizing Tindall, and as a result, important warnings about sexual abuse in classical music were largely ignored. Another dozen years passed before #MeToo brought this issue back into the spotlight.

Similarly, in 2007 Rebecca Meiser published an article in Scene on the Cleveland Orchestra concertmaster William Preucil. But naming this open secret was not enough. Preucil’s employers did not respond, other journalists did not take up the story, no one admitted wrongdoing. As Meiser writes: “Preucil remained in charge. He continued to teach at CIM and sit in the first seat at performances. To my sources — and me — it felt like we had been screaming into a pillow.” Another eleven years passed before a Washington Post investigation led to disciplinary action.

In both these cases, classical music powerbrokers – institutions and journalists – closed ranks and ignored or dismissed the story. Subsequent history showed how wrong they were. In so doing, they turned down opportunities to make classical music safer for girls and women.

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This all rings very true from my own experience over the last 15 years. I pointed the finger at an institution, El Sistema, that had become the centre of an international “movement” and a beacon of hope for the classical music world – much bigger than a single music school. As a result, the pushback came not just from the institution itself but also from classical music gatekeepers around the world.

After I published my book on El Sistema in 2014, in which I recounted that I had heard many allegations of widespread sexual harassment and abuse during my year in Venezuela, the head of the organization told the media that my claim was “absolutely false.” That is hardly surprising, given El Sistema’s track record. But there were also prominent classical music journalists – all male, as it happens – who took to the media to trash my research, even though they knew far less about the topic than I did (only one had even been to Venezuela, and he had been on tightly-controlled media tours). They took a hatchet to it not because its claims were false but because it upset the consensus that El Sistema represented a shining success story – a consensus that these journalists had been so instrumental in creating. Academic reviews were overwhelmingly positive, so the problem wasn’t the research methods or findings: there was something else going on. Namely, classical music gatekeeping.

I had approached El Sistema as a fan, but also as a researcher searching for the truth. In Venezuela, I learned that the well-known story was a carefully-cultivated myth. But seeing responses to my book, I realized that the truth was of relatively little interest in the global North. The classical music sector had seized onto El Sistema years earlier as a symbol of a resurrection and a bright future (and as a potent fundraising tool). In this sense, the mythical story of El Sistema was extremely useful, whereas the emergence of a more accurate narrative was a big headache. So most classical music gatekeepers ignored the truth or actively tried to kill it off. They weren’t really interested in what was actually going on in Venezuela, but rather in what the myth could do for them and for classical music.

It was a tough wake-up call. I had been researching music for 18 years, but I had never published about a holy cow of the classical music industry. In my naivety, I thought that people in the field would be keen to know more, even if they found my research challenging; but it turned out that many wanted to know less, and they wanted everyone else to know less as well.

In 2014-15, then, the classical music establishment largely closed ranks around El Sistema. Between the institution’s denial and key journalists’ focus on shooting the messenger, the warnings about a culture of abuse went unheeded.

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In 2016, VAN Magazine published an article co-authored by the New England Conservatory professor Lawrence Scripp and the former El Sistema violinist Luigi Mazzocchi. They described my account of El Sistema as “dead on” and specifically backed up my assertions about the culture of abuse. Mazzocchi affirmed that teacher-student relationships were “the norm,” and he recalled: “Some of the … teachers would actually say it out loud: ‘I do this [have sexual relationships] with my students because I think we’re actually helping them become better musicians, better violinists.’”

This time, there wasn’t even a denial from the institution or its international gatekeepers – just silence. No one batted an eyelid at a former student of El Sistema – supposedly a paragon of social justice – describing sexual abuse as “the norm.”

In 2021, Venezuela had a #MeToo moment and sexual abuse allegations against El Sistema made quite a stir. After they were published in The Washington Post, El Sistema made an official statement in which it acknowledged the problem and described legal and administrative steps that it was taking to address it. El Sistema expressed “absolute solidarity with the victims and their families.” (So much for my allegations being “absolutely false”…)

However, as I analyzed at the time, there were some discordant notes in El Sistema’s statement. Alongside the basic acknowledgment, there was a certain lack of contrition, a whiff of denial, and plenty of boasting about El Sistema’s achievements and reputation – boasts that sounded both insensitive and pretty hollow in the light of the information that came out at this time. Also, as I wrote then:

El Sistema says nothing about investigating or getting to the root of the problem. It acknowledges symptoms but makes no reference to causes, and its stout defence of its methods implies that it has little intention of probing more deeply into its own failures. For me at least, the message is clear: El Sistema will carry on largely as before, treating sexual abuse as a case of a few “bad apples” and ignoring the ways that it’s intertwined with institutional dynamics, imbalances of power, and the norms of classical music education.

At this point, then, El Sistema’s official line switched from “no, this didn’t happen” to “yes, this did happen, but only very rarely, and we dealt with it marvellously, proving once again how fabulous we are.”

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Last month, there was controversy in the UK media over El Sistema’s ties to the dictatorial Venezuelan regime. After highly critical articles in The Guardian and The Times, the latter entitled “Corruption, abuse, propaganda — it’s time we washed our hands of El Sistema,” Marshall Marcus (former Head of Music at London’s Southbank Centre and current director of the European Union Youth Orchestra) wrote a feature article for The Guardian offering a stout defence of the Venezuelan program. The conflict of interest was glaring – Marcus is also the President of Sistema Europe and an on-off employee of El Sistema itself, so he’s essentially an El Sistema lobbyist. His article was therefore PR rather than journalism.

