The success story of the musical revolution of El Sistema is a lesson for the Bolivarian revolution of Venezuela

Gustavo Dudamel,  the Venezuelan conductor, has been appointed as music director of the Paris Opera this week. He will continue his current job as musical director  of the prestigious Los Angeles Philharmonic which hired him in 2009 when he was 28 years-old. He is also the music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. He has conducted  the Vienna State Opera in 2016 and the New York Met in 2018. He has become one of the most famous and sought-after conductors and an iconic brand in the world of classical music. He is a rare classical artist to have crossed into pop-culture celebrity as a superstar conductor. He has won a Grammy award, among other honours and awards. He has appeared in Superbowl half time with the pop band “Coldplay”. He has invigorated the sometimes staid world of classical music with his refreshing youthful vibrancy and electric performances.  

Dudamel is the star product of El Sistema, the unique classical music educational programme, National System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras of Venezuela, known popularly as El Sistema. 

Dudamel was born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela in 1981. His parents were both musicians. His father played trombone in a salsa band, and his mother gave singing lessons. Dudamel, a child prodigy, was enrolled in the El Sistema at the age of five. Although the boy wanted to play the trombone like his father, his arms were too short and so he took up violin. He studied music composition and conducting. He took to mock conducting of music at the age of 11. He was assistant conductor of Barqusimito Youth Orchestra at the age of 13. He was spotted and mentored by José Antonio Abreu, the founder of El Sistema. Abreu, who also grew up in Barquisimeto, took Dudamel under his wing and focused in making a conductor of him. Dudamel toured the world with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, a group of the best musicians in all of El Sistema. At the age of eighteen, he was appointed as Director of Simon Bolivar Orchestra of Venezuela. He became famous after winning a competition in Germany in 2004. As his fame spread, he was invited to conduct in Germany, Italy and Austria. 

El Sistema was founded in 1975 by Venezuelan conductor and educator José Antonio Abreu. He had studied economics as well as music, and served in the Venezuelan congress briefly. He had a vision to take the elite classical music to the poor children. Besides giving access to high culture to the underprivileged he believed that collective work through orchestras would inspire a social transformation in the community especially in the slum areas. He was convinced that classical music would occupy young people with music study and instill values that can come from playing in ensembles: a sense of community, commitment and self-worth. This is especially important for children in slums exposed to criminal gangs, drug trafficking and violence. 

Abreu started a new youth orchestra and held the first meeting of the orchestra in a parking garage with few teenagers. Within a year, he had built an ensemble, and took it to a festival in Scotland and won critical praise for his work. After the success of the programme in Caracas, he opened centres (nucleos) all over the country. In 1995, Abreu was appointed Special Ambassador for the Development of a Global Network of Youth and Children Orchestras and Choirs by UNESCO. Sir Simon Rattle, director of the Berlin Philharmonic said in a statement in 2011,  "What Abreu and El Sistema have done is to bring hope, through music, to hundreds of thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost to drugs and violence." El Sistema has proved to be a programme of social rescue and cultural transformation for thousands of children from poor neighbourhoods in the country".

 

Abreu persuaded successive governments (both conservative and leftist) to finance El Sistema. President Chavez saw it fitting with his Bolivarian Revolution and 21^st Century Socialism and extended generous financial support. “Revolutionary Venezuela is aware of the infinite value of music as a bastion in the fight for equality and happiness,”  Chávez wrote in a 2011 letter to Mr. Abreu. Private foundations stepped in with donations. The Inter American Development Bank extended grants and credit for building of regional centres of El Sistema in Venezuela. The Bank has praised the program after studying its impact through an interdisciplinary group. According to the study El Sistema has helped the children improve their capacity to control their attention, behavior and emotions besides showing lesser aggression and improvement in relations with peers. 

 

El Sistema provides free classical music training during after-school hours in the afternoons. It organizes orchestras with children and teenagers (between the ages of 2 and 18) many of whom are from poor families. The system provides musical instruments. Talented and interested adolescent students are trained to become teachers and encouraged to open new centres. The most remarkable feature of the system is its instant immersion. The children begin playing in ensembles from the moment they pick up their instruments. They enjoy the novelty of playing instruments they cannot afford to buy and feel spiritual uplift from the soothing classical music in their  neighborhood filled with the noise of gunshots and screams. The parents and neighbors of the kids in El Sistema, who cannot imagine going to the theaters for classical music performances, are fascinated by the opportunity of exposure to the high culture within their community. They are proud of the performance and achievements of the students of El Sistema.

