Standing on the stage and speaking out into the Amphitheater, David Brown told Chautauquans that he’s more used to his back facing the audience. He’s a choir director, after all. To split the difference, Brown spoke from the seat of a grand piano, and the founder and creative director of Harmony Project continued the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Six theme of “Exploring the Transformative Power of Music” Thursday morning in the Amp.
Harmony Project is a nonprofit that programs musical performances alongside community service projects, which has grown since 2009 to include more than 1,000 people singing in performances weekly, to audiences of tens of thousands at concerts, and numerous community programs serving adults with disabilities, people who have experienced homelessness, the incarcerated, and students from low-income households. The testimonies from this work are powerful, as evident in a video Brown used to start his presentation, in which he covered some history — both of Harmony Project and how he came to create it — before sharing why he thinks Harmony Project’s work is so important, and how “we can all be heroes in our own community.”
Brown grew up in a deeply religious Southern Baptist household with a “very, very” Evangelical conservative family. It was an environment fraught with challenges. Where he found solace, where he felt most comfortable, was behind his bedroom door, with the music of Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow and, later, Cher and Tina Turner. He learned the importance of a key change in song, and he learned from his idols.
“I started to understand that music was my escape,” he said. “Music was where I could kind of disappear behind that door and be someone, let their voices come through me, and try to find my own voice through them.”
The turning point came when Brown told his parents he was gay.
“It was pretty traumatizing for them and for me,” he said. “They didn’t have the tools to deal with it, and neither did I.”
The tool his parents did have, however, was conversion therapy.
But during one of those sessions, at a United Methodist children’s home, a compassionate therapist told him: “If you can, get the hell out of here, as fast as you can. There is nothing wrong with you.”
He realized, it wasn’t that he needed to change; he needed an environment where he belonged — where his voice would be heard. So he hopped on a Greyhound bus to Columbus, Ohio — “the metropolis of discovery” — and connected with a friend who encouraged and supported him in making a new life. Brown found work as a children’s choir director at a church in Bexley, a suburb of Columbus.
“I found what was my superpower. I was able to channel all that love of music into working with these kids,” he said. The choir program flourished under his direction, growing from 30 to 80 children, and he realized he was creating a community for them that he himself hadn’t had growing up.
From Columbus, Brown went to New York City, where he landed a job at Marble Collegiate Church. There, immediately, Brown encountered acceptance.
“I’m gay,” he confessed to the pastor during his interview for a position directing youth and children’s music. The pastor’s response was simple yet profound: “It’s not a problem for us.”
At Marble Collegiate, Brown began to think bigger. He proposed creating a choir from the talented but often overlooked congregants. With just $500 and a Sunday afternoon time slot, he organized a concert with 26 voices. Within two years, the choir grew to 150 members and performed at Carnegie Hall.
“That was the hunger that existed within the community,” he said. “We went on to fill Lincoln Center. So many opportunities came our way. But there was still something still missing for me. When the performance was over or rehearsal ended, so did the harmony that was being created, and everyone just went their own separate ways.”
By 2005, Brown wanted a break, and time to rethink his purpose and passions. He moved to New Orleans three months before Hurricane Katrina struck and, in the aftermath, he “started watching this divided community work together.”
“Maybe there’s something here,” he remembered thinking, “something I’ve been missing in my music.”
What if, he thought, he could form a choir without auditions, focusing solely on participation?
“Maybe that’s the thing that’s missing. I don’t ask someone if they can sing, I only ask if they will,” he said.
Brown returned to Columbus in 2008 and went around knocking on doors, placing signs in salons, restaurants, bowling alleys, inviting anyone who loved to sing to join him.
“If you love to sing, even if you have been told that you can’t, if you want to be part of something bigger than yourself, meet me at this place, this date, this time,” his flyers read. At the bottom, he added: “Free food, open bar.”
