Venezuelan Nationalism via a \"Sistema\" of Youth Orchestras

El Sistema: Youth Orchestras Perform the Nation of
Venezuela
Fredericka Schmadel
Writing Sample


Venezuela: Poor Little Rich Land of Black Gold, Natural Wonders, and
Barrios

"Oil wealth had the power of a myth." This 1984 statement comes from
Juan Antonio Cabrujas, playwright and television soap opera maven, who
became an influential political commentator in the period just before
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's first term. Cabrujas's publisher,
COPRE, is a Venezuelan governmental entity created in 1984 to promote the
democratization of the state. Cabrujas compared the discovery of
Venezuela's oil wealth, which rivals that of Saudi Arabia and has never
been fully mapped to this date, with the illusion of a miracle, in a
miraculous country, a magical state. Even several decades after the
country started mining this miracle, according to him, he and his fellow
countrymen were still building the Great Venezuela. The trouble was that
the country did not really progress, according to Cabrujas. Instead it got
fat (Cabrujas 1984:7-35).
Something similar happened around the turn of the 19th century, when
Venezuela had nearly cornered the world's market for coffee. Venezuela was
a magnet for immigrants even then; newcomers flocked to certain areas to
plant coffee and reap the rich rewards. They were peasants, but with no
traditional ties to the specific pieces of land they cultivated. Such
peasant immigrants came from Spain, Portugal, and Italy. For a while they
prospered, chiefly because they had free access to fertile land in the west
of Venezuela, near the market town of Duaca, land that had previously
belonged to indigenous people others had driven out, and land the
government had re-designated public land, the Venezuelan equivalent of the
American West's open range.
This state of affairs came to a turbulent end in the 1920's and 1930's
when Duaca's traditional elites, all owners of haciendas and coffee
plantations, forged an alliance with the central government and its
caudillos Cipriano Castro (1899-1908) and Juan Vicente Gomez (1908-1935).
Gradually public land and land formerly held by Indians became less and
less available to the newcomers, who either left or settled into life as
something like an indentured servant on a hacienda. The transition did not
occur without violence, however, including damage to property and
livestock, injuries to a number of people, and at least one extremely
grisly murder (Yarrington 1997: 1,171,188.) Those who lost the game of
life and wealth – survival, really – when the oil bonanza was proclaimed
and tapped later on that same century, however, ended up in urban
shantytowns, barrios, rather than rural hacienda workers' quarters.
Venezuela did not fare differently from Mexico in this respect.


The potential wealth of the nation, a wretchedly underpaid native
labor,
exemptions from taxation, economic privileges, and government
tolerance: these are the factors that built up the boom in the Mexican
oil industry. President Lazaro Cardenas, March 18, 1938 (Falola
2005:43).






Caracas, Venezuela's capital, has many aspects. Here are two from the
year of Hugo Chavez's first election as President. Charles Hardy, an
American citizen and Jesuit priest, described the barrios as constellations
of lights glittering all around international travelers as they enter
Caracas from below, from Maiquetia, where the international airport is
located. By the light of day, however, Hardy saw that the slopes no longer
seemed anything but sordid. Some commentators describe the hilltop barrios
as a dirty ring around the bathtub that is Caracas. Every major city in
Venezuela has such barrios. In Caracas the rejects and drop-outs from the
game of life look down from their shacks and cardboard dwellings above on
their more successful fellow-countrymen living in houses and apartments
below (Hardy 2007:18).
Natural wonders are also part of Venezuela's claim to fame. Its
tepuys, or abrupt, steep, extremely tall mesas in the midst of deep jungle,
were the scene of Sir Arthur Conan Coyle's Lost World and the recent movie
Up. In addition to its cities and barrios Venezuela has alpine-like, snow-
covered Andean mountains, windswept deserts, tourist-haunted Caribbean
islands, vast fertile plains, beaches, and many thousands of square miles
of virgin Amazon jungle. Hundreds of species of birds, mammals, and other
wildlife in Venezuela are unique in the world. Internet search engines
such as Google list more entries for natural wonders of Venezuela than they
do for its petroleum-related locations. Venezuela also has abundant
natural gas, gold, diamonds, and uranium, as well as other less well-known
underground treasures. A branch of the national oil company financed a
detailed, Baedeker-style guidebook in 1985, a lavish 300-page book with
many color photos. In it a graceful essay about the vast Venezuelan
federal territory called Amazonas mentions in passing the necessity of
balancing water security – of the Orinoco River – against a moral
imperative to provide basic services to fellow citizens living in extremely
isolated circumstances, as well as national security concerns and the need
to preserve natural wonders in the area. Some of Venezuela's borders with
Colombia and all of its borders with Brazil lie on arbitrary and unmarked
lines in nearly uninhabited jungle lands.
Venezuelans are accustomed to condescension. Non-Venezuelans often
consider them the world's country cousins or Beverly Hillbillies, with
their new oil wealth, their gigantic waves of white European immigrants,
and their oddly inflected Spanish. Hundreds of thousands of people,
Venezuelans and others, both idolize and demonize Hugo Chavez, the hugely
popular and hugely controversial President of Venezuela, who died recently,
but whose image still overshadows the current, living President in people's
hopes and dreams. Like a trickster god of some indigenous religion he was
larger than life, charismatic, slyly impudent, and unpredictable.
Venezuelans have been the underdogs of Latin America for nearly a century,
however; this disrespectful attitude did not begin with President Chavez's
election.
Venezuela's self-image today, amounting to individual Venezuelans'
images of their country, and affecting their personal self-images as well,
has continued to suffer due to international media fondness for the
sensational, the startling, or the humorous. Venezuela is well known for
having vast petroleum wealth. Venezuela is well known for being a long-
term, functioning democracy, although the repeated election victories of
Hugo Chavez the avowed socialist have clouded this image a bit.
Venezuela's neighbor Colombia has condescended to it for decades, as a less-
cultured wannabe struggling to catch up in the modern world. Other Spanish-
speaking nations have shown the same attitude.
Headlines like these, collected over a six-week period in late 2009,
are typical. Venezuela makes news, but it makes news in specific ways as
seen in the following:


