Hangzhou International Congress, Culture: Key to Sustainable Development, 15-17 May 2013,

Hangzhou, China
By Claudio Espector, Director of Orchestra and Choir Programme for the
Bicentennial, Youth Orchestras, Argentina (Programa de Orquestas y Coros para el Bicentenario)
First of all, Id like to greet the organizers of this important congress: the UNESCO, the Government of
Hangzhou Municipality and you all.
It is an honor to me to participate in such a relevant event which will result in a new agenda which
undoubtedly will influence positively the States policies as of 2015.
We have been working since 15 years in projects of social and educative inclusion, that have as a model
the collective teaching of music, through orchestras and choruses of children and teenagers. An idea that
started in a quarter in the suburbs of Buenos Aires with a bunch of children, a few teachers and a couple
of instruments, today continues in the city and has grown and multiplied in all the country through the
Department of Education and Provincial Departments. A better schooling, the discovery of a vocation
and the re-entry to schools for those who have dropped it or were in risk to lose it, and the appropriation
by families and the community of this project, are some of the positive results we can point out. Our bet
is the best educational quality for those who are more in need.
Id like to add that the title of the Congress Culture: key for a sustainable development bears two very
important terms for West musical art: one is key [clef].

The clef (or key as we call it in Spanish) is placed at the beginning of the stave and shows us how
to decipher or decode the pitch of sounds that a composer wrote to perform a piece. Clefs are
not the same for all instruments. Different instruments need different clefs; we need different
clefs for high and low-pitched instruments; we need different clefs for a fagot or a violin.
However, all instruments despite their different clef participate within an orchestral frame of the
same piece, performing different roles under the conduction of the same baton.

Who conducts and how is this baton obtained? Who is in charge of setting the rules for the
interpretation, so that, despite the different clefs, the different registers, the different performances, the
different instruments, an orchestra works as a whole, dialogues, compares itself, discusses, sets up, in a
word, builds the same piece?
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The other word is sustainable, which assimilates to sostenido, sharp in English, which in
Spanish means a symbol that determines an alteration of the pitch in sounds. In tonal music, the
most well-known Western music, through these alterations we can create tension and obtain
hyper altered harmonies, which sometimes resolve and ease themselves, but watch out:
sometimes they dont.

Is it possible to think of a sustainable development without creating tensions, without affecting

interests? A piece of music without conflicts can be dull. A society that proposes a cultural development
with access and distribution of its assets for everyone: can this society achieve this without creating
tensions?
A statement seems to be accepted by all of us: public organisms have a shortfall to finance culture.
It is true that public organisms are not always able to preserve the heritage and guarantee the
transmission of the cultural heritage of a country, a city, a region.
No less true is it that a private company can be a guarantee. Actually, there are many examples that
show the opposite.
The plurality of meanings that the word culture embraces makes it a little enigmatic. Debates on culture
have not ended yet, but, on the contrary, we live times of huge cultural complexities.
We can surely assert that the big goals set for the millennium, such as: eradicate extreme poverty and
hunger; achieve universal primary schooling, promote equality of genders and womens autonomy,
reduce childrens mortality, improve maternal health, fight AIDS, malaria and other illnesses, guarantee
environment sustainability, foster a world association for development, are the first line of the culture
battle.
As my colleague, Dr. Marcelo Zanelli says culture is a space in which dispute and struggle for meaning is
always present.
The networks of meanings that human beings create, their cultural activities, are framed in a wider
territory, the one of politics.
Undoubtedly, politics is the one that sets the pace, the movement and direction of what and to whom
the efforts of the communities are intended.

The market creates tensions that translate in what we might call the need of owing assets. But it is the
market itself the one which offers those assets, which produces the overlapping of the satisfaction of a
need and private consumption. This operation leaves pending (or repressed) those needs that the
market does not meet. Namely, not all needs are met by the market. On the other hand, if profits is what
moves investment, there are a list of assets that are usually presented as useless.
Therefore, within this very important, adequate, appropriate and convenient frame I will pose and share
these questions:

Who makes the agenda of what it is necessary as regards culture?

Is it possible to separate economy from politics when thinking the future of certain cultural
assets?

To set the terms of cooperation and agreements between private investment and public interest is the
essential task of the States.
On one hand, the outlined need to show and convince political leaders of the benefits of going deep in
cultural policies shows us a part of the shortfall.
The fact that political figures interpret their pieces and play their instruments with the same clefs that
perform the economic agents in the sense of the benefits and profits of culture makes the situation even
more complex.
It is paramount that political leaders interpret music with the instruments and clefs they should use for
this symphony: the authentic music of their people!
On the other side of the counter: Are the current ideas of the world financial system responsible for the
suffering of many millions of human beings, the ones who would sit at the negotiation table to settle the
shortfalls of States in cultural issues? Are these ideas the right ones? We see in astonishment the
demands of cutbacks towards the basic needs of people which only create more set-backs when talking
about creating more fairness and justice in the core of the communities.
Are the old concepts of philanthropy and patronage, which although made possible the creation of
wonderful pieces, as well as humiliating bonds and doubtful perception on the ownership of pieces and
artists, capable of creating this so necessary sustainability?
Richard Sennett says in his book The Craftsman: Confrontational and self-righteous as Cellini could be
to patrons, ultimately his art depended on them. There was in Cellinis life a telling moment when this
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unequal trial of strength became clear to him. He sent Philip II of Spain the sculpture of a naked Christ in
marble, to which the king rather wickedly added a g leaf made of gold. Cellini protested that the
distinctive character of the Christ was spoiled, to which Philip II replied, Its mine.
Id like to tell you that as of the work I have developed for years in the field of music and as of my
instruction as musician and teacher is that I take the chance to pose these unanswered and unfamiliar
questions, but that at the same time I have some answers which I will share with you.
The assumed utopia of the conductor that leads an orchestra with the aim of putting in the forefront the
common good, the piece of art, is possible.
The idea to build a piece that materializes tensions and resolves it in the best way, it is also possible.
Each nation has to put at stake its best traditions, go deep in its present time and compose it collectively.