A Prairie Home Companion: December 11, 2004

Special Guests
Saturday, December 11, 2004

Howard Levy

He was raised in Brooklyn and Queens, the part of Queens known as Rockaway Beach, where the movie Radio Days was filmed. He studied piano and theory at the Manhattan School of Music for four years, then studied pipe organ for two years. In 1969 he went to study at Northwestern University, played in the jazz band, and has lived in the Chicago area since 1972. Last May he did a tour of Europe with pianist Anthony Molinaro; nine shows in Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland. He did a concert in Prague with the Czech National Symphony, his Concerto for Diatonic Harmonica and Orchestra, the first of such work to be recorded. He was a founding member of Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and is currently leading two bands in Chicago. He has contributed to hundreds of CDs and won a Grammy in 1997. He has taken the standard diatonic harmonica into territory where no one expected it could go, covering the entire musical scale; anyone who has ever picked up a little Hohner Marine Band can appreciate that.

The House of Hope Choir School

They were founded in 1982, built in the tradition of the European choir schools, and are an integral part of the House of Hope Presbyterian Church. The young people are admitted from second grade through high school, regardless of musical training or religion. They even offer an Early Childhood Music Program, for kids from three years old through first grade. They are affiliate members of the Royal School of Church Music, which has 9,000 groups in 40 countries. In their twenty-three years they have toured the Upper Midwest, Puerto Rico, Denmark and the Rochester Cathedral in England.