The Bolivar Lecture
Transcript of The Anglo-Venezuelan Society
THE BOLIVAR LECTURE
“How the Children of Venezuela are Teaching Scotland How To Play”
By Dr. Richard Holloway Chairman of Sistema Scotland “Big Noise”
Welcome Words By Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen, OBEChairman of the All-party Parliamentary British-Latin American Group
Committee Room 12, Palace of Westminster
Chaired by Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen, OBE Chairman, the All-Party Parliamentary British-Latin American Group
Introductory Words byJuan I. Urdaneta, Chairman of The Anglo-Venezuelan Society
Vote of Thanks by Donald Lamont
Your Excellences and other representatives of the Diplomatic Community.
Colleagues from both Houses of Parliament. Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is Anne Gibson, and I am a member of the House of Lords. I have been invited to Chair this meeting in my capacity as Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Latin America, and I am delighted to do so.I am very pleased indeed to welcome everyone here, this evening. The first Bolivar Lecture was given in April 1982 - and here we are 27 years later waiting to hear about the exciting issues surrounding the Sistema Scotland 'Big Noise' initiative. It is a wonderful turn-out this evening, and I know that you will be as keen as I am to begin the proceedings.So without more ado, I have pleasure in asking the Chair of the Anglo-Venezuelan Society - Juan Urdaneta - to introduce our guest speaker this evening.
Introductory Words By Juan I. UrdanetaChairman of The Anglo-Venezuelan Society
Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen, your Excellency Ambassador of Venezuela, my lords and ladies, Honourable members of the House of Commons, ladies and gentlemen, members and friends of the Anglo-Venezuelan society, Welcome to the Bolívar lecture. I would like to thank Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen, Chairman of the All-party Parliamentary British-Latin American Group, for her generous support in the planning of this event.
It is a great honour and a privilege to hold the 10th Bolívar lecture at the Palace of Westminster for a second time in a row. This is the 33rd year of the Anglo-Venezuelan Society, a non-for-profit, apolitical, independent institution committed to promoting Venezuela in the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom in Venezuela by building long-term institutional and cultural bridges between the two nations. With over 130 members, a calendar full of events, strong corporate support, good diplomatic relations, and more importantly your continuous participation we intend to become even stronger for the good of our two countries.
Today’s lecture is unique. It makes us proud as it will be about importing from Venezuela to Scotland the innovative know how of promoting social progress through music. Sistema Scotland has been inspired by the orchestral movement established in Venezuela, 34 years ago, by Maestro Jose Antonio Abreu in 1975. Abreu’s Sistema has produced wonders such as the Simon Bolívar youth orchestra and Gustavo Dudamel. But beyond these internationally acclaimed successes, el Sistema has quietly transformed lives: today 250,000 children attend music schools, and form part of 125 youth orchestras and no less than 30 professional symphony orchestras. This has been the vision of one man, Abreu, who is equally knowledgeable in music as he is talented in diplomacy, particularly since he has secured not only private capital but also capital from different governments from 1975 until today without compromising continuity and the essence of his social mission.
Sistema Scotland, also I understand, known locally as Big Noise, is a newly established charity with the same vision of social transformation through music. Big Noise started in Raploch, Stirlingshire, has recruited 6 talented musicians who are training and educating over 200 children in the age range nursery to primary 4. Their aim is not to produce musicians but to foster generational change, encouraging mutual respect, collaboration, endeavour and achievement.
Before introducing our speaker for today I would like to thank Anthony Westnedge for his great help in planning this event. I would also like to thank Donald Lamont, former British Ambassador to Venezuela who first introduced us to Dr Holloway and who sits on both the boards of Sistema Scotland and the Anglo-Venezuelan society. Dr Richard Holloway himself had the magnificent vision to start Sistema Scotland. He visited Venezuela and came back with a long term plan which he has successfully begun to execute. As well as Chairman of Sistema Scotland he is also the Chairman of the joint board of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen.
He has had a varied career both as a writer and as a broadcaster. He was Bishop of Edinburgh and primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church until he stood down in 2000. Dr Holloway was Gresham professor of divinity in the city of London. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Dr Holloway will speak on “How the children of Venezuela are teaching the children of Scotland how to play” Dr Holloway!