"Kidnapping has become big business for Venezuela's criminals," El
Mercurio (Chile), Dec. 31, 2009; "77% of Venezuelans believe the country's
democracy is deteriorating," El Mercurio, Dec. 29, 2009; "President Chavez
of Venezuela threatened to nationalize Toyota," The Wall Street Journal,
Dec. 26, 2009; "President Chavez renames world's tallest waterfall,"
Guardian Unlimited (UK), Dec. 22, 2009; "There is a rush to immigrate to
the United States from Venezuela," Miami Daily Business Review, Dec. 22,
2009; "Chavez is putting Venezuela on a war footing with Colombia," Gaceta
de los negocios, Dec. 22, 2009; "Venezuela – Energy Rationed," L'Expansion
(Paris), Dec. 20, 2009; "La DEA descubre nexos entre Venezuela y las
Farc," (The DEA discovers connections between Venezuela and the FARC –
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), El Nuevo Herald (Miami), Dec. 12,
2009; "Venezuela between Socialism and Warmongering," Zeit Online
(Frankfurt), Dec. 5, 2009; "Ask the President – Diet, Showering, Night-time
Bathroom Trips – Chavez's Daily Tips Stop at Nothing," Sueddeutsche Zeitung
(Munich), Nov. 21, 2009; "The most corrupt in America," Gaceta de los
negocios, Nov, 20, 2009; "Oil and Socialism Won't Stop the Recession in
Venezuela," Le Temps (Paris), Nov. 20, 2009.


These headlines and others fall into three categories: Venezuela is
an evil influence, Venezuela is going downhill fast, and Venezuela's
President Chavez is a buffoon. They come down to fear-mongering, doom-
saying, and condescension or ridicule.
It is easy to see why Venezuelans might have a rather defensive
attitude toward the media and the rest of the world. The new thing,
however, is that a political faction -- the political opposition within
Venezuela -- uses international headlines and attitudes like these to bash
the faction in office – the Chavistas. The Chavistas, however, are making
serious attempts to remedy long-standing economic and social injustices in
the country. They may be inept in going about it, and slow to deal with
large-scale corruption in their own ranks, but they are making the attempt.

Venezuelan media detail some on-the-ground efforts by the Chavista
side of the equation, such as the "missions," bringing literacy to the
barrios, setting up offices there for Cuban doctors, and helping
neighborhood committees to take over abandoned businesses and put them back
into use. It's a messy, slow process.
In an article by Daniel J. Wakin in its November 17, 2009, edition,
the International Herald Tribune described the debut of the new conductor
of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, a 28-year-old graduate of
El Sistema, a network of youth orchestras whose members hail from some of
Venezuela's poorest barrios. Maestro Dudamel rose to conduct the crown
jewel of its orchestras, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Caracas. He
then began to appear in various parts of the world, not just with the youth
orchestra, but also as guest conductor of many of the world's great
orchestras. The Los Angeles Philharmonic didn't even hold a search for its
new conductor or audition anyone. They just hired Gustavo Dudamel.
At his debut the orchestra pulled out all the stops, setting up a free
concert at the Hollywood Bowl for 18,000 people on October 3, 2009. It was
called "Bienvenido Gustavo!" Among the presentations were several by
gospel, jazz, and blues groups and soloists, with movie-star announcers and
introducers. Maestro Dudamel began the evening by conducting a new youth
orchestra the LA Symphony management had set up in homage to the Simon
Bolivar Youth Orchestra. He then went on to conduct the LA Philharmonic
playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The symphony management saw to it
that at the appropriate time the words of the "Ode to Joy" appeared
projected above the proscenium arch in Spanish. People in the audience
sang. Tears of solemn emotion fell, especially among Hispanic concert-
goers. The orchestra management has put together a mini-web site devoted
to its new conductor.


