New directions for classical music in Venezuela: The El Sistema concept - widening access and achieving excellence

Master’s Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Musicology, grade: 1, University of Music Freiburg im Breisgau, language: English, abstract: What we call classical music has developed in Europe for centuries, thanks to numerous influences and experiments. It spread around the world with European colonizers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, becoming important in all the regions where occidental culture remained until today. More recently, our music gained great popularity in Asia, mostly in China, Japan and Korea. But in the last decades, South-America has been the theater of an initiative of great scope, opening new ways for thinking occidental classical music. The source of this initiative takes place in Venezuela and is known as El Sistema , The System, formally Fundacion del Estado para el Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela , short FESNOJIV, State Fondation for the National System of Youth and Children Orchestras of Venezuela. The first part of this essay will be dedicated to the description of this movement. In the second part we will examine its workings, and in the third part we will try to determine how this experience could profit other music education systems.