Human rights award for anti-Sistema campaigner
NewsThe outspoken pianist and composer Gabriela Montero, an unflinching opponent of the Venezuela militarist regime, has received the 2024 Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent from the Human Rights Foundation.
Montero, 54, has exposed the cruelties of the regime and the callous ways it uses el Sistema, the music education programme, for propaganda and distortive purposes.
On receiving the award, she said:
‘Now, more than ever, highly visible artists are faced with moral choices; to use their art to conceal tyranny, or to reveal it.
In Venezuela, music has – by intricate state-controlled design – become the great concealer, Marcel Marceau’s immovable happy mask, beneath which the human heart writhes and languishes in abject suffering and misery. Let us not forget that, as the number of participants in Venezuela’s famed music system reportedly grows, so, too, do the number of exiles and refugees. 8.5 million Venezuelans are now estimated to have fled their homeland, representing every level of education, skill, ethnicity, and social class. All the while, our classical music family has promoted an abject lie on the world stage, that utopia lies in a Castro/Cuban iteration of Revolution in the land of Simón Bolívar.
‘It is now 2024, and another election looms in Venezuela. The next president of Venezuela, if left to the people of Venezuela to decide, would be Maria Corina Machado. However, the regime holding Venezuela hostage has decreed that she cannot participate in the democratic process. The criminality of the few continues to usurp the decency of the many.’
Find the full statement here: https://www.facebook.com/gabriela.montero.71/posts/pfbid02ZaayKr1KKTRPyDgLfN9FY8D7UxL682Vr7qXfcCnKaafwvU4WTU3EZ1GZd6rVwjwKl
Gabriela Montero calls on musicians, promoters and agents to stop collaborating with El Sistema:
“If you are a musician, use your instrument, your talent, your spirit, and your determination to protest that you and your family are denied the right to determine your own future. Do not participate in the planned Guinness Book of Records propaganda, designed to obscure electoral theft. Lay down your instruments in protest. Choristers, do not sing for those who silence opposition. Let your collective silence be deafening. If you are a promoter, examine closely whom you are inviting to your concert hall, and why. If you are an agent, whose money are you willing to accept?
If we want music to transform society, then we – the musicians and the music industry – must play our part as the agents of change. Music alone is powerless, and to suggest otherwise is to indulge in idle, narcissistic fantasy.”
However well-intended, Mrs Montero is wrong (and a threat to any piano, as the picture shows).
It is a misunderstanding to think that music is powerless to ‘transform society’ and that instead it is the musicians who should do the job of protesting against any threat to freedom and self-determination – by stopping playing the music.
Classical music transforms any listener who is open to it, and people who are not open to it simply miss the opportunity. And musicians who want to transform society in a direct way, should carefully consider on which party they will vote, or set-up their own party, or join a protest rally, or start a guerilla gang, but with music this has nothing to do.
Classical music is a psychological, non-conceptual art form, unsuited to direct political action. The best that musicians can do, is to protect it from political instrumentation. The worst of Mrs Montero’s passionate outburst is that NOT engaging in political action (by stopping playing) were indulging ‘…. in idle, narcissistic fantasy.’ This is a direct attack on the art form itself in an attempt to politicize it.
Meanwhile, I hear Labour “has changed.” Now they’re “Country First.”
Good gracious! A prize for Creative Dissent????? Whatever next? I’d like to nominate NL for this prize, by virtue of his establishment of SD, a veritable hornets’ nest of dissent, and I would nominate most of the contributors to it too. I shall also nominate all those who abstain from voting at the General Election on 4th July for want of any party that deserves their support.
Based on the principle of equity, I’d also like to advocate a prize for Creative Obeisance – to be awarded to those acolytes who ingratiate themselves to the most odious celebrities and politicians. Without detracting from their musical credentials, I would nominate Netrebko and Gergiev to be the first recipients.
And Gustavo Dudamel, obviously.
Creative Dissent is the term given to works of art created with the specific aim of challenging tyranny, as exemplified by Vaclav Havel. Tyranny is no joke to those who experience it, to those who lose their country to it.
To provide a bit of context, El Sistema just announced an attempt at the Guinness record for the world’s largest choir, in the run-up to the presidential elections in Venezuela. The main opposition candidate, who would win hands down in a fair election, has been banned from participating by the government.
The choir spectacle is clearly an artwashing exercise, designed to distract from the corrupt elections. El Sistema did the same (with an orchestra) in the lead-up to the previous elections in 2021. El Sistema is operated from the Office of the President, and the president’s son is on El Sistema’s board of directors. This is why Gabriela Montero calls on musicians not to participate in the record attempt.
But no music prizes for opposing far-right/fascist military dictators imposed on Latin America by the USA such as Augusto Pinochet (Chile,) Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (Columbia,) Fulgencio Batista (Cuba,) Alfredo Poveda (Ecuador,) the last nine dictators of El Salvador, the last four fascist dictators of Guatemala, Raoul Cédras (Haiti,) Oswaldo López Arellano (Honduras,) Luis Somoza Debayle (Nicaragua,) Manuel Noriega (Panama,) and the last six fascist dictators of Uruguay.
And of course, no prizes for opposing Carlos Delgado Chalbaud and Marcos Pérez Jiménez who were military dictators of Venezuela before the “commies” took over.
