[NYTr] Two Interesting Items on Music, Youth and Venezuela

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

excerpted from VIO Venezuela News Roundup - Aug 13, 2007

[Venezuela's Youth Symphony Orchestra is touring the United Kingdom and
providing a model for music education in Scotland, according to The
Times Online.  Venezuela's pioneering program to teach music to
children in low-income families is carried out under the Foundation for
the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras of Venezuela.
The Foundation involves 200 orchestras, and is currently reaching
250,000 children using government funding that totals about $20 million
per year.  The New Statesman reports that it is credited with helping
to bring children out of poverty and has produced several
internationally-known virtuosos.  One of these is Gustavo Dudamel, who
is the youngest conductor ever to head the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Orchestra.  The Youth and Children's Orchestras of Venezuela, the New
Statesman asserts, "has quietly transformed Venezuela's social fabric,"
by "foster[ing] a culture of extraordinary achievement" that will be on
display as the group tours abroad. -VIO]


The New Statesman via Venezuelanalysis - August 13, 2007
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=2114

Scaling the Heights in Venezuela

By Alice O'Keeffe

Felix Briseno was brought up with his six siblings in a small apartment
in Guarenas, a run-down town on the outskirts of Caracas. His father is
a security guard and his mother is a housewife. As a child, he says, he
found it impossible to imagine the world outside the scrubby grass
forecourt where he was allowed out to play. "There are lots of people
here who won't even travel the 45-minute drive to Caracas. The horizons
are very limited."

While his schoolfriends and siblings scratch a living in local
factories, Felix, who is now 22, has made a remarkable transition. He
is a classically trained conductor, working with two youth orchestras
in Guarenas. Last summer he became the first member of his family to
apply for a passport when he travelled to England to attend a music
summer school. His dream is to follow in the footsteps of his hero
Gustavo Dudamel, the 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor who is one of the
world's fastest-rising talents in classical music. "Music has not just
opened doors for me professionally," says Felix, "it has opened my mind
to a whole world of possibilities."

Stories such as his are not unusual in the music school hidden away
behind an unmarked door in one of Guarenas's backstreets. Inside,
hundreds of children scurry around carrying instruments, scores and
music stands, and the air bristles with arpeggios and scales. Under
programmes run by the Foundation for the National System of Youth and
Children's Orchestras of Venezuela (Fesnojiv), Venezuela's pioneering
music education network commonly known as "El Sistema", all children in
Guarenas have access to a free education in classical music. Demand for
the scheme from the local people seems insatiable; there are currently
700 students, and another 600 are on the waiting list.

Maria Urbina, a 12-year-old violinist, tells me that she enjoys coming
to the centre because "in my area there are people who get into gang
shoot-outs and drugs. Studying music helps keep you away from all
that". Carlos Perez, also 12, whose father is a bus conductor, is
studying cello and wants to become a professional musician. "I practise
for three or four hours when I get home every day, between finishing
school and coming here," he says. "At first, my friends didn't
understand, but now lots of them have started coming, too."

"This building becomes a community, and a safe haven for many
students," says the centre's dedicated administrator, Mercedes Ascanio.
"We are conscious that we are not just creating musicians, we are
creating citizens. They learn solidarity, punctuality, organisation.
They become more mature and responsible. Many of them have told me that
if they hadn't come here they would have ended up in prison or dead."
The school has become a vital cultural focus for the people of
Guarenas; it is run by parents, and the older children are expected to
take on teaching responsibilities, training the younger children in
addition to pursuing their own studies. "Young people are proactive by
nature," says Ascanio. "We just give them the space to do it."

In the 30 years since its foundation, El Sistema has evolved into one
of the most successful community arts programmes in the world. There
are 250,000 children studying music under its auspices across
Venezuela, from the most remote rural villages to the poorest barrios
of Caracas. Its founder, the composer/statesman José Antonio Abreu
(according to legend, he started with 11 children rehearsing in a
garage), has said that it heralds a "new era in which great art is
created by the majority, for the majority". In a politically turbulent
country, it has provided a rare point of consensus, attracting support
from a succession of governments including, most recently, that of the
socialist president Hugo Chávez, who has financed a state-of-the-art
concert hall and rehearsal space in Caracas.

At 68, Abreu, a stooped, quietly spoken man, is still the director of
El Sistema, and for his thousands of protégés, who utter his name in
hushed tones, he is something between a father figure and a guru. When
I met him after a concert by El Sistema's first orchestra, the Simón
Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (SBYO), he was surrounded by a
crowd of young people waiting to touch his hand and take his picture.

Abreu's innovation was to argue that a musical training can overcome
the "spiritual poverty" that perpetuates social and economic
inequality, giving young people the internal resources to overcome a
disadvantaged background. He has skilfully negotiated the hazards of
Venezuelan politics by maintaining El Sistema at arm's length from all
governments. "This is a social and artistic project," he told me
firmly. "It has nothing whatsoever to do with politics."

Nevertheless, many of those involved in El Sistema claim that it has
quietly transformed Venezuela's social fabric. "We have a very
different generation of Venezuelans growing up now, who have been
deeply influenced by El Sistema's egalitarian philosophy," says
Ascanio. "We still don't know what contribution all these young people
will make to the country, but I am sure it has been, and will continue
to be, a force for social change."