The Orchestra Concert – Form, Production, and Discourse of the Ritual


According to Beverly Stoeltje's article on the American rodeo
(Stoeltje 1993: 185ff), there are three basic pillars of ritual, its
sources of power. They are form, production, and discourse. Power in this
sense is not limited to denigration or subjection of others; Stoeltje
astutely notes that "power also resides in the capacity to create,
transform, or otherwise make things happen." Quoting Abrahams she agrees
that form and performance of ritual are inseparable (Stoeltje 1993:136).
How is it that the chosen form in Venezuela was the symphonic
orchestra concert? In the 1974-75 time period there were only two
professional orchestras in all of Venezuela, the Venezuela Symphony
Orchestra Society (Caracas), and the Zulia Symphony Orchestra (Maracaibo).
It was difficult for classical musicians to make a living. Many cultural
institutions began in Venezuela in this time, however; important Venezuelan
artists were returning to the country. Jose Antonio Abreu, the Venezuelan
youth orchestra system's founder and patron saint, remembers it like this:
"… the musicians who played in the country's live bands and orchestras [not
limiting this definition to those that played classical music] in the
1950's and 1960's lived off their music; not such a lucrative profession as
being a doctor, of course, but you got by. I … had to carve out an
economic position for myself …attended the Andres Bello Catholic
University, and on graduating as an economist I began to work at the
Central Bank of Venezuela" (Borzacchini 2004: 20).
Venezuela, land of immigrants, would have had problems rallying
support – contradicting its detractors – in the same way many Latin
American and African nations have chosen, with a traditional musical or
dance group. At that time most of Venezuela's middle class had less than
three generations of history in the country. Barbara Morales, a new mother
aged 29, told me that her growing up in Venezuela involved learning the
folkways, dances, and music – including the bagpipes – of her parents'
native Galicia, in Spain. She had been exposed to traditional Venezuelan
joropo folk dance and music, for example, but was unimpressed, and
certainly did not identify with these forms. It was not her culture, not
her Venezuelan culture. At the same time she separated her folkloric
activities from her nationality; they were Galician folklore, not
Venezuelan (Interview 1).
Venezuelan cultural and governmental decision-makers decided to use,
of all the imaginable cultural forms available to them, children's or young
people's orchestras from the poorest barrios of Venezuela; this form calls
attention to the Venezuelan government's labors to relieve the misery and
illiteracy of the shantytown inhabitants in terms of a high culture,
nothing tribal-seeming or uneducated.
Choosing the orchestra concert of classical music had to do with the
chooser as well as with demographics and governmental priorities. Jose
Antonio Abreu, El Sistema's founder and guiding light, was then and is now
a classical pianist and composer. Venezuela is a land of immigrants from
various backgrounds, including other Latin American countries, Eastern
Europe, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and more recently Syria and Lebanon. One
reliable common ground is music, although at the time El Sistema was
beginning to function, classical music was not any more popular in
Venezuela than in other Latin American countries. Maestro Abreu was in
that sense a true pioneer, a man of genius who changed history.
According to Esteban Araujo Rosales, a graduate of El Sistema, and a
lawyer today, "Jose Antonio Abreu freed Venezuela from the inferiority
complex of being an underdeveloped country … (he) included the lowliest
sectors of the population and created a teaching method that brought
together technical elements and musical execution in a single coaching
process [applied to individual musicians and the whole of an orchestra].
Young students are themselves teachers of children and other young people
in a ceaseless learning chain that feeds off its own resources …. He let
the System [El Sistema] be assumed as a State policy [It acquired
Venezuelan government sponsorship] that has transcended government changes
and projected itself into the future" (Borzacchini 2004:19).
Production factors: El Sistema, which now includes thousands of full
orchestras and choirs, including choirs of deaf and/or developmentally
challenged children and teenagers, confronts and conquers gigantic
management and communications-related challenges. Jose Antonio Abreu,
founder and standard-bearer, remains at the helm, but has delegated most
management duties to a cadre of El Sistema alumni from the early days, who
are musicians themselves, as well as teachers of music. They are by
definition hands-on managers. Lines of communication are fast and
efficiently informal, as well as formal and official.
Recruitment of new orchestra members relies to a great extent on word
of mouth carried by musicians' professional circles and El Sistema
veterans. Occasional efforts have targeted outreach to special
populations, such as indigenous groups, who have formed their own El
Sistema-affiliated drumming groups as well as integrating their children
and young people into nearby orchestras composed of non-indigenous young
musicians as well. El Sistema's music teachers circulate throughout
Venezuela, adding their efforts to those of the conductors on the ground
working with each individual orchestra, making the visitors' coaching
sessions a treasured special event. The vast majority of teachers may be
only a few years older than their pupils, but their work magnifies the size
and reach of the teaching staff and its ability to communicate directly
with the young musicians on their level. Using volunteer teachers also
magnifies the territory Venezuelan government funding can cover. El
Sistema's travel costs within Venezuela far outpace even the costs incurred
due to the international tours of its top-ranked orchestras and choirs.
Financial management, tour management, outreach management, media
outreach, human resources, planning and logistics, sheet music and
performance rights, as well as trouble-shooting – these are areas any large
musical or theatrical organization has to deal with. El Sistema, leaving
no stone unturned, has also set up a network of more than a hundred luthier
workshops where highly skilled experts create by hand the thousands of
violins and other stringed instruments the orchestra members use. A
jacket factory designs and constructs under contract the hundreds of
thousands of Venezuelan-flag-bearing windbreakers and jackets the musicians
wear onstage. Designated volunteers counsel the parents of orchestra
members regarding appropriate nutrition, health care, and shoes for the
musicians, including down-to-earth advice and assistance. In the early
days Jose Antonio Abreu went from one cultural venue to another in Caracas
scaring up rehearsal locations on a month-to-month basis; one current long-
term infrastructure project is to build from the ground up a boarding
school in Caracas for members of the top national orchestras. El Sistema
has produced its own videos and films of its rags-to-riches story, and many
CDs of its performances (Borzacchini 2004:120-147). Its political outreach
efforts to the executive and legislative branches of the Venezuelan
government have weathered huge changes in Venezuela's national political
scene.
The discourse of El Sistema is that of first defying, then conquering
audiences and media reviewers, to refute attitudes of condescension towards
Venezuela and to bring glory to the homeland. Advocates also cite the
redemptive qualities of El Sistema, which provides a way out of the barrio,
and therefore hope for all barrio residents. In addition it represents a
net savings to the Venezuelan government because the cost of orchestras is
so much less than the cost of prisons. Orchestra members are too busy
practicing to have run-ins with the police.
The slogan of El Sistema is "play and fight," tocar y luchar.
Maestro Jose Antonio Abreu talked about that slogan:


