Gustavo Dudamel adopts the sphinx position
OrchestrasFollowing two excoriating articles in the UK press ahead of two concerts with the Venezuela regime’s propaganda orchestra, the conductor has been advised to respond on social media. Here’s what he says:
Todo lo que hoy soy, se lo debo a @elsistema y al Maestro Abreu. Me dieron la posibilidad de aprender y llegar a ser el músico que soy. Es por eso que siempre trabajaré para compartir esta oportunidad con las próximas generaciones. Tocar, Cantar y Luchar.
Everything I am today, I owe to @elsistema and Maestro Abreu. They gave me the chance to learn and grow into the musician I am today. This is why I will always work to share this opportunity with the next generations.
Tocar, Cantar y Luchar. pic.twitter.com/bbKV1tTbRn
— Gustavo Dudamel (@GustavoDudamel) January 7, 2025
He is in de-Nile, in deep denial that Abreu was anything other than a saint and that el Sistema is flawless, when there is evidence that both acted as window-dressing for a brutal military regime and Sistema is riddled with child-rape.
Dudamel will face a tougher examination next year when he becomes music director of the NY Philharmonic.
Tocar , luchar, prostituirse …
If he was prostituting himself he would not still work with the Venezolanos at all because he has more money to make elsewhere.
Rather we should acknowledge his loyalty and desire to give back.
Norman can direct his ire at the presenter, Barbican Presents, without besmirching the young visitors.
The original Times article that Dudamel is “responding” to is available here (well worth a read): https://www.thetimes.com/article/7dc3c4ab-f7bc-4677-ade3-9f10c30706ea?shareToken=182d7d4c5d169e01972b0b862490c48b
“In 2017, however, the conductor published an op-ed piece in The New York Times, speaking against the violence in Venezuela after a young musician was killed by security forces. The result? Public scorn from Maduro, and days later the president’s office cancelled Dudamel and the NCSOV’s US tour.”
Suffice to say, there’s no good reason to criticize Dudamel for Maduro’s sins. As for El Sistema, obviously there have been some problems but his gratitude for his own hugely positive experience is understandable and even commendable IMHO.
Some problems? Corruption, abuse, propaganda. Musicians who are terrified of retribution by Abreu. This is music education but it sounds more like the mafia!
Musicians are terrified of retribution by Abreu when he died seven years ago?
Did you read the article?
I find the kind of reporting from the TIMES (shame on you Neil Fisher and Jessica Duchen!!) indicative of American style Elon Musk control of our media. Read Yuval Noah Harari to understand it’s *all* about their clicks and has zero integrity.
“Riddled with child-rape” is a very significant accusation – where is the actual evidence for this? I’ve not seen anything other than that opinion piece, which is not investigative journalism.
The opinion piece centred on the testimonies of two survivors, backed up by other current and former members of El Sistema. Presumably you’re not suggesting that survivor testimonies don’t count as evidence? A newspaper would not publish a story about institutional child abuse unless it were confident that the story would stand up to a legal challenge.
The opinion piece was founded on a year of research in Venezuela – much deeper than any investigative journalism.
A week after the opinion piece, El Sistema acknowledged that the problem was real, expressing its solidarity with the victims and their families.
In the days after the publication of the opinion piece, journalists from Venezuela, Germany, Spain, and Argentina did their own independent investigations and published their own articles, confirming the story.
Five years before the opinion piece, a prominent ex-El Sistema musician claimed in a VAN Magazine article that teacher-student relationships were “the norm.” He recalled: “Some of the … teachers would actually say it out loud: ‘I do this [have sexual relationships] with my students because I think we’re actually helping them become better musicians, better violinists.’”
If you haven’t seen anything other than the opinion piece, then you haven’t been following this topic at all closely.
Instead of criticizing Dudamel, maybe the focus should be on the broader systemic issues in Venezuela. Dudamel’s work with El Sistema is a rare positive force in a difficult situation, and attacking him doesn’t address the root causes of the country’s problems.