Dudamel conducting the orchestra in a poor neighbourhood in Caracas

 

El Sistema has trained over a million students. It operates 442 centres and 1722 orchestras with more than 5000 music teachers. The students, depending on talent and ambition, advance to statewide orchestras, with the younger ones in children’s orchestras and those in their late teens and 20s in youth orchestras. The best are selected to join the national Bolívar Youth Orchestra. Some alumni of El Sistema have gone on to distinguished careers in famous orchestras around the world.

 

El Sistema has inspired a number of similar projects in two dozen countries including US, UK, Canada, Spain, Bolivia, Philippines and South Korea. There are nearly 200 Sistema-inspired programs in the United States. El Sistema USA was founded in 2009. There are books, documentaries and academic studies about the El Sistema programme. Here is a link to one of the documentaries made in 2010 “Dudamel: Let the children play” https://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/52739/Dudamel--Let-the-Children-Play

 

Dudamel attributes his success to ‘El Sistema’ and misses no opportunity to express his gratitude to his mentor Abreu, who passed away in 2018. "He (Abreu) created this beautiful and huge program that is unique," Dudamel said. "We are his sons, we have his blood in our veins, and it's not just about music, it's about building the society and creating better citizens." Dudamel carries on his mentor’s torch by continuing to work with youth orchestras around the world encouraging and inspiring the young. In Los Angeles, Dudamel has contributed to the development of Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA), created by the Los Angeles Philharmonic after hiring him.

 

As a Venezuelan celebrity in the global stage, Dudamel could not avoid raising his voice about the political crisis in Venezuela. He issued a statement after an 18-year-old El Sistema-trained viola player, Armando Canizales was killed during a street protest in 2017. He said,” I raise my voice against violence and any form of repression. Nothing justifies bloodshed. We must stop ignoring the just cry of the people suffocated by an intolerable crisis. I urgently call on the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people.”

 

He followed up his statement with an Oped in New York Times on 19 July 2017 saying, “ In the past, I have fought the urge to enter the political discourse, believing that it was not my role. I am not looking to take sides; I am willing to take a stand. My country is living through dark and complicated times, following a dangerous path that may lead us inevitably to the betrayal of our deepest national traditions. Venezuelans are desperate for the recognition of their equal and inalienable rights and to have their basic needs met”.

 

Predictably, the Maduro government was upset and  cancelled Dudamels’ planned international tour with the Simon Bolivar Orchestra in 2017. President Maduro mocked Mr. Dudamel in a televised appearance saying,  “Welcome to politics, Gustavo Dudamel. But act with ethics, and don’t let yourself be deceived into attacking the architects of this beautiful movement of young boys and girls.”

 

But the government has let Dudamel continue to hold the post of music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. While he has not been able to perform with the orchestra since then, he still works with it remotely and has sometimes met members of the group outside Venezuela. During the pandemic he has had sessions with them over Zoom. Dudamel has now become a Spanish citizen after his second marriage with a Spanish actress Maria Velarde. His first wife Eloisa Maturen is a Venezuelan actress and journalist.

 

Dudamel believes firmly in the El Sistema philosophy about the role of music in social transformation especially for young people from the poor communities. He has created the Gustavo Dudamel Foundation with the goal “to expand access to music and the arts by providing tools and opportunities for young people to shape their creative futures.”

 

The Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez is stuck in a systemic crisis at this moment with political, economic and humanitarian problems. But the musical revolution of El Sistema has been a spectacular success story.  Venezuela will become a better country if the politicians of the country learn from El Sistema and play harmoniously like members of the Simon Bolivar Orchestra directed by Dudamel. They should listen to Dudamel’s words, “As a conductor, I have learned that our society, like an orchestra, is formed by a large number of people, all of them different and unique, each with his or her own ideas, personal convictions and visions of the world. This wonderful diversity means that in politics, as in music, no absolute truths exist”.  .

Democracy is the winner in the Ecuador elections

Guillermo Lasso, the centre-right candidate has been elected as President of Ecuador in the second round of elections held on 11 April. He had contested the elections in the 2013 and 2017 elections and had come second. He is a banker and is pro-business in his approach. But he is moderate, sensible and pragmatic and not an extremist like Bolsonaro. 