From the very beginning, when the first opposition arose, we
understood
that we couldn't just play, couldn't just turn away from the fight
that the
opposition to our project implied. Why? To prove to the opposition
that
we were right. … First of all it was a challenge to train the
teachers,
professors and conductors that we needed to extend the System over the
whole country. That has taken us 30 years. That has been our
challenge.
… Venezuela must become one great teaching enterprise, … a wise,
advanced and profound educational system that is conscious of its
principles,
its content and its purposes. (Borzacchini 2004: 23, 25).




Here's how concertino player Juan Hernandez remembers the early years:
"I recall that the first years [with El Sistema] were ones of great
sacrifice. … during rehearsals the maestro would say to us, when he knew
we were tired, that we had to make our bodies suffer, which gave us the
strength to continue despite our exhaustion. [Rehearsals started on time,
but] we never knew when we would be leaving. … once in the middle of a
performance during a Latin American tour, there was a power outage in the
theater and, to everyone's surprise, the orchestra concluded its
performance from memory and completely in the dark. … I believe the
international extension of this project is boundless" (Borzacchini 2004:
36).
Borzacchini further notes that El Sistema today includes about 200,000
Venezuelan children and teenagers playing in thousands of orchestras and
choirs, some of them youth orchestras and some of them children's
orchestras. The best orchestras have traveled widely outside Venezuela,
earning media reviews full of superlatives (Borzacchini 2004:2004: 112-
117). Either or both top-level orchestras may accompany the President of
Venezuela on official visits, whether that President is Rafael Caldera or
his opposition-party successor Hugo Chavez. The orchestras receive their
own invitations to Latin American summit conferences from the host
governments. They tour Brazil twice in two years, the second time to
coincide with a Papal visit. Winners of the UNESCO International Music
Prize in 1993, they perform at UNESCO headquarters in Paris and at the
Papal Court in Rome. They go to the Hannover Universal Exposition (World's
Fair) in 2003 and perform in honor of World Youth and Childhood Day.
Between 1995 and the present they have given concerts in every prestigious
concert hall in Western Europe and the Western Hemisphere, including the
Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (1995) and similar concert halls in
Hannover, Magdeburg, Muenster, Duesseldorf, Heilbronn, and Munich in
Germany and Kingston in Jamaica (2000).
Media reviewers cite the "wondrous" nature of the musicians' origins –
in the poorest of poor neighborhoods – and their young ages. Reviews
include lists of ambitious music not often attempted by young orchestras –
the composer Mahler comes to mind. Most of all, however, the media have
praised the musicianship, the pure musical skills, of the young orchestras,
and their showmanship; they play not like talented youngsters, but like
musicians.
The young people's attitude goes beyond enthusiasm; some reviews
praise their zest, their infectious joy. For the musicians of El Sistema a
concert tour means facing one challenge after another. Can they win over
even this discriminating audience? Can they surpass the twenty-minute
standing ovation the previous El Sistema orchestra garnered in this
particular country? Wearing performance garb in the red, yellow, and blue
of the Venezuelan flag, they conquer. The mere fact that they are playing
musical instruments at all means that they have defied the odds and
achieved something – "wondrous." They have defied society's odds against
them and see no reason not to go on defying them. The constant element of
baffled astonishment in review after review indicates that cynical
reviewers started out regarding the orchestras as just underprivileged kids
to be condescended to, but the youthful musicians used pure, raw
performance quality to smash through this prejudice and triumph
(Borzaccchini 2004:114-117.) Their triumph becomes part of the national
myth.


