I don’t know historian beefs, but in University I’ve heard choice cuts like El Sistema is a Venezualan plot to first indoctrinate Venezualan children into authoritarianism with conductors and playing music together and BeEtHoVeN, then once that is accomplished export the revolution to underfunded US school districts where they will be indoctrinated into Stalinist–Madurist authoritarianism and developed into a fifth column that will bring Venezualan imperialism to US soil. And as a side note those filfthy poors shouldn’t be taught to play music anyway because the more people that play music aesthetically devalues the entire concept of music itself and the logical extension would be to have the entire concept of listening and playing music reserved exclusively for the graduates of Juilliard or something. Instrument building was also brought into this and it was suggested that the industrial production of instruments was bad specifically, explicitly, because it made them cheaper and available to more people (they’re usually still really fucking expensive anyway). I don’t know how you can be a professor of musicology and have literally no understanding of how culture works and that it will emerge from any human population within the material parameters that they exist in. I think this man also considered himself Marxist, or at the very least an anti-capitalist.