Lasso got 53% votes as against his opponent Andres Arauz from the Left who got 47% votes.  
In the first round of elections held in February, Arauz was the leader with 32.72% votes while Lasso was second with 19.74%, marginally beating Yaku Perez, the indigenous and environmental activist who had got 19.39%.
 
If Arauz had won, Rafael Correa, the former two-term President from 2007 to 2017,would have been back in Ecuadorian politics and restarted his polarizing and personal vendetta policies against his opponents. Correa has been indicted for corruption and would face jail on entry into the country. He lives in Belgium, the country of his wife. President Correa had done a remarkable job of poverty alleviation, reduction of inequality and socioeconomic development. But he was too much authoritarian, polarising and confrontational against opposition parties, media, US and the West. When his chosen successor President Lenin Moreno turned against him, Correa had carried a vicious campaign against him. So the election was seen as a fight between pro and anti Correa forces.
 
Lasso’s coalition has won 31 seats (of which his own party CREO got just 12) in the unicameral Congress of 137 members. The leftist coalition (Union for Hope) of Arauz have got 48 seats.  Pachakutik party of Yaku Perez has got 27 seats, the second largest group in the Congress.  Lasso needs the cooperation of the leftist opposition parties which have the majority in the Congress, for passing his legislative bills. 
 
President Lasso will face the immediate challenge of dealing with the acute public health and economic crisis caused by covid. He will also have to deal with the huge burden of debt owed to China and IMF. Income from oil exports, the main foreign exchange earner for the country has come down due to weak prices and demand. 

It is interesting to note that Ecuador's economy remains dollarised since 2000. After the severe economic crisis of 2000, the country abandoned its national currency 'Sucre' to deal with hyper inflation, fall in exchange rate and capital outflow. Even the extreme leftist anti-US Correa did not try to change the system of using US dollars as the national currency. This means that Ecuador does not print its own bank notes. Panama and El Salvador are the other two Latin American countries which are also dollarised. 

 
Both Arauz and his patron Correa, have gracefully accepted the verdict despite the small margin (400,000 votes) of the victor. They did not ask for recount or alleged fraud despite the fact that Lasso himself had refused to accept the 2017 election results with accusations of fraud. He had called on his supporters to protest. But Arauz and Correa showed magnanimity by congratulating the winner and promising to play the role of a constructive opposition. The peaceful holding of the elections, the non-controversial transfer of power, the absence of gun-totting thugs and extremist rhetoric during the campaign and the prompt acceptance of the verdict by losers  are a reflection of the strength and maturity of democracy in Ecuador and Latin America, in general.
 
The peaceful and civilised democratic transfer of power in Ecuador should be a lesson to the so-called global champions of democracy who preach from the top of the Capitol Hill which saw ugly undemocratic horrors earlier this year. 

The Ecuador example becomes more important and timely in the context of the poisonous Bolsonaro who threatens to unleash his armed thugs if he is not reelected in the elections in 2022. 
 
Although Ecuador is a small country with a population of 18 million, India has a substantial trade which was 614 million dollars last year. India exported more (253 million dollars) to Ecuador than to neighbouring countries such as Cambodia (188 million) and Kazhakstan (202 m) which have the same population as that of Ecuador. India has been sourcing crude oil from Ecuador regularly. The Ecuadorian government has shown keen interest in strengthening bilateral relations and have sent a number of high level delegations to India. Given the growing economic relations, it would be in India’s interest open an embassy in Quito as soon as possible. 
 
 

“Neruda: the biography of a poet” by Mark Eisner

Pablo Neruda from Chile was one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century in Spanish language. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971.  

Mark Eisner, the biographer, had spent two decades working on projects related to Neruda. He has translated Neruda’s poems in English, written articles and books and produced a documentary on the poet. With this background and confessing that ‘his life was saturated by Neruda’s poetry’  Eisner has brought alive the remarkable life story of Neruda.

Neruda was a ‘people’s poet’ appealing to ordinary people such as workers and miners, besides intellectuals. He read his poems in election campaigns, factory visits and to masses in sports stadiums. His love poems are quoted by lovers in Latin America even now. His anti-fascist poems were read in the front lines of the Republican fighters during the Spanish civil war. In ‘Canto General’, Neruda constructed himself as the poet of the Americas.

 

He wrote his first poem at the age of eleven. At the age of twenty, he became famous after the publication of “Twenty Love Poems and a Desperate Song” which would go on to become one of the most popular books of poetry in the world. By 1972, two million copies had been sold in Spanish alone, with far more sold in translation. More than ten million copies are estimated to have been sold worldwide. 

