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And not just music but participation in music.

In case you haven’t seen this, I commend it to you when you can spare 17 minutes and want to know hope.

One of my favorite lines towards the end (a little weakened in translation):

“The spontaneity that music has excludes it as a luxury item — and makes it a patrimony of society.”

There are currently 300,000 children and teenagers involved in this very serious artistic/social program, in a very poor country that is burdened with a degrading political environment. Music (and the community that it creates at its best) is rescuing them from anonymous poverty, giving them an identity (the loss of which is often the most sorrowful fruit of poverty), endowing their communities with pride, and leading them to other upbuilding personal and social attitudes and actions.

True, participation in music can’t solve every problem, but — given the chance that Abreu and his fellow-travelers have given it — it can do a great deal more than almost all conventional “social programs.”