Hundreds of violins, violas and double basses sounded at Venezuela's military academy on Saturday, then woodwinds, brass and percussion gradually joined in — thousands of musicians, mostly children and adolescents, with one goal: setting the record as the world's largest orchestra.
The musicians, all from the country's network of youth orchestras, performed a roughly 10-minute Tchaikovsky piece outdoors under the watchful eyes of independent supervisors with the job of verifying that more than 8,097 instruments were playing simultaneously, which would break the current record.
The country's music network, known as "El Sistema," had hoped to gather 12,000 musicians.
The Guinness Book of World Records will determine within 10 days whether a record was set.