 

Neruda had an adventurous and colourful life as a bohemian, diplomat, politician, communist and anti-fascist fighter. He had to secretly run away from his country into exile on horseback through the Patagonian forests of Chile into Argentina to avoid arrest by the Chilean authorities. He had three wives, many lovers and numerous affairs. He socialized with great artists like Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera as well as with famous writers of his time. He had travelled around the world and collected masks and sea shells, among other things, which are displayed in his houses converted into museums in Chile.

 

Since his poems did not earn him enough income in the beginning, he needed a day job for survival. Through some contacts, he managed to get appointed as consul in Rangoon at the age of 23 in 1927. Next year he was transferred as consul to Colombo and in 1930 he went to Batavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) as consul. In 1933, he was posted as consul at Buenos Aires, Argentina. Here he flourished as a literary celebrity and used the diplomatic status to reach out to the Argentine literary and cultural circles.  The consul general of Chile, Socrates Aguirre told him “You will be responsible for making the name of Chile shine by establishing friendly relations with writers and intellectuals. Your job is culture”. In 1934, he was posted as consul in Barcelona and later in Madrid.  When Neruda assumed his post in Spain, Chile’s consul general, Tulio Maquieira, directed him: “You are a poet. Please dedicate yourself to being a poet. You don’t have to come to this consulate. Tell me no more than where I can mail you your check each month.” In 1940, he was named as Consul General in Mexico City. In 1971 he was posted as ambassador in Paris, a dream came true.

 

He won a seat in the Chilean senate on the leftist ticket in 1945. He was considered as a candidate for presidential elections in 1970 but he stood down in favour of the professional politician Allende. He was a Communist and clung to his Stalinist views even after the horrors of the gulag were revealed. Later, he admitted his error of pro-Stalin position. He was an admirer of Cuban revolution until the pro-Castro literary circle turned against him. He was a cheerleader of the Republicans against Franco during the Spanish civil war. He helped thousands of Spanish refugees to travel to and get asylum in Chile.

 

Despite his communist leanings, Neruda liked the luxuries of life. He had bought and built expensive houses and enjoyed partying and travel. His rightwing critics labelled him as a “Champagne Communist.” Neruda was conscious of the contradictions and complexities within him, from the shockingly shameful to the inspiringly heroic. 



Neruda says that it was not he who found poetry but it was poetry which found him. He writes in Memorial de Isla Negra: 

“And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived 

in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know 

where it came from, from winter or a river. 

I don’t know how or when, 

no, they were not voices, they were not 

words, nor silence,

but from a street it called me, 

from the branches of night, 

abruptly from the others, 

among raging fires 

or returning alone, 

there it was, without a face, 

and it touched me. 

—“Poetry”

 

Eisner makes an interesting point that Neruda’s career as a poet was nurtured by Chile which has a long cultural history of reverence for poetry. Poetry was ingrained in the culture of Mapuches, an indigenous tribe. From the early sixteenth-century epic poetry of Alonso de Ercilla to the strong roots of oral poetics in indigenous Mapuche culture, Chile has earned its reputation as a “nation of poets,” where poetry is not only enjoyed by the elite, but also recited by campesinos, factory workers, miners, and ordinary people around their campfires or kitchen tables. This unique environment nurtured Neruda’s passion for poetry from the beginning. Tiny towns in the middle of nowhere would have poetry contests as part of their fairs. In 1919, at the age of fifteen, Neruda traveled north some 250 miles by train, probably alone, to read a poem in the tiny, dusty town of Cauquenes. He took third prize for best poem at the Maule Flower Games. The importance of poetry in the Chilean culture allowed Neruda to gain popular recognition early on, which eventually evolved into widespread fame.

 

In a 1970 interview for the Paris Review, Neruda said, Chile has an extraordinary history. Not because of monuments or ancient sculptures, which don’t exist here, but rather because Chile was invented by a poet, Don Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga . . . a Basque aristocrat who arrived with the conquistadores—quite unusual, since most of the people sent to Chile came out of the dungeons. De Ercilla, “the young humanist,” wrote La Araucana on scraps of paper as the Spanish troops pursued the native people in the forests and towns around Temuco, the region from which the poem’s name derives. Neruda described the poem as “the longest epic in Castilian literature, in which he honored the unknown tribes of Araucania—anonymous heroes to whom he gave a name for the first time—more than his compatriots, the Castilian soldiers.” Published in full in 1589 and then translated throughout Europe, it is still considered one of the great masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age.

