But one
question remains: why are we all so potty about Venezuelan young musicians when
the UK has plenty of its own?
Britain’s
got talent. And the real talent has little to do with Simon Cowell, but everything
to do with our youth orchestras. The
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain is
a prime training ground for the best young orchestral musicians in the country;
to hear them is to be bowled over and out by the standard of their playing, and
the passion and dedication they show for their music.
What’s
the matter with us, then? Why do we fête the Venezuelans instead? What on earth
do they have that we haven’t?
It would
be easy to say “Nothing”. It would be easy to pretend that the Simon Bolivárs
are all show and no substance: the twirling basses, the football shirts, all
that Latin heat and light. But, though it pains me to say it, there is
something. And it’s the other way round. It’s something that we have that they
don’t have that’s the cause.
In a
recent interview for
The Strad, I
asked Levon Chilingirian, leader of the
Chilingirian String Quartet, what he
thought about this. He and his three colleagues visit Caracas regularly to
coach the students of El Sistema in chamber music. “One aspect which is very
different from here,” he says, “is that they don’t have any limits set for them.”
Many children learning music in the UK work their way through the Associated
Board grade exams system by hook or by crook. “Mostly by crook as far as I can
see,” Chilingirian adds. “It can be a case of: ‘You do your Grade V this year
and next year I’ll give you a nice present when you do Grade VI’. And if you suggest
to someone that they might learn a particular piece, they’ll say ‘No, no, that’s
Grade VII and I’m only Grade IV.”
That
doesn’t happen in Caracas. Chilingirian met a young violinist who’d been
learning for only a year, but brought the Bruch Violin Concerto No.1 to a
lesson and was determined to perform it with an orchestra soon afterwards. The
group also told me about a 23-year-old taxi driver who, bored with his job, met
some youngsters from El Sistema, heard about their work and decided to become a
cellist, having never touched an instrument before. “Nobody said ‘You can’t’
- so he did it,” says Chilingirian. “He’s a very accomplished player.”
Music
exams in Britain are an extremely mixed blessing. On the plus side, they
provide a target to work towards, a chance for youngsters to prove themselves
and gain a sense of achievement. The exams set by the Associated Board of the
Royal Schools of Music in particular are a global success story, a system
embraced wholeheartedly in countries the world over, notably the Far East.
And yet,
and yet... How many people in the UK have horror stories to tell about childhood
music exams? How many youngsters who might have gone on to enjoy making music
socially are left with a terror of performing after an unfortunate sojourn in the exam room? How many have had a bad experience and given up, because working
for an exam is no fun at all? For many of us, these exams are our first-ever try at playing to other people, and an unhappy start can leave deep
scars.
This set-up is
satisfactory for very few. The examiner has little space to write notes and
very, very little time in which to do so. Sight-reading tests rarely bear any
relation to real music. The pieces offer a bit of choice, yet so
little that often a child has to spend months practising something that he or she
doesn’t even like – and then, of course, it often sounds like it, too. And sometimes
a candidate’s chin wobbles or the eyes start to brim, but an examiner can’t take
time to reassure them, because the system is a conveyor belt - the next
candidates are in the waiting room building up their own store of nerves and mustn’t
be kept waiting. This is an exam all right. But is that any way to make music?
It’s
worth reflecting that in a target-oriented, achievement-focused society
blighted by the class-ridden nature of the education system, children have to
be very lucky to find themselves making music for the sake of enjoying it. Oftener than not
they do so to please their parents, to win a music scholarship (few parents
realise the hard work involved in that), to pass exams that will allow them to
go on and pass more exams. It’s all about measurement and competition. But for
El Sistema, it’s about personal and social transformation.
Maybe it’s
no wonder that many successful British professional musicians of my acquaintance never
went through the graded exam system at all; if someone is more than averagely
talented, exams quickly become an irrelevance. Do they hold the students back? I
believe so. Just think about scales. You could learn them all. But if your
grade prescribes only a certain number of them, you’re probably going to bother learning just
those few, aren’t you? Levon Chilingirian is right: music exams instil the
sense of an invisible ceiling that we dare not shatter. Rarely are we
encouraged to chuck out the exam books, find a piece of music we love and damn
well learn how to play it, even if it’s by Rachmaninov. That would be real
motivation: a passion from within.
Plenty
of other ways exist to learn and make music, and plenty exist in the UK. There’s
Colourstrings, for example – a Saturday morning music school derived from
Zoltán Kodály’s famous Hungarian system in which every child first learns to sing; they
subsequently develop excellently trained 'ears'. The kids perform to one
another in relaxed concert days, play in ensembles together early on and seem confident
with their instruments.
And now we have pockets of El Sistema too: with enthusiasm for these schemes taking root
around the country - the
Big Noise in Scotland and
In Harmony across
England, in centres including Lambeth, Liverpool and more - there’s hope that
our youngsters may also discover, like the Venezuelans, that making music is about
joy, life and love. Not about quaking in your shoes alone with your half-size violin
in a chilly school gym in Hatch End.