Indisputably, it has fostered a culture of extraordinary achievement.
In recent years, some of the biggest names in classical music,
including Daniel Barenboim and Simon Rattle, have sung the praises of
the programme; after his first visit, Rattle said emotionally that
"there is nothing more important in the world of music than what is
happening here in Venezuela". Graduates from the SBYO, which is made up
of El Sistema's best musicians aged 17-24, have been snapped up by some
of the world's most prestigious orchestras. Dudamel is now principal
conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and will soon take over
from Esa-Pekka Salonen as musical director of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic. A 22-year-old double bassist, Edicson Ruiz, is now
playing with the Berlin Philharmonic. The SBYO itself has been signed
to Deutsche Grammophon and will play at the Proms and the Edinburgh
Festival this summer.

"El Sistema creates a community in which the most important thing is
the orchestra," Dudamel tells me when I meet him in Caracas later that
week. "In music conservatories in other parts of the world the focus is
on individual study, but in Venezuela you are always encouraged to
share in the group." He stresses that the social and musical objectives
of the orchestra are inextricably linked. "The emphasis on the
collective is what gives our orchestras their very special sound. But
it is also where we are constructing our country. An orchestra is a
harmonious community, where you can have a different background or view
of the world to the person sitting next to you, but you still sit down
with a shared objective."

It is a particularly pertinent message in contemporary Venezuela. In a
country deeply divi ded along economic and political lines, classical
music has become an increasingly important, if unlikely, source of
pride and unity. At a concert at the Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas,
Dudamel and the SBYO were greeted as heroes by an audience of every
age, race and social background. "We are all very proud of them," said
Henrique Ruiz, a 70-year-old nurse sitting next to me. It was the first
time he had come to a classical music concert, and he had queued all
afternoon to get a ticket. "When I got to the front they had run out. I
must have looked as though I was going to cry, because they gave me one
for free."

Paradoxically, however, as the international profile of El Sistema
grows, it must negotiate its relationship with the state ever more
carefully. Earlier this year, after the government took the
controversial decision not to renew the broadcasting licence for the
opposition television station RCTV, the launch of the replacement,
government-friendly channel TVes was marked with a broadcast of a
recorded performance by Dudamel and the SBYO. Opposition groups were
quick to attack; one "open letter" posted on many internet blog sites
compared Dudamel to Wilhelm Furtwängler, a conductor once accused of
supporting the Nazis.

Dudamel defends the performance, pointing out that the orchestra has
always played on both private and state channels. "The day we played
the anthem, we played it for the whole of Venezuela, not for one group
or another. The image of the orchestra is made for everyone." 

                                   ***

The Times Online UK - August 13, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2246441.ece

Music saved the street children of Venezuela - 
could it work for Scotland too? 

By Ben Hoyle

In the violent slums of Venezuela, free classical music lessons have
transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of children and created
an unlikely production line of virtuosos.

For 32 years El Sistema (the System) has tackled the ?spiritual
poverty? among some of South America?s poorest street children by
teaching them to play Bach, Beethoven and Mahler in orchestras.

Now El Sistema is coming to Britain, where project organisers hope that
it will rescue a generation of children on one of Scotland?s most
notorious housing estates.

On Friday the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, El Sistema?s
dazzling standard-bearer, is to play a rare British concert at the
Edinburgh International Festival.

Families from the Raploch estate in Stirling will be at the rehearsal,
dreaming that their children might one day follow in the footsteps of
Gustavo Dudamel or Edicson Ruiz. Dudamel, 26, is music director
designate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Ruiz is a double-bass player
who was plucked from the ghettos of Caracas to become, at 17, the
youngest-ever member of the Berlin Philharmonic.

Raploch could use a few success stories. On the outskirts of Stirling,
overshadowed by the castle, hemmed in by the Forth River and the M9
motorway to Perth, rows of crumbling pebble-dash houses testify to
years of decay.

Half a century ago children played in the streets and factories lined
Raploch?s main road. Now there is widespread unemployment and parents
are scared to let their sons and daughters outside.

Mechelle Kerr, 32, a mother of three, said that parents would do
anything to keep their children off the streets. El Sistema is the
answer to her prayers, she said, watching her middle child Stuart, aged
5, ride past on his tricycle. ?There?s nothing for the bairns at that
age except the swing park, and that?s full of 14-year-olds drinking
Buckfast [tonic wine].?

Stuart wants to take up the trumpet and learn the music for the Sonic
the Hedgehog video games.

Raploch?s fortunes are already being slowly transformed by a £120
million regeneration project, including 900 new homes, new schools,
nurseries, sports facilities and a health campus. It is hoped that the
regeneration programme and El Sistema will support each other.

Judy Barrow, of the Raploch Urban Regeneration Company, said that the
area?s poverty does not compare with the conditions that many of El
Sistema?s current pupils grow up in.

?We don?t have shoeless starving kids in Raploch but we do have kids
who don?t have the same opportunities as other kids to go to ballet
classes or music lessons because their parents can?t afford them.?

In Venezuela, El Sistema embraces more than 200 orchestras, reaching
250,000 children. It attracts more than £15 million a year of
government funding. But it started humbly, with a handful of children
playing in a garage.

The Scottish pilot will follow this modest model. A company has been
set up to run the five-year scheme in Raploch, backed by the Scottish
Arts Council, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Stirling Council.
If the pilot is successful there are plans to roll it out across
Scotland.

Susan Carragher, who is responsible for communities and culture at
Stirling Council, travelled to Venezuela in May to see El Sistema at
work. She was struck by the passion of the children. ?We saw one
student with a bandage on. She?d been shot but she didn?t want to miss
a class.?