Gustavo Dudamel receives $1 million award from musician Herb Alpert: ‘We can change the world, but it starts with educating young people’

Herb Alpert and Gustavo Dudamel are separated by many things. Their birthplaces—Los Angeles, California, and Barquisimeto, Venezuela are 3,728 miles (6,000 km) apart—; their ages—one is over 90; the other has just turned 45—; their languages... But there is even more that unites them, as their long conversations, which often end in laughter, demonstrate. The first and foremost is their passion for music, which they’ve shared since childhood, and for transmitting all that it can offer to new generations. For discovering in children a passion for sound, for culture, for all the emotions it can evoke. Both want to open the eyes and ears of young people around the world; not to turn them into virtuosos, but to give them the tools to be critical thinkers. This unites them more than all their differences, and it’s what’s led them to join forces so effectively for this purpose.

Because Herb Alpert, a trumpeter, producer, and one of the world’s most famous, prolific, and award-winning musicians, has decided to create the Herb Alpert Honor, an honorary award worth one million dollars. And the first recipient of the award is Gustavo Dudamel and his charitable organization, the Dudamel Foundation. For 31 years, Alpert has presented the Herb Alpert Awards, giving five annual prizes of $75,000 each to five different artists, but this time he wanted to go a step further. “And I just thought this gentleman here is the perfect first candidate,” he explains in an exclusive interview with EL PAÍS.

That gentleman, who places his hand on his chest and bows his head with humility and pride upon receiving the award, is Gustavo Dudamel, the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, immersed in his 17th and final season at the helm of the orchestra before heading to New York. “I‘m so honored that this is coming from somebody that embraces this giant idea of music as a tool of social transformation,” says the music director. The conversation takes place in his office, in the heart of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a building full of steel curves and a symbol of the city, designed by his late friend Frank Gehry. A grand Steinway piano in a vibrant green, a unique piece that once belonged to Gehry, presides over the room. Dudamel and Alpert sit at it, play it, chat, and laugh. Their connection—musical, intellectual and personal—is palpable. Furthermore, as Dudamel explains, he spent his childhood listening to Alpert, since his own father, Oscar Dudamel, is a trombone player.

Alpert acknowledges that he’s been following Gustavo’s work and his foundation for years. “The way you inspire the kids and the music that you were making there at that time in Venezuela,” Alpert tells Dudamel. “It was a bunch of young musicians but there was a feeling, because I think music and the arts is all about a feel. It’s not about the notes, it’s not just the mechanics of playing the right thing, it is how you do it. And when you can inspire kids to expose themselves, to be themselves, they don’t have to be virtuosos. If they can just make music that can inspire themselves, it will inspire others.”

At 90, Alpert is still active, giving concerts across the country, and, as he explains, he sees that the music he played six decades ago is “experiencing a rebirth.” “I’ve been inspired to hear an audience that is filled with Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, gay, whatever you want, all the mix, and they’re all together feeling the music that’s being made. I think we need more of that in this world,” he says. “Art is all about a feeling. You stand in front of a Jackson Pollock painting, and if you try to analyze it, you’ll never get it. But if you come through you and feel it, you’ll understand it differently,” he observes, something that is also true of music, which “goes to a deeper place in the body.”

The trumpeter highlights his colleague’s humility, but also his ability to transmit his passion for the arts to others. “You are a special person, and I am honored that you accepted this award, and that you are the first to receive it,” he says. Dudamel blushes and returns the compliments. “You are an inspiration, a guide in terms of generosity and art, making people be together, enjoy, be transformed by the music. We live in the world of beauty with the music that we do. To understand the real dimension is the most important thing,” says Dudamel.

The Dudamel Foundation—co-directed by him and the Spanish actress María Valverde, to whom he has been married for nearly a decade—will use the money to continue its complex and expensive music immersion and learning programs for children. But for the Venezuelan conductor, beyond the financial contribution, this award means much more; he is, of course, grateful for the “material” contribution, “but above all, for the spiritual one.” This honor brings him back to his roots and to the meaning of art and music. “We have to put into context what this means, because coming from him makes everything more special, more unique and significant. He is a reference point, an inspiration. In music, of course, but also in art as a tool for social transformation. This goes beyond mere entertainment,” he reflects. “It surrounds you with beauty, with the technical elements, harmonies, aesthetics… When you have the opportunity to be surrounded by that, you are transformed. And this is the power of music. I had the privilege of growing up in that environment created by my teacher, José Antonio Abreu [who passed away in March 2018]. I am the result of a dream. I believe that, like Herb, Maestro Abreu understood the true power of music. That beautiful space for young people not only to be musicians, but to create a life through music.”

That’s why, for him, it’s essential to have that “opportunity to multiply” the opportunities for those who don’t have it so easy. He wants to unite young musicians from all over the world and get them creating, thinking, uniting them in their differences. As a conductor, he’s used to “disagreements, differences in sound, points of view, or techniques” on stage, “but in the end, harmony is created, and that’s the best example.” “Undoubtedly, we live in a world where you have to think a certain way, because if you think differently, it’s bad, but the other side is saying the same thing... So we never see how important it is to think differently and how beautiful it is to disagree. It’s something I do every day in the orchestra; it’s a collaboration,” he affirms.

That cultural and ideological mix is ​​also what has given Alpert his best professional results. In the 1960s, he led the band Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. It all started with a visit to the Mexican city bordering California, when he went to a bullfight. There, a brass band was playing in the stands. Beyond the mariachi music, which he hadn’t intended to play and which was the most well-known Mexican style at the time, as he recalls, he joined them to create powerful medleys that continue to resonate and tour the world, six decades later. And no, he adds humorously, he never actually faced a bull.

So, will music help us, will it save us as a society? “Of course it’s meant to make us better,” Alpert states without hesitation. “Music has so much power that only good things can come from it. I hope I can return to what I said at the beginning: I would love to be able to be useful and help kids to think. Not what to think, but how to think, to make decisions for themselves, to not be surrounded by the opinions of others, to not follow the crowd. To think well. We could use more of that.”

Dudamel supports this, explaining the difficulty of pausing to reflect. “Let’s put things in perspective, humanity evolves and that’s wonderful,” he observes. “There’s a lot of technology, which is an achievement, but at the same time there’s contemplation, spirituality, and balancing it all will be much better. We would have a more empathetic world.” He urges, “Let’s take all these tools to the right place and enrich our nature, and the only way to do that is by creating culture. We have to delve deeper and create culture, education, and find ways to educate people, not just cut back and make education more technical and rigid and tell young people what they have to do. It’s about opening that up. Yes, I believe we can change the world, but it starts with the foundation, which is education, what we give them, the young people.”

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