Put a group of inner city boys together in a room. Let them use their voices. Give them a backbeat. Tell them to dance. And watch them be angels.

Angels?

Yes, angels – if the leader is Walter Turnbull and the group is the Boys Choir of Harlem, which performed Saturday to a warm and appreciative audience at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono. It’s hard not to think of angels when these boys start singing works by Handel, Bach and Mozart. Or even jazzier tunes by Scott Joplin, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington or Fats Waller. Behind the scenes, these boys may not be angels, as Turnbull is quick to say with a knowing smile and a gesture toward his graying hair.

Still, the boys choir is all about angels in some fundamental way if you consider

that for the past 33 years Turnbull has been using music as intervention in the lives of young, at-risk boys in New York City. Turnbull, a visionary whose prism is music, calls it “art as a tool for life.” Through music, Turnbull’s singers learn about self-discipline, community, character and hope. It’s not an unprecedented approach. As Turnbull knows, choirs have been used to educate boys for more than 600 years. He has just moved the methods to Harlem.

All of this coalesces at more than 100 concerts annually. With immaculate comportment, the boys ages 8 to 18, as well as older bass alumni, file onstage with their heads lifted high. And even if there are more professionally tuned choirs, it would be difficult to find one as emotionally substantive and richly entertaining as the boys choir.

Turnbull admitted Saturday that he was traveling with an abbreviated group, that some singers had been left behind at the Choir Academy of Harlem (the accredited teaching arm of the choir) to take their SATs. He asked the audience if he might lead the boys in a practice run of several choruses from Mozart’s Coronation Mass. Accompanied by the fine craft of Keith Burton on piano in the first half of the show (and with Burton and the boys choir band in the second, more-boisterous half of the show) the boys shot a pulsing halo of song through the hall.

The audience was only too happy to witness both the music and the plucky choreography that went with the pop segment of the show. In unusual numbers, listeners stayed behind in the lobby after the show to greet the members of the choir, still dressed in gospel robes, to congratulate them and thank them for spiriting a mood of angels in the neighborhood.