Leonard McCants, Jr. was born on September 8, 1988 in Brooklyn, New York. He is the oldest boy out of six children, one who lost thier life at birth in the early 90's. Leonard started playing the piano when he was 3 years old. He looked up to his father when he was around because his father played the piano. Although not experienced with reading music, his father had a good ear. His father would right songs that had a lot of hip hop and R&B background from the 80’s. After a while, his father started to slide back from the piano and focused on loser things for making him not enthused with a lot of playing around on the piano. Leonard, on the other hand, picked up very quickly about the piano. At this time Leonard was at the age of 5 when his mother and father sought to put him in a highly advanced music school in Upper Manhattan. Leonard learned how to play in recitals and performances with his young repertoire of easy Mozart, Khachaturian, and Bartok pieces. His teacher, Alfred Engel, mother and father was hard on him, only trying to make him a better performer in playing the piano.Leonard finished music school on the intermediate level around the age of 7 years old. Around this time, his brother and sister where attending the school for music also, playing a recorder in a beginners fundamentals class. Leonard left the music school knowing how to read music, play the piano on a more advanced level, and had knowledge of Music Theory and devoloped a concept for perfect pitch.When Leonard attended Elementary School, he was an honor role student for the three years he attended. It was hard for him going to school because he was on a higher level of education than most of his classmates. The school was a bad school and Leonard was always a good boy in his young childhood. This caused many tensions between him and some of the students at the school. Most people knew of him to be musically gifted and therefore most kids were jealous of him. Two teachers who encouraged Leonard at the school were his music teacher and his 3rd grade teacher. Elizabeth Williams started everyone out on the xylophone. She noticed Leonard had a quick ear for music and thus helped him get into a good middle school in the future. His 3rd grade teacher also encouraged by giving him her piano. He practiced on it every night, although he hated it. His parents were always there pushing and pressing him on to be excellent.After Leonard's third year in elementary school at the age of 8, Leonard moved to Philadelphia, were he currently resides, and on to a highly advanced magnet school. His parents, as well as Elizabeth Williams, made it possible for him to attend GAMP after he graduated from Meade Elementary in Philadelphia to finish out his elementary year in school. With his honor role grades and his musical abilities, they accepted him easily. In Gamp, he learned many more talents being exposed to many new composers such as Bach and Beethoven and was able to express music how he wanted with teachers and friends, including his close friend Ahmad Frazier who also had a wonderful gift of music. He loved Gamp in middle school, although he did not make honor role every year now that he was in a more challenging school.In sixth grade, he took up playing the Double Bass as a secondary instrument. Over the years, he sort of put off the Piano as a primary instrument and made the Double Bass come first. He was so good with the Double Bass that he made it to be the youngest Bassist in the All-City Philadelphia Youth Orchestra in the sixth grade. He stayed with All-City Orchestra throughout his years at GAMP, making him Principal Bassist for two years before he graduated High School. In seventh grade Leonard started to break out of his shell as being the quite-corny one, as he noticed his academic grades started to fall dramatically. Being those he was popular for being the only youngest African American Male Bassist in his schools Chamber Strings and Orchestra, he started to clown around a lot and forget about his grades. In result, Leonard went to Summer School for five years straight in the years to come. Both his Parents were not pleased. They took music away from him, and he was banned from performing anywhere, even his church which he started to play for in sixth grade.This Result of not playing music for a while lead to new talents McCants did not no he had. Since he was in Advanced Placement Theory for a long time, he knew the idea of writing compositions. He certainly had the ear for it. In eighth grade, along with picking up the cello as a third instrument, he began writing music. At this early point in writing music, he favored a gospel artist at this time that had writing a lot of classically themed gospel songs. Richard Smallwood was his inspiration at this point until one of his repoirtered pieces in an All-City Concert was Vivaldi’s Concerto Grosso in A minor for Two Violins No. 8 Op.3. He loved that piece. He was so good he did not have to see every single part in the Score to rewrite all the parts exactly the same as Vivaldi had written them. Till this day, he loves Vivaldi and thinks of him as his "older brother". In this point of his life, he realized he loved Classical Music, but above all, the Baroque style of music was how he liked to write.Leonard had mastered his first piece of music in the eighth grade when he had written a Concerto for the GAMP Chamber String group. After his loved Double Bass teacher Mr. Boris Blomenkrantz and string teacher Chugna Doughty had got him started on these fascinating string instruments, it was time that they left GAMP. This made Leonard want to leave the school, besides the fact that he wanted to expand his talents at a different musically advanced high school in Philadelphia. He was getting taught so well with music there his mother and father did not want him to leave. Thus, he stayed for high school as well as his close friends. The school also felt their was a need for him to stay.
