José Antonio Abreu
Founder of the much-copied El Sistema programme that brings music to impoverished children
JOSÉ ANTONIO ABREU, who has died aged 78, was the founder of El Sistema, the Venezuelan education programme that has used the power of music to rescue children from poverty, drug abuse and ignorance; among its notable successes have been the conductor Gustavo Dudamel, now music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and members of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra.
Other countries have followed suit, including Scotland, where a Sistemalike operation known as Big Noise was developed on a tough housing estate in Stirling with support from the violinist Nicola Benedetti. The cellist Julian Lloyd Webber was enthralled by the operation in Venezuela, declaring in The Daily Telegraph: “It is surely the most extraordinary social phenomenon of our times.”
Abreu, a former economist, believed that every child, no matter how impoverished, should have free access to music and instruments and that their lives would be transformed as a result. He founded El Sistema in 1975 with 11 children in a disused garage. Within 30 years it had provided musical experiences and opportunities to an estimated 300,000 youngsters.
Ever the canny politician – he survived at least 10 different Venezuelan administrations – Abreu kept the programme away from the culture department, where the budget is first to be cut when times get tough, and instead emphasised its social and educational benefits.
El Sistema is based on “nucleos”, or teaching centres, around the country, often situated in impoverished or violent areas. The idea is simple: from the age of three children learn to play a musical instrument. There is no charge, instruments are provided, and the emphasis is on participation rather than perfection.
Inevitably there were critics, among them Geoffrey Baker, an academic at Royal Holloway College, University of London, who doubted that El Sistema was having a transformative social effect. In a 2014 book he questioned the value of exporting western classical music to a Latin country and claimed to have found in El Sistema “discrimination, nepotism, favouritism, bullying, poor pay and working conditions, strife between management and teachers, and exploitation of staff and children”.
Reviewing Baker’s study, Ivan Hewett, the Telegraph’s music critic, recalled finding the opposite. “My impression of visiting a nucleo is that the kids enjoyed playing Bizet every bit as much as playing arrangements of Venezuelan pop songs,” he wrote.
“But Baker is suspicious of such enjoyment, comparing it to the pleasure of eating junk food. One catches a whiff of puritanism, determined to root out forms of musical enjoyment that are ideologically unsound.”
Abreu himself remained aloof from such carping, though admittedly he also did little to stop others portraying him as a musical mixture of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. Whatever El Sistema’s shortcomings – and like any institutionalised facility it no doubt has many – it has brought a love and awareness of music to youngsters whose lives were otherwise blighted.
He was born José Antonio Abreu Anselmi in Valera, north-west Venezuela, on May 7 1939, the eldest of six children. His maternal grandparents had emigrated from Italy to Venezuela, where his grandfather founded a regional orchestra and his grandmother, a passionate opera fan, would play recordings of Puccini or Verdi while translating the Italian lyrics for young José. By the age of nine he was practising on the family piano, the only one in the neighbourhood.
He learnt piano, organ, harpsichord and composition, but also studied petroleum economics, becoming Professor of Economics at a university in Caracas. In 1963 he was elected as a deputy in the Venezuelan Congress.
This combination of music and politics proved to be the springboard for El Sistema. “I had a deep frustration because I lived in a country that only had one orchestra, where 70 per cent of musicians were foreign,” he told the BBC. “Other countries such as Argentina, Brazil or Mexico had reached great musical development. That’s when the idea was born to organise a system to have at least one great Venezuelan-born orchestra.”
The Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra (as it then was) and Dudamel, the most high-profile results of El Sistema, first visited the Proms in 2007, for a concert that a Telegraph critic described as “what must have been the most joyful Proms performance ever”.
Abreu, a small, humble and aesthetic figure who dedicated his life to what he described as a “human development” project, was unmarried.
José Antonio Abreu, born May 7 1939, died March 24 2018