The Bolivar Lecture By Dr. Richard HollowayChairman of Sistema Scotland I am highly conscious of the great honour you have done me, by inviting me to deliver the Simon Bolivar Lecture. Humanity has produced many different kinds of hero. There is the explorer, the inventor, the saint; but one of the most enduringly attractive is the liberator, the man who widens human freedom: and Simon Bolivar was such a man. Tonight I want to talk about liberation, social and spiritual liberation, of a kind that is inspired by a great movement of the human spirit that started in Venezuela and is set fair to spread throughout the world. And I want to tell you about its impact on Scotland. August 16 2007 was a tense day in Edinburgh, where the Festival was pursuing its course. The population of the city had trebled in size, as always happens during these August weeks when the world descends upon our beautiful city, its grey sobriety made vibrant and vivid by the hundreds of artists, musicians, writers, TV crews and visitors who crowd its ancient streets. The atmosphere was particularly expectant that year, because the most thrilling orchestra on earth was due to have its Edinburgh debut in the famous Usher Hall. The Simon Bolivar National Youth Orchestra of Venezuela was not only taking the world of classical music by storm, it was provoking interest among social reformers as a possible model for reaching out to young people who had been discarded and alienated by the social and industrial revolutions that had rushed like hurricanes through the fabric of British society. So we were expectant, but we were getting anxious. I was hoping to meet the remarkable man who was responsible for the birth of the orchestra, because I wanted to enlist his help in doing something like it in Scotland. I knew getting a meeting organised would be a tight squeeze. They were due to arrive in the evening of August 16, rehearse the next day and perform in the evening, and depart on the 18th; so fitting in a meeting would be tight, but do-able - if they got here in time. And that was the problem: we heard on the morning of August 16 that the plane they had chartered had broken down, and they were still on the ground at the airport in Caracas. Later we heard that they had found another plane, but they wouldn’t arrive till August 17. Fortunately, it all went smoothly, the musicians piled cheerfully onto the relief plane, and they arrived it Edinburgh at 5 in the morning on August 17, the day of the concert. The 200 eager young people were taken on buses to one of Edinburgh University’s student hostels to rest before rehearsals in the afternoon. The hostel is close to the 251m. peak, called Arthur’s Seat, the remains of an extinct volcano system that is such a remarkable feature of the geography of old Edinburgh. I am told that when the young musicians saw this inviting hill just across the road from where they were supposed to rest, they immediately wanted to drop their bags and climb it. Instead, they were packed off to bed for a few hours, before being taken to the Usher Hall to rehearse the concert that was only a few hours away. I got my interview with Maestro Abreu, something to which I’ll return, and the concert went ahead that evening as planned. And what a concert! Scotland had never seen anything like it. I told a journalist who interviewed me that we all left the Usher Hall better people. We were obviously buoyed up by the quality of the music we had heard - and many critics since that night have poured a lot of ink into defining what it is that is so distinctive about it - but for most of us it was the human story that lifted our spirits and sent us out into the August night changed by the promise and hope the story of the orchestra represented. What is now the Foundation for the State System of Youth and Children’s Orchestras – FESNOJIV – was established in 1975 by a man of genius and unusual goodness, José Antonio Abreu. Maestro Abreu was born in Valera on May 7 1939. Though he is small in stature and modest in demeanour, he has the powerful presence of a man of purpose and destiny; and he is a polymath. He holds a Ph.D in petroleum economics from the Universidad Catolica Andrés Bello, and did graduate work in the University of Michigan. He served as a Deputy at the Chamber of Deputies in the old Congress of Venezuela, and after his political career he worked as a professor of law and economics at Universidad Simon Bolivar, and at his Alma Mater. But he is also a musician of great ability. He began his music studies in Barquisimeto, and later attended the Caracas Musical Declamation Academy in 1957, where he studied piano, organ, harpsichord and composition. He received the Symphonic Music National Prize for his musical ability in 1967. This is the man who is responsible for the phenomenon that Sir Simon Rattle says is the most important thing happening in classical music on earth. The music is miracle enough, but the greater miracle is the purpose that lies behind it, and the impact it has had on the half a million children who have gone through it, and the quarter of a million children aged 2 to 25 who are currently in the programme, in a network of 125 youth orchestras, all in a country that did not get its first conservatoire till the 1920s. What began with eleven young people in a back street garage in Caracas as an attempt to make the glories of classical music available to ordinary Venezuelans soon metamorphosed into one of the most effective and revolutionary programmes of social transformation on our troubled and unequal planet. For Maestro Abreu, music has a transcendental power to change the lives and renew the hopes of poor children anywhere. He has said that in the struggle for human rights we must vigorously incorporate the right of children to music, in whose soul shines Being in all its splendour and mystery; and if we reveal to our children the beauty of music, music will reveal to them the beauty of life. Sceptics might scoff at this mystical claim, were it not for the empirical evidence of the Simon Bolivar Youth orchestra, many