THE TWO FACES OF VENEZUELA
By Paul Merkley.
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Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
Plato
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When you set the googlim to searching for VENEZUELA AND MUSIC they will drop into your lap items that describe in terms of excitement the good work being done in Venezuela by its music program in the schools.
One is struck immediately by an embarrassing contrast to the situation here in Canada where music has always been a poor relation, God-only-knows-how-many notches below sports in the “academic” pecking order. The actual content of “music studies,” where these exist at all in any school draws mostly upon commercial-popular music, rather than upon the classical heritage.
By contrast (according to Reuters, in an article from a decade ago), “Venezuela’s youth orchestras and choirs have helped thousands of children resist thug life in some of South America’s most violent slums, and now wealthy countries are lining up to emulate the system.” The Reuters reporter notes a great irony here: “Governments from Los Angeles to Scotland may not much like President Hugo Chavez’s brand of Cuba-inspired socialism but they will soon try to replicate Venezuela’s achievements on their own streets… Teachers say the system markedly reduces truancy in slums with some of the highest murder rates in the world… There are now orchestras being formed in Venezuela’s almost lawless prisons.”
“The System” was inaugurated in 1975, and has thus been around long enough that it is tempting to imagine the effects of music training ramifying through the schools and working a massive transformation of the economic, social and political life of the land. But anyone who has been paying attention to Venezuela’s political, economic and cultural life of Venezuela knows that the national life is not governed by that “moral law” that Plato said radiated from the study of music. In fact, Venezuela today presents quite a desperate picture.
Just a few days ago, President Nicolas Maduro announced a 95 percent devaluation of the country’s currency – just the latest in a series of perverse governmental actions intended to head off an economic crisis caused by falling oil prices, but in reality leading to a massive exodus of economic refugees.
Sadly, the public life of Venezuela has been sliding downwards towards hell just about as long as The System has been pouring its graduates into Venezuelan society.
Without doubt, the most widely celebrated graduate of the System is Gustavo Dudamel, 38, today Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the superstar Guest Conductor of just about every major orchestra this season. Precisely because of his unmatched fame he is being called upon today to speak out about the political reality in Venezuela. But he won’t be moved. This week, Gustavo Dudamel told the Los Angeles Times that he is simply “a musician. If I were a politician, I would act as a politician for my own interest. But I’m an artist, and an artist should act for everybody.” Grandiose and cowardly at the same time! That very week, six people had lost their lives in Venezuela amid protests against what another Venezuelan musician, pianist Gabriela Montera, calls the “organised thuggery” of Nicolas Maduro’s government.
Poignantly, these protests occurred precisely as Dudamel was conducting a concert to celebrate the 39th year of The System.
Without claiming to know how Venezuelan musicians should discharge their political duties, we certainly have a right to point up the failure of the most thoroughly democratic music-education system in the world to affect political realities under what would seem to be nearly-ideal conditions. With Gustavo Dudamel leading the parade, the children of The System are moving in lock-step celebration of the dictator, Nicolas Maduro. Yet, there seems to be nearly-universal agreement that Maduro cannot long preside over a government so incompetent and so venal that prices are rising at an annualized rate of over 100,000 percent!
Since the opening of the French ‘Revolutionary Era three centuries ago, the prosperity of music and musicians has generally been seen to follow from political stability and that has meant, for the most part, singing the praises of extant political regimes. Confronted by critics on the matter of his apparent political apathy, Dudamel says: “We are creating in Sistema not only musicians but better citizens. We exchange instruments for guns. We teach tolerance and respect….I’m a musician. If I were a politician, I would act as a politician for my own interest. But I’m an artist, and an artist should act for everybody.”
Unless musicians of the stature of Dudamel discharge the responsibility of political leadership that goes with their cultural eminence they risk seeing the rapid collapse of their cultural eminence.
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The Bayview Review 