The first public performance by a youth orchestra based in Raploch, Stirling, and inspired by a revolutionary teaching method from Venezuela, is to take place with the aid of best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith.

The first public performance by a youth orchestra based in Raploch, Stirling, and inspired by a revolutionary teaching method from Venezuela, is to take place with the aid of best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith.

The Big Noise Raploch Children's Orchestra is the first in Scotland to be set up in a project inspired by the El Sistema method of the oil-rich but economically divided south American country.

Now 15 of the pupils from Raploch are to make their first public appearance during a concert at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh in a concert to promote McCall Smith's latest novel, La's Orchestra Saves the World, on November 4.

Since summer, children from P1 to P3 at Raploch Primary and Our Lady's Primary in the deprived estate have been learning to play orchestral instruments in the Big Noise - the scheme inspired by Venezuela's much-admired music policy.

It is hoped that with the success of the music system - which relies on the free distribution of instruments, free tuition and intensive, group-based musical teaching centred around the idea of teamwork and the ensemble - it will spread to other areas in Scotland, with the first cities in line thought to be Aberdeen and Glasgow.

For more than 30 years in Venezuela, the system of youth orchestras has given a sense of hope and accomplishment to more than 400,000 children from the barrios, or slums.

Rising musical stars such as 26-year-old maestro Gustavo Dudamel, now a conductor at the LA Philharmonic, came through the system.