Roberto

Roberto, 31, is a punk/rock band lead singer, guitarist, and composer. He teaches in the education department of a state-funded children’s healthcare institution. His earliest musical connections and media provided by a web of peers:

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After window-shopping toy instruments at a store … my neighborhood pals and I played the trendy [radio] pop songs on our toy instruments⁵⁰: spoons, pans and pots … We couldn’t afford to buy records, but we were able to tape record the songs and share the cassettes among us (P1, 1, 1).

He remains a friend with these boys to this day. He explains that they did not seek to be performers, but to do something they liked.

Roberto did not experience freedom or pleasure in music schooling:

[Music] was just another school subject … to sing the national and patriotic hymns and [endlessly] playing the recorder. What happened … was a full disconnection with the students … There was this way of thinking, that the teacher knew everything, that the students were not taken into consideration, say, not even in choosing the songs … It was tremendously boring … I never felt any connection with school music. My friends mock at me because in eighth grade I flunked music

… I never felt interested in it (P1, 1, 1).

Hymns singing brought tension into Roberto’s music learning. Secondary school was not relevant to him, either, to the extent that Roberto dropped secondary school and finished his studies through distance education.

Afterwards, Roberto was encouraged by old childhood pals to seek private guitar lessons. He acknowledges:

I rediscovered my love for music when I was 18, everything before that was sort of a dull period, very “desert” (P1, 1, 3).

According to him, the key was that he was presented with challenges that he could overcome, and received encouragement to do so. He acknowledges that his motivation went beyond music. He was aware that there were things he was excelling at, such as languages. However, music was not one of those things, so music learning represented a challenge that he was able to approach He acquired

50 Such as songs from the United States boy band Backstreet Boys, that could be heard on the radio.

123 nivel⁵¹. Roberto also encountered very encouraging teachers, and this was decisive in the construction of this motivation: “I can do it; I can do it” (P1, 1, 12).

Roberto was comfortable playing popular music on the guitar with his former childhood fellows. He decided to enter a municipal conservatory, where his voice and guitar instructors encouraged him to become a better musician. This experience was so relevant that he decided to apply for admission to a college music education program. Roberto acknowledges that at this point he was certain that music was what he wanted to do with his life.

Roberto would encounter college instruction for which he was unprepared, being a quiet and shy student:

Given my motivation to dedicate my life to music and the [richness of] previous interactions with teachers and peers, it was very shocking [for me] to encounter a different kind of treatment from the teachers in college. Some were actually mean.

For instance, if they noticed that you were shy [like I was] they would eat you alive (P1, 1, 8).

In fact, Roberto will never forget one particular college teacher:

He is acknowledged as a great pianist and composer, but he lacks many human values. I was a freshman and enrolled in his group piano class. At the beginning of the course he left us a fingering exercise for homework. I practiced it and played it in class the way I thought I should. He said to me: ‘It’s deplorable. Are you dyslexic, or what?’ He said this in front of all the other classmates, none of whom I knew. I had to go to the washroom [and pull myself together]. I dropped the course and waited a couple years (P1, 1, 9).

Roberto’s classmates had no previous formal vocal, keyboard, or instrumental studies at all, or were proficient in notation reading before entering college.

Roberto’s personal strategy for survival and success in university education was to mentally block unpleasant experiences and teachers.

After finally graduating as a music teacher, Roberto was employed at an urban, Protestant-denominational, private secondary school, for almost two years. It was

51Spanish word for level, extent, or degree. This word often appears in the accounts of participants and can be interpreted as ability to perform difficult music.

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his first teaching job. Even though private schools are not subsided by the Costa Rican government, there are some guidelines from the Ministry of Public Education that they are expected to follow. There was some curricular freedom, but Roberto’s school principal was a very strong advocate of hymn learning that the public institutional web dictated. She warned Roberto that non-Art Music should be banned from the school, unless it was studied to understand the bad in it. She also advocated religious music as part of the curriculum.

