The worldwide phenomenon known as El Sistema is the subject of Playing For Their Lives: The Global El Sistema Movement for Social Change Through Music.
El Sistema, a program that began 42 years ago with 11 struggling music students in an abandoned parking lot in Caracas, has grown to include 750,000 children in Venezuela and has sparked one of the world’s most remarkable social initiatives.
For authors Tricia Tunstall and Eric Booth, the heart of the El Sistema story is in the programs that have sprung up in over 60 countries across the world, inspired by the vision of its founder, José Antonio Abreu: “When you put a violin in the hands of a child, that child will not pick up a gun.”
To research Playing For Their Lives, the authors visited El Sistema-inspired programs in 25 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. “In some cases,” they write, “we saw poverty so brutal that it overwhelmed our senses and jolted our understandings of what societies can tolerate and humans can survive.”
They discovered that in such surroundings, El Sistema programs are oases of safety, energy and beauty. The book is filled with vivid reports of children’s orchestras, bands, and choruses flourishing in Nairobi, Bethlehem, and Kabul; in the stressed immigrant communities of Gothenburg and Vienna; among traumatized young people in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Fukushima, Japan; and in the ghettos of London, Istanbul, Paris and many US cities.
Embedded in these stories are profiles of the activist-artists who lead Sistema-inspired initiatives—people like multi-awarded Filipino concert pianist Jovianney Emmanuel Cruz, who abandoned his life in New York City to return to his native Philippines, eventually collaborating with First Philippine Holdings chairman Federico Lopez to establish Ang Misyon—the largest El Sistema-inspired program in Southeast Asia.