"The young people are our heroes."

Antonieta Duran, a middle-aged office manager in South Florida became
an American citizen after emigrating from Venezuela. Her heroes, and the
heroes of her Venezuelan-American friends and relatives, include a number
of young people who left the country after Chavez's election. In the
imagined Venezuela of her heart these young people of the diaspora are the
future. They are the talented engineers, medical doctors, scientists, and
intellectuals who have managed to succeed in tough venues such as Spain,
Canada, France, and the United States, or in the giant multinational
companies anywhere (Interview 1). Renan reminds us that nations need heroes
and a glorious past, and that it is very the sacrifices people make in the
name of their nation that foster their love, support, and national pride
(Renan 1882:17). Antonieta and her friends felt they had to leave
Venezuela in order to continue to love it, the glorious Venezuela of their
shared vision, the true Venezuela whose young heroes also have to leave it
and overcome hardships elsewhere.
Venezuelans at home and abroad, no matter their political affiliation,
revere their national liberator from Spanish colonial rule, Simon Bolivar.
Hardy remarks on the Bolivar portraits hanging on the walls of ordinary
people's houses, and the obviously home-made Bolivar devotional displays,
resembling altars to "the Liberator," in many living rooms (Hardy 2007:
83). He comments that Catholic priests had had trouble conveying the
message of so-called "liberation theology" in the Venezuela of the 1970's
and 1980's, when that theology was in vogue all over Latin America. The
term never caught on in Venezuela, because Venezuelans know only one person
as The Liberator, and that is Simon Bolivar. Venezuelans who have no
religion, as well as the religiously devout, revere him. Some might say
that it would be a step up for Jesus Christ in Venezuela if he became known
as "The Liberator." I witnessed Venezuelan military ceremonies and
speeches in which the words Bolivar or The Liberator inevitably came up
again and again. The massed troops, standing at parade rest, would always
snap to attention the second they heard either of those terms – "Liberator"
or "Bolivar." It made a thunderous sound over the entire assembly area,
and an equally thunderous din when they returned to parade rest afterwards.

El Sistema's symbolic resource – following Stoeltje (1993:144) – is
the barrio and its young people. The orchestra concert as symbolic
battlefield leads onward to a defensive, reactionary form of nationalism;
Hobsbawm (1983: 78-79) is also relevant here. Venezuela defies external
cultural hegemony and oppression by triumphing in the decidedly highbrow
field of classical music. To do so using the efforts of the poorest of
poor children is defiance indeed. It also makes it impossible for adult,
middle-class professional musicians from other, more "developed" nations to
compete on this particular battlefield. El Sistema triumphs on behalf of
the Venezuelan nation in an atmosphere of contested cultural hierarchy.
What is the Venezuelan barrio, other than a poor neighborhood like
many others? Charles Hardy went to live in such a barrio and describes
what he found (Hardy 2007:18):


The barrio structures, which hardly appear beautiful to the
unaccustomed eye, are really an architectural wonder. … The
sweat and labor involved in carrying water, cement, gravel, and
all the other necessary materials up the mountains
that surround Caracas would make an army of ants proud of the final
product.

