Cape Festival and El Sistema

Music belongs to everybody. It is a means for social change, a way to a better future, a learning tool and a source of immeasurable joy. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan children have found their way to a better life through FESNOJIV, the country's national system of music education. "El Sistema" is now internationally celebrated as the world's most extraordinary musical success story.

In just over three decades, founder Jose Antonio Abreu has built music schools across the country, where 300,000 children, most of them living below the poverty line, learn to play and sing together. Venezuela now boasts 220 orchestras, and exports some of the world's finest musicians. South Africa can learn from the Venezuelan example.

In South Africa, millions of children sing together in choirs, which are networked through impressive national competition and festival structures. This extraordinary resource of talent is the ideal basis for a new initiative to give South African children access to musical skills which will serve them in all walks of life.

Through its pilot projects, children!s opera and education conference in 2010, the Cape Festival launched an exciting collaboration with FESNOJIV to provide long- term, sustainable education in music literacy, choral and orchestral skills to South Africa's children and young people.

In March 2010, young Venezuelan instrumentalists worked together with their South African counterparts in workshops, concerts, and rehearsals of Benjamin Britten!s charming children!s opera "Noye's Fludde". In a series of discussions, lectures, demonstrations, and film screenings, leading teachers from FESNOJIV presented "El Sistema's" methods and strategies to South African participants. This long-awaited exchange marked the beginning of an important and ongoing collaboration between the Cape Festival and FESNOJIV.