Inundating the Country with Music: Jorge Peña, Democracy, and Music Education in Chile

Abstract

On October 16, 1973, at four o'clock in the afternoon, musician and educator Jorge Pena was executed in the penitentiary of La Serena, Chile, on the command of General Sergio Arellano Stark, the leader of the Caravan of Death and delegate of the army commander-in-chief Augusto Pinochet. (1) A military court had convicted Pena on trumped-up charges of having participated in the acquisition and distribution of firearms and of instructional and organizational paramilitary activity against the armed forces, policemen, and people of (2) As the dictatorship's violent killing brought a halt to Pena's musical reforms, the exile of many of his colleagues by the Pinochet regime scattered Pena's followers. The military's suppression of his ideas removed them from public discourse until after the return to democracy in the 1990s. All that stood as testimony to his life were remnants of musical compositions written during his final days of imprisonment with the ends of burnt matchsticks on the inside of old cigarette boxes. Why was Pena so brutally silenced? In 1950s and 1960s Chile, Jorge Pena proposed and successfully instituted reforms that fundamentally changed the access Chileans had to music education and performance. He openly critiqued the music education institutions of previous decades as elitist and aristocratic, since they provided music education for a select few and restricted Western art music performance to a small circle. In contrast, Pena sought to bring Western art music beyond Santiago and make it available to all across social and geographic divisions. In overturning traditionally restricted access to Western art music his musical work became controversial and ultimately politically powerful, resulting in his execution during the early days of Pinochet's regime. In this essay, I show that Jorge Pena reformed Chilean music performance and education in three steps: founding the Sociedad Bach de La Serena in 1950 and the Conservatorio Regional in 1956, focusing on children in the proposal of the Plan de Extension Docente and the Orquesta de Ninos in 1964, and institutionalizing these changes in the form of the Escuela Experimental in 1965. These reforms had the immediate effect of transforming Chilean music education and performance in the 1960s and a long-lasting resonance in the development of Western art music in Chile as the philosophical foundation for the youth symphony movement of the 1990s. Methodology In this article, I analyze Pena's work in its historical and political contexts and locate Pena as a protagonist in the process of democratizing Western art music in Chile. Restoring this context requires innovative research, since much documentation has been lost through both deliberate erasure and neglectful storage. This historical analysis is pieced together using a variety of primary sources, including personal interviews with colleagues and students of Pena. These are supported by reviews and articles in music publications such as the Revista Musical Chilena and local periodicals such as El Mercurio (Santiago) and El Dia (La Serena) published during the time Pena was working, in order to provide perspective into both public and institutional reactions to Pena's reforms. Key secondary sources include a biography about Pena's life and works and two unpublished dissertations. (3) Pena's Early Work: The Sociedad Bach and the Conservatorio Regional Jorge Pena had the intuition that it was possible to redefine boundaries, to tear down the barriers that had determined Western art music should be reserved for the cultured elite of our country. --Jose Weinstein, former Chilean minister of culture, 2003 The importance of Pena's work can be highlighted in contrast to the state of Chilean Western art music prior to the 1950s, which was restricted to the upper class and confined to the capital city of Santiago. Music professor Marfa Luisa Munoz summed up the midcentury situation: Only in small and select groups that keep themselves isolated, is art music cultivated and its aesthetic benefits valued. …