He doesn’t HAVE to comment on everything. His art and his work with young musicians are already a huge contribution. He gets to decide when and how to speak up.
If the BBC was accused of corruption, abuse, and propaganda in a major newspaper report, don’t you think that the Director or someone at the top should be obliged to respond, and not just by saying “I love the BBC, it’s been so wonderful to me”, but actually by addressing the substance of the allegations?
Are our institutions required to be flawless now and staffed by saints? Justice is symbolized by scales on which claims are weighed and balanced. He is genuinely grateful for what he received from others, a rare trait among conductors.
As one writer notes, Dudamel is in a difficult position here. He obviously wants to protect El Sistema (though the HRF claims that he’s a “puppet” of the regime are absurd – he literally wrote an NYTimes op-ed against Maduro!), and so even if he’d like to speak out against the current situation, he can’t without risking the safety of the program and the students and musicians.
How is he not a littler of the regime when MADURO’S SON NICOLAS IS ONE OF THE DIRECTORS OF EL SISTEMA?! What planet do you live on Harold?
It’s true that he put his name to that article in the NYT. It’s also true that he quietly kissed and made up with Maduro a couple of years ago, and is now persona grata again with the regime and welcomed in Venezuela. Funnily enough, you don’t hear about that in the official statements.
What a schmuck. But the showbiz machine will support him no matter what. The Hair still sells. However, every video of him rehearsing is painfully & cringfully embarrassing.
The vast majority of decent, hard-working Venezuelans we meet in our daily life (not just musicians but engineers, doctors and everything between) are incensed and insulted that GD will conduct the SBO in Europe’s great halls as the ink dries on Maduro’s ceremonial self-re-anointment as dictator this coming Friday. As insulted as they were when he conducted the Children’s Orchestra at Carnegie Hall just five days after the fraudulent election itself, last July.
How can such a wonderful musician, they wonder, be so tone-deaf to the despair beyond the concert halls?
The argument is often made that arts and politics should be separated – even if it ignores the long history of the arts as society’s creative temperer. But can we at least make the crucial distinction between benign governments which support the arts without direct involvement, and malignant regimes which seize arts institutions and invest heavily in them – at orders of magnitude higher than benign governments – with an expectation of whopping returns in the form of ideological influence, global soft power, and reputation-washing?
Make no mistake. This Venezuelan regime has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in ES touring of the most lavish sort (I will leave the anecdotes of five-star hotels and lobster to others) and Askonas Holt has made millions in fees over the last two decades from its client state. The regime expected a return, dressing musicians in the infamous Chavez tracksuit – optics, optics, optics – and organising symposia to overtly promote the values of the Bolivarian revolution.
The constant justification is that “music transforms society”,
– a lovely idea, if no other variables deigned to intrude – and music education is the permanent trump card played to squash any form of analysis, dissent or criticism. Typically, then, GD’s response today on X is to say that JAA changed his life – I have no doubt he did – and that their musical mission, by implication, exists beyond all other considerations of civic duty. It carries the ultimate immunity card and creates its own class of privileged citizen.
Beyond JAA’s influence, all Venezuelans know the extent to which DG personally benefitted from his close friendships with regime insiders, like the criminal Rodriguez siblings, one of whom, Delcy, presented him and the SBO to the UN Security Council (2016) in front of the infamous image of Chavez insulting the UN. A “Concert for Peace” they called it, while the regime imprisoned and tortured dissenters. A reminder, here: https://media.un.org/photo/en/asset/oun7/oun7184327
Venezuelans know that he never once spoke out against the regime during the halcyon days of private planes and international tours, and continued as normal until Armando Cañizales, an 18-yr old violist, was killed in protests in 2017. He was shot in the neck by security forces. Only then did he issue his general call for restraint and respect for the constitution, stopping short of openly condemning the regime: “I am not looking to take sides, I am willing to take a stand”. Others had indeed taken sides, calling out criminality for over a decade and eschewing all professional benefits and privileges in so doing. By now the country was in collapse, oil prices had dropped, and the coffers were empty. The time for speaking up had passed many, many years earlier.
