A pianist, organist, singer, and composer, Anthony Leach came to Penn State in 1991 to work on his Ph.D. in music education. Shortly after his arrival, he founded Essence of Joy, which has become renowned locally and across the country (and even internationally) and has since expanded to include Essence of Joy Alumni Singers and Essence 2, a community choir in State College.
Organized in November 1991, Essence of Joy is one of 10 choral ensembles in the School of Music. The choir is composed of undergraduate and graduate students from many academic programs and performs sacred as well as secular music from the African/African-American traditions. Annual campus events include fall and spring concerts. This fall’s concerts are October 9 and December 10, both at Pasquerilla Spiritual Center.
Essence also has performed across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Florida, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Illinois, Florida, Minnesota, Iowa, and Georgia. It has had international tours to Krakow, Poland; Prague, Czech Republic; and South Africa, Spain, and France.
A native of Washington, D.C., Leach holds a bachelor’s degree in music education from Lebanon Valley College in Annville. He earned his master’s and PhD in conducting and music education at Penn State. He currently teaches graduate courses in music education.
Town&Gown founder Mimi Barash Coppersmith sat down with him to discuss how he became involved in music, growing up as an African-American, and his role in starting Essence of Joy.
Mimi: It is a real honor to talk with you about how you’ve become the giant that you are. What’s the single incident that sent you on this remarkable path?
Anthony: When I was 3 years old, I asked my mother if I could learn to play the piano, because she was studying piano at that time, and she said No I was too young. And I kept asking until I was almost 7. The piano teacher showed up, and the rest is history as far as music is concerned. My mom was a church musician, so she was working with various church choirs the whole time we were growing up.
Mimi: Tell me about your piano lessons.
Anthony: I realized within my first year of playing piano that there were some things that I could transfer from one piece to another piece. My mom would always have music pieces around, and so one day I decided to just open the hymnal and start playing hymns. The piano teacher showed up early and said, “Was that your mom playing ‘While Shepherds Watched Their Flock by Night’ ?” I said, “No, that was me.” She says, “Well, I didn’t assign that to you.” I said, “You didn’t have to assign it to me. I just opened up the books and started playing it.” She says, “Well play it again.” I played it again. She says, “Can you play it in any other key?” I said, “What key do you want it in?”
Mimi: How did you know all that?
Anthony: That’s just how I function, to this day.
Mimi: Now you grew up in Washington, DC. Did your parents grow up there?
Anthony: No. My mom was born in North Carolina and my father was born in South Carolina. My mom’s family moved to DC in the late 1930s. My father and his youngest brother came to DC after World War II.
Mimi: As far back as you can remember, could you try to explain to me what it was like to be a young, black person in a very white community?
Anthony: Oh wow. On one level we were kind of insulated from that because everything that we needed occurred in the black community. Now my first piano teacher was Caucasian. She was actually from Pennsylvania and moved to the DC area to do her graduate degree in piano at the University of Maryland.
Mimi: I am the child of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and I can remember in elementary school one particular boy in the class called me a “dirty kike,” and I will never forget it. I will never forget how hurt I felt, and I would imagine along the path of your early years, what were some of your experiences that you had to deal with to become the guy you are?
Anthony: Probably the first negative encounter that I remember was my grandmother took me with her to downtown DC to shop, and we got on the streetcar and I sat down in the front. She told me to come to the back — we can’t sit there. So I got up and we went to the back. I couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 years old. The next time that it was an issue was when my father took me to South Carolina when I was in fifth grade. This was 1960. We drove late afternoon into the night, and he stopped at a gas station to call his brother. I needed to go to the bathroom. For the first time, I saw “white” and “colored,” and I thought, “Oh okay. That’s what that’s about.”
Mimi: Now tell me how you landed at Lebanon Valley College? Why didn’t you come to Penn State?
Anthony: I didn’t know anything about Penn State. When I transferred high schools in the middle of my junior year, I became friends with kids who had connections with Lebanon Valley College because their parents or someone had gone to LVC. When I met with my guidance counselor just to talk about all the university opportunities, she mentioned that the recruiter from Lebanon Valley College was going to be stopping at our school. And when I got done with our meeting I said, “Sure! Great!” I scheduled an audition. It’s the only audition that my parents attended with me. In April of my senior year, my mom said, “We need to talk.” She was pregnant. I said, “What do you mean you’re pregnant?” Because it was me, my oldest brother, my brother Darnell, and then Teddy, who is seven years younger. I was like, “You can’t be pregnant!” She says, “I’m pregnant, and you’re going have to stay home and go to school in Maryland.” I said, “Oh no!” So I got Lebanon Valley fever because it was away from home.
Mimi: Tell me a little bit about life at Lebanon Valley College as a college student?
Anthony: LVC originally was a school with the United Brethren in Christ Church and is now affiliated with the United Methodist Church. It is a small school, less than 1,000 students. I was one of a very few male students of color my freshman year. Two guys came in from Baltimore; they were on the basketball team. One guy came from New York; he was a football player, and then there was me — a music major. And only two of us graduated — Donnie Johnson from Baltimore and me. And so, freshman year was okay because I had gotten involved in cheerleading my senior year in high school, and so that got me involved with a bunch of things I would have never been involved with, like cheering for four years at LVC.
Mimi: I love watching you and listening to those you lead over a lot of years. It is truly the “essence of joy,” but the most recent one was at the Arts Festival, and it was spectacular!
Anthony: Thank you!
