Sabhas are the concert halls where the connoisseurs of Carnatic music in Chennai city go to listen. Kuppams are where poor people struggle to make a living and have no access to classical music. TM Krishna, the talented and revolutionary Carnatic music singer is pushing the boundaries of Carnatic music from the Sabhas to the Kuppams. He has taken the classical music to a fisherman’s village Urur Olcott Kuppam on the margins of Chennai city. His initiative has now become institutionalized as “The Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha”, a multi-genre festival. Every year, as part of the run-up to the Vizha, T.M. Krishna sings at Elliot’s Beach in front of people most of whom have never seen the inside of the Sabhas.
T.M. Krishna has also revolutionized the compositions of classical music for his new audience. While the Sabha music is mostly the compositions of the Trinity Composers (the 18th century trio of Thyagaraja, Shyama Shastri and Muthuswami Dikshidar) and religious songs, Krishna has taken on new compositions with contemporary social issues, some of which are not to the liking of the Sabha crowd. During the February 2024 Vizha, Krishna performed a number of songs, among which was the first Carnatic song written about the Urur Olcott Kuppam by Perumal Murugan, a revolutionary writer.
This initiative to take classical music from the elite urban audience to underprivileged areas reminds me of a similar outreach revolution in Venezuela, called as “El Sistema”. This was founded in 1975 by the Venezuelan conductor and educator José Antonio Abreu. He took classical music to the poor children in slums with the motto " Music for Social Change".
Besides giving access to high culture to the underprivileged he believed that collective work through orchestras would inspire a social transformation in the poor communities. He was convinced that classical music would occupy young people with music study and instil values that can come from playing in ensembles: a sense of community, commitment and self-worth. This is especially important for children in slums exposed to criminal gangs, drug trafficking and violence.
Abreu started a new youth orchestra and held the first meeting of the orchestra in a parking garage with a few teenagers. Within a year, he had built an ensemble and took it to a festival in Scotland and won critical praise for his work. After the success of the programme in Caracas, he opened more centres all over the country. In 1995, Abreu was appointed Special Ambassador for the Development of a Global Network of Youth and Children Orchestras and Choirs by UNESCO. Sir Simon Rattle, director of the Berlin Philharmonic said in a statement in 2011, "What Abreu and El Sistema have done is to bring hope, through music, to hundreds of thousands of lives that would otherwise have been lost to drugs and violence." El Sistema has proved to be a programme of social rescue and cultural transformation for thousands of children from poor neighbourhoods in the country". The Inter American Development Bank extended grants and credit for building of regional centres of El Sistema in Venezuela. The Bank has praised the program after studying its impact through an interdisciplinary group. According to the study El Sistema has helped the children improve their capacity to control their attention, behavior and emotions besides showing lesser aggression and improvement in relations with peers.
El Sistema provides free classical music training during after-school hours in the afternoons. It organizes orchestras with children and teenagers (between the ages of 2 and 18) many of whom are from poor families. The system provides musical instruments. Talented and interested adolescent students are trained to become teachers and encouraged to open new centres.
The most remarkable feature of the system is its instant immersion. The children begin playing in ensembles from the moment they pick up their instruments. They enjoy the novelty of playing instruments they cannot afford to buy and feel spiritual uplift from the soothing classical music in their neighbourhood filled with the noise of gunshots and screams. The parents and neighbours of the kids in El Sistema, who cannot imagine going to the theatres for classical music performances, are fascinated by the opportunity of exposure to the high culture within their community. They are proud of the performance and achievements of the students of El Sistema. El Sistema has trained over a million students. It operates over 400 centres and 1700 orchestras with more than 5000 music teachers.
The students, depending on talent and ambition, advance to statewide orchestras, with the younger ones in children’s orchestras and those in their late teens and 20s in youth orchestras. The best are selected to join the national Bolívar Youth Orchestra. Some alumni of El Sistema have gone on to distinguished careers in famous orchestras around the world.
Gustavo Dudamel, the celebrity music director of Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a product of the El Sistema. He is scheduled to become the Music and Artistic Director of the New York Philharmonic in 2026. He attributes his success to ‘El Sistema’ and misses no opportunity to express his gratitude to his mentor Abreu, who passed away in 2018.
El Sistema has inspired a number of similar projects in two dozen countries including US, UK, Canada, Spain, Bolivia, Philippines and South Korea. There are nearly 200 Sistema-inspired programs in the United States.
I hope TM Krishna succeeds in his mission to spread the Carnatic music to more Kuppams.
The author is an expert in Latin American affairs
