EDITORIAL
The Sound of the World

 
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EDITORIAL
The Sound of the World

Anis Barnat, Co-founder, El Sistema Greece; Managing Director, Community Arts Network (CAN)

09-04-2024

Summer, 1999. Teenager Anis travels with his music school’s orchestra and choir from Pau, France to a youth music festival near Lake Michigan, United States. Teenager Anis is a clarinetist, enjoys music very much, but has not yet understood or experienced what else—beyond music—youth collective performance in festival contexts is really about. So what were his first impressions? He had the best summer of his life! Not only was the music great, but teenager Anis made new friends, discovered other cultures, and made some progress, both musically and socially.

Fast forward to the summer of 2024: World Orchestra Week (WOW!) at New York’s Carnegie Hall gathers youth orchestras from the U.S., Venezuela, the African continent, Beijing (China), Afghanistan, and the European Union. In Pesaro, Italy, Sistema Europe Youth Orchestra (SEYO) hosts young musicians from 16 countries in Europe, as well as from the U.S. and Peru. In Barcelona, Spain, Chords of Harmony welcomes Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) and youth musicians from Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Greece, Venezuela, France, the U.K., and Switzerland. In the U.S., Ravinia® brings together music students from the U.S., Sweden, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Greece. Los Angeles’ “Citizens of the World”: An International Youth Festival showcases the YOLA National Festival Symphony and Overture Orchestras and the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela. And Side by Side International Music Camp in Gothenburg, Sweden invites 2,500 young musicians from all over the world for a week of collaborative music-making and new friendships.

Why has this idea spread so much in 25 years?

National and international youth orchestra and choir festivals instill a collaborative mindset in their participants and provide all attendees with powerful, lasting memories. But they are time-consuming to organize, requiring logistical know-how and well-considered, family-flexible safeguarding policies for the children and young people. It’s not only tiring; it’s expensive. And program leaders know firsthand that students progress with or without these national or international festivals. So why bother? What do they offer to young people that their own programs can’t provide?

My answer, in a word: perspective. These festivals don’t offer any revolutionary approaches to music-making—at least, not so different from what you are already doing in your programs—but they do open up horizons that most of us can’t anticipate or understand. It can feel trite, in this field, to call music the universal language. But because these festivals offer young learners (and educators!) the opportunity to write a new story with peers of different backgrounds, they justify that big claim. These experiences doesn’t only have rapid and lasting impact on young people’s socio-emotional growth; they can also become a shortcut to their individual growth—and to the growth of their programs. In the end, the return on investment outpaces the difficulties.

In fact, I believe these gatherings may be the most cost-efficient way to grow the global field of music for social change. I am living proof of this, having committed my life to this work thanks in part to those happy memories from 25 years ago. Seeds are planted at these festivals and seminarios. Students, teachers, and administrators feel motivated to prepare, to absorb, and to share with others. In doing so, they apply the social and emotional skills they’ve learned in their own programs in a larger, more challenging context.

In my view, the biggest impact of the multiplication of youth festivals is the collective consciousness these festivals create for all participants—onstage, in the audience, and in the teaching artist community. Citizens and communities come together and choose to listen to each other, to understand others’ points of view, and to develop a common ideal of how our societies should be shaped. Cliché? Perhaps. True? Absolutely!

Music is a tool. But it is such a beautiful and deep tool. As Leonard Bernstein said, “Art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed… Because people are changed by art—enriched, ennobled, encouraged—they then act in a way that may affect the course of events… by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think.”

At youth music festivals, this change shows up in how children and young people find new ways to collaborate and to bring the best of their artistry and humanity on stage—and how they develop social skills off the stage. It shows up in how the adults organizing these events use these gatherings to plant other seeds in the minds of educators, decision-makers, policymakers, and funders.

And even with civic engagement at their core, these festivals still produce some formidable music. Their sound is the sound of the world, with all its diversity and universality. A sound that is plural by definition, enriching our understanding of life.

Afghanistan, Africa, Anis Barnat, Beijing, Canada, Carnegie Hall, China, Chords of Harmony, Citizens of the World, European Union, France, Greece, Italy, Mexico, National Children's Symphony of Venezuela, Peru, Portugal, Ravinia, September 2024, SEYO, Side by Side, Sistema Europe Youth Orchestra, Spain, Student Collaboration, Sweden, Switzerland, United States, Venezuela, World Orchestra Week, WOW!, YOLA, Youth Orchestra Los Angeles

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