venezuela’s youth orchestra system

If you pay attention to classical music, you’ve probably heard of Gustavo Dudamel. The young Venezuelan conductor has been hailed as the next Leonard Bernstein; he brings tremendous energy and color to his performances and has received glowing reviews from just about every major, well, reviewer in existence.

Even more exciting than Dudamel, though, is his orchestra. While he will in 2009 be taking the helm of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he currently serves as musical director at the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, where he has been since 1999. That’s right, the world’s most up-and-coming conductor runs a youth orchestra.

The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra is part of a network of 125 youth orchestras in Venezuela, all overseen by the Fundación del Estado para el Sistema de Orquesta Juvenil e Infantil de Venezuela, also known as the sistema, which was founded in 1975. The sistema’s training programs currently accommodate 250,000 budding musicians, 90% of them from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, who can enroll in the intensive musical training program at as early an age as two years old. And the program isn’t just remarkable for what it does for kids, taking them off the streets and giving them something to be good at. It also turns out seriously excellent musicians. One sistema alumnus is Edicson Ruiz, who at 17 became the youngest double bass player ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic. Eight years earlier, he had been working in a supermarket to supplement his mother’s scanty income and becoming ever more drawn to the street gangs in his neighborhood — until he showed up at the sistema’s local music school, saw a double bass, and never looked back.

One of my closest friends is an aspiring professional violist, and having peripherally partaken in her saga over the past few years, I can state with authority that it is extremely difficult in the United States to enter the professional world of classical music without having an obscene amount of money at one’s disposal. Venezuela’s government may have its problems — and I’m not even going to start trying to untangle that mess — but they’re doing something right.

the curse of the ninth

Here’s a pretty well acknowledged condition for being an artist: you’ve got to be at least a little wacked in the head. Take, for instance, Gustav Mahler. He spent pretty much his entire career obsessing over Beethoven’s legacy, particularly over Beethoven’s ninth symphony, a giant in both scale and impact and the first symphony to incorporate a choral component. It was Beethoven’s last, though; he died shortly after its completion. Franz Schubert, Antonin Dvorak, and Anton Bruckner suffered similar fates, as, eventually, did Mahler. He was so terrified of writing a ninth symphony that after completing his eighth, he instead wrote an unnumbered symphony simply (or not so simply) entitled Das Lied von der Erde: Eine Symphonie für Tenor-Stimme, Contralt -Stimme und große Orchester (nach Hans Bethges “Die chinesische Flöte”). He then proceeded to a ninth symphony, thinking he had defeated the “curse”, but died while composing his tenth.

Arnold Schoenberg, an Austrian-American composer of the twentieth century, described the “curse” as follows: “It seems that the ninth is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter.”

Of course, there are also many exceptions to “the curse of the ninth”, notably Dmitri Shostakovich, who deliberately avoided writing a momentous ninth and went on to compose a total of fifteen symphonies.