On a block with boarded-up row houses and broken windows sits Baltimore’s Harriet Tubman Elementary School. Practically all of the students at the school get free or reduced-price lunches. Some of the kids live in homeless shelters.
But a remarkable new music program lives inside the school’s unremarkable walls. OrchKids is a collaboration between the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the school. The idea is to introduce disadvantaged students to classical music, and maybe change their lives in the process.
The Baltimore Symphony’s Dan Trahey runs the OrchKids program. This is the first year of the project, which has started with the younger students — mostly first-graders. Each year, it’ll grow to eventually encompass the whole school.
Trahey has an advanced music degree and is a trained orchestra musician. Before taking over OrchKids, he says he felt like he was performing for the wrong audience — symphony subscribers who really didn’t need the music.