Genuine worldwide movements for social change are rare in human history. Even more rare is the phenomenon of a worldwide movement for social change through art, with teaching artists at the forefront. This article presents the evolution of such a movement now, in the global blossoming of "El Sistema," a program that seeks to change the…

In this article, the author talks about Venezuela's national youth orchestra program called El Sistema whose attributes offer a direct challenge to traditional Western music practices. As U.S. classical music--and all "high arts"--struggle to find relevance to more than the small "arts club" percentage of the U.S. populace, El Sistema proposes…

MusicianCorps is the flagship program of Music National Service (MNS), envisioned and founded by singer-songwriter/social entrepreneur Kiff Gallagher, a one-time White House staffer for the Clinton Administration, a singer-songwriter, and a social entrepreneur who was involved in creating AmeriCorps. Over the past several years, Kiff traveled the…

The FESNOJIV (the Spanish acronym for the State Foundation for the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras), more commonly known as "El Sistema," teaches 300,000 of Venezuela's poorest children in the nationwide music learning program. Many begin attending the "nucleo" as early as age two or three, and the vast majority continue well…

The many worlds of arts education began to grow into one worldwide community in March 2006. Twelve hundred arts education leaders, in delegations from 97 countries, attended the United Nation's Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO's) first-ever worldwide arts education conference, held for four days in Lisbon, Portugal. The…