Rosie’s House student Jamil Muhammad playing Liszt

Venezuela’s El Sistema has swept the musical world. The system of universal music education for underprivileged children has led, over the 34 years since its founding, to the emergence of Venezuelans as major players on the classical music scene. The recent appointment of Sistema graduate Gustavo Dudamel as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic is only its most visible result.

More than that, El Sistema has empowered millions of Venezuelan children to rise above poverty and the hopelessness that poverty generates. Almost 250,000 Venezuelan children are currently enrolled in the El Sistema’s vast network of youth orchestras.

The Valley has a small-scale counterpart to El Sistema called Rosie’s House. The non-profit school has functioned since 1996 as a haven for children who want to learn strings, woodwinds, brass, guitar, piano or voice, but who come from disadvantageous circumstances. Like El Sistema, Rosie’s House provides everything free of charge, including lessons and the use of instruments. Unlike El Sistema, Rosie’s House is not publicly funded and requires individual and corporate giving to keep it going.

The school was started by Rosebell “Rosie” Schurz and her husband, Woody. Growing up in Germany in the devastation of World War II, Rosie found music to be a great consolation, and in 1992 decided to bring that same consolation to the underprivileged children of her adopted home, Phoenix. She and Woody began what was then called “The Christmas House” (named for her favorite holiday) in a small South Phoenix house with a handful of donated music instruments, a few teachers and a couple dozen students. Today, relocated to Central United Methodist Church in central Phoenix, the renamed Rosie’s House provides music education to more than 300 students, ages 5 to 18,

Rosie and Woody are still around, albeit on the sidelines now, cheering everyone on.

“Rosie is a constant source of inspiration,” says Becky Bell, executive and artistic director of Rosie’s House.

“It’s amazing the effort she and Woody put into founding this academy. They are both incredibly dynamic and dedicated.”

Bell sees Rosie’s House and El Sistema as having sprung from the same understanding of music as a spiritual/mental force.

“El Sistema and Rosie’s House were both founded on the principal that music education is an effective method for changing the life of a child,” Bell says.

“I see the transformation each and every day. These students learn music, but beyond that they learn discipline, confidence, teamwork, creative thinking, goal setting and achievement.”

It was qualities like these that caused Abreu to see in music-making a power far beyond music itself and to create El Sistema. Good citizenship, Abreu has said, is the real result of a solid music education.

Rosie’s House can certainly brag of some real success stories. One graduate, Diane Solario, is a senior at Stanford University; another is studying guitar at the San Francisco Conservatory. Flutist Chad Salazar, a current student, was recently featured on the public radio show “From the Top,” and has set a goal of attending the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia.

On Dec. 17, some of the school’s top students, including Salazar, will perform in concert at Central United Methodist. It should be a chance to hear what talent might have gone undiscovered without Rosie’s House, and to wonder a little as to why, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Rosie’s House is the only school on the United states to provide completely free music education to the underprivileged.