VENEZUELA HAVE IT RIGHT
Many is the time that I have written about the multitude of benefits to children of learning to play music. Quite apart from the aesthetic and cultural enhancement of their lives, they learn pretty well all the skills necessary for living a good life. By playing in groups and orchestras they develop self-respect and respect for others. They learn how to submit to direction and still maintain their individuality. They learn co-operation and initiative, how to cope with highs and lows, success and failure, and still come up smiling. They also find that they have learned an international language which will enable them to feel at home in any country of the world where there are other musicians. When they move to a new home they will find among the local musicians an instant source of new friendships. As a last resort, if they are down and out, they can busk on a street corner.
The latest youth panic in the news is about knife crime, and the government in its effort to be seen to be doing something will no doubt come up with another law which it will be unable to enforce. Yet again they will be answering a negative with another negative.
In Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, there were vast numbers of marginalised young people, much as in our big cities. José Antonio Abreu decided that a good idea to tackle the problem was to get them playing music. The first session involved 11 young musicians and took place in an underground car-park, but the numbers grew rapidly and eventually attracted funding from the state. ‘The State has understood perfectly……that this is a social project’ says José ‘a project for human development’. Now there is a State Foundation for the National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras which offers lessons and the loan of instruments to hundreds of children. There are academies and orchestras being formed in cities and rural areas all over Venezuela now, and more than 500,000 students have graduated and gone on to pursue careers in music, many of them as teachers in ‘El Sistema’. Simon Rattle has described it as being the most important thing happening in classical music anywhere in the whole world.
At the present count there are more than 57 children’s orchestras, 125 youth orchestras and at least 30 professional adult orchestras – and the numbers are still growing.
How wonderful it would be if (let’s not be too optimistic) a trial project were to take place in a known troubled area such as Hackney, or Plaistow, with absolutely every child being given the opportunity to learn an instrument. Economically it can’t be nearly as expensive as the vast array of law-enforcers, social workers and institutions that are currently trying to stop things happening, rather than making something better happen. Answering negatives with positives is so powerful – I wish people were not so scared of trying it.
© June Emerson
First published in The Gazette & Herald March 2007
