Michael Chapman Is Keeping The Music Alive

Children in Pittsburgh who have musical dreams don’t just have to play in the school band or teach themselves GarageBand to get into the field. Hip Hop Orchestra, created by award-winning guitarist Michael Chapman, puts acoustic instruments in their hands and helps them master musical concepts through hip-hop.

After winning a competition for a national guitar music festival in 1995, Chapman, born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, earned a scholarship to Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University the next year. He eventually began teaching. He split his time between directing guitar ensembles as an adjunct professor at Duquesne University and teaching part-time in his home country. He also founded the Pittsburgh Classical Guitar Society.

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In 2014, Chapman established Guardians of Sound, a nonprofit dedicated to engaging young local artists by introducing them to acoustic, orchestral, and traditional instruments through modern music. He used the organization as the home for his idea of Hip Hop Orchestra, which launched in 2017. The goal isn’t a traditional youth program, as Hip Hop Orchestra musicians generally perform alongside older Guardians of Sound working musicians who serve as mentors.

“We would do current music that is appealing to the population of [today], but we would use traditional instruments: the piano, the acoustic guitar, the violin, the cello, the harp, percussion instruments,” Chapman explains. “With a hip-hop orchestra, we can use that as a tool to bring youth into the fold.”

In 2017, Chapman landed a grant from the August Wilson African American Culture Center in Pittsburgh to put together a summer camp that introduced Hip Hop Orchestra to area youth, 9-19 years old, bringing aboard local artists as teachers. Youth could either learn their choice of instruments or engage in lessons to become MCs or singers focusing on “conscious” hip-hop. Chapman would enlist local producers to create beats through their digital music-making tools, then he’d transcribe them for children to play. The program is a much-needed supplement for children interested in the mechanics of music, especially when schools nationwide are losing funding for arts programs.

“When I say Hip Hop Orchestra, and when I talk about Guardians of Sound focusing on promoting use of acoustic instruments, some people may think that the organization is trying to say that what we do is somehow an elevated thing. Or that we’re trying to imply that we are bringing something at a more elitist, higher level,” Chapman says. “It’s nothing like that.”

Chapman explains that since hip-hop songs are based on loops and repetition, they make for easier vehicles for children to learn an instrument than the classical compositions from the 1700s.

“What I saw is that hip-hop producers and MCs are creating these nice, short, melodic, motivic ideas for their beats. Oftentimes, they’re short enough and so well-crafted, that it’s a good little snippet of music that you can more easily teach a child than trying to get them to learn a long, drawn-out piece, or some nursery rhyme or folk song that’s disconnected from their reality,” he explains. “Some of the musical parts of hip-hop might come across as repetitive, but that repetition is a great thing for learning music.”

One of the artists teaching the children is Idasa Tariq. The Wilmington, New York, native is the son of two activists: a mother who is a former social worker, and a father who was one of the organizers of the 1971 Attica Prison riot, where prisoners demanded better living conditions and political rights. Tariq discovered hip-hop as a preteen, first engaging through poetry, and later learning how to make beats when he couldn’t afford to buy them from other producers. Upon his second time living in Pittsburgh, Paradise Gray (formerly known as Paradise the Architect), of the rap group X Clan, helped him land a job as an assistant creative director with 1Hood Media Academy. Through his work with that organization, he met Chapman, who proposed that he translate his music into orchestral pieces.

Tariq became involved with Hip Hop Orchestra in 2017 and was shocked at what he saw. When he was a child, he said, learning hip-hop at school was so much of a do-it-yourself affair that he had to beg his music teachers to allow him to bring his bootlegged Fruity Loops computer software into the classroom.

“There was a whole gang of us that would just be there at lunchtime, and that’s how we learned, just teaching each other,” Tariq remembers. “So, it was dope to be in a position where [my students] didn’t have to go through all that. A lot of people got left behind and weren’t able to pursue that, just because there wasn’t someone there showing them how to do it.”

Hip Hop Orchestra initially had some 40 students, but its numbers dwindled after the COVID-19 shutdown. The program now hosts around 20 students year-round, with larger numbers for its summer programming. They rent instruments from the Chamber Music Society of Pittsburgh, and they meet at East Liberty Presbyterian Church, with the instrumentalists and the vocalists meeting in separate groups before reuniting for jam sessions and performances.

Chapman said the full orchestra performs about six to ten times a year, and specific groups perform between 15 to 20 times. Increasingly Chapman is seeing more hip-hop artists like Kendrick Lamar, Jeezy, and Rick Ross performing with orchestras at award shows and symphony halls, which wasn’t happening when he started his organization.

Chapman and Tariq said that in upcoming years, they want to focus on developing more interactive open mic performances to more openly engage with the public; integrate dancing into the group; and secure resources to offer children transportation to and from their gatherings. But seven years into his work with Hip Hop Orchestra, Tariq is still moved by the extent to which his students have “heart.”

“This generation, when you pass the ball to them, they aim to turn into Space Jam. Go from one end of the court to dunk that jawn, and they know that they can do it,” Tariq says. “They just don’t know how a lot of times, so they’re looking for the technical way of doing it.”

Hip Hop Orchestra provides them the missing link.

William E. Ketchum III is a reporter and editor dedicated to covering the intersection of music, culture, and society. His work has appeared in VIBE, Vulture, GQ, Complex, Billboard, Guardian, NPR, MTV, XXL, and Ebony.

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