El Sistema

El Sistema documentary film by Paul Smaczny and Maria Stodtmeier. Features José Antonio Abreu, Gustavo Dudamel, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, and the Caracas Childrens's Orchestra. Learn about the famous Venezuelan music education program.  Grade: A

José Antonio Abreu is a Venezuelan amateur musician, economist, politician, philosopher, and visionary. In 1975, he started a movement to intensively train children in his county in formal music. The movement, now popularly called "El Sistema," isn't a fine-arts program for the elite. It's a social-services initiative aimed at protecting and helping children (90% poor), their families, their neighbourhoods, and the entire nation. In 2009, El Sistema serves about 350,000 children in small local training centers, and the goal is to eventually serve millions. These children have rich lives as they go to regular school 4 hours each morning and receive music training 4 hours each afternoon.

El Sistema has about 35 orchestras and choirs, the best of which can can give children opportunity to become professional musicians. There are also special units for children who work as scavengers in the garbage dumps, blind and deaf! children, and adults in the prisons. In the Smaczny film you see impressive landscapes recording the cataclysmic impact of dense urban build-out in an impoverished country. The small elite and middle classes are invisible except for interviews with administrators and teachers. What you mostly see are the happy faces of brown kids who are busy learning music and losing their baby teeth. The children show a remarkably mature understanding of the obstacles they face. There are snatches of music through out the film, but these are all too juvenile or too short!

The film also gives you a good introduction to the Abreu philosophy. The children of third-world counties are poor. But they have one advantage over children in rich countries who, surrounded by over-abundance, are afflicted by ennui. The poor children benefit from facing real challenges in growing up. Music, the oldest and most profound of the arts, is the best tool available for helping children meet these challenges. Music training also lends itself to working in groups. So music is is an excellent way to teach children how to work together to attain goals. Because the appreciation of music is universal, music training for everyone tends to support the goal of a more just and inclusive society. And all artists, not just musicians, have a moral obligation to use and share their talents to this end. All this suggests some further questions that Abreu doesn't ask. Could a nation redeem itself by making the development of the fine arts into it's top priority? Could a nation, seeing the failure of feudalism, royalism, colonialism, fascism, communism, socialism, capitalism, and consumerism, create it's own ism based on the model of the symphony orchestra or the ballet troupe?