Spanish Translation

We just passed the darkest part of the Sistema world year in the Southern Hemisphere and the lightest part of the year in the North—do you know what the BUSIEST place in the Sistema world is all year long?  It’s Sistema Global, especially their Facebook page.

I was fifteen years old. It was the summer of 2012. My dad and I were making the sixteen hour drive up to Interlochen Arts Camp, and I was surfing the web on my iPhone. I began browsing TED talks, when one caught my eye: “The El Sistema music revolution”. For the next seventeen minutes, I sat in awe listening to José Antonio Abreu discuss his founding of a program that changed lives through music. As Maestro Abreu explained the program of social rescue, its structure, and the cultural impact that it has on the people of Venezuela, I grew more and more captivated by the model.

If “student voice” could be captured in a fairy tale on film, here is one way it might look.

Sistema programs in many countries are exploring ways to increase “student voice” in order to intensify students’ motivation and social development.  A program in Bosnia has taken a unusual approach. 

El Sistema Kenya (ESK) has just celebrated its fourth year of working with children in Nairobi. ESK currently has three staff members who handle program logistics and finances, and six teachers who teach violin, clarinet, flute, recorder, singing, and music theory. They are working with over 200 children in three different slums in Nairobi.

Ensemble Nambanga, a new El Sistema-inspired ensemble of young string students, is taking shape in Port Vila, the capital city of the Pacific island nation Vanuatu.  The name Nambanga refers to the banyan tree. Banyans are deep-rooted, strong trees that grow to enormous proportions and have deep spiritual meaning for the Vanuatu people.

It’s even more important than I thought.  The Ensemble and The World Ensemble have published positive pieces in the past about the Collaborative Composition (CC) work that Dan Trahey leads with other teaching artists in support, but this was the first time I witnessed most of the full process.  It is educationally and artistically powerful, and bursting with potential for the El Sistema-inspired movement.

Can the core musical endeavors of El Sistema be enhanced by introducing the art of music composition?  At the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers (VYC), we believe the answer is yes.  We feel that all music education is furthered by empowering students to be creative to the point of composing for ensembles, bands and the orchestra itself.  There are, of course, many ways of introducing children to their innate creativity, and enabling them to hear their musical thoughts performed by themselves, their peers, even by professional musicians. The VYC, a program founded in 1995, has been working closely with El Sistema for seven years, primarily in Caracas, VZ.  We have also worked with children in countries around the world.