El Sistema

El Sistema and Gustavo Dudamel: rescuing children with music

As Gustavo Dudamel's Simón Bolívar Orchestra helps launch London 2012 Festival, Ivan Hewett travels to Venezuela to witness the music system El Sistema that produced it – and helps to save children from lives of violence and crime.

Right note: students at an El Sistema training centre  

By Ivan Hewett

The Venezuelan musical training system known simply as El Sistema is a marvel. Its flagship orchestras are renowned the world over, and its most famous son, conductor Gustavo Dudamel, is perhaps the only universally known face in classical music. It’s rescued untold thousands of poor children from drifting into crime. Its visionary founder, José Antonio Abreu, is spoken of in hushed tones. Some even say he should win the Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s not surprising that everyone wants a piece of the Sistema magic, and imitations have sprung up all around the world. We have one in the UK, on a bleak estate near Stirling in Scotland. There are Sistemas in Sweden, in New Zealand, in the US, and in 22 other countries. But can they replicate the thing that makes the Venezuelan Sistema so special? And what is that mysterious thing anyway?

Hoping to find out, I set out to Caracas to see it close up. One factor becomes clear the moment I arrive. There’s a potency in the air, which compared with rainy, chilly England is intoxicating.

Caracas may not be a picturesque city, but what it has in abundance is balmy subtropical magnificence. The mountains rearing up behind the city are startlingly green, and the araguaney trees are in brilliant yellow bloom. Everywhere you look there are huge murals, shouting, Pay your taxes at this number! Support our leader Hugo Chavez’s socialist revolution! Next to them are giant painted figures of Christ the King. Even the barriers dividing the lanes of the highways are painted bright orange.

Looking at this cityscape, the joy you see in the faces of the Teresa Carreño youth orchestra seems less mysterious. But it wouldn’t be right to romanticise Caracas. Under Chavez’s rule, the murder rate has more-or-less tripled, and drug-related shootings are a daily occurrence. Out there in the tangle of flyovers, tower blocks and scruffy shopping precincts El Sistema has a hard job to do, using music to keep kids off the streets four hours a day, six days a week.

To see it in action, I went to one of the dozens of nucleos or musical centres spread around the city (there are 270 in the country as a whole). Caracas is not a place a foreigner wanders around unchaperoned, so El Sistema laid on a car and minder to take me there.
As we speed down one of the highways that criss-cross the city, my minder turns on the radio. A charmingly old-fashioned folky jangle emerges, sounding like a Latino waltz.
“That is joropo,” he tells me. “It’s an old type of folk music from the southern plains of Venezuela, with harp and a small guitar called a cuatro. It comes from the last century, but people still like it. You see that?” he said, pointing towards one of the hills just ahead. At a distance it seems to be encrusted with red and blue boxes at crazy angles. As we get closer, the corrugated metal roofs become visible.
“That is a barrio, or slum. We have a lot of these in Caracas, and the nucleos are near them, so the children who come to us do not have to travel far.
“This one is called Antinamo, and is quite famous because the city authorities wanted to demolish it, but the people refused to leave.”
We’d now arrived at the purpose-built concrete block that is the Montalban nucleo. Inside there’s a hum of activity. Little children with scrubbed smiling faces and instrument cases come and go. Three rehearsals are going on at once, and their music mingles in the corridors. From behind one door I hear something reminiscent of the folk music I’d just heard. This turns out to be an orchestra of cuatros, rehearsing a folk song. In another room there’s a group of young string players who start with a song called Moliendo Café (Ground Coffee) and then move on to Handel’s Water Music. It’s fascinating to see a form of folk music and high Western art music taught side-by-side. Around the room are adult helpers, who apparently are there to keep order.
But all eyes were on the conductor, who never has to raise his voice. One of the minders tells me that the kids have been attending the nucleo since they were three, and so it is now an ingrained part of their lives.
Today they’re going to try something new. Marshall Marcus, violinist, one-time chief executive of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and head of music at London’s Southbank Centre, has returned to Caracas, where he used to play profesionally, to start a new project. He’s setting up a Baroque orchestra, the Espíritu Baroco Venezuelano, with players from the Sistema’s top youth orchestra, the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra. But from time to time he likes to engage with the little ones, and he’s come to show them what a Baroque violin bow looks like.
They all want to have a go, of course, but they didn’t seem so keen at his suggestion that they learn a two-part version of Corelli’s La Follia by ear. But with some help from the musical minders they get the hang of it with amazing speed.
Back in the car, heading towards El Sistema’s HQ in the city centre, Marcus tells me why he’s so set on bringing “early music” to Venezuela.
“I’m working with a group of 20 musicians from the main youth orchestra, the Teresa Carreño orchestra,” he says.
Does this involve new instruments? “Well, we have ordered 54 Baroque bows, and I’m encouraging my players to use the right sort of strings. But really this isn’t about creating a little clique of specialists,” he says. “It’s to do with encouraging a different sort of musicality, more to do with dancing than expressivity. Eventually I’d like all the players to experience it. They love the music already, it’s just a question of getting them to appreciate the style.”
After a lengthy drive we come to the nerve centre of El Sistema, an impressive combination of performance spaces and music school right by the botanical gardens in the centre of town. It’s a fascinating mix of Latin-American vibrancy and Southbank concrete brutalism, which opened only last year. The floor is made from a rare tropical hardwood, and the seats in the two concert halls are vibrantly coloured to a design by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. (He’s a favourite of Hugo Chávez, who takes a great interest in Sistema, and insists that its board reports direct to the presidential office.)
I’m shown around by Rodrigo Guerrero, head of international affairs, who rattles off reams of impressive statistics about the centre: two concert halls, 94 practice rooms, 1,500 daily visitors, all built at a cost of $50million.
The centre takes the best young players from the regional nucleos and offers them training and accommodation. And it hosts El Sistema’s five flagship orchestras, including the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, now a fully fledged adult orchestra, which will be appearing in Raploch and London as part of London 2012.
Wandering down the corridors, and peering at the pianists and brass ensembles rehearsing in the practice rooms, you might think you were in a normal conservatoire. But as El Sistema’s executive director Eduardo Mendez points out, this centre is actually called the Centre for Social Action Through Music.
“We are a social agency first and foremost,” he says, “and it’s our job to provide services to lots of government agencies such as the Ministry of Prisons, various medical agencies, the Education Ministry. You know we have a problem here in Venezuela, with violence becoming more prevalent generally, and we do a lot of work with offenders. I don’t say we have all the answers to their problems, but we do give them self-esteem and a means to reconnect with their families, who would otherwise reject them.”
On a three-day visit I wasn’t going to crack all of El Sistema’s secrets. But I did spot several key factors that will be hard to replicate in chilly Britain. Caribbean joyousness is one. The old-fashioned charismatic authority of a founder-figure is another. Yet another is the existence of a truly unified, national folk culture which has survived intact down the centuries. But perhaps the most important factor was revealed in a conversation I had with Juan, a cellist in Marcus’s Baroque orchestra.
“Before I joined the Sistema,” he says, “I was not serious about music, I was crazy about sport, and about partying. Then I joined Sistema in 2007, and there’s something about it that makes you grow up inside. When I visit my old friends I don’t feel comfortable any more. When I am with my new friends, and we talk about music and cello, I feel at home.”
For those who are in it, the Sistema isn’t a bolt-on to their lives – it becomes the centre of everything.