the astounding performances of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which are remarkable for the enthusiasm, energy, passion and expertise of the young performers. They have received the highest critical praise. Documentaries that I've seen have also focused on the transformational quality of the program, for individuals and society. It doesn't just produce--and doesn't aim at producing--spectacular talents like Gustavo Dudemal (recently appointed lead conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic); the intentions of the program are to spread love of classical music as a cooperative venture and to create orchestras in every community. And it has been amazingly successful in those goals. Two million Venezuelan children have passed through this government funded program, most of them disadvantaged street children. Two hundred and fifty thousand children are currently in the program in Venezuela (and other such programs have been started in other countries). Hundreds of community orchestras have been organized in communities throughout Venezuela, by these children after they graduate. They retain a lifelong devotion to classical music.
The program struggled financially until the election of Hugo Chavez, whose government has enthusiastically supported it and has enabled it to grow exponentially. El Sistema is, of course, entirely free for the participating children.
http://www.fesnojiv.gob.ve/en/tours/544-sinfonica-de-la-juventud-venezolana-simon-bolivar-camino-a-chicago.htmlhttp://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10129http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_29098.shtmlHere are some typical comments on the social differences between El Sistema and other classical music cultures:
"In many ways, the El Sistema operation is the opposite of the way Western classical music is taught and experienced in the more developed world. 'In the U.S. and Europe, culture tends to be owned by the elite, and shared as much as possiblewith others,' says Mark Churchill, dean of preparatory and continuing education at New England Conservatory, which has a longstanding relationship with ElSistema. 'What’s so fascinating is that in Venezuela, they are doing it the other way around. The culture is being introduced from the lower economic strata. It has become the hallmark of the lower classes; and the middle- and upper-class kids whoparticipate are the minority.' Clive Gillinson, executive and artisticdirector of Carnegie Hall, is also intrigued by El Sistema’s upside-down quality. 'Almost all of us who are involved in music education think of the top-down approach—you find the right teachers, identify talent, etc. For me, effectively this has been a bottom-up process, with a small number of people who wanted to make music together and helped other people do it. It’s amazing, and almost counter-intuitive, the way it has grown up out of passion, not out of particular skills or talent. And now that it has grown exponentially, all of that has reached a point where skill level is very high, and these players become impassioned ambassadors for the next generation.'"http://www.bsomusic.org/res/pdfs/presskits/elsistema.pdf---------------------------------------------
The corpo-fascist media and their scriptwriters in the U.S. State Department and the CIA like to create a bogeyman in Hugo Chavez, whom they demonize relentlessly and completely unfairly. Their idea is to paint socialism as a necessarily tyrannical system, requiring submission to a 'dictator' and curtailment of individual freedom. They create this bogeyman in order to knock him down--and completely ignore what is actually happening in Venezuela and the millions of Venezuelans who are participating in it: including the poor in democracy. Neither democracy nor classical music nor any of the good things of life should belong only to the rich. This is the new Venezuela, and it is not only-- and not even chiefly--about Hugo Chavez. It is about these millions of child classical musicians, and the millions of others--the workers, the poor, ordinary citizens, voters--who support Chavez's socialist policies, and who put him in office to attend to the interests of the majority.
Curtailment of individual freedom? Ask the children of El Sistema what freedom is, and they will not likely answer the freedom to become a billionaire, but rather freedom from dullness and the freedom to scale the intellectual heights of classical music with your friends, cooperatively, in an orchestra. That is a very dangerous idea to predatory capitalists and war profiteers. Venezuela is rich in individual freedom. It is one of the most individualism-driven societies in South America. People are free to say whatever they like, and that includes the corpo-fascist media. (Curtailment of press freedom is entirely a rightwing myth.) And they are free to get rich as well. (That is another myth, that somehow the rich are an 'endangered species' in Venezuela.) But a new idea has been born there--and one of its mothers may well have been El Sistema, which began as one man's vision of musical education, and has spread so far and wide--that every child is a genius, no matter how disadvantaged, and that every human being, no matter how poor, no matter how lowly, is a citizen of the collective entity called a nation and deserves respect, a decent life and opportunities to contribute to the whole.
A recent Latin American poll reveals that 7 out of 10 Venezuelans approve of their own democracy, and a whopping 85% believe in democracy as the best form of government (as opposed to only 49% in Colombia, for instance). Venezuelans also have high regard for the fairness of their economic system. You will never see these stats in a U.S. State Department handout, or from corpo-fascist reporters, who, because of who owns the media here, are not free to write about them. (Talk about curtailment of press freedom!) El Sistema is a good exemplar of WHY Venezuelans approve of their government and love democracy. Venezuelan democracy is a cooperative effort, from the ground up--from the grass roots--just like the classical music movement in Venezuela.
http://www.borev.net/2009/12/every_year_the_venerable_old.html#comments
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