Marcus offered a highly selective overview of El Sistema on its 50^th anniversary, but he did not avoid this thorny issue:

Reports of an oppressive regime and a boot-camp mentality in the nucleos were compounded when allegations about a specific case of sexual harassment surfaced in the spring of 2021. There was immediately the question, was this a one-off – in which case it was still extremely serious – or was it a sign of something even worse – a generalised practice and culture?

To their credit El Sistema Venezuela appear to have taken very seriously the sexual harassment allegations: they reported them to the Public Prosecutor’s office and, working with Unicef, have introduced safeguarding measures, including workshops and child-friendly kits on safeguarding for staff and students. “Every El Sistema nucleo now has an office of remediation and protection composed of people from the community,” El Sistema Venezuela’s executive director Eduardo Méndez told me. “We have connections with Unicef and other NGOs that have helped us to provide the right processes for these offices.”

This all sounds great: an allegation was raised, El Sistema responded with concrete measures, problem solved. Unsurprisingly, given Marcus’s bio, his version parrots the institutional one. But the reality, as I’ve suggested above, was more complicated and less flattering.

As reported in The Washington Post, there were two specific cases, not one – and one of the accusers claimed explicitly that her experience was part of a generalised practice and culture, and far from a one-off. The former El Sistema musician Angie Cantero alleged that El Sistema “was / is plagued by pedophiles, pederasts, and an untold number of people who have committed the crime of statutory rape.” Behind its attractive façade, she claimed, “there are a lot of disgusting people who love to deceive girls and teenagers, taking advantage of their position of power and renown within El Sistema.” Many commenters on social media backed up Cantero’s allegations, based on their own experience.

Cantero’s allegation of a generalized problem is supported by Mazzocchi’s testimony in his VAN Magazine article. I, too, had described a pervasive problem in my 2014 book. Also, in the wake of the Washington Post article, there were four published investigations of sexual abuse in El Sistema, by journalists from four countries, and all supported Cantero’s general picture.

In sum, there has long been ample evidence in the public realm to answer Marcus’s question (“was this a one-off […] or was it a sign of something even worse – a generalised practice and culture?”). Posing the question was entirely unnecessary, and leaving it unanswered, as he does, smacks of an unwarranted attempt to sow doubt about the extent of the problem and play down its significance, in a high-profile feature article in a national newspaper.

Marcus also omits to mention that El Sistema’s “very serious” response came after years of warnings and inaction. Recall that in 2014, far from taking my allegations “very seriously,” El Sistema described them as “absolutely false.” In an echo of the Blair Tindall and Rebecca Meiser cases, seven years passed before significant action was taken. The consequences of this delay were pinpointed by “Lisa,” one of the sexual abuse survivors whose testimony was central to El Sistema’s belated acknowledgement in 2021:

I wonder why they waited so long. This isn’t new. I just presented my testimonial [in 2021], but in 2014 Geoff Baker published a book where he described the structures at El Sistema that allow the abuse, and concrete cases he collected in his interviews. Baker’s book was read, in Venezuela and abroad, as an attack against El Sistema. But at that moment I was being abused in the institution. If they would have taken action then, I would have been protected, as well as other people.

As I note above, whether even the long-delayed 2021 institutional response should be considered “very serious” is highly questionable, given its boastful tone and its lack of enquiry into the culture and conditions behind the specific allegations. As the lawyer Selene Soto, who specializes in gender issues, told Caracas Chronicles: “the discussion has been focused only on the legal aspects, but an internal investigation is key. This kind of strategy delegates the protocols to entities outside El Sistema, without assuming any institutional responsibility, which is far from being the right response.”

In this light, Marcus’s article can be seen for what it is: not inquisitive journalism, but rather classical music gatekeeping.

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So where does this leave us today? Back where we began, with the habitual responses of the classical music sector to open secrets and concrete allegations of sexual harassment and abuse. First came the denial, gatekeeping, and shooting the messenger. When the evidence became too much, there was a shift into a different mode of damage limitation, but with protecting the institution’s reputation still the priority. Acknowledge the problem but minimize it. Make no mention of earlier warnings. Make it look as though the problem is now dealt with.

Marshall Marcus’s article in The Guardian fits this mould. To the vast majority of readers, unaware of the full story, it will look like a serious and appropriate response. But in the light of the full facts, he seems to be playing down the problem and protecting El Sistema’s reputation. Hardly anyone reading his article will go away thinking that abuse is a serious problem in El Sistema or something that we need to worry about: “allegations about a specific case of sexual harassment”… “appear to have taken very seriously.” Whereas if you read my book, and the VAN article, and the Washington Post article, and the four other journalistic investigations, and the actual testimony of people involved (something that Marcus omits), it’s clear that sexual abuse IS a serious problem that goes far beyond “a specific case,” and we DO need to worry about it. After all, a pervasive issue that was largely ignored from 1975 to 2021 is hardly going to disappear overnight, particularly if there’s no sign of a thorough inquiry into the institutional culture that sustained it.

But this is not what classical music gatekeepers want you to think, and particularly not in relation to the sector’s golden goose, El Sistema. And as Marcus’s article illustrates, the media often play this role: while there have been some admirable articles that shine a light on the culture of classical music, there have been many more that muddy the waters.