Venezuela's classical music pipeline is breaking

Millennium Park was no match for Pacho Flores.

Most would look out at the sea of people in the Pritzker Pavilion and balk. Not the Venezuela-born trumpeter, 44. During a concert with the Grant Park Music Festival last June, his sparkling sound and agile virtuosity danced above the sticky summertime heat.

At one point during a solo, he pointed his trumpet bell at the conductor — Grant Park Music Festival artistic director Giancarlo Guerrero, an old friend — and blew a teasing raspberry.

Before Flores became an international soloist, and Guerrero famous enough to score a cameo appearance in Bad Bunny’s ecstatic, pan-Latin halftime show, both men passed through the same organization: El Sistema Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela, or “El Sistema” for short.

Flores was the principal trumpet player of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, an all-star orchestra which accepts the crème de la crème of regional Sistema orchestras around Venezuela. Guerrero, then in his 20s, was appointed to lead one of those orchestras, in the western state of Táchira — his first professional conducting job.

“I owe basically my career to El Sistema and Venezuela,” Guerrero, 56, told WBEZ in a recent phone interview.

El Sistema was founded in 1975 by economist and conductor José Antonio Abreu, a former cultural minister who used his political clout to turn El Sistema into a state-run program. The country’s oil boom fueled El Sistema’s rapid growth, organized into so-called núcleos — like the one Guerrero led, in Táchira — across all 23 states in Venezuela.

Its top orchestra, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, first became a global sensation after a high-octane performance at the 2007 BBC Proms, donning windbreakers emblazoned with the Venezuelan flag. More recently, the orchestra opened for Coldplay during its 10 sold-out concerts at Wembley Stadium last summer, with frontman Chris Martin hailing it onstage as “maybe the best orchestra in the whole world.”

Now, El Sistema alums are conspicuously well-represented in classical music institutions and conservatories everywhere. This fall, Venezuela-born conductor Gustavo Dudamel, 45, will take the reins of America’s most visible classical music post, the New York Philharmonic, while still acting as music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra. Fellow conductor Rafael Payare, who participated in El Sistema at the same time as Dudamel, leads the San Diego and Montréal symphonies.

And Venezuelan musicians are members of some of the world’s best orchestras, from the Berlin Philharmonic to our own Chicago Symphony.

“People talk about oil, especially nowadays in Venezuela,” Guerrero said. “Honestly, it is professional classical music which may be the biggest export for that country.”

Amid a flashpoint in U.S.-Venezuela relations and ramped up domestic immigration enforcement, the future of that export has never been more in question. Last June, the State Department stopped issuing visas, including student visas, to Venezuelan nationals, with limited exceptions. Those exceptions were narrowed further in January.

That spells uncertainty for Venezuelan musicians who might have otherwise moved to Chicago to pursue their career, whether at the city’s many top-tier conservatories or through early-career opportunities at the Chicago Symphony, Civic Orchestra of Chicago or Grant Park Music Festival.

“I have two [Venezuelan] students who want to come, who are really good, and I'd like them to come,” said Almita Vamos, a Chicago-based violin pedagogue whose prestigious studio attracts students from around the globe. “I don't know if they can.”

Play, sing and fight

El Sistema is a massive organization that defies easy definition. Its core operations pertain to its nationwide network of community music schools that offer extracurricular instruction to children free of charge.

However, it also encompasses several professional ensembles, all at the apex of their respective regional núcleos. Accomplished students, no matter how young, can progress and join the ranks.

The Nicaraguan-born, Costa Rica–raised Guerrero says that kids as young as 12 and 13 years old played alongside veteran musicians in his professional orchestra in Táchira. Sometimes, members from various levels of the núcleo play together for special events — a spectacle of orchestral performance that doubled as a learning experience for the younger musicians.

“We’d be doing Beethoven symphonies with 400 players,” Guerrero recalled.

Even in its earliest years, El Sistema’s focus on ensemble education — at first orchestral education, with choirs added later — set it apart from other free music programs. Founder José Antonio Abreu codified El Sistema’s mission as one of social uplift, drawing parallels between the collaborative nature of a musical ensemble and civic participation. More idealistically, El Sistema positions itself as a way for Venezuela to conquer growing poverty and gang violence — echoed in its mantra to “play, sing and fight” (“tocar, cantar y luchar”).

“The project was always seen as national development as opposed to cultural or artistic development,” says Norma Núñez-Ruch, operations manager of both the Loop venue Guarneri Hall and Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center in Hermosa.

Núñez-Ruch, 39, trained on the viola through El Sistema and held administrative jobs in the program for six years before working at some spinoff programs in the U.S.

After the Simón Bolívar Orchestra, and by extension El Sistema, dazzled the world 20 years ago, copycat programs sprung up in under-resourced communities across the globe. Some of the most prominent examples in the United States include the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) and the Baltimore Symphony’s OrchKids program, a brainchild of Ravinia chief conductor Marin Alsop.

Locally, Ravinia’s Reach Teach Play programming also includes a Sistema-inspired pillar for orchestral students, as does the People’s Music School in Uptown.

