Last Sunday morning I sat in on a class for juniors and beginners at the Buskaid music school in Diepkloof, Soweto. An evidently gifted six-year-old attracted my attention. An older boy knelt beside him, held up his violin, repositioned his bow and fingers, and talked and timed him through a practice session like a solicitous older brother. At the end of the group session the small boy waited patiently to confirm the times of his one-to-one lessons for the following week. Outside, after class, I saw him running in the yard, eating a packet of crisps as he played with his friends. Six years ago, this budding talent was found, covered with cigarette burns, on the rubbish heap where his prostitute mother had abandoned him.

This is only one of the many stories of the disadvantaged, fragile backgrounds of the children of Buskaid. The school is a microcosm of all the social, educational and health problems faced by ordinary South African children, their lives touched from birth by poverty, widescale orphanhood, HIV and Aids, TB, drug problems and inadequate education. In the process of becoming musicians, these students learn essential life skills; discipline, application, punctuality, how to carry themselves as self-confident individuals and how to work together as a team.

Most of them are poor, but a few are the children of millionaires. Playing together is a levelling process, a cross-class integration of students from diverse backgrounds working together, coaching, learning, concentrating, experimenting and laughing with each other.

And this Sunday some of their number will be playing at the Albert Hall, as the Buskaid Soweto String Project becomes the first South African classical orchestra to appear at the world’s greatest music festival.

The success story of Buskaid is now legendary. In 1992, the British viola player Rosemary Nalden heard an interview on Radio 4’s Today programme describing the problems faced by a fledgeling group of young string players in Diepkloof. So she organised 120 of her professional colleagues to take part in a simultaneous fundraising busk at 16 railway stations that raised £6,000 in two hours for the young township musicians. The Buskaid charitable trust was born.

In 1997 Nalden was asked to go to Diepkloof, to teach and conduct the children. Originally they were a small group, learning and playing in a small room in the grounds of a church, at the mercy of the weather. When a thunderstorm caused a three-day power cut during workshop rehearsals for a concert, the students performed by candlelight.

Now the ensemble has a purpose-built music school consisting of seven studios, a music library and a large rehearsal room. There are about 70 students, aged from 6 to 27, who come to Buskaid for individual lessons and group practice after school and at the weekends.

For the past decade, Buskaid has sponsored the regular day school and college fees of 11 gifted children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2002, a teacher-training programme began for the senior students who now assist Nalden and her co-teacher, Sonja Bass. In the same year Bass took a course in instrument restoration and is now responsible for Buskaid’s collection of stringed instruments and bows. Students start taking their instruments home to practise on their own after the first three months of tuition, and are lent them for long as they are Buskaid members. Some of them live in shacks and township back rooms. But the instruments are immaculate.

I met Walden for the first time on the brick-step entrance to her school, in the sharp chill of Gauteng winter sunshine. She led me through the entrance, past a brightly painted mural, to the small kitchen from which students get tapwater for lessons and rehearsals, and the plethora of framed awards for the ensemble that frame the door of the music library. Later, I returned to browse in this small strip-lit library that houses an extraordinarily comprehensive diversity of music from all ages, all systematically labelled and meticulously archived.

I had arrived during the ensemble’s rehearsal of Purcell’s Overture to King Arthur. The chord progression and intonation sounded exact; the glissando elevating. But Walden brusquely interrupted my sublime epiphany, peremptorily lowering her baton and declaring the rendition “scruffy” and “all over the place”. More work to be done. Were they actually listening to one another? Why was the violin quartet a player short? Had the (named) backslider overslept, or did she imagine there was another justifiable excuse for not being punctual for rehearsal without due notice? Fifteen minutes later the bashful miscreant had turned up, the problems with the piece identified and analysed, solutions practised and sublime harmony satisfactorily achieved.

The Buskaid ensemble is extraordinary proof that our global civilisation, of which classical music is an essential part, is, as Amartya Sen puts it, a world heritage, not just a collection of disparate local cultures. Rising up against the old prison of cultural apartheid, Buskaid is a living, growing example of the profound values of the diverse global culture that belongs to us all.

— The Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble play Rameau on Sunday (Prom 3). For more information about the ensemble go to www.buskaid.org.za. Rachel Holmes’s latest book, The Hottentot Venus, is published by Bloomsbury.

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