How does one live there? The lifestyle came as a shock to Hardy,
although as a priest he was no stranger to poverty, and no newcomer to
Venezuela, either. Apartments were made of pressed cardboard reinforced
with thin sheets of tin, in long barracks-style buildings; the walls
separating each dwelling from the next were of a single layer of cardboard.
There were even apartment buildings ranging from two to ten stories in
height, none with elevators. Some unfortunates lived in metal shipping
containers like those used on ocean-going freight ships; they were ovens
indeed in the hot Venezuelan sun, even at the somewhat higher altitude
above Caracas. Small cinder block houses also existed. Land under the
barrio Nueva Tacagua, an official government housing project, was so
unstable that landslides continually fractured the walls of more
conventional constructions. This barrio had originally had public toilets,
but they never had drains, never had running water, so they became totally
unsanitary; barrio residents reclaimed the ground to construct more huts.
Under the Chavez government Cuban doctors came to live, to make house calls
and to treat patients in such areas. Literacy missions came to teach
adults to read. Electricity, often stolen from nearby lines, meant that
most residents had radio or TV. This explains the lights on the steep
slopes that seem so magical to international travelers entering Caracas by
night.
Hardy's arrival at his assigned residence, House 51 on Terrace B of
Sector C was an eye-opener. Starting to walk toward his assigned barracks-
style cardboard quarters, he met an eight-year-old boy who offered to help
him carry his effects. When Hardy started to put his suitcase down on the
ground in front of his building, the boy protested, "Caca, caca!" This is
a word for excrement often used by Venezuelan parents of whatever social
class to say no to their children, or to warn them off something.
The boy was using the term in both senses. The barrio rested on deep
layers of human excreta; no place on the ground was clean enough to put
something down on. There were after all throughout the barrio no drains,
no facilities for running water, and no sewage outlets. Instead sewage had
become part of the ground the people walked on at all times and in all
places. Hardy comments that he got used to the stench rather quickly, but
more slowly to the lack of privacy behind the thin cardboard walls.
Government corruption is the cause of this misery. I spoke with
family members of the university student Rigoberto Dao in Caracas in 2003
(Interview 1). He had told his mother and uncle that he was studying
economics, not because he agreed with capitalists, but because he wanted to
beat them at their own game. He said the mainstream political parties at
the time of the Pact of Punto Fijo did agree to peaceful transitions of
power following elections, and talked a lot about "sowing the oil" so as to
develop and diversify Venezuela's economy, but they kept the money in their
own inner circles. "First one party stole all they could, and then the
other group got elected and did the same. There was never a really free
economy, but the poor were too poor to leave, and the middle classes did
sometimes leave but … here they had servants, here they had clout and
connections." President Chavez ran for office the first time as a voice of
the people against governmental corruption.
Hardy and his neighbors in the barrio bought water by the barrel from
water trucks that visited on irregular schedules. There was never enough
water for cleaning chamber pots or bedpans or the like; Hardy describes in
detail the early morning routine of defecating on a layer of newspapers,
then taking the entire bundle outside in the morning – avoiding his
neighbors' glances as they did this as well – it was so demeaning – and
doing as they did, throwing the thing down the steep hillside slope in
front of his door, or up the slope behind his living area. There were no
other options. Urine trickled outside onto the ground from the corners of
everyone's living quarters at various times of day. When the fresh water
supply trucks had not been back in three or four weeks barrio residents
became tense, stuck close to home, and waited to bathe and to do laundry.
Children did not attend school, for lack of clean clothes. A water
delivery was like a mini-holiday, except that, as Hardy notes, barrio
residents paid a much higher price for water than their more fortunate
fellow citizens paid, the ones who got their water piped directly into
their apartments or houses, down there in the parts of the city where the
privileged people lived.
When Hardy and a barrio delegation went to the Caracas newspapers to
complain that they had not had a water delivery in six weeks, the article
appeared, but was countered the next day by a spokesperson for the water
department, who claimed that he personally had sent two trucks loaded with
water to that very barrio every day during those same six weeks.
Venezuelans, Hardy stresses, are very clean people. Their society
does not tolerate body odor. Jokes go around about the offensive or
peculiar body smells of foreigners. In such a culture not having enough
water to stay clean, and not knowing when the water might come again, is a
form of torture (Hardy 2007: 9–12).
Stoeltje's first context of the ritual is the symbolic resource, in
this instance, as noted above, the barrio. The second context is the
invention of the tradition. Jose Antonio Abreu got his ideas for setting
up youth orchestras from a year or so of graduate school spent in the
United States in 1973-74. He admired the vast network of American public
school orchestras and musical instruction that offered opportunities to
each pupil, beginning in the first year of school and continuing up to age
18, with instrument rental set at low prices for instruments the school
systems owned (Borzacchini 2004: 22). This system became his model, the
idea he transmitted to the school-age musicians in his first orchestra.
Ironically enough, most public school districts in the United States
today have eliminated or curtailed public school music instruction because
of limited funds; most sold their stocks of musical instruments and moved
away from the cheap rental business as well, so that now, if American
parents want their child to learn to play the violin, they must purchase a
violin.
El Sistema's many video and CD productions, in addition to its
ambitious curriculum and huge in-person outreach efforts, have preserved
and propagated the founder's vision and kept the tradition Abreu invented
on the track he wants it to follow.
The third context of ritual is the performance as competition. El
Sistema members, alumni and founding maestro continually express their
thoughts centering on the "play and fight" slogan, and the notion of
hardship, opposition, and challenge that function as a kind of forge or
crucible to purify individuals and create solidarity at the same time.
Anyone who has ever played on an athletic team understands this context,
the urge of the underdog to prevail.
The most obvious competition venue of El Sistema is the orchestra
concert or the international musical competition. Another, however, and
one its backers praise most, is the production of a set of intelligent,
self-aware, self-supporting, enlightened citizens of Venezuela and the
world. In this sense El Sistema is competing against the entirety of
Venezuela's essentially white, techno-elite or money-elite society and its
prejudices, and against the drawing power of the essentially powerless,
miserable barrios from which so many of its members came. Few have
returned there. The alumni do not like to speak publicly of leaving El
Sistema; it seems to many of them a lifelong commitment, like church
membership or a religious vocation.


