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| The view outside my new apartment window in Rio |
I’m back in Rio de Janeiro now for my final month in
Brazil. Coming back to this city after 7
months, I now beginning to realize what an incredible city this is. This is not to say anything bad about the
other cities in Brazil that I have lived in or been to, but there is really something
special about Rio, and I’m really starting to see why it is called “a cidade
maravilhosa” (“the marvelous city.”) It
has the amazing natural beauty of the beaches, the mountains, and the forest,
plus so many interesting buildings, architecture, and neighborhoods, the
Portuguese pavement sidewalks, and the still mysterious favelas set up on the
hills. There is so much to explore and
do in this city, it kind of overwhelms me, and I’m really glad to be able to spend more time here.
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| Marlos Nobre with Rio in the background |
Shortly after I arrived, I was fortunate to be able to meet
and interview Marlos Nobre, perhaps the most prominent and recognized classical
Brazilian composer still living. The reason
I wanted to talk with him was that back in 1976, while he was the director of
FUNARTE, the National Foundation for the Arts, he created a social music
project called Projeto Espiral (“Spiral Project”) that was eerily similar to El
Sistema in Venezuela. Projeto Espiral
started just one year after El Sistema, and although Nobre has always been good
friends with Jose Abreu, they were unaware of each other’s projects until a
couple years after they started them. Nobre partnered with
SESI, a national organization of industry workers, to start giving free string
instruments and classes for the children of these workers, many of them living
on the streets or in slums, in the northern state of Ceará. He also partnered with a violinist and
teacher named Alberto Jaffe, who, as I learned about several months ago, had
developed his own method of collective music instruction by adapting the Suzuki
model and was looking for an opportunity to implement it.
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| Program booklet from the 2nd national meeting of string teachers of Projeto Espiral, Fortaleza, Ceará, May 11-12, 1979 |
At that time, there were very few Brazilian musicians in the
country’s own professional orchestras, and even fewer that were willing to
teach. As a result, Nobre hired foreign musicians who played in Brazilian orchestras to teach at
the project as well. The project
provided the kids, none of whom had had previous musical training, with
instruments and classes, although because there were thousands that wanted to
enter the program, Jaffe tested the children on basic musicality to whittle
down the number. They started with about
100 kids in the program but it expanded and grew quickly and in just a few
years it already had over 1000 students in about 5 different centers in cities
around Brazil. Nobre told me that the
kids were so dedicated to practicing, up to 15 hours a day, because while the
Brazilian middle class viewed music as a lower profession and pursuit, the poor
viewed music as an opportunity to escape a life of poverty.
Another aspect of the project was that, as a way of providing
instruments, which are quite expensive to buy, Nobre decided to create a
national luthier school by training kids in a juvenile detention center in Rio
to make string instruments for the project.
He brought in a great luthier from Italy named Guido Pascoli, whose
dream was to create such a national luthier school. Many of these kids, who had been murderers,
thieves, drug dealers, and had been given up on by society, went on to become the
most important luthiers in Brazil during the past 30 years.
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| From the same booklet: a picture of Projeto Espiral's National Luthier School |
The project was very successful, but as it expanded in 1978,
they began to run into problems with a lack of teachers and so needed to
start training more in Jaffe’s method.
It was around this time that Nobre got back in contact with Abreu and
they were surprised at how they had been doing such similar work for the past
couple years. Then, in 1979, Nobre was
arrested and interrogated about his involvement with the project, and was
accused of being communist. This was during the era of the military
dictatorship (1964-85) which was a very repressive time in Brazil’s
history. Projeto Espiral was created
during the presidency of Ernesto Geisel, who was very tolerant of the project
because his daughter was a big supporter of the arts and she respected and supported
the project, as did the then Minister of Education Ney Braga. After 38 hours of interrogation without water
or being able to sleep, Nobre was finally released, which he believes was due
to the intervention of Geisel’s daughter in the situation.
But this was just the beginning of Projeto Espiral’s
problems. Shortly after this incident, a
new president, João Figueiredo, was designated and was much less tolerant with the project. Nobre contacted Abreu again
and asked him what he could do to save the project. Abreu advised him to get the project funded not by the Ministry of Education as it had been, but through social development
funding like he had done in Venezuela.
Nobre says the difference between him and Abreu is that Abreu has the
ability to be very politically involved yet is willing and able cooperate with whatever
regime is currently in power, whether it is on the left or the right. This is because he cares first and foremost
about the project, even more so than any personal political beliefs or convictions, yet this
is something that Nobre couldn’t bring himself to do. In his own words, he couldn’t “samba” with
politicians, and this led him to being fired, as well as Jaffe, and the project
crumbled shortly after.
Just like that, the project was destroyed. Had it continued to this day, like in
Venezuela, Nobre thinks that Brazil would have an even larger and impressive
“sistema” than Venezuela. Nowadays, Brazil is starting all these social music projects inspired by Venezuela, but it
as if Brazil lost 3 decades while Venezuela continued to grow and progress
during that time.
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| From the same booklet: Projeto Espiral string orchestra |
Since then, Nobre has been very happy with what Abreu has
accomplished. They remain very good
friends, practically brothers as he says, and share the same age. Nobre has written several pieces for El
Sistema, performed many times with the Simon Bolivar Orchestra as a pianist, as
well as recorded with them. He recently
wrote a 35-minute concerto for orchestra for them and is working on another
couple pieces for Gustavo Dudamel to conduct.
When I talked to him, he was getting ready to head off to Venezuela in a
couple weeks where he will have one of his pieces performed by a Venezuelan-Brazilian
bi-national youth orchestra that will be formed with several young players from
the two countries, including kids from NEOJIBA, Orquestrando a Vida, and from
Nobre’s own orchestra which he directs in Recife.
While he certainly supports El Sistema and is proud of what
they have accomplished, he is worried about whether it can have a truly
large-scale impact on Venezuelan society by reducing poverty and crime. 300,000 kids is a large amount to be involved
in El Sistema, but it is far from a majority of Venezuelan children. He is also worried that El Sistema is
creating so many youths that want to become professional musicians that there
are not enough orchestras in the country or abroad that can absorb them all,
creating a lot of unemployed musicians around Caracas, and he is afraid of
Brazil following in the same path and meeting this same problem down the
line. He thinks that there should be a
lot more professional orchestras created in Brazil, one in every good-sized
city to address this in the future in order to address this growing need.
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| Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro |
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