Found: Bringing music to the Near West Side

By Christopher Landers

Technically, Dick Ford is retired. Just don’t tell him that.

The 76-year-old Ford is spending his summer bounding around the campus of Cazenovia College, darting from class to class — big band for twenty minutes, piano for twenty more, and maybe voice if he has time before lunch.

Ford is the founder and executive director of Signature Syracuse, a nonprofit organization that provides free music lessons, free instruments and free college counseling and preparation to middle and high school students in Syracuse. Every year since 1993, he and his staff have ran the Signature Music Summer Residency — a two-week music education camp that gives kids the chance to live and play music together.

But Signature Syracuse is about far more than just music. It’s the opportunity for self-realization through expression, for possibilities denied to so many children in low-income families.

“Kids who feel disenfranchised in other areas of their life, especially in the high school or middle school curriculum, music can be so empowering in terms of self-concept,” Ford said. “When you teach music, you really aren’t teaching in the sense of putting something into kids. You really are pulling stuff that’s already there that the kid didn’t know they had it within them.”

Ford recently moved the organization’s office to the Near West Side — a neighborhood he says has great “energy,” and a place where opportunities to play music are few and far between.

“I don’t think many people realize that music of all the academic disciplines is probably the most elitist,” he said. “Public schools don’t offer private lessons, it usually requires an affluent parent with the money and transportation and resources.”

But Ford is hoping to change that, one student at a time.