BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – From a white school building lost among the dirt roads in Buenos Aires province drifts the mixed chords of an orchestra. At 9 a.m. on a Saturday, the rest of the town is silent.
The locality of San Vicente is located less than 60 kilometers from the city of Buenos Aires, the nation’s capital. But life is fairly rural here, with dirt roads, one-story houses and local citizens traveling by horse.
The doors are wide open at Escuela Primaria No. 22 or "Dr. Luis Agote," a public school in the neighborhood of Santa Rosa. The school has just six classrooms, all decorated with children’s drawings. The hallway leading to the music is full of flags that are white and light blue, the national colors of Argentina. Around the corner is the cafeteria – the source of the music.
Through the cafeteria door, the sound resounds more clearly. There are percussion instruments, trombones, clarinets, cellos, bass guitars, violins and flutes. The kids who play them are between 10 and 20 years old, participants in the Programa Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Infantiles y Juveniles para el Bicentenario, a government program that aims to connect youth in underprivileged areas with music.
The young musicians are sitting in a corner of the cafeteria, each one with a music stand. Among them is a teacher for every instrument. Gonzalo Pumilla, 14, plays the cello in the orchestra, though he passes from one instrument to the next with enthusiasm.
To his side, his father, Sergio Pumilla, laughs with his arms folded across his chest. He says that his son began to participate in the program in November 2011, a month after the orchestra formed at the local primary school.
“Gonzalo is pleased,” his father says. “He is happy. In reality, he wanted to play a sport. But when he tried the orchestra, he chose to come here every Saturday. Since he started with the orchestra, he traded the computer and PlayStation for the music. From Monday to Monday, he talks about music.”
Pumilla says that before every Saturday rehearsal, the parents prepare breakfast in the school for the teachers and students. They then all dine together to kick off the weekend practice. Complementing the weekend practices are classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays in which the aspiring musicians learn how to read music and play the instruments.
Pumilla says he couldn’t afford to buy a cello for his son, but Gonzalo attends these classes twice a week to learn how to play it. The Saturday rehearsal is special because it offers him more contact with the instrument on the weekend.
“The theme of music is integration,” his father says. “It gratifies my wife and I a lot. And here, Gonzalo has the opportunity to play an instrument that is not within our reach to buy.”
The Argentine government launched Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Infantiles y Juveniles para el Bicentenario in 2008 in order to offer more inclusive education to socially vulnerable children and adolescents. The objective is to expand their access to cultural activities while stimulating their enjoyment of music. Many times, their passion and talent surpass the expectations of the music instructors, and the participants' school teachers observe that the music even encourages better peformances in the classroom academically and behaviorally.
The program drew inspiration from similar models in various Latin American countries, starting in Venezuela more than 30 years ago, according to Argentina's Ministry of Education. The Buenos Aires city government initiated the first project of its kind in Argentina in 1998. Between 2008 and 2011, the Ministry of Education launched 70 orchestras and 60 youth choirs on a national scale in low-income areas across the country in conjunction with the corresponding provincial ministries, Fundación del Banco de la Nación Argentina and various nongovernmental organizations.
The orchestra in which Gonzalo plays began in October 2011. The participants come from humble backgrounds with no knowledge of music, let alone their own instruments. Yet music has become a big part of their lives thanks to the program, and they even had two performances last year.
Jessica, Jonathan, Ceci and Joana are four siblings between the ages of 12 and 20 who are also at orchestra rehearsal with Gonzalo. Their parents were not present to give permission to publish their last names. Like Gonzalo, two of the siblings play the cello, while the other two play the clarinet.
“I really like the clarinet, and I like to come to the orchestra and to learn,” Jessica says.
She adds that she and her siblings talk about notes and compositions all the time at home.
“My siblings also love it,” she says.
Another boy in the orchestra, Julián, 13, interrupts Jessica to say he plays the viola. Julián, whose parents also were not present to give permission to use his last name, goes on to explain the difference between the viola and the violin.
“It has other keys and also another sound,” he says. “I liked the sound.”
He adds that he likes Beethoven and Mozart.
This Saturday, the orchestra is playing tango music. The teachers prompt the young musicians to begin to use their voices and hands to practice the rhythms that they will later play on the instruments.
