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) sets out among its strategic axes the broadening of dialogue with society and the opening of formats to interdisciplinary, intercultural, and participatory dimensions. This contribution presents a case that resonates with several of these orientations and with what this symposium names interweaving: an intensive Colombian wind band project carried out 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 format led to two public concerts and fostered ties with a range of audiences, including Latin American diasporas and institutional actors within International Geneva.
Irreducible to its intercultural content alone, the case highlights the spaces the school was willing to open for such a process to unfold. Rooted in my doctoral research on situated interculturality in higher music education, the project took artistic and pedagogical form at the HEM. Conceived, proposed, and piloted from my position as doctoral assistant, it also points to the role that multifaceted early-career profiles can play when an institution allows them to generate artistic, pedagogical, and institutional initiatives.
One of the central stakes of the project lies in the way distinct cultures of musical transmission were brought into practical relation: different ways of learning, rehearsing, listening, distributing authority within an ensemble, and adjusting collectively to what the repertoire requires. The repertoire itself calls for a subtle decentering, involving a productive re-attunement of the body towards other ways of listening, sensing pulse, phrasing, and playing, from within the musicians’ own instrumental training. My doctoral research analyses this situated interculturality through three dimensions: the transmission of embodied and collective musical knowledge, the pedagogical and structural adjustments required of the different actors across the stages of the project, and the relational intelligences that sustained it, still rarely made explicit in the frameworks of higher music education.
Drawing on this single case, my thesis examines the conditions of transferability to other contexts and other intercultural projects. This is the object of inquiry I wish to bring into dialogue: interweaving as a practice through which an institution can reconfigure its formats, its categories, and its 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