Dudamel and "El Sistema"

Gustavo Dudamel, whom Reuters calls "the hottest thing to hit classical music in years," has been wowing Los Angeles audiences in his first concerts as music director-designate of the Los angeles Philharmonic. Appropos of that, here's a column I wrote last year for a local print publication regarding "El Sistema," the music education program that helped birth classical music's new superstar.

American educators, it seems, could learn a few things from Venezuela:

Music education is all too often thought of as “fluff.” This was the actual word I heard used in conversation recently by a Valley educator: “Fluff.” What was not fluff according to him? Math, science, English and history. And the last two, I suspected, were only admissible if by “English” one meant the minimum skills required to read, and by “History” the story of which large groups of people long ago killed which other large groups of people. And why. Maybe.

What good is music education, anyway? You learn a few piano pieces, or sing with some friends. Maybe you’re lucky enough to learn to play a string or wind instrument in a band or orchestra, but you probably put it aside after a while. After all, it’s not exactly the hip thing to do.

What can music education do beyond diverting us for a few moments?

Do you really want to know?

It can change the lives of whole communities. Take the example of El Sistema, the astonishingly successful music education system in Venezuela. (Those with negative political feelings about Venezuela can retire them. El Sistema was begun long before Socialist Hugo Chavez came to power, and has been embraced by every political group in that country.)

El Sistema is a music education network that offers free classical music instruction and the free use of instruments to any Venezuelan child. Starting with only 11 students in 1975, there are now 270,000 young musicians in 220 youth orchestras across Venezuela, thanks to El Sistema. “The System” emphasizes performing in front of audiences right from the start, and with great success. It has placed musicians in major symphony orchestras all over the globe. The man named as the next music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, 26-year-old Gustavo Dudamel, is an El Sistema graduate.

For most of those 270,000, of course, a career in classical music won’t happen. So, what do they get out of it? Musician and economist Jose Antonio Abreu founded the system with a simple idea in mind. An article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper sums up that idea:

“That in the poorest slums of the world, where the pitfalls of drug addiction, crime and despair are many, life can be changed and fulfilled if children can be brought into an orchestra to play the overwhelmingly European classical repertoire.”

A crazy notion, proven not-so crazy. Google “el sistema music Venezuela” and you will find story after story in various publications, most of them British, of students practicing Mozart and leading optimistic lives who were in jail or on their way to it just a few years ago. It’s about music, but it’s about more than music, because music – despite what you may hear from people afraid of certain truths – is more than organized sound that either pleases or displeases us. Javier Moreno, El Sistema’s current general manager, explains this in a quote taken from an interview in another Brit newspaper, The Independent:

“We’re interested in creating citizens with all the values they need to exist in society: responsibility, teamwork, respect, cooperation and work ethic. Maestro Abreu sums it up perfectly. He says an orchestra is the only group where people get together to reach agreements and they reach those agreements producing something beautiful.”

The outrageous success of El Sistema bursts several politically correct bubbles, including:

1) Classical music is a dead art, made by elite white men for other elite white men. Clearly, the racially blended poor children of Venezuela disprove that.
2) There’s no difference in value between one kind of music and another, except for personal taste. If that were the case, then the children of Caracas wouldn’t need El Sistema to elevate their spirits and lift them from drug addiction. They’d use the music already at hand in the streets to elevate their spirits. Hip-hop would work just as well, right?

El Sistema is still barely known about in the United States. While periodicals abroad have published article after article about its success, hardly any US ink has yet to be spilled to publicize this musical miracle from South America. Nor does there seem to be much interest in implementing El Sistema’s principles in our country. More than two dozen countries have started programs that imitate El Sistema, but there is no move to do so here.

Why should there be? Music is such…fluff.

- Kenneth LaFave