We heard them play Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from "West Side Story" and Mahler's mighty Fifth Symphony. Both were heart-stopping. The players range in age from 12 to 26, yet they are an unbelievably polished ensemble with world-class musicians throughout.
They were not worshipping at the altar of high art but were propelled forward by joy and total absorption in the music and the sheer fun of it all. (You can see and hear a performance on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgcrLj2DAkM).
This phenomenal orchestra is the product of an extraordinary music-education program called "El Sistema," supported for 30 years by the government of Venezuela through 10 changes of regime. It is the life work of José Antonio Abreu, who thinks of an orchestra as a sort of ideal society where "everybody respects meritocracy, everybody respects tempo, everybody knows he has to support everyone else, whether he is a soloist or not."
A goal of the program is to provide a musical instrument and a place in a youth orchestra for every young person in the country who wants one. There are 250,000 students enrolled, three quarters of them from poor families or otherwise disadvantaged backgrounds, with thousands of teachers and 600 youth orchestras. Abreu has said, "For me, the most important priority was to give access to music to poor people. As a musician, I had the ambition to see a poor child play Mozart. Why not? Why concentrate in one class the privilege of playing Mozart and Beethoven?"
The youth orchestra we heard is made up of the best of the best from the system of which Gustavo Dudamel is himself a product, one of its most illustrious. Another is a bass player who, at age 19, is the youngest member of the Berlin Philharmonic. The training of professional musicians, however, is not and cannot be the chief goal of the system. Abreu hopes in the next five years to see the program in every school and to double its enrollment to 500,000 children. The system is also reaching out to homeless children who subsist as scavengers in garbage dumps.
Couldn't we have such a program in Utah? Let's buck the national trend of slashing music programs and labeling them unaffordable and frivolous. Utah has the musical culture to make it happen. Venezuela has almost exactly 10 times the population of Utah and it has 600 youth orchestras. By this measure, Utah should have 60. I know of only one, but hope there are more out there. There should be.
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* GALE DICK lives in Salt Lake City.