Again Maestro Abreu:
Art has irreversibly ceased to be the monopoly of elites, and has
firmly
established itself as a social right of our people. As a result the
artistic
education in the child and the youth is revealed to us now as the
standard-
bearer and signal of an unparalleled social revolution that no
seriously
committed social project can possibly deny. The more we educators
passionately convince ourselves of the huge potential of art, the
closer
we will be to finding the miracle key to the destruction of chronic
poverty (Borzacchini 5).




Father Rafael Barquedano, Jesuit priest: "…Jose Antonio's greatest
gift to Venezuela's culture is having given the country back its true
ranking on the national and international scale. … Every time I enjoy a
presentation by the orchestras of El Sistema, I feel called upon to dream
for my country" (Borzacchini 2004:18).
Barbara Abreu, pianist: "I was working in cultural activities in
Trujillo State. Starting in 1974 … seven musicians came with me to Caracas
every two weeks for the … National Youth Orchestra. Then visits were
weekly. The State government helped us with our traveling expenses and we
stayed over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday rehearsing with other kids that
came in from [other Venezuelan states of] Aragua, Zulia, Merida, and
Carabobo. The first major rehearsal was February 12, 1975, at the Juan
Jose Landaeta School. Then there were many more, until the concert at the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs on April 30."
"The orchestra was almost entirely made up of people from the interior
of the country, so the whole movement took on a national character from the
outset. It was difficult at first… nobody believed in the concept, you
could count our supporters on the fingers of one hand. Many believed that
Jose Antonio was out of his mind and they said so publicly. There was
nothing at the beginning – nobody to organize the logistics of the tours.
We all put everything aside for this project … it really seems like a
miracle; we were instruments of God's intent to move this project forward"
(Borzacchini 2004: 33).
Ulyses Ascanio, violinist: "I was a rocker in 1974. …I'd abandoned
the violin. …I arrived for the fourth or fifth rehearsal [of the original
orchestra]. I was terrified because I hadn't played for years. But he
[Jose Antonio Abreu] beguiled me with his energy. I'd been studying
engineering for a year, because I graduated from high school when I was 16.
…Jose Antonio was as euphoric as ever. That was 30 years ago. I'm a
founder; I've been with the Simon Bolivar Orchestra from the word go, and
I've been giving classes for 25 years. Now I direct the Caracas Children's
Orchestra. My one-week commitment from back then – Jose Antonio talked me
into it – has lasted that long. The force of the children just took hold
of me. They are the continuity, the future, and they are the tangible
proof of how all this has evolved" (Borzacchini 2004: 33).
Frank di Polo, violist and first Founding Member after Maestro Abreu:
"We gave our first concert at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and after
that the invitations quickly began coming in from Colombia, Mexico, and the
island of Guadeloupe. When the invitation came to go to Aberdeen,
Scotland, to participate with nine youth orchestras from different
countries, Jose Antonio sent me to look for [composer] Carlos Chavez. I
went to Mexico, convinced the Maestro, brought him back, and I prepared the
festival program with him [using several of his newest compositions], and
we were more successful than anyone could have imagined. … Jose Antonio
constantly looked for economic and infrastructure support. All of us that
began with the project became managers as well as teachers and performers.
We played, we gave concerts, we went into the interior of the country to
give classes, we had seminars. … I've been sowing the seeds of orchestras
for 14 years from Mexico to Patagonia. …
When governments are interested in our project, and the presidents of
these countries ask what is needed, we design the whole plan for them so
that they can get their infrastructure started. We have given the project
our all, ourselves, the most wonderful thing one can give, our will to sow
the seeds and our happiness in creating music at the very highest level of
excellence and professionalism. Young people coming to us now are at a
higher level than we were [at their same age]. They start orchestra
training when they are very young, which is something we never had, and for
which we have fought and achieved. Three years ago I started the Traveling
Viola School of Venezuela, and I go all around the country sowing the
instrument, doing everything from baroque musical arrangements to tangos
and [traditional] Venezuelan music, but only for violas and viola
ensembles. … In Barquisimeto we rehearsed all week, with 187 children, and
teachers giving classes, and finally gave a great concert, beautifully
balanced, as only we know how. … [With audiovisual techniques and storage
of all our seminars and concerts, stored in the National Archives] we are
going to multiply our teaching by reaching more and more students
throughout the country and all over the world."
Ricardo Blanco Uribe, bassist and founding member: "Through the
orchestra I learned not only about music but human values such as sharing,
discipline, order, friendship, community, and respect for the rules. To
live all that at that tender age is fundamental for a young boy. [The
orchestra] gave me tools to live happily in society. … El Sistema has put
thousands of young Venezuelans on the right track and given them a future.
… I left the orchestra many years ago, but there are still men and women
that carry on this worthy fight. I am a man fulfilled, thanks to music"
(Borzacchini 2004:35).
Edgar Saume, percussionist: "What began as a group of kids under Jose
Antonio's guidance grew exponentially. The orchestra taught us that he who
gives, receives. Now my students are many, spread all over Latin America.
I feel I am a part of a big catapult, of a movement that has changed
Venezuela forever" (Borzacchini 2004:39).
And, finally, Maestro Jose Antonio Abreu: "Music comes to me as a
whole and awakens my feelings, my dreams, nostalgias, illusions, and
energies. It demands action and commitment. It's a dynamo, a basic energy
I need today and have needed ever since I was a boy, to be able to lead a
full existence. … Music transforms adversity into hope. It transforms my
challenges into action. … I don't need to listen to rock music to connect
with the youngsters, since I do this permanently during their learning
processes, their schooling, their symphonic choral exercises … my contact
with [today's popular music, hip-hop and rock] is minimal. But exactly the
opposite happens to me with Venezuelan folk music, which I love and
thoroughly enjoy, not only Venezuelan, but also Latin American, and the
folk music of all the countries. I love the UNESCO collection of the great
folkloric music of the world" (Borzacchini 26).






