During High School, Leonard still attended Temple’s Esther Boyer College of Music (as he started attending in sixth grade also under the teaching of Benjamin Blazer who was another young excellent Double Bassist.) Benjamin really started to build up Leonard’s Double Bass repertoire during the four years of his high school life. Leonard’s good friend Irene Dip inspired him to pick up the Violin, therefore learning the instrument quickly and within a couple of months ended off playing the Bach Double Violin Concerto in D minor as his most experienced piece of music for violin in the ninth grade. A few months later he picked up on the Viola, thus being the highest level Viola player at his school at the time of learning the instrument, although people played for years and Leonard still ranked first chair violist for his school, being those he stuck to the Double bass. He also was invited to be the Double Bassist for the Philadelphia Baroque Chamber String Ensemble at Temple University, which he happily accepted for only three years because of academic issues. He was the Principal Chair of that for the whole three years he was attending, playing with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra and learning more fundamentals about the Double Bass. This is where most of Vivaldi, Bach, and other baroque composers where introduced to him as he played there music and enjoyed every aspect of picking up the various styles they had written in.Leonard knew he loved Classical Music, but a particular person came in his life and started to change an aspect of his style a little. CiaraFaye Martin was and still is his Best Friend. She has a beautiful voice and loved the way Leonard played the Piano, no matter if it is at church or at school. Ciara attended Gamp for the three years of his life. They started to perform together as their friendship grew. She had more of her own style of singing and Leonard had a classical style. They put both of these styles together and collaborated every time they perform. This is how they get their music to sound so original. Leonard was determined to only play for Ciara and she was determined to only sing for him.McCants then graduated high school in 2006, ranking number fourty-six of sixty out of his class with a G.P.A of a 1.6. After the 10th grade McCants’s grades started to slip dramatically. He had turned into a rebellious rebel in G.A.M.P by not following uniform policies everyday and by cutting class with some friends, and even started to take up smoking. Although still very gifted in music, he had become a bad seed. He was way below average and was not suppose to receive his diploma, but by the grace of his music director Jack Carr, he received his diploma and graduated with his class. His friend Ciara (although leaving G.A.M.P in 2004 and graduating from C.H.A.D the same year McCants graduated) still remaines very, very close to him and they do everything together.After high school Leonard took some time off from school. He always told his mother, he did not want to go directly into college because of his previous performance in G.A.M.P. Although his mother made him go to school in the beginning of the semester, he felt that it was too much pressure working and living home with parents who always dealt with his rebellious ways, so he moved out.Leonard moved to Strawberry Mansion, a little neighborhood in North Philadelphia. The neighborhood he moved in was hard to cope with because a lot of crime went on. This is the place where he wrote his Symphony No. 1 in D minor, about 10 Concertos for various instruments and about 3 sonatas, reflecting on the feelings he felt while living in Strawberry Mansion. Most of these collections of music which would of been his first opuses are far lost and gone because of his busy life. He either threw them away mistakenly or misplaced most of these works. Leonard continued to go to School as his mother and father wanted. There at Community College of Philadelphia he studied with a small baroque ensemble that included two clarinets, a guitar, a piano and viola which he played, a violin, and a cello. This group was under the instruction of Vivian Barton Dozer, a magnificent cello graduate of Curtis Institute. Knowing that he had much knowledge about this style of music, Leonard brought a style of “Aww†to the group. Even the teacher was amazed at some of the things that he portrayed such as sight reading experienced piano parts on sight perfectly and playing various instruments. This was amazing for his age. At that age, most kids were into hip-hop and rap, but Leonard was into classical. This made him feel very weird but unique.After a while, Leonard became lazy and stopped going to school. His parents were very displeased, but he was happy. He turned his part-time position around to a full-time position and started to focus on making a lot of money to pay bills and rent he had to pay. He felt comfortable at the stage of life he was in and did not want to make any advances, until one day he found out that his older sister who lived downstairs from him had a boyfriend who did voodoo. He finally made up his mind to leave the house. Knowing his parents were moving around the same time he was moving, he sought not to reside with them in their new house in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, but instead moved in on his Aunt, his Grandmother and his first cousin in Yeadon. He was determined not to move back home. That reason is still not yet to be determined. Although going over his parent’s house to write most of his works by electronics, most of his music was stored in his head. In Yeadon is where he wrote his next collection of music. A perfect example is his first set of Opuses, The Yeadon Collections, which was a group of eighteen concertos for various instruments including a Trombone Concerto and a Clarinet Concerto which is rare for the Baroque era music repetoire of instrumental concertos. He called his first set of opuses The Yeadon Collections on purpose. He wanted people to know where he wrote the set of works. The Yeadon Collections would have been his second set of opuses if he would of stored most of his lost works from his previous neighborhood in Strawberry Mansion. His goal was for every neighborhood he lived, there would be a number of opuses. In Yeadon, He combined most of his kept works from Strawberry Mansion and started over. All of his musical friends called him a “Black Mozart†because he never made a major dramatic mistake while writing compositions in pen.This was a stage in his life, at the age of 18, where he started to really invoke in the deepness of Vivaldi’s intentions and constantly listen to how Vivaldi made certain themes flow into sequences. Leonard’s music reflects that concept, such as his Concerto Grosso No. 3 Op. 1 in G minor for Two Violins and Cello or his Concerto Grosso No. 6 Op. 1 in A minor for Two Violins and Cello. He considered all his concertos have a beautiful slow follow up movement in contrast to his Allegros, with the solo instrument or instruments taking the full solo while, usually being a chamber string group, played quarter notes accomplamenting the soloist, often with no true Bass. This was another conception he learned from Vivaldi, who did the same in most of his Largos, Adagios, or Grave's with his Concertos between Allegros.By this time at his age, Leonard has written about 36 different concerto, 5 Orchestra pieces; Three of them being symphonies; five sonatas, and six Choral works, three being with Orchestral accomplament. He also had written a number of gospel songs for his Youth Praise Team at his church, Voices of Judah, which mainly sang inside of church because McCants did not like a lot of exposure at the time. Solo songs where collaborated with Ciara as he remade Whitney Houston’s “I Believe the Children Are Our Future†and Mary Mary’s “Still My Childâ€. He also did his own Solo works which some people yet to hear because he was a very shy person who did not like to share his music with a lot of people. He was a very confidential young man. Leonard continues to progress as he gets older, with hopes of moving back to New York very, very soon and going to The Julliard School, which he did get accepted in 2007 but refused to go because of money situations, or The Curtis Institute for things he loves best; Playing the Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello, Double Bass, Composing, and even singing. He is a very humble, generous, and soft-spoken young man who started to achieve his goal at a very young age. This is the life "so far" of Leonard McCants Jr.
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