“The feelings have come home to me.” : Examining advertising films on the Swedish website of El Sistema

The purpose of this study is to analyze how the music educational program of El Sistema Sweden is advertised and legitimized through moving images. The films are a major part of the information on the Swedish national website of El Sistema and are supposed to contribute to the picture that the organization and its founders wish to market. The use of moving images and sounds, actors, backgrounds and environments, artefacts, and music in two short films are analyzed with the help of discursive tools from discourse theories, multimodal analysis, and pictorial semiotics. From a social constructionist perspective, and within a frame of contemporary debates within music education and philosophy of music, the article argues for the need to consider both governing moral values and the objectification of music when making claims for social development and integration through music education