In the fall of 2007, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela (SBYOV) took to the stage at Carnegie Hall and created a stir with their passionate and virtuosic performances. The youthful ensemble and their charismatic conductor Gustavo Dudamel mesmerized audiences in New York, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and what was really on display was the educational program of which they were a product.
The Fundacion del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (known simply as el Sistema) was founded in 1975 by Jose Antonio Abreu, and what started with a handful of children in Caracas has grown to an organization of more than 300,000 students in Venezuela and an international movement using music education as a vehicle for social change.
I was a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music when the SBYOV came to Boston, and my classmates and I couldn't stop talking about what we had seen. There was tremendous excitement upon seeing el Sistema in action, and now young musicians are creating their own opportunities to put this into practice. Community-based education, once an unusual career choice for a classical musician, is now becoming highly sought after. Being a musician is about more than creating art; it is about creating community.
Six years later, more than 75 local organizations exist within El Sistema USA, sharing Abreu's fundamental ideas: social transformation, access to excellence, and building community through music. These organizations and the musicians who created them are changing the role of music education in our society and awakening communities to its tremendous power to create social change. Many of these community-based arts programs have developed in urban areas with little or no access to the arts. Bound by the conviction that great music should be available to everyone, there is no audition to play the trumpet in West Philadelphia, no tuition fees to learn the violin in Harlem, and no aptitude test to take flute lessons in Baltimore. With no barriers to entry, the only requirement for a transformative musical experience is the desire to have it.
Although it is a simple melody, a child's first performance of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" is a big achievement, and a joyous, memorable occasion. When children share the experience of mastering a skill, and share their resulting art with their community, they become more connected; the imaginative experience shared between performer and audience, between child and their community, is transcendent, or, as philosopher Maxine Greene states, "as close as we get to each other."
For three years I had the opportunity to serve as resident cellist at Music Haven, a community-based arts education organization in New Haven, Connecticut. Some of the most rewarding moments of my career have come while working with children and communities with little or no access to arts education. Seeing the impact of music on a community and its ability to bring people together is truly astonishing; it is with these experiences that we learn that our purpose as teachers is not to teach music, but as Shinichi Suzuki wrote, to "make good citizens, noble human beings."
Matt Beckmann is a freelance cellist based in the New York City area.
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