El Sistema is not merely a pedagogical program. Musicians of any age can advance to its paid, professional-level orchestras, and, in many cases, children are paid enough to become the primary breadwinners for their family. That incentivizes students’ participation and progression in El Sistema, but also sometimes lends it a brutal competitive edge.

“I have a very good friend who told me he was making more money at 20 than his father, who was an engineer,” says Ricardo Lorenz, a Venezuelan-born composer who now teaches at Michigan State University.

Lorenz and Núñez-Ruch both remember a time when those salaries were enough to keep musicians inside Venezuela. But when its economy collapsed in the 2010s, even well-heeled El Sistema no longer had the funds to retain musicians. A surge in musicians choosing to study and work abroad followed — and Venezuela’s loss became the world’s gain.

Where music and politics collide

El Sistema and Abreu himself have been the subjects of widespread criticism both within and outside Venezuela for years.

The program was founded more than 20 years before the presidency of Hugo Chávez, whose populist ideology laid the groundwork for the more tight-fisted authoritarianism of his successor, Nicolás Maduro. But the degree to which El Sistema has been used as a propaganda tool by both regimes has led to accusations of political opportunism and “artwashing” — in other words, using culture to distract from a bleaker political reality.

Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero, who regularly performs with world-class orchestras like the Chicago Symphony, is one such critic. She told The Times of London last year that “it is no longer morally acceptable to host orchestras owned and operated by rogue states as mechanisms of soft power and influence.”

Many have petitioned Dudamel to take a similarly firm stance. Though the conductor has criticized the Maduro regime in the past — most notably in 2017, when an El Sistema student was killed by soldiers during a protest — he remains music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, El Sistema’s most prestigious ensemble, and a champion for the organization at large.

When she worked for El Sistema during the Chávez years, Núñez-Ruch notes that many within the organization were clear-eyed about Venezuela’s political realities. At the same time, El Sistema receives some 80% of its funding from the Venezuelan government, leaving the organization essentially stuck.

“In my perception, [the attitude of El Sistema] was, ‘Say whatever you want to say as long as we can sustain the work.’ That's part of the political strategy of the organization and its leadership,” she says.

The Venezuelan government’s dysfunction and strong-arming tendencies sometimes snowball into El Sistema itself. While living in Chicago in the early 2000s, Lorenz was helping spearhead a community program with the Chicago Symphony in Pilsen. Abreu pushed Lorenz to forge a connection between the CSO and El Sistema, which never materialized.

But Abreu, who was always “supportive” of Lorenz’s career, later reached out asking if Lorenz would be interested in returning to Venezuela. While Lorenz mulled the offer, Chávez named the composer to replace the current president of the Instituto Universitario De Estudios Musicales in Caracas via his weekly television program, “Aló Presidente.” Lorenz was shocked. He’d only been in early talks for the position, which he quickly declined. The episode effectively ended his relationship with Abreu. “He was very disappointed after that,” Lorenz recalls. (Abreu died in 2018.)

More recently, British scholar Geoffrey Baker has cast doubt on the idea that the program prioritizes social uplift at all. In the absence of demographic data, which El Sistema keeps private, his 2014 book “El Sistema: Orchestrating Venezuela's Youth” leaned on hundreds of interviews and a year observing El Sistema’s núcleos. Baker’s findings indicated that the program served a core demographic of middle-to-upper-class children, with impoverished students in the minority.

Additionally, Baker observed that El Sistema’s “revolutionary” educational philosophy was, if anything, retrograde. Núcleos more often resembled old-school European conservatoires where endless hours of practice were the norm.

“I naively thought that when Abreu died and more musicians left the country, some would start speaking out about the problems,” Baker wrote to WBEZ via e-mail. “But I hadn't counted on the fact that El Sistema's good name was essential to their job prospects overseas — it was their meal ticket.”

Núñez-Ruch doesn’t dispute accounts of internal politicking and interminable rehearsals. But she does feel as though El Sistema was operating with more political deftness than it is often given credit for. She points to El Sistema’s use of broadly Venezuelan symbolism on its tours rather than the United Socialist Party’s logo, at a time when that imagery was ubiquitous inside Venezuela.

“Managing that is not a small feat,” Núñez-Ruch said of the organization’s ability to detach itself from Chávez-related iconography. “It’s something that is very herculean, and only in hindsight, and outside of the country, can I see how masterful it was not to cross that line.”

Lorenz likewise “owes a debt of gratitude” to El Sistema, he wrote via e-mail, despite his own mixed feelings. Next month, Dudamel will conduct a new work of Lorenz’s to commemorate his final season with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he has led since 2009. The piece is inspired by Venezuela’s landscape: the rugged eastern coast, birds twittering in the six-mile-long Guácharo Cave, and drumbeats ringing over Lake Tacarigua, to the north.

“The sad part of all these things that have happened in the past month is that it’s trying to bring us back 100 years, where the only thing that Venezuela has is oil,” Lorenz says. “I thought we were beyond that.”