Jose Antonio Abreu: Venezuelan conductor who created music education programme 'El Sistema'

Though not without its critics, the state-funded system gave hope to children in crime and poverty and prompted a Nobel Peace Prize nomination

The former economist with one of his most famous alumni, Gustavo Dudamel (AFP/Getty)

Jose Antonio Abreu was the founder of Venezuela’s internationally acclaimed music education programme, El Sistema – a national programme offering hundreds of thousands of children education in music and allowing them the chance to play in orchestras.

In 2015, The Independent described it as possibly “the last national institution around which most Venezuelans still proudly unite”.

Known affectionately to his fellow Venezuelans as “Maestro”, Abreu, who died aged 78, was born in Valera, a small city in the Andes. His maternal grandparents immigrated to Venezuela from Italy in the 19th century, bringing with them their love of Italian opera.

Abreu’s maternal grandfather founded a local orchestra. His mother was a keen pianist who encouraged young Jose to take up the instrument himself at the age of nine.

Though a talented musician, when it came to choosing a university degree Abreu decided on economics with a view to being able to financially support his family.

He graduated from the Andres Bello Catholic University and taught at two universities in Caracas before going into politics.

In 1963, he was elected as a member of the Chamber of Deputies in the Congress of Venezuela and in the 1980s, he was culture minister during President Carlos Andres Perez’s second term.

‘From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he is no longer poor,’ Abreu said (AFP/Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

Throughout his career, music remained Abreu’s first love. While working as an economist, he continued to study composition, winning the Symphonic Music National Prize in 1967. It was in 1975 that he first decided to share his passion with Venezuela’s least privileged children by founding the free music education programme El Sistema, using his government connections to raise funds.

Explaining El Sistema’s philosophy in a TED Talk in 2009, Abreu said: “The idea is that the families join with pride and joy in the activities of the orchestras and the choirs their children belong to.

“The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself, which also lies within itself, ends up overcoming material poverty. From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he’s no longer poor. He becomes a child in progress heading for a professional level, who’ll later become a full citizen.”

In the run-up to El Sistema’s first meeting in downtown Caracas in 1975, Abreu gathered together 50 music stands, expecting at least 100 children to attend. Just 11 children showed up. But Abreu was not to be put off.

He told the BBC: “They were so determined and so enthusiastic that I understood from that very moment that success was guaranteed.”

Indeed, El Sistema quickly grew to touch the lives of thousands of children, many from poor rural areas, who attended Abreu’s free afternoon music classes.

Forty years later, El Sistema mentors more than 300,000 children at 280 different music centres. It supports more than 500 orchestras and ensembles. El Sistema’s flagship orchestra, The Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, plays to sellout crowds in the world’s best music venues.

In the struggle for human rights, let us vigorously incorporate children’s sublime right to music … Let us reveal to our children the beauty of music and music shall reveal to our children the beauty of life

Jose Antonio Abreu

Abreu’s teaching model has been adopted in more than 50 countries.

One of El Sistema’s most famous alumni is Gustavo Dudamel, conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He told The Independent: “El Sistema is the most important thing apart from my family, and my family at the same time is El Sistema.”

Abreu and his programme were lauded internationally, with awards from the Royal Swedish Academy and Unesco.

Abreu himself was given the Latin Grammy Trustees Award by the Latin Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2009.

Receiving the B’nai B’rith Human Rights Award in 2008, he said: “In the struggle for human rights, let us vigorously incorporate children’s sublime right to music … Let us reveal to our children the beauty of music and music shall reveal to our children the beauty of life.”

But despite his huge success, Abreu’s life and work were not without controversy.

In 2014, during a period of anti-government unrest, Abreu and his star alumnus Dudamel made a television appearance with Venezuela’s unpopular socialist president Nicolas Maduro, who is widely criticised for having undermined Venezuela’s democracy (though later Abreu would speak out in favour of anti-Maduro protests).

El Sistema’s flagship band, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, plays to crowds around the world (Getty) (AFP/Getty Images)

At the same time, British musicologist Geoffrey Baker published El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela’s Youth, accusing El Sistema of harbouring a culture of corruption and Abreu himself of being a vengeful autocrat.

And until last year, El Sistema’s official biography claimed that Abreu had a PhD in petroleum economics from the University of Pennsylvania. After an Associated Press investigation revealed that Abreu had never attended the university, Abreu’s brother, Jesus, put the false claim down to an “administrative error”.

However, it remains widely believed that for many thousands of children, El Sistema has been and remains positively life-changing.

When Sir Simon Rattle proposed Abreu for the Noble Peace Prize in 2010, he said: “What Abreu and El Sistema have done is to bring hope, through music, to hundreds of thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost to drugs and violence.”

Summing up his own hopes for the future of El Sistema and the role of the arts in the wider world, Abreu told his 2009 TED audience, “We hope that [you] can contribute in a full and fundamental way to the building of this new era in the teaching of music, in which the social, communal, spiritual and vindicatory aims of the child and the adolescent become a beacon and a goal for a vast social mission.

“No longer putting society at the service of art, and much less at the services of monopolies of the elite, but instead art at the service of society, at the service of the weakest, at the service of the children, at the service of the sick, at the service of the vulnerable, and at the service of all those who cry for vindication through the spirit of their human condition and the raising up of their dignity.”

Jose Antonio Abreu Anselmi, Venezuelan conductor, born 7 May 1939, died 24 March 2018