‘Culture for the poor should never be a poor culture,’ said Jose Antonio Abreo, the founder, builder and promoter of El Sistema, speaking at the first of three symposia – ‘Through Venezuelan Eyes’ - held contemporaneously with the performances of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra during their acclaimed week of residence at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank.

Abreo is a slight, frail, 80-odd year old man, who spoke in his native language with such passion that his translator sometimes struggled to keep pace with the eloquent stream of thoughts, as Abreo explained his ideas about music and how it can change society. ‘Art is a human right’ he said, but in the mid-1970s in Latin America, the ‘Arts’ were a luxury for the elite, and he and a group of Venezuelan colleagues decided to organise to change things. It was their mission to introduce, by way of music, the concept of beauty into the lives of alienated poor children, and to transform their harsh reality through a programme of live practice. ‘El Sistema’ proved a great success and has continued ever since.

Over the weekend, more than 30,000 people including many children and educators visited the Southbank to hear the orchestra play a series of sold-out concerts showcasing their expertise in classical, popular, and Latin American music. The free concert space and live video link-up in the Clore auditorium downstairs was packed and overflowed into the bar and restaurant area.

The faces of the people watching and listening were filled with an almost religious rapture as these young Venezuelans from the favelas and barrios played and swayed in trainers and loose fitting tracksuit uniforms. They were not the best choir ever heard in terms of technical expertise or interpretation. The National Youth Orchestra of Britain is probably equally proficient or even better. The fascination was about where these youths had come from and what they had overcome – the poverty, the drugs and the violence. The hope was whether this could be achieved in Britain. With knife and gun crime ever present in the headlines of our newspapers, could our youngsters from the sink estates of East London, Glasgow and Liverpool be similarly diverted? If only!

A series of three symposia under the collective banner ‘Not If but How’ were organised to explore in depth how the model of El Sistema can best be used in the UK to promote the social advancement through music that it has achieved in Venezuela. In the UK two different projects have recently been initiated and modelled on El Sistema: Big Noise, launched in summer 2008 by Sistema Scotland with the support of the Venezuelan Sistema, and In Harmony, a three-year pilot programme also launched in 2008 and chaired by Julian Lloyd Webber, which is run by the Department of Children, Schools and Families and currently supports projects in Liverpool, London and Norwich. I attended all three symposia, and by the end I felt less hopeful and more frustrated about prospects in Britain than when I arrived.

All the British speakers – including representatives of Big Noise and In Harmony as well as other illustrious figures from the arts world, such as Jude Kelly and Gillian Moore – spoke about how much they admired the depth and profundity of a leader like Jose Abreo, and how they wished we had someone with the same passion here in Britain. What they all singularly failed to understand was the idea that had motivated such passionate leadership: the idea of bringing culture to the masses rather than settling for ‘mass culture’.

On the first panel, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger did in fact cite Abreo’s maxim quoted at the top of this article, but was immediately pounced on by Christine Coker, the chief executive of Youth Music, who asked with haughty indignation, ‘Surely you don’t mean that the Western classical tradition is better than any other cultural tradition of music?’ Alan Rusbridger spluttered a hesitant, ‘No, no, of course not.’ I was astonished at how unwilling the whole panel was to defend the worth of the Western classical tradition.

Perhaps I should not have been. In their eagerness to be seen as advocates of multiculturalism, they mistakenly embrace all musical traditions as equal, and unfortunately imprison children in their ‘own’ cultural ghettos – achieving the opposite effect of what they intend. The point being made by Abreo is not that Western classical music is elitist in itself, but that it has been the preserve of the elite for too long. The development of music within this tradition is important for all to understand and requires a certain rigour of training and education. It was left to an American to make these points from the floor to grateful applause from the audience; but Razia Iqbal in the chair decided – perhaps with faint-hearted tact - not to refer the question back to the panel for comment so that important debate was never aired.

Instead the panellists blamed the 1988 Thatcher government for the dismantling of what they say was a previously good system in Britain and they praised the numerous projects now sprouting all over the country. When one looks at what passes for cultural projects, however, one immediately sees the problem. Checking my local Hackney website, the following discussion relating to a programme for involving young people in the arts reveals Britain’s approach all too clearly.

Popular culture or high art? Does it matter as long as it is enjoyable?

Petra Roberts, DYH Founder and Hackney Council Cultural Development Officer: ‘This question is essentially about how we can make the Arts more enjoyable. For me, Art is about being challenging and complex, but we need to make it comfortable as well. I think Discover Young Hackney is a really good example, as not everyone feels comfortable in a football stadium or being at a hip hop concert, and we need to create environments where everybody has a wide choice and can decide what they want to go to. I think Discover Young Hackney does that. Just because the Arts should be challenging, it doesn’t mean it has to be alienating and painful. It shouldn’t taste like medicine, where it tastes horrible but it is good for you. The Arts should be enjoyable.’

It is no surprise that local projects involve children in learning how to be a DJ or how to write rap and dance to hip-hop. These are no doubt enjoyable for the children involved but will not transform their reality. In many instances, this is the only reality they know. The El Sistema approach, by contrast, would have forced them to engage with a different more rigorous tradition than the one they have grown up with. Richard Holloway from Big Noise went so far as to say that creating an orchestra was not the aim of their project. Their main aim was simply to involve children for the sake of it.

Nicola Kilean, his colleague from the Big Noise spoke about the need to recognise the barriers to involvement for individual children – their backgrounds, their transport problems and their learning environments. At the Big Noise, they don’t give the children the instruments to keep as they do at El Sistema; instead they keep them locked up at a central venue and hand them out when the child attends. This is because they need an incentive to get the child to attend rehearsals.

This is antithetical to the El Sistema approach, which is based on a more progressive notion of reciprocity. The children are given the instruments in return for their commitment to train with the orchestra. The family are part of this contract. There is no discussion about barriers; there is a discussion about what there is to gain from their involvement and the children simply reorganise their lives around their new commitment.

There was much talk from the panels about achieving excellence, but this hides the fact that there is a difference between learning the technical expertise of any instrument and an understanding of musical knowledge in its broadest sense.

Later on that evening, musicians from the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra joined British Jazz composer Omar Puente to play an exciting set that had the normally staid crowd of the RFH on its feet and dancing. These musicians showed that an understanding of classical music is no barrier to playing different musical genres; in fact they were able to play with greater swagger and confidence having understood how jazz improvises and deviates from classical forms.