Pedagogies of "música llanera" in llanos-based negotiations of the Venezuelan state

• In Event: El Estado Venezolano: relaciones producidas entre la omnipresencia y la discontinuidad

Abstract

Alma Llanera is a national program that teaches the música llanera (music from the plains region) tradition and was formally established in 2014, purportedly as leverage for assuring long-term state support for El Sistema, Venezuela’s national system of music education. The founding of Alma Llanera is only one of several recent maneuvers through which música llanera has increasingly come to represent as well as to enjoy the financial and political support of the Bolivarian state. As a state-sponsored program, Alma Llanera has exerted new demands on the música llanera tradition, emphasizing mass, spectacular, and academic approaches to performance and pedagogy. In this paper, I draw on fieldwork conducted between 2016-2018 to examine how teachers in Alma Llanera programs based in Guárico – an interior llanos (plains) state where música llanera is local tradition – negotiate the teaching of local musical tradition within a new state institution. In Guárico, the demands of formalizing música llanera pedagogy for its inclusion in El Sistema (“The System”) often rub against both local oral transmission practices and informal ecosystems of performance practice. From a llanos perspective, El Sistema tends to elide with the Bolivarian state, which – given the current economic and social crises – increasingly tends to elide with the distant realities of Caracas. In this context, I argue that teachers’ quotidian pedagogies become sites of resisting state-demanded formalizations of música llanera, as well as spaces of reacting to power based in Caracas and the failures of the state in relation to current lived realities in the llanos.

Author

• Elaine C Sandoval, CUNY Graduate Center