the amazon’s lost cities

You’ve no doubt heard of El Dorado: a mythical civilization, deep in the heart of South America’s wilderness, where gold is as commonplace as soil. European explorers had already, after all, discovered great and wealthy empires in Mexico and in the Andes, and there were tales from the earliest explorers of the Amazon of vast cities, some of them already in ruins. The mythology of the Amazon’s lost cities is an extensive one, marked in particular by the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett while attempting to find what he dubbed “The Lost City of Z”. Even more expeditions have gone into the Amazon in the last century to attempt to find traces of Fawcett’s party, but one anthropologist from the University of Florida, Michael Heckenberger, has been successful in discovering not one lost city but an entire network, each fortified city about three miles from the next, suggesting that the early Amazon was highly urbanized. He believes that the inhabitants of these cities were the ancestors of the present-day tribesmen in the same area, the Kuikuro.

How, then, did it take us so long to uncover this civilization? For one thing, the Amazon is hardly a hospitable climate for ruins. While the cities were only abandoned roughly 400 years ago, not long at all when compared with the remnants of ancient Greek civilization, for instance, their only remaining traces are some earthworks and darker soil, called terra preta, where the land had been cultivated. And how did we get the notion that there had been advanced civilization in the Amazon in the first place? Until recently, many experts considered it highly unlikely, citing the poor quality of Amazon soil and the unreliability of our only reports of cities there, which came from the earliest conquistadores. The fact is, it seems, that when Europeans arrived, their diseases spread more quickly than their stories, and by the time reliable witnesses made it into the Amazon, the population had already been decimated and the more visible traces of civilization swallowed by the rainforest. Congratulations to Michael Heckenberger, who by collaborating with the Kuikuro to find the subtlest signs has finally uncovered Fawcett’s legendary “Z”.

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.