May 14, 2024

Impoverished children in Buenos Aires find expression in ‘slum orchestra’

WORLD
By Michael Kelly, OSV News

Some of those receiving a meal from Mary Mother of the People Parish’s soup kitchen in Buenos Aires, Argentina, are pictured in an undated photo. Parish volunteers provide hundreds of meals every day for needy people in the community. (OSV News photo/Margaret Murray, courtesy Pontifical Mission Societies USA)

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (OSV News) — While it may have become commonplace to view classical music and going to the opera as the preserve of the rich and famous, Italian opera greats always saw the gift of their music as belonging to everyone.

That is a message being taken to heart in slum communities in the suburbs of Argentina’s sprawling capital Buenos Aires.

Father Pedro Cannavó, one of the curas villeros, or slum priests, beams with pride as he talks about how disadvantaged children in the slums, often blighted by drug abuse, find new ways of expressing themselves by joining an orchestra with the help of industrious music students from more affluent neighborhoods.

Among the many projects in the parochial school of the parish of Mary Mother of the People near the city’s famous San Lorenzo Stadium is an orchestra, with instruments that have mostly been donated. Each year, it culminates in a sold-out show in one of Buenos Aires’ most sophisticated concert venues.

“The project and the event are a way to cultivate culture and music in the hearts and souls of the neighborhood’s young people,” Father Cannavó told OSV News.

“Music unites people and also social groups, even though stereotypes pigeonhole certain musical genres to a certain social class,” Father Cannavó said of the opera, admitting that many people in the community would have seen classical music as something for people from another social class.

Father Cannavó recalled his experience of the rehearsals in the community. “The people of the slum were approaching little by little, some of them curious, some knowing what was happening. … There were also the families of the teenagers and the orchestra guests, many of them excited and proud. It was a show with a classical repertoire but also with their own compositions,” he said.

Father Pedro Cannavó, pastor of Mary Mother of the People Parish in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is pictured in an undated photo. He is standing outside the parish’s on-site drug rehabilitation facility. (OSV News photo/Margaret Murray, courtesy Pontifical Mission Societies USA)

Some of the best-known works were by Giuseppe Verdi and Giacomo Puccini. The orchestra is part of the parish’s outreach to younger people, many of whom are vulnerable to crime and drug gangs.

“We work with children up to 18 years of age, we accompany them through art, sports, education — trying to awaken their interest so that they are not in the streets,” according to Father Cannavó.

“Through music and art in all its dimensions, it is also possible to express what is inside: not through shouting, not through a punch or a weapon. But through the beautiful violence of music, which is also a shout for the neighborhood, but a healthy shout, which challenges, awakens and engages,” Father Cannavó said.

The music also allows young people to be vulnerable, the pastor explained. “In the slum you can’t show weakness, but in music it happens, and it is valid. This idea of freedom, identification, and power of expression within the art is the one that prevails in the productions. The stories of the operas are tragedies, and what is lived here in the neighborhood is as well.”

“That the children, through music, can express what they live day by day as a sort of updating of these works is something beautiful because they are expressing their feelings and taking off their heavy burdens,” Father Cannavó said.

Michael Kelly, who writes for OSV News from Dublin, traveled to Argentina for OSV News with the Pontifical Mission Societies-USA.