El Sistema Venezuela
Venezuelan children practice at a typical El Sistema nucleo, or community-based center
An orchestra is a community where the essential and exclusive feature is that it is the only community that comes together with the fundamental objective of agreeing with itself. Therefore the person who plays in an orchestra begins to live the experience of agreement. And what does the experience of agreement mean? Team practice – the practice of the group that recognizes itself as interdependent, where everyone is responsible for others and the others are responsible for oneself. Agree on what? To create beauty.
– Jose Abreu, the founder of El Sistema
Since its founding in 1975, El Sistema has provided free-of-charge music training for over 800,000 Venezuelan children and youth, 90 percent of them from very impoverished backgrounds. Heralded worldwide as “groundbreaking” and “life-changing,” El Sistema has received government support through ten politically-divergent national regimes. Officially known as the Fundacion del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela, (Fesnojiv), and sometimes translated to English as the National Network of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela, El Sistema currently enrolls some 300,000 children and youth throughout the country.
El Sistema serves children from the most impoverished neighborhoods
Children as young as 3- or 4-years-old begin music training at one of 180 community-based centers, or nucleos, located throughout the country. Through rhythmic movement, chorus, and other activities, they learn basic musical concepts and literacy; by age 5, they play recorder and percussion instruments, and at age 7 the children choose their first wind or string instrument. From the outset, ensemble work and performance is emphasized, and children learn teamwork, responsibility, and mutual respect. School-age children typically train six days a week after school and quickly gain habits of discipline and perseverance.
Today Venezuela boasts 70 children’s orchestras, 150 youth orchestras, a network of regional symphony orchestras, and a plethora of national orchestras, the most prominent of which is The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, which regularly performs to great acclaim throughout the world.
Conductor Gustavo Dudamel leads an orchestra in a barrio in Caracas, Venezuela. The 30-year-old is one of El Sistema's most successful graduates. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE GLENN GOULD FOUNDATION
El Sistema’s mission is not to create professional musicians, but:
To systematize music education and to promote the collective practice of music through symphony orchestras and choruses in order to help children and young people in achieving their full potential and acquiring values that favor their growth and have a positive impact on their lives in society.
Nonetheless, the program has produced some remarkably talented and accomplished professionals, the most famous among them Gustavo Dudamel, 30-year-old virtuoso conductor who now leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Others include bassist Edicson Ruiz, at 17 the youngest member in the history of the Berlin Philharmonic; Natalia Luis-Bassa, now conducting three English orchestras; flautist Pedro Eustache, violinist Edward Pulgar, and violist Joen Vasquez.