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El Sistema, Venezuela’s program of social uplift through classical music, has received more attention over the last few years thanks to the meteoric rise of its most famous product, Gustavo Dudamel. The conductor has brought the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he is music director, to Caracas for a series of concerts.

“El Sistema’s aim is to address a depressingly universal problem: how to remove children from poverty’s snares, like drugs, crime, gangs and desperation,” Daniel J. Wakin writes. “The method, imagined by El Sistema’s founder, the economist and trained musician José Antonio Abreu, was classical music.”

Students attend an outdoor percussion class at a school in Sarrìa, a neighborhood in Caracas.