From Institutional Ambition to Concrete Case: The Banda Sinfónica Colombiana Project at HEM Geneva
Under the vision “Music in a World in Motion,” the Projet d’école 2023–2032 of the Geneva Haute École de Musique (HEM) identifies dialogue with society and the opening of formats to interdisciplinary, intercultural, and participatory dimensions as strategic priorities. This contribution presents an intensive Colombian wind band project carried out at HEM in November 2023, bringing together, under the direction of Colombian conductor and researcher Patricia Vanegas, HEM students, pre-professional students, and alumni from the Colombian diaspora. The one-week project led to two public concerts and fostered connections with Latin American diasporas and institutional actors in International Geneva.
The project highlights not only its intercultural content, but the institutional conditions that enabled it to unfold. Conceived and piloted from my position as doctoral assistant, it brought distinct cultures of musical transmission into practical relation, including different approaches to learning, rehearsing, listening, distributing authority, and adapting collectively. The repertoire also invited musicians to re-attune their bodies to different ways of sensing pulse, phrasing, and playing.
Drawing on this case and my doctoral research on situated interculturality in higher music education, I examine the transmission of embodied and collective knowledge, the pedagogical and structural adjustments required across the project, and the relational intelligences that sustained it. The project offers a lens through which to consider interweaving as a practice that can reconfigure institutional formats, categories, and forms of engagement with audiences and partners.
Angela Mancipe
Angela Mancipe is a Colombian oboist and ethnomusicologist, doctoral assistant at the Centre des Cultures of the Geneva Haute École de Musique (HEM), where she is also an alumna, and PhD candidate in Musicology at the University of Bern under the supervision of Prof. Britta Sweers. Her doctoral research examines situated interculturality in Swiss higher music education, drawing on the Banda Sinfónica Colombiana project.
As a performer, she explores the oboe beyond the classical repertoire, playing with the ensemble Tarab, whose repertoires are inspired by the Silk Road, and taking part in various Latin American music projects in Geneva. Active in cultural governance and international cultural cooperation, she has served for a decade on several committees within Geneva’s cultural sector. Notably, she represents FILMAR en América Latina, a festival dedicated to independent Latin American cinema, within the Fédération genevoise de coopération (FGC), where she participates in development and advocacy networks. She is also the author of Pensar en Voz Alta, a translingual digital notebook connecting situated cultural analysis, migratory experience, and applied ethnomusicology.
Haute école de musique de Genève