Appendix: Honors, Awards, and Decorations of Jose Antonio Abreu


2004 Doctor of Education Honoris Causa, Andres Bello Catholic
University, Caracas;
World Award of Italy, President of the Republic;
2003 Doctor Honoris Causa, Francisco de Miranda National Experimental
University, Santa Ana de Coro, Falcon State;
2002 Music and Life Prize, Music Coordination, Rimini, Italy;
Social Entrepreneur Honors, Schawb Foundation, Geneva,
Switzerland;
Doctor of Music Honoris Causa, New England Conservatory of
Music,
Boston, Massachusetts;
2001 The Right Livelihood Award, Alternative Nobel Prize, Right
Livelihood Foundation, Sweden;
2000 Order of the Merit of Work, First Class, Bolivarian Republic of
Venezuela;
1999 Gold Insignia of the City of Caracas;
Prize for Excellence, Mayor of the City of Caracas;
1998 Goodwill Ambassador for Music and Peace, UNESCO;
1996 Gabriela Mistral Interamerican Cultural Prize for Science and
Musical Art,
Secretary General of the Organization of American States;
1994 Order of Francisco de Miranda, First Class, President of the
Republic of Venezuela;
The Saman de Aragua Award, First Class, Aragua State;
1993 Order of Francisco Fajardo, First Class, Federal District,
Caracas;
1991 The Gabrial Mistral Prize, Grand Officer Class, Ministry of
Education,
Republic of Chile;
1990 Order of the Grand Cordon of Jose Maria Vargas, First Class,
Vargas City;
Bernardo O'Higgins Order of the Great Cross, President of the
Republic of Chile;
Grand Officer of the National Legion of Merit, President of the
Republic of France;
1989 The Cecilio Acosta Award, First Class, Miranda State Government;
1985 Commander of the National Order of Merit, Republic of Colombia;
1984 Vicente Emilio Soja Award, First Class, Miranda State;
1982 Order of the City of Barquisimeto, Lara State;
1979 National Prize for Music, National Council of Culture, Caracas;
1975 Order of Andres Bello, First Class, Sash of Honor, President of
the Republic of Venezuela;
1966 National Prize for Music, National Institute of Culture and Fine
Arts, Caracas.





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