Mimi: And here you are in a phased period of retirement. Tell me a little bit about what led you to that and how does it feel?
Anthony: I want to do a few “me” things because I have been committed to others all of my professional life, and, for instance, last academic year I actually completed three articles, a book chapter, I could not have done that two years ago.
Mimi: Because you had a teaching load.
Anthony: Exactly. It’s not until I stepped away from my teaching load that I realized how much energy, planning, and coordination I had been manifesting for 40-plus years.
Mimi: Your mother’s musical experience and her journey certainly passed on to you.
Anthony: Oh yeah!
Mimi: The spirit that comes with the beautiful voices, and you’re physically active, leading and playing at the same time creates an unbelievable picture of pleasure.
Anthony: I’m always in the moment, but I’m also very aware of the dynamic of the choir because I never know what’s happening behind me in the audience. I gauge that from the choir’s reaction to what the audience is or is not doing. And often, of course, a listener is just absorbing something, and it’s not until they have the opportunity to talk to me at the end of the concert or to applaud to have any idea that “Oh yeah, you’re really sharing this thing with others.”
Mimi: When did you start Essence of Joy?
Anthony: 1991.
Mimi: That wasn’t long after you came to Penn State.
Anthony: That’s right. I came back to Penn State in 1991 to start the PhD in music education, and not long after I was here that fall semester, the president of the Forum on Black Affairs was told that I was here, and she contacted me about doing music for the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Banquet, which was at the HUB at that time.
Mimi: Now you and Essence of Joy have travelled to a lot of places.
Anthony: Yes we have.
Mimi: How do you fund that?
Anthony: Well, when we leave campus, whoever invites us is responsible for our transportation and a performance fee on honorarium. When we travel internationally, the kids pay, but the university may provide us support for the coach. If we’re invited to a national conference, as we have been many times, the university may fund our hotel or provide a coach to get you to the conference. In some cases, they would even pay the students’ registration in case they wanted to attend the conference. … We are planning international travel for next year.
Mimi: Where?
Anthony: I want to take as many of our students as are available to go, so I’ve asked our travel agent for destinations closer to home at a cost that will enable more of our students to go. I’m waiting on itineraries for Cuba and Canada.
Mimi: That would be interesting.
Anthony: Oh yeah. And the West Coast, in particular, Seattle; Victoria, Vancouver. So we’ll see.
Mimi: Why is South Africa special in your experiences?
Anthony: Let me tell you about South Africa. My former pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church in Washington, DC, Walter Fauntroy, was also the congressional representative from DC at the time. He, along with Randall Robinson and others, launched a movement called Free South Africa, on Thanksgiving Day 1984. They went to the South African embassy, got arrested, and the rest is history. The Free South Africa Movement (FSAM) was a coalition of individuals, organizations, students, and unions across the United States of America who sought to end apartheid in South Africa. And so for four years or so, you had representatives from South Africa coming to New Bethel, like Dr. Allan Boesak, a South African Dutch Reformed Church cleric and anti-apartheid activist, as well as Bishop Desmond Tutu. Dr. Boesak was so impressed with my music ministry that he made arrangements for his director of music from Cape Town to come Thanksgiving 1986. He brought his whole family and stayed with our congregation for three months. We provided housing, transportation, and you name it. At one point, I said to him, “I can’t go to South Africa, but I am so glad that you are here.” But, I said, “When we can come to South Africa, we’ll be with you.” So, in 2005, we made our first trip to South Africa with Essence of Joy and a constituency from my church and had wonderful encounters from Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Grahamstown, and then down to Cape Town.
Mimi: Wow!
Anthony: North, about three or four hours out of Johannesburg, is the Mogoshi Elementary School in Polokwane. That encounter not only opened our eyes but opened our hearts and our pocketbooks. Since 2008, the Essence of Joy ensembles started to provide financial support for this school. Here we are, in 2016, just completed a tour with the Alumni Singers, and we began in Cape Town and then north back to the Mogoshi School, just to check to see the improvements that they have made. They now have toilet facilities, a technology lab, an administrative suite, and a soccer field. Now the next phase will be for a kitchen and a dining room facility.
Mimi: Good for you. One quick last question, how do you feel about the current conditions of politics?
Anthony: Well, I know what it is to feel safe and what it is to feel not so safe. Because I grew up in southeast Washington, DC, I always carry in my mind where I’m at and who’s around and what do I need to be aware of. And as I move around the world, which would go beyond the United States, whether it’s personal travel or with a choir, people always want to engage us, as in the case in South Africa, on aspects of politics. A pastor at the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg said in his closing remarks, “We look to the United States for leadership. Let’s hope they do the right thing when it comes to voting in November.”
Mimi: Some people feel there’s not a right thing.
Anthony: Let’s hope that we make a decision on behalf of right, fairness, equity, and justice, which begins with people being aware of those that have no sense of justice, no vision for anything beyond the control and containment that has occurred in all aspects of our society. Violence is not the answer, there’s no question.
Mimi: Violence is not the answer.
Anthony: But at the same time, politicians right now have an awesome responsibility to act on behalf of people as opposed to lobbyists.
Mimi: To heal the nation.
Anthony: Thus the song that we sang with Essence, “To heal our lands, heal our lands, we need to reconcile.” Nobody’s talking about reconciliation. We need to move that forward in our vocabulary because if we could reconcile a few of our differences, things that separate us, that can contribute to our everyday lives being better.
Mimi: That’s a fine note on which to thank you very much for your thoughtful interview. I really appreciate it.
Anthony: Thank you!
