Children play in the street in Soweto, South Africa. Photograph: Gideon Mendel/Getty
There are few experiences as thrilling as watching young people make music. It is a big part of the appeal of rock, which is always at its best when performed by teenagers and twenty-somethings relishing the sheer noisemaking potential of an electric guitar or a drum kit.
It is equally true of young classical musicians, who are capable of bringing a joie de vivre to their music-making that has been all but extinguished in many professional musicians.
In Soweto Strings, a documentary that aired on BBC4 recently, you could only marvel at the young performers' enthusiasm. One of them showed the camera crew around his home, deep in the Johannesburg townships, a typical corrugated iron shack into which he and at least four generations of his family had managed to squeeze themselves.
Outside rusted old Kombi vans whizzed along dirt roads past chicken coops, abandoned furniture and huge, arbitrary chunks of concrete. Many of the kids' parents had abandoned them, or been struck down by Aids or violence - yet still they felt able to play.
Founded a decade ago by Rosemary Nalden, a British viola player, Buskaid Soweto is a music programme based in Diepkloof township, where children from the impoverished surrounding neighbourhoods can learn a string instrument and play in one of the school's resident ensembles. The programme uses a similar model to Venezuela's much-lauded El Sistema: the more advanced players tutor the intermediate students, who themselves go on to teach the beginners, all of them gradually being drawn into this new and very different world where the music of Bach and Rameau is given pride of place alongside the ubiquitous pennywhistles of kwela and hip-hop beats of kwaito.
Watching Nalden with these kids is inspiring. She is their coach, mentor, champion and, in many cases, maternal figure. Between classes, rehearsals, fundraising and administration duties, she is constantly helping her young charges confront the demons that are forever tempting them towards recidivism, all the while emphasising the discipline and self-control required to better themselves and their music.
The results speak for themselves, as anyone who witnessed Buskaid's performance with John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists at last year's Proms can attest. Their verve and innate understanding of the music beneath their fingertips was thrilling.
Watching the progress of star players such as Samson Diamond or Kabelo Motlhomi, both of whom won places at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, is to understand the genuine transformative power of music.
