Pepi Cardenete |
Madrid (EFE).- Although it is not the first time that she has participated in an Action for Music concert, the foundation that gives her extracurricular classes in which she learns to play the violin and makes new friends, Lucira does not hide her logical nervousness before the recital that he will share this Wednesday afternoon at the National Auditorium in Madrid with 300 colleagues.
The Symphony Hall, where more than 2,300 spectators are expected at 7:30 p.m., is “very big”, argues Lucira, a young woman from Angola who began studying this year at CEIP Manuel Azaña, in Alcalá de Henares. , and who will participate in the free concert “Touching the future” with which the Acción por la Música foundation celebrates its tenth anniversary.
Music as a vehicle for promoting inclusion
These are the same years that this young aspiring violinist has thanks to a project that uses music as a vehicle to promote inclusion, empowerment and education in values, all with the aim that each member of the orchestra achieves the self-realization, an important step on the road to try to get out of vulnerable or adverse situations.
It all started in 2013, and it was thanks to a documentary about “El sistema” that the maestro José Antonio Abreu created in the 70s in Venezuela to “transform adversity into hope” taking music to the most impoverished places in the country.
The lawyer María Guerrero saw a documentary on this methodology widely replicated in the world and winner in 2008 of the Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts a couple of years earlier, and in 2013 she founded Acción por la Música, a social inclusion project inspired by “ The system” with which free extracurricular classes are given in the centers where it operates.
“It is true that it is tremendously ambitious to aspire to change a person’s life, but it is really not impossible to be able to occupy 30 percent of the time of a child or young person (with extracurricular classes), and whatever we have dedicated to 30 percent of our free time in childhood and adolescence is essential, it is part of our identity, part of us. That is, ultimately, what we aspire to”, the founder and director of the foundation tells EFE.
Guerrero recalls that the first contact with Acción por la Música was at the CEIP Pío XII, in the Madrid district of Tetuán, and that, given the scarce means available at the time, the students themselves created their instruments with cardboard.
Ten years later, with a bank of instruments -many of them from donations- that they donate to students, Acción por la Música has groups of choirs and orchestras in public schools and centers in several Madrid districts, as well as Alcalá de Henares and Vigo (Pontevedra), and has accompanied more than a thousand minors and adults throughout this decade.
And it is that, in addition to working with children and young people, especially with those who are vulnerable, they have expanded the radius of action and also bring music to adults with disabilities or people in situations of unwanted loneliness.
Guerrero values the valuable integration that is generated when the different groups come together, and emphasizes that Acción por la Música focuses on the socio-emotional part of situations of vulnerability to eliminate the “invisible chains” that bind people to those situations.
He gives as an example that “what most predicts if an unfavorable economic situation is going to last over time and become chronic is not that situation itself”, but rather “shame, a deep feeling of oppression and stress that ends up chaining people ”.
Music, “a kind of unlocker of change” or
“As soon as people appropriate their dignity and their self-esteem, you unlock change”, and music, in this case, is “a kind of unlocker of change”, says Guerrero, who points out that in Acción por la Música they begin ” the house through the roof” focusing on the upper part -“self-realization”- of the famous theory known as Maslow’s pyramid.
This process of self-realization is “sealed” at concerts thanks to the applause of the public, he adds.
That is why the concerts are a fundamental part of the work of Acción por la Música, whose students have brought their music to venues such as the Teatro Real, the Moncloa Palace, the Prado Museum or the National Music Auditorium itself.
On this stage, 300 musicians -270 children- will repeat this afternoon with the special collaboration of Daniel Abada, principal conductor of the Chamber Orchestra of the Valencian Community, and other musicians from the Classband of the IES José de Churriguera in Leganés (Madrid) or from the youth orchestra Etorkizuna Musikatan de Bilao, among others.