December 2009, in a hall in the infamous 23 de Enero (“23 January”) barrio high above Caracas, Venezuela. This can be a daunting part of town, especially with its intimate links to the 23 January 1958 revolution that ousted the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Dangerous enough to have security patrols from a local community group created after street protests in 2002. So, although I am here on my own, there is also my minder. All hell seems to be breaking loose.
The noise is the sound of intense clapping, whistling, crying and cheering in this bare communal building, and all, from the youngest to the oldest, are enthralled at what they have just encountered. In fact, quite a number of the people are just staring at each other with a wonder in their eyes.
The cause of the uproar may surprise: the first-ever concert by 36 local six- to 12-year-olds. To open the concert, just two months after starting to learn to play on a variety of string instruments, the children have just played The Song of A and B, so called because it only uses the two pitches A and B, in a simple melody of 24 notes. Some of the children look as surprised as anyone, although most simply smile. And why not: many of them are having their first taste of being publicly lauded, their first experience of communal approval.
Fast forward to 2023. Back at the 23 de Enero barrio the hall is freshly painted and now part of a much larger complex. A show is being put on for visitors, every room filled with assorted groups of local musicians, from a wild African-Caribbean band and dancers outside, to an infant group, special-needs ensembles, huge choruses and little folk orchestras in the rooms inside. It’s staggering to think of the change in these 14 years; what started out as the humblest of small string ensembles is now a sophisticated Latin American musical village.
That same visit, I travel to another more recent music centre for young people. Over 1,000 kilometres south-east of Caracas, this is Canaima, deep into Venezuela’s Gran Sabana, a spectacular region originally populated by the Pemon Indians that stretches from the Orinoco river towards the Colombian, Brazilian and Guyanan borders. This is still wild country, and Canaima a complex place; an Indian settlement turned tourist attraction due to the astonishing beauty of its surroundings and its proximity to Angel Falls, the world’s highest waterfall. Tourist prices still mix with pretty basic levels of subsistence. Two shy young violinists who have passed the national auditions to become members of the National Children’s Orchestra of Venezuela are introduced. Canaima, like the 23 de Enero music centre, is part of El Sistema (“The System”).
El Sistema is a music programme with a methodology linked to personal and social development. You don’t so much learn a musical instrument – as in traditional western classical music education – as learn the skill of playing music together. All of the work happens in local community music centres known as nucleos, with a fast-paced and immersive approach. A typical nucleo will provide activity for the kids for four hours a day, six days a week, at a level of energy that can leave you breathless. One of its most important principles – loved by some, loathed by others – is that it sees music as a vehicle for social development. Yes, the kids aim for artistic and technical excellence, but it is precisely in that process, and working together in ensembles, that social and musical development is argued to result.
The programme leapt to fame a couple of decades ago when its most famous orchestra, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, burst on to the European cultural scene with performances characterised by a depth of joy and wide-eyed hunger to communicate. The fact that many of the young musicians of the orchestra seemed to come from deeply disadvantaged social backgrounds made their success all the more awe-inspiring. Here was a model for how music really changed lives. Repeated globally, the march of the orchestra and what it represented seemed unstoppable.
There are now hundreds of Sistema-inspired programmes across five continents. No year seems to go by without an international Sistema festival somewhere, but none come close to the Venezuelan numbers: its website lists more than a million current participants, 1,722 orchestras, 1,426 choruses, 1,704 local centres and 443 nucleos. According to an El Sistema Venezuela source, about two-thirds of the costs of this, for the day-to-day running of the nucleos and the central administration, are covered by the government, with around one-third from additional private sources and concert fees for special projects.
El Sistema is about to reach its 50th anniversary, and this week, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela arrives at London’s Barbican Centre for a mini-residency as part of a sold-out, nine-concert anniversary tour of seven major European cities.
You’d think that this current anniversary tour would be a cause for joyful celebration all round. Not so. A recent news story reported that another of Venezuela’s remarkable musicians, pianist Gabriela Montero, was “calling on concert halls and music promoters to cut ties with her country’s world-renowned youth orchestra”. (Although, to be accurate, this particular orchestra is no longer a youth orchestra: most of the players are now in their 30s, and the word “youth” has been dropped from the name).
This call-out emerged after “Nicolás Maduro’s alleged theft of last year’s [Venezuelan] presidential election,” says the Guardian’s Latin American correspondent, Tom Phillips. But what, you may ask, has an orchestra to do with the elections? Did we see any demands to stop Venezuelan sportspeople at the Paris Olympics? According to Montero: “The cultural sector must no longer facilitate the overt promotion of a manifestly failed ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ through the emotive optics of Venezuela’s youth orchestras.”
