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Five years ago, Sistema New Brunswick had one teacher. This year, as the Sistema team met in Moncton for a professional development workshop aimed at getting everybody up to speed for a new school year, there were 37 teaching artists from five countries gathered at Edith Cavell.
President and CEO Ken MacLeod believes Sistema New Brunswick, a program of the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra aimed at creating positive social change through the arts, is now the largest organization of professional artists in the province.
It's certainly helping the province's economy, even if you ignore all the other benefits of having some of the world's finest perfor mers teaching music to hundreds of the province's children, many of whom might otherwise not get suchan opportunity.
A number of Sistema's teachers are Maritimers who now can stay at home to follow their passions for careers in music. Others are getting to come home to New Brunswick after many years away. And many are coming from other parts of Canada and the world to take part in Canada's largest Sistema program, a program that's taking the original Venezuelan concept and making it work where many said it couldn't.
'I still remember the first year, many many people said, 'kids won't do this in North America. They won't come five days a week, three hours a day,' ' Ken says.
Sistema youth music program draws new instructors from far and wide
'Well in fact the kids did come, they stayed, and we saw really transformative social development.' The teaching artists have come too, musicians like Dave Halpine, who grew up in Salisbury, and has just come back from the Far North to set up the new Sistema program on New Brunswick's Tobique First Nation.
He and his wife came home from Inuvik with their four boys under 10, six goats, two dogs, two cats and two rabbits. The 9,000-kilometre drive took the family about 25 days.
Rodrigo Cortina has come from Mexico to teach the Sistema program after some stops along the way, including one at the University of Sherbrooke where a fellow musician named Mylene Dube told him about her experience spending three months with Sistema in Venezuela. She apparently impressed him. They are now married and teaching together in Richibucto.
Says Rodrigo, 'when I left Mexico, I left for the American dream, but I found the Canadian dream better.' Another pair of Sistema teachers found love in Sherbrooke and now Catherine Gagne and Nicolas Tremblay have moved their family to Dieppe so both can teach in Moncton.
Rodrigo has a fellow Mexican émigré with him in Richibucto. Swan Serna tells a similar story of how he and his family came to New Brunswick.
'In the beginning we wanted to be in Quebec province because of the culture,' Swan says. When he decided to come here, 'the people around me said, 'what do you want to do there? There is nothing over there.' And I said, 'well no, I don't think so. Over there is the future the children.' ' The future may have been in question when Sistema New Brunswick was first started through the vision of the NBYO, but now they know it was as bright as they had dared dream.
'What we had hoped for has in fact turned out to be true,' Ken says. 'We're on budget and we've met the goals we had for the first five years - to have four orchestra centres, Moncton, Saint John and Richibucto and now our fourth in Tobique.' Similarly, Sistema New Brunswick has met its goal of being in different parts of the province, to offer its program in English (in Moncton, Saint John and Tobique) and French (in Richibucto), to urban and rural children, and to a First Nations community.
Another Mexican, Emmanuel Ortega, has joined Dave Halpine in getting things underway in Tobique. Emmanuel has played all sorts of music, from rock 'n' roll to flamenco, but has lately put his guitar down to play the cello. After performing and studying in Mexico, Emmanuel furthered his music education at the University of Victoria. This summer he bought a car and set out for New Brunswick.
'People told me once I got past the Rockies, there would be, 'nothing,' ' he recalls with a laugh. 'But it was beautiful. Every town I stopped in, I said, 'I want to live here.' ' A couple of westerners are also among the Sistema team. Winnipeg's Chelsey Hiebert went to Brandon University to play basketball, fell more deeply in love with music and is now in New Brunswick teaching the oboe.
'I finished school on a Friday and came here on a Monday,' she says.
Louis Garson grew up in Saskatchewan, played in orchestras in Ontario, and eventually spent many years in the United Kingdom. He played in productions ofPhantom of the Opera in both London and Toronto and performed with the London Philharmonic, as well as teaching in England.
'I believe in what these guys are doing,' he says, adding he means that in both the musical and pedagogical senses.
Sistema New Brunswick also of course offered him a chance to return to Canada, something it also did for Prince Edward Islander Tristan Jeffrey, back close to home after years in Austria.
Carlos Avila, like the NBYO's conductor Tony Delgado, has come from that original Sistema program. He is in Saint John to teach this year, but missing his wife and baby boy, who he hopes to get from Venezuela in January once their visas are approved.
Andrew Miller, on the other hand, is an NBYO grad. American-born and Sackville-raised, Andrew has played with the National Arts Centre orchestra, the Canadian Opera Company, and for Broadway touring shows in Toronto. He came back a couple of years ago to play with Symphony New Brunswick and coach the NBYO, 'but I have to say if it wasn't for this, I'd probably be gone. I was just kind of scraping by.' Beyond the benefits of giving professional artists a means of making a living - ask any economist and you'll hear that having an artistic class is critical to any place's economic health - Sistema New Brunswick is also having an economic impact on New Brunswick's future.
And it doesn't really matter if the children in today's Sistema programs ever pursue musical careers, because much more than music is being taught.
'Its focus is building certain values - discipline, respect, co-operation,' Ken says. 'These values enable the children to be successful at the music. Because they're doing the music three hours every day, five days a week, they get really good at it.
'Then their self-esteem rises, their confidence increases and everything else in life begins to see positive change. Attendance in school gets better, behaviour gets better, academic performance gets better.' Ken says he and the rest of the Sistema team see those results all the time, but now New Brunswick's Department of Health and Wellness has done two years of research that backs that up.
'The research has found social change at an extraordinary level,' Ken says.