The first night, 87 people showed up. Ten weeks later, they sold out two performances and raised over $47,000 for a local nonprofit. In some ways, Brown had started a congregation of sorts — people would tell him, “This is where I belong.”
“Who knew I was not alone in wanting that? I didn’t. I thought I was the only one that didn’t fit,” he said. “What I found out is that the human condition is a longing, constant longing, to belong. To be heard, to be seen.”
By 2009, the year Harmony Project was officially founded, the organization had grown significantly, contributing tens of thousands of volunteer hours annually to the Columbus community. Harmony Project, Brown emphasized, wasn’t about the quality of sound but about making every voice heard and recognized as valid.
“The point of all of this is that music has transformational power,” he said. “Sure, there is data about the way our heart rates begin to beat at the same rate when we sing together, our brain waves begin to align, our breathing aligns — all of the science of it. But the emotional impact of it is that, when we are able to bring collective voices together, our voice is empowered.”
In extending that transformational power to people who might not get to experience it otherwise, Brown took Harmony Project programs into facilities for differently-abled adults, schools with no music programs, and prisons. These programs provided incarcerated individuals an opportunity to connect, express and transform through music.
In women’s correctional facilities, with women incarcerated anywhere from two years to 25 years, singing songs written by women, “you began to see their shoulders come down. you begin to see their jaws loosen. You began to see them leaning in and smiling and tears coming down,” Brown said.
In expanding the work to correctional facilities, Harmony Project “goes in and meets them where they are.” Every week, the program begins with this mantra: “Where I am does not define who I am.”
Brown had his audience repeat after him: “Where I am does not define who I am.”
“That goes for your location, and for your frame of mind, and your frame of heart,” he said. “Wherever we are at any moment, there is a song. There is a lyric. There is music. … Watching this happen within Columbus and watching this happen as we have gone around the country has shown me there is a human need for collection and belonging — and music is one way … that we are able to access that sense of belonging and that sense of purpose and voice.”
Being raised in an environment where it was constantly reinforced that he was not enough, that he didn’t belong, inspired Brown to “years later, turn that around and tell people, your voice matters no matter where you are. No matter who you are. No matter what you’re done. No matter what you haven’t done. If we want to change the world that we’re in, we can’t just be audience members.”
Sometimes, “we have to get our butts out of the seats and get on to the stage.” That’s what Harmony Project does, and that shift in perspective yields dividends.
Consider, Brown told the audience, making a list of what inspires you. Start with songs that “stimulate you to want to go do something for someone else. It doesn’t have to be related to music, but let the music be your inspiration.”
Then, whatever you’re inspired to do, don’t do it alone.
“Find someone that you wouldn’t do it with, because that is how we change the country,” he said. “We change the country by engaging in the process and saying, this is how I’m going to do it. This is what my part is going to be. Your voice doesn’t have to be great to sing in one of my choirs, and your brain doesn’t have to be the smartest to bring about change in the universe. We all just have to play our part.”
In Sunday School, Brown was taught the story of the tax collector Zacchaeus. His pastor always summarized it thusly: “Jesus told him what he had to do. He told him what was wrong. He told him how to change his ways.”
But when Brown was at Marble Collegiate Church, the pastor had a different message: There is no record of what Jesus said to Zacchaeus.
“All we have a record of is that (Zacchaeus) was loved in front of his enemies. Someone recognized him. Someone said, ‘I see you,’ ” Brown said. “Someone in front of those who didn’t love many, loved him. That’s transformation.”
Brown doesn’t identify as a Christian, but he does identify with belonging, and he believes “we can build our congregations wherever needed” — including the congregation of Chautauqua, which he asked to sing with him.
The entire Amp audience joined him in a rendition of David Bowie’s “We Can Be Heroes.”
“Remember this,” Brown said after. “In music, harmony does not exist with only one note. The same works in our society. For social change and social harmony to happen, it requires more than one way of thinking, more than one voice, more than one idea.”