Others accuse El Sistema of being a political organisation, pointing out that it sits under the office of the president and that its board of directors includes high-profile government politicians. Prize-winning international conductor Gustavo Dudamel has come in for particularly trenchant criticism, with one claim that he serves as Maduro’s “puppet and henchman”.
With such criticism flying around, you have to ask, why does Dudamel – who is about to take up a position as music director of the New York Philharmonic – bother to carry on with El Sistema’s orchestras? He could make his life a lot easier by walking away from the Venezuelans and living a five-star life conducting the world’s great orchestras, all of whom seem to want his services. Why does he choose to spend part of his time away from the New York, Berlin and Vienna and instead take what currently seems to be the hard road? His answer is not about the government, but the kids, and an education system he grew up in, which gave him the opportunity to be who he is, and to which he now wants to give back.
The criticisms of El Sistema, however, go further. Reports of an oppressive regime and a boot-camp mentality in the nucleos were compounded when allegations about a specific case of sexual harassment surfaced in the spring of 2021. There was immediately the question, was this a one-off – in which case it was still extremely serious – or was it a sign of something even worse – a generalised practice and culture?
To their credit El Sistema Venezuela appear to have taken very seriously the sexual harassment allegations: they reported them to the Public Prosecutor’s office and, working with Unicef, have introduced safeguarding measures, including workshops and child-friendly kits on safeguarding for staff and students. “Every El Sistema nucleo now has an office of remediation and protection composed of people from the community,” El Sistema Venezuela’s executive director Eduardo Méndez told me. “We have connections with Unicef and other NGOs that have helped us to provide the right processes for these offices.”
Montero clearly has support, but many in Venezuela, including those critical of the government, disagree with her. Anaisa Rodriguez, for example, responded in Noticiero Digital, a well-known Venezuelan news site often critical of the government, “[Montero’s] words filled numerous people with indignation who have no links with ‘Chavismo’.” Many said that El Sistema is a product and symbol of the country not the government, and that it existed for several decades before the current presidential incumbent.
Part of this is the natural pride of Venezuelans: in a country where so much appears to have gone wrong in recent decades, El Sistema seems the one successful story, something positive to say about Venezuela rather than hyperinflation, distressing economics, depressing politics and a huge desperate diaspora.
What to make of all of this? My experience of El Sistema goes back to 1979, when I was living in Venezuela, leading a (non-Sistema) orchestra, and teaching in the then four-year-old programme before El Sistema was even its name. In hundreds of concerts within the country and across the world, I am yet to see the presence of a single government figure, apart from perhaps on one occasion in Caracas (and that was to praise El Sistema with no mention of the government). Abroad, never. If the government is trying to use Dudamel or the orchestras as puppets or henchmen, someone needs to give them the “how to” handbook.
Instead, we should not forget the profound effect the training and methodology has had on millions of Venezuelans. People such as Ron Alvarez, global teacher ambassador and a recent recipient of a coveted CNN Heroes award: “El Sistema gave me the tools to transform my life through education and music. In a new world of inclusive values, I discovered its true power: it’s about humanity and resilience. Today, I work with refugees in Europe, offering them hope, dignity, and the belief that music and education can rebuild even the most broken dreams.”
Eric Booth, a prize-winning arts learning consultant and writer from New York who was named by Americans for the Arts as “one of the 50 most influential people in the arts in the US”, has long studied El Sistema and written books about it. He says: “For 50 years, El Sistema Venezuela has set a new standard for the potential power of music education – an example that has inspired a world of colleague-programmes, and that has changed countless lives and communities. Within 10 minutes of my first entering a nucleo in El Sistema Venezuela, I knew this was the most significant accomplishment in arts education I had ever seen.”
None of this stops some critics. But in the midst of this clamour, the one voice I do not hear is that of the orchestra’s musicians. They are here in Europe to make music, to celebrate an anniversary and show what their training has done for them and their country, yet some people in the papers and on social media seem to be trying to use them as convenient puppets in a fight with the Venezuelan government.
So, as a musician, my last words go to the young Simón Bolívar musicians on stage: cut out the white noise, hold your heads up high, and show what you can do. You are yourselves. Only be that, and your concerts will be the amazing success they deserve to be.
• The Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra is at the Barbican, London on 15 and 16 January. Both concerts will be broadcast live on Radio 3 and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days. Marshall Marcus is founder and president of Sistema Europe, and executive and artistic director, European Union Youth Orchestra.
