Arts • Education

“The Music Saved Me. I’m Sure of It.”

February 17, 2008
by Celeste Fremon
17 Comments

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Nothing stops a bullet like a cello?

Sunday’s 60 Minutes featured a profile of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s next music director, the astonishingly young (26-years-old), astonishingly curly-headed, and just plain astonishing Gustavo Dudamel, who is slated to take over from Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2009.

The video of the segment, which can be found on the 60 Minutes website, is worth watching to get a preview of the wunderkind’s wondrous style, but also because of what it has to say about the unusual" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen> program that led Dudamel to music:

He was in a music program, which is a Venezuelan innovation. It is called El Sistema, the system, and it takes children – a quarter of a million children – almost all from poor neighborhoods, and teaches them how to play instruments.

This has led to hundreds of youth orchestras sprouting up all over the country.

But El Sistema is less a music program than a profound social movement that takes kids off the streets, takes them away from crime and drugs and despair.

“The music saved me. I’m sure of this. With all these bad things around you, you are exposed to these things, very close. The music give me a way to be far of these things,” Dudamel says


Dudamel says that when he takes over in 2009, he hopes to do for many of LA’s inner city kids what was done for him.

“Now we will start a project with the young people from the poor communities here in LA, like in Venezuela,” he says.

May it be so, Gustavo, may it be so.

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17 Comments

  • Impressive. I wish him luck on duplicating the successful program in L.A. I worry, however, that the culture is too different for it to work.

  • Dudamel is frigging amazing. I haven’t seen the 60 Minutes piece, but I did see him last year conducting the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

    I worked in the music business for 20 years and I can tell you that the best gauge of a musician’s performance is if they appear to be at least having as much fun as the audience. This orchestra was having a ball and so was Dudamel.

    To be a great conductor IMHO is to be a genius: you have to know every instrument’s part and where it fits in in the larger scheme. Dudamel could very well the greatest young conductor since Leonard Bernstein.

  • RP, I’d go with “genius.” 60 minutes did the Bernstein comparison, it seemed quite apt. If you saw the SB Youth Orchestra then you probably saw them play Bernstein’s “Mambo” from West Side Story. There was a clip of it on last night, but I found a couple of YouTube videos of the full performance and they were just flat out joy-producing.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6q7RCAcaBk&feature=related

    I think we in LA have won the lottery and then some with this guy.

  • I’m envious, Celeste, I’m envious. Mambo (coincidentally composed by Bernstein) was amazing.

    It reminds me of a how I saw The Kronos Quartet do several years ago. They did pieces by Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk and other 20th Century composers. The show-stopper was when they did Purple Haze, with the cellist taking that opening quitar riff. Unbelievable. See for yourselves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP7rjppeRA0

    At a Q & A afterwards, the members where asked if they had conservatory training. David Harrington,the lead violinst replied, “Yes and we’ve spent years trying to get over it!”

    I hate the term “serious music.” There’s no reason why classical music can’t be a no holds barred blast.

  • Although I haven’t seen this guy, the Bernstein analogy also seems to hold in the sense of a passion for connecting the music with younger audiences (and, potentially, players.) Bernstein – as a composer, conductor and communicator – was more than willing to cross boundaries, combine his classical skills with touches of jazz and pop, and engage his audiences without any condescension.

  • One aspect of this that has not been mentioned is that fact, that in a town with a growing hispanic population and an aging, caucasian, population that is providing a dwindling audience for the Philharmonic, the presense of Dudemel replacing Salomen presents the people at Disney Hall with a chance to develop a new audience that could ensure the healtgh of the symphony here for the next half century. And at a time when a lot of orchestras are in serious financial trouble that is no small consideraqtion.

  • Yes, the Philharmonic Board has been grappling with this issue of how to attract changing racial demographics for some time, and if you attend at the Music Center you can see how much the audience is largely older, affluent and white. The Hollywood Bowl has long had jazz concerts and other artists which attract minorities, but you don’t see a lot of young, black faces outside the jazz nights. I for one really have enjoyed Solonen, but his proclivity for his countryman Sibelius’ brooding Scandinavian music and new-age stuff hasn’t helped with the demographics.

    I liked what R P said about the Kronos using classical instruments to play guitar riffs — anything to make classical sound cool and more relatable to younger kids. It’s sad when a kid excels at a classical instrument but the only instrument with social cachet is the guitar.

  • Nothing like the violin for sheer beauty and expression, though. To hear Itzhak Perlman live…And my point also is as a parent, getting kids to stick with an instrument that may not be as populist or useful in getting girls or the cool factor. Too many boys quit as teens. But I love classical guitar, too. And the unique classical folk duo Rodrigo and his female flying-fingered partner — whose name escapes me. (Gabriella?)

  • And unlike other instruments it takes quite a while to play anything on a violin but chords or noise.

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