Soccer and baseball players are a source of national pride in much of Latin America. But in Venezuela, many young classically trained musicians have become their town's local heroes. The national System of Venezuelan Youth and Children's Orchestras have been training young Venezuelans for 31 years. It's made classical musicians out of half a million of them, many of them poor.

Jens Erik Gould visited some of the program's music institutes in Caracas and sent us this report.
Edgar Monrroy lives in a cinder-block house on a mountainside in a poor Caracas neighborhood. Mounds of trash block most of his narrow street. The neighborhood only has running water a few days a week.

Monrroy: "In my neighborhood, lots of things can happen to you. Everyday you see crime, drugs. Music moves you away from that. The program moves you away. It changes your life, your vision of life."

Edgar's vision of life changed when he was 15. That's when he started taking lessons with Venezuela's Youth Orchestra program. It's also known as El Sistema. The government-funded program offers free music classes to any child regardless of their ability to pay. It also provides the instruments. Edgar wanted to learn the trumpet. But the local music institute didn't have any to spare.

So it lent him a bassoon. Soon, he and his father were playing duets, Edgar on bassoon, his father on the cuatro, a traditional stringed instrument from the Venezuelan plains. Six years later, Edgar plays bassoon in the nation's top youth orchestra, the Simon Bolivar. Edgar is one of nearly 400,000 who have gone through Venezuela's classical music program since its start in 1975. The program was founded by a musician and former government minister named Jose Antonio Abreu. Abreu says he thought of it as a social program to improve the lives of the country's underprivileged youth.

Abreu: "As a Venezuelan musician, I proposed to make my art an instrument of authentic social development, an instrument to build citizens, a powerful vehicle to achieve an integral education for children, compensating in this way the traditional deficiencies of the continent's education system. "

There were only two symphony orchestras in Venezuela when Abreu started El Sistema. Now there are about 200, with at least one professional orchestra in every state. Every Venezuelan government in the past 30 years has funded the program. This year its budget is 23-million dollars.

Young violinists are rehearsing in a youth music center here in Caracas. They're members of the children's orchestra of Montalban. Antonio Mayorca directs the orchestra. He was also one of El Sistema's first students. He says classical music used to be reserved for the elite.

Mayorca: "When I started to study classical music, when people saw me with my violin, it was like I was a strange person. 'Look Antonio with a violin? What is this?'.. Now it isn't strange to see a child here with a violin. It's something natural. I go to classes here and I see rivers of children with violins."

In another one of El Sistema's music conservatories, 23-year-old Lennar Acosta is practicing Robert Schumann's "Pieces de Fantasie." Six years ago, Acosta was serving his ninth stint in a Caracas correctional facility. He had a history of drug offenses and armed robbery. El Sistema took Acosta on as a clarinet student, giving him lessons in the detention center. Acosta now earns a living teaching in the program.

Acosta: "El Sistema opened the doors for me. If it weren't for that opportunity, I don't think I would be here today, enjoying this. None of my friends made it past 15 or 16, because of the type of life that we led."

Last year, Acosta, Edgar Monrroy and hundreds of others joined the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in Caracas. They performed Gustav Mahler's epic Second Symphony. The conductor, Sir Simon Rattle, said that Venezuela's music program was doing some of the most important work anywhere "for the future of classical music." Some of that work is now going on elsewhere. Venezuela's orchestra program has inspired more than 20 other countries in Latin America to create programs of their own.

For The World, I'm Jens Erik Gould in Caracas.