 

Besides these anthropological explanations, there are social factors that were also of great importance. Chile’s poetry is rooted in the remarkable oral storytelling tradition of the Chilean campesino, the mine worker, the factory worker, the proletariat of the country. Stories told through verse were passed down in front of a fire, from one generation to another. At the turn of the twentieth century, northern miners would break into poetry readings at social gatherings. In the early twentieth century, coinciding with Neruda’s coming of age, poetry in Chile served as an art that was accessible to people who were poorly educated. They were the principal audience for the poets, more so than those in the high-society literary salons. Poetry was not perceived as elitist but as an art form with wide appeal. 

 

Eisner says that Chile has an extraordinary concentration of poets, of all levels of brilliance, per capita. Chile is still unique as a “nation of poets”. Chile is the only Latin American country to get two Nobel prizes for literature out of the total of six for the region. While the other Latino Nobel Laureates are novelists, the Chilean winners are both poets.  Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet, was the first ever Latin American Nobel laureate for literature when she won the prize in 1945. Neruda had met her and showed his poems to her when she was posted as headmistress of a school in his home town Temuco. She had encouraged him, impressed by his potential. 

 

Fortunately, Neruda died on 23 September within two weeks of Pinochet’s coup on 11 September. This spared him from humiliation and possibly torture and even killing by the dictatorship. The military ransacked and damaged his houses and also arrested, tortured and murdered his leftist friends.

 

Neruda and India

 

Neruda had visited India for the first time in 1928 during his consulship in Colombo. He attended a conference of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta, as a visitor. He met Gandhi and Nehru among others. He does not have much to say about India’s freedom struggle or the non-violent method pursued by Gandhi. He describes Gandhi’s ‘sharp profile like a very cunning fox’.

 

During his second visit in 1950 he met Prime Minister Nehru. But he was upset by the waiting in Nehru’s office and his cold and indifferent attitude during the meeting. Neruda was also agitated by the suspicious checking of his luggage and documents by the Indian Customs officers because of his credentials as a Communist. In protest, he cancelled his plan to visit Taj Mahal and preponed his trip back to Paris.

 

Neruda was caught in a controversy of ‘plagiarism’ by his critics who accused him of copying Tagore’s lines in one of his poems. Texts of the two poems were published side by side on the front page of the cultural magazine Pro’s November 1934 issue, under the title “El affaire Neruda-Tagore”.

 

Tagore: You are the evening cloud floating in the sky of my dreams. I paint you and fashion you ever with my love longings. You are my own, my own, Dweller in my endless dreams! Neruda: In my sky at twilight you are like a cloud and your color and form are as I love them. You are mine, you are mine, woman with sweet lips,

  

The rest of Neruda’s poem continues to be very similar to that of Tagore, who was one of Neruda’s favorite poets in his student days. In reaction to this accusation, Neruda said that yes, he had borrowed from Tagore, but he insisted that it wasn’t plagiarism but rather a “paraphrase” of Tagore’s poem. In the fifth edition of Twenty Love Poems, released in 1937, Neruda states at the beginning of the book that Poem XVI was, “for the most part, a paraphrase of Tagore’s ‘The Gardener’. He then writes, “This has always been known publicly”. 

 

It is odd that Neruda did not visit Shantiniketan nor mention Tagore during his 1928 visit to Calcutta, despite his self-admitted admiration for Tagore's poetry.

 

Neruda was indifferent to Indian as well as Asian culture, literature and philosophy. He never explored the Asian heritage during his stay in Rangoon, Colombo and Jakarta. He writes in his Memoirs ( which I have read), “ The orient struck me as a large hapless human family, leaving no room in my conscience for its rites and gods”

 

He mentions in his memoirs how he raped a Tamil woman servant of pariah caste in his house. He describes how she looked like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. He says it as a routine detail of his stay in Colombo, without hiding his racist attitude. Eisner, the biographer, has pointed out this contradiction in the context of Neruda’s embrace of the downtrodden and Latin American natives subjected to conquest and domination by the European colonisers.

 

During the visit of Chilean President Lagos to India in 2005, I (as Head of the Latin America Division in the Ministry of External Affairs} had quoted a poem of Pablo Neruda in the draft banquet speech of the Indian President. But the External Affairs Minister cut out the quotation. He disliked Neruda because of his unkind view of India. But this Indian experience should not diminish in any way the greatness of Neruda as a poet.