Young Venezuelans learn like Dudamel

But step inside and you may hear the opening notes of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 spilling from a second-floor rehearsal room filled with 15- and 16-year-old string players. Or youthful fingers plucking a traditional Venezuelan folk tune on a harp, accompanied by a soft percussive rattle.

In the poor hillside neighborhood of Chapellin and at nearly 250 other locales throughout this nation, tens of thousands of young Venezuelans are learning to play classical music and to make art a permanent cornerstone of their lives. They’re the latest recruits of El Sistema, or the System, a 33-year-old program that many regard as a model not only for music instruction but for helping children develop into productive, responsible citizens.

Without doubt, El Sistema’s most illustrious graduate is Gustavo Dudamel, the 27-year-old conductor who next September will take over as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Yet El Sistema measures its success less by how many world-class professional musicians it churns out than by how well its pupils are able to absorb the values of self-discipline and teamwork in service of social harmony.

Roughly 80 percent of the students are from low-income families. Some have been afflicted by domestic violence, parental drug addiction or worse. Many live in urban barrios such as San Agustin, a sprawling development in central Caracas. Others have serious learning and/or physical disabilities. El Sistema takes all comers and gives them the same chance — including free instruments. The Venezuelan government contributes $29 million annually.

Mayra Rivero, a teenager who started out singing in an El Sistema choir then moved on to playing the cello, says the program has affected her life in many ways, all positive. “I’ve improved, for example, on an academic level, because here we study a little history about the music,” she says, “and on a personal level also, my friends above anything else.”

El Sistema is the brainchild and lifelong spiritual mission of Jose Antonio Abreu, 69, an economist and politician. When he started the program in 1975, with 11 children and a handful of volunteers operating out of a garage, a few skeptics scoffed at the idea of imparting classical music to the disadvantaged. Today, about half a million children are enrolled in El Sistema’s training centers, called nucleos, and the program has been copied throughout Latin America and in Europe.

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