Musical Encounters

Approaching Venezuela, its people, and their mesmerising music.

In 1975, musician (and economist) José Antonio Abreu developed a state-funded program to bring free classical music education, and instruments, to children across his country. He called it “the System”, “el sistema”. Across 45 years, over 900000 young people have benefited from a program that has revolutionised the access to music education across the country, and that has been admired, studied and adapted, across the globe. 

Nonetheless, great ideas need great support, and it rarely comes for free. Questions on power, control, identity, nationalism have challenged a top-down program that managed to survived 7 different governments accommodating to the prevailing political discourse of their time. Is “el sistema” an antidote to poverty or a tool to consolidate power? Can culture and access to education be truly independent if they depend on state support?

"El sistema" is, no doubt, a story of success, with more lights than shadows, from a fascinating country that illustrates success and failure as no other. The richest in resources, and the poorest in their distribution, a country in which petrol is cheaper than water, with a broken society united only in their pride for their homeland. A country of talent, of nature, of beauty, but, above all, of music. The country of Simón Díaz, Gustavo Dudamel, Serenata Guayanesa or Juan Vicente Torrealba. Venezuela. 

A bilingual approach to Colombian culture, through the works of Gabriel García Márquez, a visit to Cartagena the Indias, a dash of Colombian unique vocabulary... and some songs. 

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In 1955, a then struggling young writer working for a Bogota newspaper, was called upon to ghostwrite the story of Luis Alejandro Velasco, a shipwrecked sailor who had survided after drifting for ten days on a raft in the middle of the ocean, with no food or water. He had been tossed overboard from his navy destroyer in choppy seas and, after four days of searching by Colombian authorities, given up for lost. Through astuteness and perseverance, Velasco survived on his raft and finally made it to the Colombian coast, where he was eventually proclaimed a national hero. The young writer took the task, and published the story in a series of articles. However, in the ghostwritten story, he did not fail to recount how the ship was dangerously overloaded with a contraband cargo--stoves, fridges, and televisions--which prevented it from maneuvering to rescue any of eight sailors tossed overboard. These revelations caused a political stir which embarrassed the dictatorship of Rojas Pinilla, putting in the target the shipwrecked sailor and the writer. That story represented a turn in the life of both. The sailor, who, through endurance and resilience had saved his life and was made a hero, fell into a forced oblivion. The writer who had exposed the corruption of the government officials saw his career as a journalist jeopardized, and was sent as a correspondent to Paris by his newspaper, something that change his life forever. 

Fifteen years after the shipwreck and its political fallout, the writer was worldwide acknowledged as one of the greatest living writers in Spanish language, when his publisher persuaded him to publish the newspaper articles about the sailor’s story as a novel, with an opening chapter detailing the events which surrounded its original publication. The writer was Gabriel García Márquez, and the book, “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor”.