CHICAGO – In some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where children are well acquainted with the sounds of sirens and even gunfire, Leo Harris is giving them Mozart, Bach and Beethoven.
For more than two decades the 82-year-old Harris and his South Side Family Chamber Orchestra has provided for area children an alternative to the temptations of drugs and gangs.
“It can make a difference,” Harris said. “It’s a discipline. You have to stick to a beat, and you have to practice. That discipline pulls them out of the gang culture and away from other problems.”
Harris isn’t the only one to see how children are pulled into the world of classical music.
“He has moved mountains,” said Holly Hudak, senior director of education, community relations and diversity for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “A young person looks to Leo Harris and people who’ve been involved in that orchestra for a long time and they say, ‘I can do that, I can do that.”’
One such young person is Justin Wilson. The 12-year-old was walking down the street with his mother one day when he heard the faint sound of a violin solo coming from the window of a church.
Justin’s smile was all Harris needed to bring him inside and, as he’d done so many times with so many others, talk him into giving the violin a try.
More than a year later, Justin is a changed person. “Justin won’t listen to rap now,” said his mother, Marcella Jackson. “He listens to gospel, jazz and classical. We go to the store, he gets his own little classical cassettes. It’s weird.”