of whose players would have had a very different life without El Sistema, the method conceived by Maestro Abreu to reveal to them the beauty that life can possess, a beauty that too many of the world’s children never encounter, because it is ugliness that surrounds them and pain that awaits them. That is why when I met the Maestro that afternoon in August two years ago I kissed his hands. But before telling you why I wanted to meet him, let me say something about the social crisis that is confronting Britain, with particular reference to my own country of Scotland. The most dramatic characteristic of the human species is our brilliant restlessness, leading to revolution after revolution in the way we work and organise ourselves. And the sad fact is that it is the vulnerable in any society who bear most of the cost of these changes. Think of the way the industrial revolution in Britain chewed up and spat out generations of the rural poor, before we learned how to protect them from its worst depredations. In Scotland it is the death of heavy industry that has devastated the poor. Much of this is the consequence of global economic changes, coupled with the closure of pits and defence industries. Heavy industry has been replaced by the knowledge economy, and we are only now trying to catch up with its consequential impact upon the uneducated. As if that were not enough, social change has combined with the economic revolution to destroy the cultural cohesion of the most vulnerable sections of our society. When the culture revolution of the Sixties and Seventies met the economic revolution of the Eighties and Nineties there was created a potent instrument of change that has transformed the social landscape of Britain, and its most devastating impact has been upon young, uneducated, workless males. The institutions that once gave them a motive for responsible living, such as holding down a tough, demanding job with its own culture and honour, and presiding within a marriage and family that was the primary context for the nurture and socialising of children, have largely disappeared; and with them the main ways the human community traditionally disciplined and integrated children into the social contract. This shattering of the structures that once gave the poor significance and purpose has created a breeding ground for despair that prompts the kind of destructive behaviour that only reinforces their alienation. When most people were poor there was a camaraderie and cultural cohesion in belonging to the working class that gave them a strength and pride that fortified them in the face of the structures that excluded them. But in a society where most people are prosperous, and the poor are a minority whose culture has disintegrated, the pain and anger they feel is heightened. The devastation these social and industrial revolutions have caused to traditional working class communities has been heart-breaking. Let me give you a snapshot of one community, representative of many, which is in the top 5% of areas of multiple deprivation. 22% of the community experience incidents of Scotland’s Big 3 health scourges: chronic heart disease, stroke, and cancer. 20% claim incapacity benefit. Only 22% of the population aged 17 to 65 have qualifications beyond standard grade. Only 4% enter higher education or training. It is estimated that one in every six children has a learning disability, and a Scottish Executive Survey in 2006 pointed out that adults with a learning disability are ten times more likely to be unemployed than the general population; while the Prison Reform Trust reported in 2007 that between 20% and 30% of the Scottish prison population has a significant learning disability. We also know from other surveys that over half of the children in custody have been in the care of, or are involved with, social services. It is worth pointing out here that keeping a significant section of society on welfare dependency is expensive. A National Audit Office report on youth offending in 2004 reported that it can cost up to £185K a year to keep a young person in secure accommodation. That is a staggering sum. If we could find new and imaginative ways of keeping children out of custody we could save them a lot of misery and ourselves a lot of money. We know that more equal societies are happier and healthier for everyone, and that unequal societies are more dangerous and miserable for everyone. Surely, if we willed it we could find ways to turn those damaged and despairing communities round. For years I have been looking for something new to try here. I knew that, since it took generations to destroy the spiritual and cultural fabric of these communities, it would take generations to restore it. Was there, somewhere, a process of slow, organic, revolutionary change that might overcome this damaging legacy and build new communities? Shortly after I became Chair of the Scottish Arts Council five years ago a journalist with the Guardian newspaper told me about El Sistema in Venezuela. She had been to see it for herself, and she said the quality of the music was extraordinary. I was interested too, but less in the music than in the change it seemed to be bringing to the lives of the children who played it, so I decided to go to Venezuela to investigate. As fortune had it, something else intervened that was to have an effect on what happened next. I was invited to the BBC HQ in Glasgow to hear the Director General of the BBC. During his speech he asked for suggestions about ways in which the BBC might cooperate in new social and cultural initiatives. I told him about El Sistema, suggested that it might be just what the Other Scotland needed to reverse years of decline, and said I was just about to go over and see for myself. The upshot of that encounter was that the BBC came on board as a partner in the exploration, so when two of us from the Scottish Arts Council got on the plane to fly to Caracas we took with us a young camera-man director who filmed over twelve hours of material. What we saw in Venezuela had a profound and liberating effect on us, and I came back determined to replicate it in Scotland. What broke my heart was that I saw children playing again, playing with a joyous intensity that was transformative. Yes, playing. What we fail to realise in our work-obsessed culture is that play is not only good for our spiritual and mental health, it has always been the main element in our progress and development as a species. The human ecologist Joseph Meeker described play as:‘…a spontaneous behaviour whose only purpose is to please its participants and keep them playing. When goals or objectives appear, or when rules become rigid, play disappears.’ Meeker says humans did not invent comedy or play. We are the beneficiaries of millions of years of evolutionary history. Meeker makes the point that play and a highly developed brain go together. The brain gives animals an opportunity to expand their perceptual and behavioural repertoires, and to venture into new and unexpected levels of experience. Play may be one of the ways the brain developed in order to accommodate novelty and to explore the unknown. The reason play has contributed to our evolution is that it prompts us to take risks. Playful curiosity leads us to stick our noses where they’ve never been before, or to test just how far we can crawl on that limb before it breaks. Art and play are sources of new experience and they encourage change, which is why they worry people who like things to stay put. It is instructive to watch children at play, representing and repeating what they see around them, dreaming up new realities, singing worlds into being. Playful creativity is intrinsic to childhood, though most of us lose it as the shades of adulthood close round us. Robert Hughes says that genius is the ability to recapture childhood at will, including its terrors and desires, and not just its innocence. Play and its sister creativity are intrinsic to our nature, aspects of our essential being. Let me leave that thought to one side and move to something else. As Chair of the Scottish Arts Council I go round local authorities to discuss their art policies with them. Everywhere I hear the same story: they’d love to find more money to promote human creativity in all its forms, but they are ham-strung by their enormous social work budgets. I sympathise. Local authorities have to do what they can to patch up their fractured communities and respond to the needs on their doorsteps. And in so doing they eat up enormous resources. But I am wondering if we haven’t got things the wrong way round. Camila Batmanjelidh of Kids Company says that the scandal of our policy towards troubled children is that we only start cascading financial resources into their lives when they start offending. Then we can find fortunes to feed them through the human shredder that is the British penal system. If we are not to go on losing generations of children to alienation and criminality, we have to find another way. This is where El Sistema comes in. It gets children playing again, playing arduously. There are three aspects of the method that are instructive. In the classical European musical pedagogy, children learn to play a musical instrument in private tutorials; and after years of solitary practice, if they are good enough, they’ll graduate to an orchestra. El Sistema turns this paradigm upside down, by placing children in orchestras from the very beginning. I have watched Venezuelan children aged two, dummy-tit firmly in their mouths, solemnly bowing tiny violins with intense concentration. The other two aspects of this revolution are intensity and immersion. Remember, what we have to do here is find a more powerful and dominant social reality for the children than the one that is damaging them: the orchestra offers a complete alternative reality, day in and day out. It is this intense immersion in the orchestra and in the beauty of music that is the key to its revolutionary success in socialising children into disciplined, co-operative human beings, who discover pleasure in effort and joy in the exultation of music. That’s what I saw in Venezuela and it is what I wanted for Scotland’s children, which was why I was determined to meet the Maestro that afternoon in Edinburgh two years ago. We had created a board and registered ourselves as a charity. We had raised enough money to hire a gifted young woman as director of the project; and we had found a community in Scotland that was regenerating itself after a difficult history, and was keen to let us try the experiment on them. But I did not want us to be another youth music initiative inspired by El Sistema: I wanted us to be El Sistema in Scotland. Above all, I wanted the blessing of the man of genius who had founded the system. All of that I got from Maestro Abreu, and more. He announced at a press conference the afternoon of the concert that he would enter a covenant with us to help us deliver in Scotland what they were delivering in Venezuela; that they would share their wisdom with us; above all, they would invite us to become part of their family. All this we sealed that day, and a few months later we sent another delegation to Venezuela to sign the covenant. A few months after that we sent our newly hired team of musicians to Venezuela not only to gain some training in their approach, but to get the vibe, be evangelised, be motivated by what they saw. We’ve been going for a year in Raploch, and our hearts are warmed and our wills confirmed by what is happening. We are showing that the Venezuelan miracle can work in Scotland, a very different society with a very different culture. It works because children are children everywhere, and they know in their hearts how to play, creatively, redemptively, if given half a chance: that is the chance we are giving them. But this is only the beginning. Dostoevsky said the world would be redeemed by beauty. José Antonio Abreu has shown us how music can make beautiful the lives of the children who play it. We are thrilled because, through his genius, the children of Venezuela are teaching the children of Scotland how to play again.