Finally, the orchestra’s conductor, Darío Díaz, whom the kids call “el Profe,” directs them to begin playing. First, the clarinets, trombones and flutes begin. Then, the violins, cellos, bass guitars and percussion join them.
“Well done!” Díaz exclaims to the concentrating young musicians. “Very good!”
To the side of Gonzalo is a thin, blond boy, Ignacio Martínez. Ignacio or “Nacho” is trying to play the trombone for the first time. It’s the 10-year-old's first rehearsal. His face transforms as the hours pass. It evolves from embarassment to uncertainty to enthusiasm, notes his father, Adrián Martínez.
“He looks very happy,” his father says without hiding his own happiness. “The idea was that he would come and listen and see what it’s about. The only instrument that was free was the trombone. And there is Nacho playing it.”
Díaz, who directs two of the program’s orchestras, says that the initiative has gone even better than he had anticipated.
“Before starting, I thought that I had to persuade the kids with an instrument or motivate them all the time,” he says. “And it’s the reverse. The kids have more will, and you have to order them a little.”
To connect the young musicians with the works that they interpret, the program relies on a repertoire featuring songs that usually relate to the identity of their town. The subject matter is aligned with characteristics of the community or the landscape. “Calbagando en San Vicente” is one of the works that they are rehearsing this Saturday, which talks about riding horses, one of the modes of transportation in the area.
“We do every type of music,” Díaz says. “But almost 80 percent is composed and arranged by the teachers for this group, with their own interests and specific technical needs.”
Díaz says that almost every participant can choose the instrument that he or she wants to play, and some try various ones until they finally make a decision. The group of instructors – one for each instrument plus a social worker – is currently analyzing the possibility of letting some of the youth bring their instruments home to practice, something that the program envisions but has not occurred yet here.
“We evaluate the response and attitude of the child,” Díaz says. “If he or she is devoted, if she or she always comes, if he or she is fond of what he or she is doing. The home environment is also evaluated. We can’t make an expensive instrument available if we think that the home environment is not safe. We have to analyze each individual case.”
Another option under consideration is to bring the children to the instruments more.
“We are also seeing if we can give more turns so that the students come to study during the week and can have more contact with the instrument,” he says.
The majority of the music teachers, all under 30, have studied in a conservatory or have had some period of formal training, though not necessarily have attained a degree in music. Díaz says that what’s most important is that the teachers involved in the project have the capacity to excel in a unique teaching environment.
“The profile to do the work does not necessarily imply having some degree and institutional laurels because it is totally demonstrated that many times, in order to do this work, the people who have the most training or graduate from school drown when he or she is in front of 60 kids who have particular problems in a particular place in the world that is neither the capital nor a private institution.”
He says it takes a special type of music teacher to excel in this role.
“You need to have another type of aperture and methodology for those kids,” he says, “which doesn’t imply that he or she doesn’t have to know music.”
Díaz explains that all the teachers must pass a course designed by the Ministry of Education in order to participate in the program.
The program is not only empowering youth to learn how to play an instrument, but it is also helping them in school. Díaz says that the participants' teachers and administrators at school have expressed surprise to see a complete transformation in many orchestra participants who used to struggle academically or were rebellious.
“Personally, this largely surpassed my expectations,” Díaz says. “Especially with this group here. The response of the kids is impressive, much more than what one hopes. They surprised me. The musical response they have surprises me. I think that they are kids who have a lot of potential. There are complicated, more complex cases. But the general group response is really good.”
Camila Mandirola Lucci, the orchestra’s clarinet teacher, attributes this positive response in part to the fact that the students elect to participate in the orchestra.
“The kids are here because they want to be here and not by a desire of their parents,” she says. “Sometimes we wonder if it won’t be too much [meeting] three times per week. But there are kids who ask me to come more days.”
Mandirola Lucci says that the orchestras in the government program perform in some of the most prestigious theaters in Buenos Aires, including the famous Teatro Colón. Some 150 kids even go on to play in higher-level orchestras. For example, one clarinet player is now in the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, and various students have won competitions organized by Teatro Colón to gain spots in the Orquesta Académica del Teatro Colón.
Behind Mandirola Lucci, Gonzalo celebrates after he succeeds in completing a musical sequence on the cello that the teachers had given him to practice. Thanks to the program, maybe he too dreams of one day playing in a big orchestra, and maybe one day, he will succeed.
