Note for note: how a simple enough idea--exposing kids to classical music--led to changed lives and less violence.

For decades, Venezuela has been best known for producing oil and baseball players. But in 2007, the South American nation began exporting a product that may make it even more famous--high culture.

Just this year, Gustavo Dudamel became the first Latin American to head a major U.S. orchestra after signing a five-year contract to direct the Los Angeles Philharmonic beginning in 2009. (Enrique Diemecke, the musical director of the National Symphony of Mexico, also conducts California's Long Beach Symphony).

Twenty-six years old, Dudamel skyrocketed onto the international music scene after signing an exclusive contract with the prestigious record label Deutsche Grammophon and becoming the principal conductor of the Gotenburg Symphony in Sweden. He is clearly a major talent--coveted by a half-dozen orchestras in the United States and Europe before signing with Los Angeles.

"Gustavo Dudamel is quite possibly the single most remarkable talent I have seen," Deborah Borda, president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association told me. "From the moment he stepped on our podium there was an immediate and palpable connection and chemistry with L.A. Philharmonic musicians and our audience. He is about the future."

Dudamel owes that success not just to extraordinary talent but also to a little-known program in Venezuela that Sir Simon Rattle, the renowned English conductor, has not hesitated to describe as the "most important thing happening in music anywhere in the world."

The unique project--the National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras of Venezuela--was created in 1975 by a 67-year-old economist and music professor named Jose Antonio Abreu, known affectionately as "El Maestro." Abreu founded the program in a garage with 11 students.

Today, El Sistema--as the curriculum is popularly called--provides some 250,000 children with free instruments, instruction and transportation to more than 100 learning centers. Since the program targets mostly poor children it has become not only a model for developing nations but a badly needed alternative to gangs and the kind of poverty-driven crime endemic in Venezuela. In some shantytowns, the system actually cut crime and violence while improving school performance.

In response, successive governments, including that of current President Hugo Chavez, have helped finance its US$25 million annual budget. The United Nations has dubbed Abreu a goodwill ambassador for "peace through music."

Dudamel entered the system at four, eventually learning to play the violin. At 12, he took up conducting, becoming musical director five years later of the program's flagship orchestra, the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Caracas.

Unlike the majority of kids helped by the system, however, Dudamel's family was not impoverished. His father played trombone in an orchestra in the city of Barquisimeto and his mother taught voice at a local conservatory. Bassist Edicson Ruiz is more a typical inductee. He was abandoned by his father and raised in a poor section of Caracas. In 2002, he won an audition with the famed Berlin Philharmonic at the age of 17, earning a permanent post three years later.

When I attended classical music concerts at such magnificent venues as the Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro or the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, I typically encountered only the well-to-do in the audience. The poor obviously could not afford a ticket, and many had little interest in music other than popular dance tunes. That's no longer the case in Venezuela. In 1975, the nation had just two orchestras, consisting mostly of foreigners. Now each of its 22 states has a major orchestra stocked with Venezuelan musicians, along with 140 youth orchestras and 128 children's orchestras. It's a staggering national commitment to music, one few industrial economies can match.

Fortunately, Abreu's philanthropic notions have caught on elsewhere. More than 20 other countries have duplicated his program. In Colombia, for instance, some 30,000 underprivileged children displaced by that nation's four-decade-old civil war are learning classical music in a program called the Batuta youth orchestra.

Abreu's program should be replicated in every Latin American country, and is undeniable proof that music is a wonderful investment, one that can not only enrich young lives but, for some, completely change them.

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