Vote of ThanksBy Donald LamontMember of the Board of Sistema Scotland, Member of the Executive Committee of the Anglo Venezuelan Society and former HM Ambassador to Venezuela
Baroness Gibson, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, “mi Presidente” Richard Holloway I should like first to thank you, Baroness Gibson for agreeing to chair this event this evening. Please pass our thanks also to the House authorities for making appropriate arrangements, and for the constitutional flexibility they seem to have shown in doing so! “Sistema Scotland” is neither a party political organisation nor a political lobbying organisation (except, of course, in trying to get money out of the Scottish Government!.) But it seems to me entirely right that Richard’s lecture should be given within these Houses of Parliament because what “Sistema Scotland” is about is surely something that lies at the heart of politics – helping young people, particularly those who are disadvantaged in society, to recognise their talents and abilities, and to develop those talents and abilities to the full. I first met Richard Holloway when he visited Venezuela to get to know “El Sistema” and how it worked. The British Embassy was not involved with “El Sistema”, but I had got to know Jose Antonio Abreu slightly and had formed two thoughts about the system he had created. First, when I saw and heard the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, I thought that, even setting aside their talent and skills, their exuberance and sense of fun (not common terms in the Scottish vocabulary!) would blow the socks off a Scottish audience. Of course, there would be critics who would sniff and say “What an outrageous way for an orchestra to behave!”, but I thought they would make a truly refreshing impact on our culture. And of course, living and travelling in Venezuela, you realise that it is not just the Simon Bolivar Orchestra - in every town there is an orchestra of young people performing to a high standard and getting such enjoyment from doing so. But living in Venezuela you also meet lots of people who are not in an orchestra, but whose lives have been immeasurably enriched and whose horizons were lifted by their experience of “El Sistema” – as has been said here, the music is one thing, but the fundamental aim is social. As has been suggested earlier, Maestro Abreu is in his way a revolutionary, a liberator of the human spirit in the mould of Simon Bolivar. And in Richard Holloway, we have our own Abreu. Naturally, we wish you well in England and Wales as you develop your own schemes inspired by “El Sistema”, but of course you have one huge disadvantage – you have no Richard Holloway! And you can’t have him! In Richard Holloway we have in Scotland someone who has established an outstanding identity of view with Abreu. Both use the same language of passion, of love. Both share a huge commitment to bringing about social change. But I don’t want to embarrass Richard by excessive praise. Indeed I feel I must record that he and Maestro Abreu share a major flaw. Neither, in their respective languages, has quite mastered the notion of “It cannot be done” or “Impossible!” Those of us who were fortunate enough to attend the first birthday of “Big Noise” in Raploch last week saw things many would have thought impossible a year ago. And I want to thank the Venezuelan Ambassador for the nice piece put on his Embassy website by the member of the Embassy he sent to represent him at our birthday concert. We have a very good relationship with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – they have developed, among other schemes, a “buddy” relationship with the children in Raploch. And it was fantastic to see the children in the Raploch orchestra gaze up at their “buddies”, absolutely rapt with attention, tapping their feet in rhythm as the group from the SSO played Grieg. And a parent beside me, when I asked whether he had a child in the orchestra said, “Two - one on the cello, the other on the violin. They just love it!”. “Just love it”: absolutely what Richard was saying about how the children are reacting to the opportunity they are getting through “Big Noise”, a name we’re really proud of! So thank you, Richard, for bringing to Scotland, to the United Kingdom, this creation of Latin America, of Venezuela, and for inspiring the children and parents in our country. And thank you for inspiring us all this evening.
« Back