Roberto negotiated with his students the extent to which hymns would be taught, practiced, and assessed. His students agreed to practice hymns, as long as the corresponding assessment would not be of much weight. This agreement was supposed not to be shared out of the classroom.

Nevertheless, Roberto was called up to the principal’s office a couple times to be censored, because a rumor was out that he did things differently from what he was instructed.

They were never able to understand my aim for doing things …. They only saw my class as a game … the class where kids talked … where they engaged in indiscipline … she did not [like] that my projects included guitar and instruments like that … [In order to challenge me] the principal [commanded me] to make a recorder ensemble (P1, 2, 8).

Roberto dropped weight considerably during the last semester at school, and began feeling depressed. A class incident took place: A bunch of tenth graders enthusiastically responded to a group vocal-instrumental performance project on folk Costa Rican music⁵², by choosing to perform their own version of the Costa Rican folk song De la caña se hace el guaro (“Booze is made from cane”). The waltz-like song evokes an idealistic peasant life within the narrative of national identity described in the first chapter. It speaks of how the spirits of sugar cane booze cheer up someone’s spirit when he/she is head over heels.

52 This activity is part of a newly implemented school music curriculum for secondary school. See Rosabal-Coto (2010) for a discussion of foundations, goals, and rationale.

Roberto’s principal overtly opposed the pedagogical practices in this curriculum.

125 The school principal called him again. She made clear that at such young age students like to socialize at techno parties where they drink alcohol and that, naturally, the school context was religious. She did not want Roberto to induce them to such lifestyle through activities in music class. The principal fired him without any explanation. Roberto decided to leave his bachelor’s apartment near his former workplace, and moved back into his parent’s house in his hometown outside the capital city.

Not too long after the religious school dismissed him, a public health care institution in the capital city recruited Roberto. This school caters to patients under age 13, and offers music education to the patients during their stay. Roberto was welcomed at the job interview by the health center school director, who openly valued him as a candidate who perhaps was not quite academically qualified, but had the necessary youth and desire to learn on the job. Roberto considers he finally have gained institutional legitimacy as a teacher and enjoys it to its fullest:

My main goal is to transmit that love for music and that they feel it … I perhaps want to be the music teacher I never had (P1, 3, 4).

At the time of this study, Roberto had recently networked through online webs that allowed him to relate to practices he would have never expected to learn in formal schooling webs, like electric guitar performing and rock singing. He recruited fellow musicians to start a punk rock band, through interaction in online forums. In his own words:

While some people might borrow money to buy a house or a car, I decided to borrow money from the bank to be able to fund my own album (P1, 2, 5).

He wrote the lyrics and music for the album, and was the vocalist and guitarist of his band. To the time of the study, Roberto’s parents (with whom he lived) did not know he made this loan to invest on his album: “They just would not understand”

(P1, 2, 5). Roberto allowed me to include a literal translation of the Spanish lyrics of the main song in his new album, and was not concerned that this would make his story recognizable to other participants, or the readers:

I am the pillar industry of this nation, I am foreign, I always offer the best

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at the expense of my underpaid employees resigned to this prison.

I always insist that they give their best.

I almost forgot, but ‘Welcome to this big family of envy, grudge, and treason’.

I hope you can deal with the pressure of my transnational agency because we are on a deadline to export.

Chorus: Damn corporation! Don’t cheat my people! Don’t cheat this people!

And if I appoint you as manager, forget your people.

I pay you to be indifferent, and if sometime you see something you can’t stand, you better shush, so I will pay you more.

If your country doesn’t want me anymore, I don’t care.

I’ll go to another one where they will truly need me, where they are willing to stand any atrocity, so they can have food for one more day.

Chorus: Damn corporation! Don’t cheat my people! Don’t cheat this people!

Roberto narrated that he hoped he had become the kind of music teacher he never had.