The Fit between Sistema and Youth Orchestras

Youth Orchestra Festival Day at Walt Disney Concert Hall (5/14/11)Paul's youtube    Paul's soundcloud   Paul's facebook

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"Music has to be recognized as an agent of social development, in the highest sense because it transmits the highest values - solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community, and to express sublime feelings"  
- Jose Abreu, founder of El Sistema
So ran Abreu’s vision in 1975 when he founded the first ensemble in Venezuela to help protect kids from criminal behaviour, school drop-out and physical danger by creating a utopian orchestral world. Over nearly 40 years, Sistema has given hundreds of thousands of at-risk kids intensive music training, starting with beginners' orchestras from day one, rather than individual instrumental lessons. Teachers are supported by kids, who get involved in mentoring and coaching each other. Thus, local communities of music makers evolve over time into world class youth orchestras like Simon de Bolivar. 
Today, many countries are starting to copy Sistema. It’s challenging, expensive and intensive, the vision has to fit the culture, but their leaders are passionately driven. They too support at-risk kids in poor and dangerous areas where music could lead to brighter futures as rounder, better educated adults. Independent research shows that school attendance, criminal statistics, learning ability and many other social factors improve where Sistema is present.
So, if Sistema is happening in your town, alongside your established local, county or national youth orchestra, how do they fit together? As more and more kids from Sistema audition for these youth orchestras, they will enter a competitive environment with the hierarchy inherent in all orchestras alongside kids who have more money and better provision than them.
Who then is going to give them the instrumental support and finance their participation?   What are the emerging solutions?
Santa Anna Suzuki Strings
„Our goal is to raise children in at-risk communities by putting a violin in their hands as early as age 3“
An Hispanic American violinist who trained with the Santa Anna Suzuki Strings, recently became their first player to join the mainly Asian American Community Youth Orchestra of Southern California. Living physically close to, but economically apart from his peers, he also mentors in the Santa Anna programme and wants to study music at university. The contributor of this story added:
„The problem is not one of lacking the funds to support such musical communities and alliances. It is one of revealing resources that were overlooked and evolving a new ecosystem of relationships between organizations. Even when forces seem impossibly entrenched, it is the many small creative efforts to plant those first seeds that break through initial resistance and gain future momentum.“
Batuta
Batuta, the Columbian programme similar to El Sistema serves kids who are socially and economically excluded from existing music education. They also co-ordinate encuentros, massive collaborative music projects such as the 900 kids in the Cali region who played in an aircaft hangar to mark the 90th anniversary of the Columbian Air force.
„Every program in that area worked hard on the same music for months, with Batuta sponsoring professional development for faculty of all programs, to ensure success at their big shared event. Trust and collaborative practices were built, and now they continue to collaborate in projects years after the encuentro.“

Music Hubs
Music Hubs in England, who allocate funds for local music education, are responsible for strategically integrating a broad range of partners, some of whom sit on their steering committees. Sistema projects and established youth orchestras can find new ways of collaborating through these to ensure instrumentalists flow from one to the other, but the leaders of Hubs must be open enough to support this. Both Hubs and Sistema are relatively new to Britain. However, growth is happening fast. Scotland has just alllocated 1.325 million pounds for Sistema work in Glasgow.

Community Opus Project
A youth orchestra setting up its own Sistema programme is rare. After all, it’s a lot work and money, and existing resources are continually stretched. It could also require a radical reshape of  structure, mission and values.
However, after noting that their kids came from affluent areas, San Diego Youth Symphony (SDYS) sets out to make music affordable to all. Their Community Opus project starts Hispanic American kids on instruments in elementary school, so that they are ready to apply to youth orchestras by the time they reach high school. In October 2010, the project gave free lessons and instruments to 70 kids in Chula Vista. By 2011, this had expanded to 250 kids, 20 of whom went on to join the Debut Strings Orchestra of SDYS. Those that couldn’t afford membership, were supported by scholarships.

What's the future?
Nascent Sistema programmes still face many questions in the developed world. 
How should Sistema projects interpret their role as feeders for existing youth orchestras? 
Will the success of one influence how the other measures success? 
Who pays for musically gifted Sistema kids from poor families to join and sustainably participate in more affluent youth orchestras? 
Would limits on this support be seen as a social failure by Sistema, or a social success by others?  
Will Sistema projects build their own senior orchestras instead? 
And why must many youth orchestras accept a majority of players whose families can privately afford instruments, tutors and courses in the first place?

If these two movements in music education can collaborate on the ground level, financially, strategically and structurally, then there's a chance these questions can be answered for the benefit of all kids.
By perceiving Sistema as either a music or a social programme, one faces the same paradox that the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq knows. Are we about reconciliation or music, rebuilding culture in Iraq or major cultural diplomacy, East or West? The answer is all of the above, and one happens because of the others.  An enlightened funder understands this.
With many thanks to Lauren Widney, Marion de Mello Catlin, Eric Booth, Cynthia Faisst and the Linkedin Sistema Global group for helping me with this article.
To find out more about Sistema teaching practice and resources:
YOLA resource library
This article is a follow on from my original thoughts:

The Fit between Sistema and Youth Orchestras