Music Students Around the World Have Benefitted from 50 Years of El Sistema

By David Templeton | From the November/December 2025 issue of Strings

In 1975, Venezuelan musician, educator, and orchestra conductor José Antonio Abreu (1939–2018) worked with his government to launch a free, publicly funded music education program to offer four hours of hands-on music experience per week to any school-age child in the country who showed up. Dubbed El Sistema, or “the system,” the program eventually expanded beyond Venezuela, and today there are El Sistema programs or comparable partner programs providing musical opportunities to kids in more than 70 countries all over the world. This year, El Sistema has been celebrating its 50th anniversary.

“Fifty years is quite a lot,” notes Eduardo Méndez succinctly. “Fifty years is very special.”

For the last 17 of those years, Méndez has served as the executive director of El Sistema and its celebrated Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra & Choir, a position he moved into when Abreu appointed him in 2008. Having entered El Sistema when he was just five years old, living in the Andean town of Mérida, Venezuela, one can accurately say that Méndez has been with the organization almost all of his life. “I started out learning to play the violin in the youth orchestra, but I was so young, I wasn’t even too sure what El Sistema was,” he acknowledges in a recent conversation over Zoom from London, where, as part of its year-long 50th-anniversary celebrations, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra & Choir recently opened for the band Coldplay. “My mom thought it would be good for me to learn music, and that I would like it. I guess that my mom was right—because I never left.”

Over the course of its half century of existence, El Sistema has produced many classical musicians and artists, including Gustavo Dudamel, currently conductor and music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 2026, Dudamel will become the music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic. He and Méndez were contemporaries in the organization, though Dudamel, also initially a violinist, was drawn toward the conductor’s podium while Méndez, two years older, found his interests moving in a far more unexpected direction.

“When I was in my teens, we moved to Caracas, and I became involved in El Sistema there, and I was so impressed that there was no change in the way of learning,” Méndez notes. “Everything was so organized and consistent. As I moved on through the program, I became more and more involved in management within the organization. When I went to the university—Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas—though I remained involved with music, I decided to get a lawyer’s degree.”

After earning that degree, Méndez told his mentor, Abreu, that he was gearing up to find a job in his new profession, when it was suggested that he put his law skills to use as part of the El Sistema leadership team. He gradually rose up through the ranks of the organization and was eventually named by Abreu as his successor.

Since then, Méndez has been instrumental, so to speak, in expanding the organization’s reach across the globe. When he took the position in 2008, there were 60,000 children participating in the program annually. Today that number has ballooned to 1.2 million, with scores of individual youth ensembles and orchestras performing publicly all across the globe.

As mentioned, to celebrate El Sistema’s half-century mark, its youth orchestra has been holding special concerts all year long. A few days after its appearance with Coldplay, Dudamel conducted the youth orchestra in a performance at the Southbank Centre in London. At the time of this conversation, Méndez was still in the UK participating in other celebratory events. All of this attention on El Sistema’s history has given him plenty of time to think about the program’s legacy and significance.

“Since the very beginning, El Sistema introduced a new way of learning and teaching classical music,” he says. “Giving an opportunity to young people who have no opportunity, bringing them into this collective way of learning music while playing in an orchestra from the very beginning, it was very untraditional. Before that, a music student would study for years with one teacher, but in El Sistema, it’s many students with one teacher all at once, learning to read music, and what music theory is, and how to play the repertoire, but all as a group instead of one at a time.”

Early on, there was criticism of this approach, as it seemed to defy generations of acceptable convention and music teaching tradition. “But maestro Abreu always said, this isn’t a better way of teaching music,” says Méndez. “It’s just a different way.”

Fifty years later, the results have shown that the program clearly works, for those who thrive in such a collaborative and mutually supportive environment as the one El Sistema was designed to establish and support. “El Sistema is more than just a music program,” he says. “Through music, we teach values. It’s an opportunity to develop engaged and involved human beings, people who may not become professional musicians, but who can remember what they learned in the program and use it in their lives in many, many important ways.”

Among the values that El Sistema emphasizes is the importance of cooperation and collaboration over competition and individual achievement at the expense of others. “For these kids, this is a family,” says Méndez. “Everyone understands that everyone is important. They understand that everyone gets to grow together, so they help one another, and they learn from each other. In the end, it’s the group that is most important, and what they can accomplish together as part of that group is what matters.”

Such concepts are spread through partner programs such as the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA), which Dudamel founded after his appointment to the L.A. Phil. Launched in 2007, the program was closely based on El Sistema’s model. On a recent episode of the UK radio show and podcast Desert Island Discs, Dudamel spoke often of El Sistema and YOLA, at one point observing, “When you give an instrument to a child, you are giving identity, because you are giving culture to that person, you are giving a space of creativity, and a space where they can create beauty through a discipline of working together.”

To that description of this program’s benefits, Méndez adds, “I would say that by giving an instrument to a child, not only do you give them identity—you give them a future. Even if they don’t become a player at the New York Philharmonic, they will always know what they can achieve with hard work and passion and collaborating together.”

Looking back at what El Sistema has accomplished, Méndez concludes, has only made him more excited about what is to come. “To sustain a program like El Sistema over 50 years, you have to face a lot of challenges,” acknowledges Méndez. “We have certainly had many challenges. But looking back, we have done more than just survive. We have grown. We have introduced to the world a new way of looking at music and how to teach it. Over more than 70 countries, we have shown that music, whether it is classical or pop or whatever you love to play, can change lives. We project that over the next 50 years, there will be more and more countries adopting these kinds of programs as a way to bring music into the lives of even more millions of children.”