But let’s forgive all that. Let’s put that down to a young, talented guy coming up through the only system he knew, one he felt compelled to protect at all costs, becoming a superstar and feeling an unpayable debt of gratitude to his people – even if they were the most corrupt and criminal in society. Let’s game that theory out.
So, now what?
By now the entire world knows what is going on. GD is a grown man, well-travelled, worldly and powerful. The entire world knows that Maduro is an election-stealing dictator and human rights abusing thug. The entire world knows that his office controls and largely funds the SBO. The entire world knows that Maduro belongs to the axis of Russia, China and Iran. We know that he presides over a narco-state, and that not one dollar of the money that will pay for the upcoming SBO tour can possibly be designated as clean.
So what is the excuse today, on Saturday in Paris, or next week in Berlin, London and Madrid? Will the concert halls back out? What is their excuse? Bums on seats? That’s it? Will Askonas drop the regime as a client? What’s their real excuse, beyond the PR fluff about education and mission? That millions in profit outweighs repetitional risk? Will any of the moral standards rightly expected of Russian artists apply to Venezuelans? Or is the destruction of a nation, the exile of 8 million, and the violent crushing of dissent simply not enough to move the needle of change? Would Maduro have to invade his neighbour to push the classical industry over the moral red line?
An industry, don’t forget, that loses its moral mind if a white Otello darkens his face on stage.
Tomorrow, Venezuelans will risk their lives on the streets. They will fight, their spirit encapsulated in the word “luchar”, a word integrated into El Sistema’s motto, “tocar y luchar”, play and fight (struggle against injustice, tyranny, prejudice). So, is this motto a moral invocation or just a succinct, fundraiser-friendly catchphrase like “make America great again”? Does it actually mean anything? Is it not time that the musicians of Venezuela stand with the rest of the country and live by the challenging credo of “luchar”, that they temporarily lay down their instruments and raise their voices? Is it not time that the classical music industry live up to its own progressive principles of justice and higher purpose? Because there is nothing noble about promoting a values-based music education mission while making vast amounts of money from a rogue regime of narcos and thugs.
“will face a tougher examination in NY”
No doubt Dudamel had a one long uninterrupted honeymoon in LA under Mark Swed’s watch, but in NY, already under Zachary Woolf, the NYT desk is far more balanced and critical, and over at the New Yorker, Alex Ross has been openly hostile.
Above all, I think the NY audience is a lot more blasé, if only because they see Berlin and Vienna and the cream of the crop American orchestras coming to town every season, therefore much more unforgiving than the LA crowd who only had Disney Hall and went there to be seen rather than to see with open eyes.
I repeat my prediction: Dudamel will last one season in NY before running back to LA with tail between legs.
Why does Dudamel think he is the sole savior of El Sistema, afterall, it succeeded in producing him without an international conductor, just a local hack in Abreu.
It speaks volumes that more is said about the implications of Dudamel’s sociopolitical stances than about his non consequential music making (except maybe his commendable work with young musicians which makes him a very good orchestra preparator…)
This, as reported today by the BBC, is what happens to you in Venezuela if you fight for the social transformation demanded in July by 2/3 of the electorate:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgz5l6l7k7o
And yet the same regime that will officially refuse to implement the will of the people tomorrow, January 10th, and tortures protesters, will fund its orchestras to tour Europe next week and pontificate in the cultural heart of functioning democracies about social transformation though music.
If they want social transformation, surely they should sort out their own house first by respecting the overwhelming, proven results of an election that called for it.
Well, I gather that GD would like to see the program continue as it generally does very good things for the students, in spite of complaints that have been raised. Complaints not unlike things we heard about some prominent US and UK conservatories. So, the choice is speak out and perhaps the program will be diminished or remain quiet and see that good things happen to kids that need it. What good would it do for GD to speak out against the regime. Does anyone think they wouldn’t kill off the program just to spite GD? I know of musicians who have spoken out who can never return to that country.