Last January, I was invited to conduct the City of London Sinfonia at the Cartagena Music Festival in Colombia. As an adjunct activity, I was asked to work with the Colombian equivalent of "El Sistema" -- the state-sponsored music education program in Venezuela that produced Gustavo Dudamel, the LA Philharmonic's new music director. The experience I had in Medellin was truly life-changing.
 
Like El Sistema, this program is part social program, part orchestra, the idea being to offer an artistic outlet for poor musicians and to create musicians from some of the poorest and most potentially violent segments of the Columbian youth, in the hopes of building a better society. No small task that. Through musical training, the students learn respect and self-respect, rare attributes in the vicious ghettos of Medellin, where there is very little hope for a young person. 
  
I was shocked by the deprivation these brave young musicians suffer: about 20 of them subsist on "soup" made only with water, salt, and coriander, and probably 50 more are so malnourished to be borderline starving. One young girl fainted during one of our weekend rehearsals, because her only meals were the five subsidized weekday lunches she received at school - she simply did not eat on the weekends. There was uneven attendance at rehearsals because many learned that sleeping all day is a way to cope with going unfed.
 
In addition to this extreme poverty, Colombian youth struggle with the additional nightmare of unimaginable violence from the drug trade compounded by the gang warfare that consumes the destitute "Misery Belt" of Medellin's highlands. In this culture, one gains respect by stealing, harboring illicit material, or killing. Yet they perservere: a young percussionist, who only has about 40 notes in the entire concert, attends rehearsal after walking two hours through the most dangerous parts of the city; the bass trombonist has lost a mind-boggling 21 male family members to violent deaths.
 
Recently, I was told of a musician who was ordered to hide guns in his house for a local gang, and given a list of names of people he was to kill in order to gain entrance into the gang and thus, 'protection.' Upon learning that this young man had been accepted into the orchestra, the gang allowed him to forfeit the weapons and the killing, and instead, provided him with armed escort from his home to the bus stop to attend rehearsals. Ironically, such is the respect that acceptance into this orchestra garners, even among the most violent of Colombia's criminals. As a result, at no time did I ever feel threatened or unsafe in all of my time in Colombia. Musicians or teachers -- or in my case, both -- are simply untouchable there.
 
Once rehearsal starts, however, there is an incredible degree of seriousness and concentration, which I have experienced only with the best orchestras. Despite their relentless miseries, the pure joy these young musicians expressed after the concert is moving to the extreme. The pride they exuded after their performance of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony was awe-inspiring.