No, what we really need is a prize for supporting all these US imposed dictators of Latin America. Perhaps it could be in the shape of a large clump of bananas. It would fit so well with the conservative, bourgeoise character of classical music and its keen social values.
Typical Osbourne false-equivalency, whataboutist garbage. If you cared for people – as opposed to your commy ideology – you would congratulate Gabriela Montero for her unyielding fight against tyranny itself. But you are more concerned with labels. Left, right, it has nothing to do with any of this. These are criminals, narcos. They have wrecked a country, and the USA had no part in this particular demolition, even if they had plenty to do with plenty of other catastrophes in Latin America and elsewhere. Stick to the topic at hand, and recognize a fighter for the rights o’ man when you see one, as the Human Rights Foundation has.
As if there were no problem with the one-sided criticisms of Latin American despots. Fascists OK, leftist no.
“They have wrecked a country, and the USA had no part in this particular demolition, even if they had plenty to do with plenty of other catastrophes in Latin America and elsewhere.”
The USA has staged two coup attempts to overthrow the government of Venezuela. And it has subjected the country to crippling economic sanctions. The cause has been Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil resources. The main backers of the attacks on Venezuela have been oil interests in Texas.
To clarify, Gabriela Montero is an anti-tyranny campaigner. Who would not be, unless a beneficiary of tyranny? After all, she has not been able to return to Venezuela, her native land, for 14 years.
That campaign begins with the Venezuelan regime, and it therefore follows that she is critical of any instrument of state that serves the regime’s aims. El Sistema is just one of those instruments of state.
This is my official statement, on receipt of the award, beginning with these words of Vaclav Havel himself:
“You do not become a ”dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
― Vaclav Havel
I would like to thank the Human Rights Foundation for recognizing that for some fifteen years I have turned, in my limited way, to the codified language of music specifically, and the platform of the performer generally, to return power to the powerless, to challenge the usurped authority of those who continue to hold our beloved Venezuela hostage to tyranny, crime and the chaos of failed statehood.
In holding music dear to my heart – and insisting that all art forms must provide the essential building blocks of every child’s education – I equally fervently reject the expedient, catch-all banality that “music transforms society”.
Let us not forget that, in the 20th century, the most cultivated society in human history unleashed history’s greatest horror. Its leader would listen to the sublime music of redemption in Parsifal before ordering millions to their deaths.
It is not music that transforms society, but leaders of good moral virtue.
The role of the artist – whether poet, playwright, painter, or musician of any genre – is to capture the moment, to reflect on it, to celebrate it, to protest it, to satirize it, to offer creative commentary so that the human tendency to excess is tempered. I am not the first to do so, indeed our classical canon finds so much of its inspiration in protest, from The Marriage of Figaro to the symphonies of Shostakovich.
Now, more than ever, highly visible artists are faced with moral choices; to use their art to conceal tyranny, or to reveal it.
In Venezuela, music has – by intricate state-controlled design – become the great concealer, Marcel Marceau’s immovable happy mask, beneath which the human heart writhes and languishes in abject suffering and misery. Let us not forget that, as the number of participants in Venezuela’s famed music system reportedly grows, so, too, do the number of exiles and refugees. 8.5 million Venezuelans are now estimated to have fled their homeland, representing every level of education, skill, ethnicity, and social class. All the while, our classical music family has promoted an abject lie on the world stage, that utopia lies in a Castro/Cuban iteration of Revolution in the land of Simón Bolívar.
It is now 2024, and another election looms in Venezuela. The next president of Venezuela, if left to the people of Venezuela to decide, would be Maria Corina Machado. However, the regime holding Venezuela hostage has decreed that she cannot participate in the democratic process. In other words, there is no democratic process to speak of. The criminality of the few continues to usurp the decency of the many.
I urge every citizen of Venezuela to use every instrument at their disposal to protest this fundamental injustice. If you are a musician, use your instrument, your talent, your spirit, and your determination to protest that you and your family are denied the right to determine your own future. Do not participate in the planned Guinness Book of Records propaganda, designed to obscure electoral theft. Lay down your instruments in protest. Choristers, do not sing for those who silence opposition. Let your collective silence be deafening. If you are a promoter, examine closely whom you are inviting to your concert hall, and why. If you are an agent, whose money are you willing to accept?
If we want music to transform society, then we – the musicians and the music industry – must play our part as the agents of change. Music alone is powerless, and to suggest otherwise is to indulge in idle, narcissistic fantasy.
I dedicate this recognition to all who resist tyranny, wherever they encounter it in our world, and whatever its political affiliation.
Gabriela Montero,
May 22nd, 2024
“Let us not forget that, in the 20th century, the most cultivated society in human history unleashed history’s greatest horror. Its leader would listen to the sublime music of redemption in Parsifal before ordering millions to their deaths.”
The suggestion is, that music cannot transform listeners to ther better selves, but in the same breath music is claimed to be an inspiration for protesting etc. Both in the same time is not possible.
And using the complete misunderstanding of a psychopathic killer to demonstrate music’s powerlessness, is absurd.
To fail to get the point, Mr. Borstlap. Her point, made pretty clearly in her statement, is that it is leaders who transform our societies, and that neither music nor any of the other arts are – in and of themselves – bulwarks against chaos. She is trying to push back against those who claim music’s transformative power at the level of society while simultaneously serving those who destroy society through the abuse of political power. She herself lives a life in music, so clearly believes in music’s intrinsic value. It is the hijacking of culture for political gain that she protests.