Sonorous Worlds

Co-winner of the Edie Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing awarded by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2022

Winner of the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology Book Prize, 2021

Winner of the Labrecque-Lee Book Award by the Canadian Anthropology Society, 2021

Read the Introduction

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Sonorous Worlds is an ethnography of the young Venezuelan musicians who participate in El Sistema, a state-funded initiative that brings free classical music education and instruments to one million people in the country. Many of these musicians live in urban barrios and face everyday gang violence, state repression, social exclusion, and forced migration in response to sociopolitical crisis. This book looks at how these young people engage with what the author calls “enchantment,” that is, how through musical practices they create worlds that escape, rupture, and critique dominant structures of power. Stainova’s focus on artistic practice and enchantment allows her to theorize the successes and failures of political projects through the lens of everyday transformations in people’s lives.

Praise / Awards

  • “Incisive and captivating, Sonorous Worlds leaves you with a feeling for which there are no words. The sentient, the storied, and the unresolved merge seamlessly in Yana Stainova’s bracing ethnographic composition. Like the music at its center, the writing pulls you in and carries you far. A magnificent feat, a must-read for our dire times.”
    —João Biehl, Princeton University

  • "By some hailed as visionary, by others reviled as propaganda, Venezuela’s once-vaunted El Sistema has—like much else in the country—become mired in antagonistic debate. Sonorous Worlds cuts through the diatribe by focusing on the everyday experiences of the program’s young musicians, their families, and instructors as they navigate seemingly dissonant contexts: urban violence, luxury travel, social hierarchies, political turmoil, world-class performances. Combining a musician’s ear with gripping ethnography and novel theoretical reflections on sound, enchantment, and the ineffable, Stainova shows how the unpredictable emotions that music elicits at once empower and constrain El Sistema’s members to imagine alternative futures for themselves and their nation in ways that resist easy manipulation. More than a study of Venezuela or music, Sonorous Worlds is a master lesson on how deep listening can expose complex meanings beyond polarized narratives."
    —Alejandro Velasco, New York University

  • “By inviting us into the sonorous worlds of El Sistema’s young musicians, Yana Stainova enriches and even transforms our understanding of music and the political. In reading the book’s twenty short, gem-like chapters, we begin to truly understand why, in the midst of deep social turmoil, young people in Venezuela would choose to devote their lives to perfecting the music of mostly long-dead and geographically distant composers. Written with humility and grace, Sonorous Worlds is an exceptional music ethnography and a compelling model for anthropology in the twenty-first century.”
    —Gavin Steingo, Princeton University

  • “In Sonorous Worlds, Yana Stainova brings to life Venezuela’s famed El Sistema program. Stainova deftly places intimate portraits of the young musicians and their families within the program’s history and relationship to the politics and institutions around it. Ultimately, at the heart of the book is a profound exploration of music and its remarkable ability to empower individuals and communities.”
    —Francesco Lecce-Chong, Music Director of the Eugene Symphony and Santa Rosa Symphony

  • “A beautifully written ethnography of Venezuela’s famous musical education system, known as ‘El Sistema,’ in relation to worlds of experience and self-expression in the face of suffering, marginalization and social injustice in Venezuela, Stainova played with, did interviews with and lived in various working-class barrios across Venezuela. She examines how young, working-class identified musicians use classical music in order to be agentive creators and innovators against powerful systemic forces–poverty, political instability, discrimination–in their lives. Focusing on the sensory experiences and life stories with which sound is entwined, rather than the genre of classical music itself, Stainova allows me and others to think about the social and symbolic work of classical music in a broader, richer and contextualized setting. Crucially, Stainova brings her own artistic practice and skills and identity into not only the fieldwork, as a form of participant observation, but also into the storytelling of the text, allowing an entry point into the narrative world of both the ethnographer and the rich, sound-filled ethnographic field setting being described.”

    —Kristina Jacobsen on behalf of the Edie Turner Prize Committee 

  • "Sonorous Worlds offers a note of hope in its celebration of utopian creativity through music."
    —NACLA Report on the Americas

  • "Stainova’s book is an engaging combination of theoretical insight and observations from fieldwork and interviews with Sistema musicians spanning 2011-2018. ...This book will be interesting to music scholars, educators, and performers and anyone who has asked themselves questions about music and its place in society, particularly during times of struggle or unrest." 
    —CAML Review