[Marxism] Venezuelan youth orchestra affects Placido Domingo & others

[Brian Shannon <Brian_Shannon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

VENEZUELAN YOUTHS TRANSFORMED BY MUSIC
By Jens Erik Gould
In Caracas

Placido Domingo cried when he saw the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra
perform.

The world-renowned opera singer confessed that the concert evoked the
strongest emotions he had ever felt.

Sir Simon Rattle, director of the Berlin Philharmonic, swore that the
country's youth orchestras were doing the most important work in
classical music anywhere in the world.

And former Berlin Philharmonic director Claudio Abbado only needed to
see one performance by the orchestra to invite the Venezuelans to play
in Germany.

The talented musicians of the National System of Venezuelan Youth and
Children's Orchestras are a source of national pride, like football
stars in other Latin American countries.

They have also inspired 23 countries across the hemisphere to launch
similar music education programmes.

Troubled youths

Called El Sistema by its members, the programme is celebrating 30 years
of making classical musicians out of half-a-million young Venezuelans,
and it has transformed the lives of many underprivileged and at-risk
youths in the process.

"I wish players in the US were here to hear the conviction with which
you play," Gwyn Richards, dean of Indiana University's School of Music,
told a Caracas youth orchestra after it played Dmitri Shostakovich's
Festive Overture in honour of his visit.

"No-one is just walking through it, watching the clock," he said later.
"When they play, they really mean it."

The young musicians' excitement stems from the programme's social
mission, which its founder Jose Antonio Abreu describes as helping "the
fight of a poor and abandoned child against everything that opposes his
full realisation as a human being".

One of Mr Abreu's musicians is Lennar Acosta, 23, who six years ago was
already making his ninth visit to a Caracas correctional facility after
a history of heavy drug use and armed robbery.

While the facility denied Mr Acosta's request to return to school, the
youth orchestra took him on as a student and soon gave him a
scholarship.

He now earns his living at a music institute, has played a dozen times
in the nation's famed Teresa Carreno music hall, and is studying to
perform Mozart's clarinet concerto.

"One of the biggest emotions I've felt was when they gave me a
clarinet," Mr Acosta said, sitting with his instrument in hand in a
Caracas music conservatory.

"El Sistema ended up straightening me out. It is my family, like my
home."

Key performance

When 11 young musicians put on the Youth Orchestra's first concert in
1975, there were only two symphony orchestras in the entire country.

The programme has helped boost that number to around 200, with at least
one professional orchestra in every state.

El Sistema has also transcended politics and regime changes, receiving
increased funding from every new government. Its 2005 budget is $23m.

        We broke the myth that you have to be from the upper class to play
violin
Carlos Sedan

The growing quantity and quality of Venezuelan musicians is due in part
to the programme's teaching methods, which involve inviting children as
young as two to play in front of audiences as soon as they begin
learning their instruments.

Susan Siman, one of El Sistema's founders, says that playing her first
concert at the age of eight motivated her to keep improving as a
violinist.

"I was terrified. The music score went blank," Ms Siman said of her
performance of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, with her parents in the
audience.

"But at the end, [the concert] was what motivated me and I wanted to do
it better."

This approach to music education is beginning to leave its mark on
orchestras worldwide.

The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra's Gustavo Dudamel, 24, who is a
disciple of Sir Simon Rattle, won the Bamberg Symphony's Gustav Mahler
Conducting Competition last year.

He also received rave reviews from local press after conducting the Los
Angeles Philharmonic in September.

The programme's Edicson Ruiz has also earned a seat as double bassist
with the Berlin Philharmonic at just 20 years of age.

Class barriers

In a two-week period in November, visitors to the Caracas Youth
Symphony included Gwyn Richards, contemporary Polish composer Krzysztof
Penderecki and Italian violinist Uto Ughi.

Mr Richards said he was impressed with the programme's goal to create a
larger space for classical music in popular culture.

El Sistema has brought the sounds of Beethoven to the masses, by giving
children instruments, scholarships and free transportation, in barrios
such as the Caracas neighbourhood of Sarria.

About 90% of students there are from the country's lowest economic
class.

"In Venezuela, we broke the myth that you have to be from the upper
class to play violin," says the Sarria school's director, Carlos Sedan.

Young musicians in Sarria are not allowed to take their instruments
home because of the risk of being mugged, and some come to class with
headaches because their families cannot afford food.

Yet when they perform, they become the pride of their neighbourhoods
and inspire their parents to learn about the great classical composers.

"I saw the whole evolution. [In the beginning] you saw a certain
sadness in their faces," said Antonio Mayorca, who taught music in a
low-income Caracas neighbourhood and is also first violinist in the
Simon Bolivar orchestra.

"But when they started to play music, it was different. The light that
they transmitted taught me a lot."
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4457278.stm


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