Growing up in Louisiana, David Brown discovered that music was his outlet — and that it had the power to change lives for the better.
“Music was always kind of transformational for me, because it allowed me to escape the bullying at school and escape this world that I didn’t feel like I really fit into,” said Brown, founder and creative director of Harmony Project. “In the voices of these other musicians and other singers and artists, I learned to find my own voice.”
Through Harmony Project, a nonprofit organization he started in 2009 in Columbus, Ohio, Brown continues to bring communities from different backgrounds, faiths and abilities together through concerts and community service projects.
This work will inspire his presentation at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater as he continues the week’s theme, “Exploring the Transformative Power of Music.”
Brown, who studied at Capital University in Columbus, spent much of his early life directing church youth choirs, and after spending time working with children, he wanted to form a choir program for adults. At Norman Vincent Peale’s Marble Collegiate Church, he started a Sunday School choir with just 28 singers; a year later, it had grown to 150.
After selling out venues like Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, Brown formed the Metro Mass Choir in New York City, which performed for the first gathering of the United Nations following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Brown has also directed choirs that have sung for artists like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.
While he loved the thrill of directing choirs and performing, he felt something was missing.
“In the background, there was this feeling that when the concert ends, so does the harmony,” he said. “Everybody kind of goes their own way and I didn’t know what was next — but I knew I didn’t want to just do music for the sake of doing music anymore. I wanted there to be a higher purpose to it.”
In 2005, he moved to New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina. In the aftermath, Brown noticed that despite social divides of geographics, economics and race, the tragedy brought people together.
“I started to think about this concept: Why is it always that tragedy is what seems to bring us together momentarily, and then once the tragedy ends, we go back to the way we were?” he said. “I started thinking, what if the music was not about whether or not you could sing? What if the music and the singing became the unifier and the thing that brought people together?”
Inspired, in 2009 Brown created Harmony Project, an initiative to bring communities together through various music programs.
“It started with 86 people who committed to sing in a little concert of 10 songs at a small theater in Columbus while doing some service project work, and now it’s grown to a $2.3 million annual operating budget with 1,370 people participating in programming every week,” Brown said. “We’re in schools, we’re in assisted living facilities and we’re in prisons.”
In May, Harmony Project and the Human Service Chamber of Franklin County performed “The Concert for Humanity” in Columbus, and the short film, “We Can Be Heroes,” was filmed at Pickaway Correctional Institution and the Greater Columbus Convention Center. The project, which included a partnership with the menswear shop Pursuit and video production company Mills James, fit custom-made suits for incarcerated men who performed in a choir at Pickaway.
Brown said fitting the men in the suits gave them the opportunity to look at themselves in the mirror, some for the first time in years, and recognize their potential.
“If we’re supposed to be about rehabilitation, reformation and helping these folks move back into society, then we have to show them the better angels of themselves,” he said. “We have to help them see something that maybe they’ve never been shown before.”
Through his own journey with music, the programs and concerts he’s organized, and his work with Harmony Project, Brown hopes to inspire Chautauquans to find their own voices through music.
This morning, he intends to “turn the audience into a choir” with the song “We Can Be Heroes.” He knows some people can be hesitant or embarrassed to share their voices, but it isn’t about what a person’s voice sounds like. It’s about people joining together.
“The harmony that I’m going for isn’t musical — it’s social,” he said. “I’m using music because that’s where my passion and talents lie and I know what music did for me. If music could do this for me, it can do the same for others.”
