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You write candidly about growing up as a violin prodigy. How did early success shape your relationship with the violin – both as an instrument and as an identity?

Vijay Gupta: Being a prodigy cuts both ways. I was lucky to have parents who pushed me and teachers who moved me into places of prestige. But those were also parents I knew I could never let down, and teachers who were intensely cruel. The label only lasts as long as you never disappoint anyone. And what I was truly prodigious at wasn’t learning music quickly or memorising my Paganini Caprices. I became prodigiously good at reading a room and telling people exactly what they wanted to hear, so good that I lost track of when I was performing and when I wasn’t.

Early success is early, and successful, because of a lack of friction. Later, I learned that professionalism worked the same way: stiff upper lip. Even after I joined the orchestra, I played through a constant, burning pain – tendinitis and bursitis from performing four concerts a week for 44 weeks a year – but the deeper pain was the way I had learned how to treat my body like a kind of object. Once music became a job, I felt that it was something extracted from me, at a tremendous cost – physical, psychological and spiritual.

Success blinded me to the tools of connection I would have to build for myself later, even after I left the LA Philharmonic. For all the years I spent learning to sight-read, I had not learnt to listen. What I understand now is that I am the instrument, not only the one I get to play. The real work ahead of me is to turn myself into a kind of Stradivari, to sing and speak with the clarity and depth that reveals every layer of who I am.

At the end of my book, Restrung, I write about going back to my childhood home, after years of estrangement from my family, to find my first, tiny, 1/16-size violin in a cupboard surrounded by piles of trash. The bridge had collapsed, but the strings were still attached. Our very lives are a metaphor of stringing and restringing: we need to learn how to live in the tension.

Our very lives are a metaphor of stringing and restringing: we need to learn how to live in the tension

Vijay Gupta at the free Street Symphony concert series ‘Music With A Mission’

Through Street Symphony in Los Angeles, you have spent years bringing live music into shelters, clinics, jails and prisons. What has that work taught you about the role of a violinist beyond the concert hall?

Vijay Gupta: The great cellist Pablo Casals thought of himself as a human being first, a musician second, a cellist third. The phrase ‘beyond the concert hall’ assumes the stage is the centre and everywhere else is the margin. Making music in shelters, clinics, jails and prisons has taught me the opposite.

We forget that the concert hall is a recent invention. It was Wagner who darkened the hall at Bayreuth, sank the orchestra into a pit and trained audiences to sit in silence until the end of an act. It was never our only job to hand people a polished product to admire in the dark.

In the rooms where Street Symphony plays, no one is obligated to pretend to be moved, because no one paid for the right to enjoy what we play. If the music does nothing, they tell you, or they leave. So I stopped performing at people – as I had been trained to do – and started communicating, both as a musician and a human being.

So my work now is to bring that connection back into the concert hall, through storytelling and through music that lets us tell each other how we want to be seen. This is not about doing good beyond the concert hall. It is a reminder that the power of what we do is not a commodity to be admired. We are far more powerful than we think.

Vijay Gupta performing Reena Esmail’s ‘This Love between Us’

You write, ‘Art is not a noun’. At this point in your life, what does ‘good playing’ mean to you?

Vijay Gupta: In The Gift, the writer Lewis Hyde argues that art was never a commodity to be bought and sold, but rather a current of connection between the giver and the receiver, offering the possibility of transcendence. However, once we reduce any art to a transaction, or into a thing to be judged or valued on the market, that generous and generative spark is extinguished. Art is something that happens between people, or it does not happen at all.

Of course good playing means good technique. Technique is a form of hygiene. I am not making an excuse to play out of tune or out of time. Rote perfection that moves no one is precisely the thing a machine does better than we ever will, and yet, in an age already terrified that machines will replace us, we keep chasing, and celebrating, that which reduces us to mindless automatons. We are ruled by the binary of right and wrong, and we have forgotten what we came for.

Classical music needs a new why: ‘good playing’ is playing with intention, offered to someone who needs to hear it.

Restrung is frank about burnout and ambition – the cost of attaching one’s worth to musical achievement. What do you hope younger musicians, especially string players trying to build a life in music now, might recognise in your account of coming undone and finding a different way to make music?

Vijay Gupta: Stop chasing success on everyone else’s terms. Most of the ambition burning young players out is not even theirs. We hold up the orchestral job as the only legitimate outcome, and faculty celebrate only the students who win auditions, when we graduate far more players each year than there will ever be jobs. That is not mentorship. It is selling a lottery ticket and calling it a career.

We have also denigrated the young people who wanted to improvise, or play jazz, or write their own music, because we still believe the myth that classical music is great. The truth is, there is no such thing as classical music. It is a category invented by 19th-century Victorians, calcifying art into a museum of finished masterworks to be reproduced as perfectly as possible. And even though the early music and historically informed movements have brought back some of the fire of improvisation that informed Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, we have done little to rekindle the human and social contexts from which their masterpieces emerged.

So when I tell a young musician to be rigorous, I do not mean obedient, but rather ruthlessly curious. Play in tune, but also be in tune with yourself, the people on stage with you, and the people in the room with you. The only way to make music that matters is to insist on what matters: anything less, and we haven’t played anything worth hearing.

Anthony Bourdain never turned down a grandmother’s cooking.

“I often talk about the “Grandma rule” for travelers. You may not like Grandma’s Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked and dry—and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblet you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it’s Grandma’s turkey. And you are in Grandma’s house. So shut the fuck up and eat it. And afterward, say, “Thank you, Grandma, why, yes, yes of course I’d love seconds.”

—Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw

This isn’t about dry turkey.

It’s about not refusing something made with love.

What if we made music the same way?

I am often asked whether the people I play for on Skid Row, many of whom have never seen a violin up close, can really “enjoy” classical music. “Wouldn’t it be kinder to play them rap instead?”

(Nobody on Skid Row has ever asked me whether the people in the concert hall can enjoy Nipsey Hussle.)

The question pretends to be about access, but it is usually about permission and judgment. Who is allowed to love Bach? Who is allowed to be moved by Schubert? Who is allowed to be bored by Beethoven?

What kind of person are you if you like Katy Perry instead?

Classical music has spent a long time confusing quality with hygiene. We call a performance “good” when it is clean, controlled, accurate, bulletproof, inoffensive, and mistake-free. Which is not quality. It is quantity: the number of notes nailed, the number of errors avoided.

Talk about some dry-ass turkey.

And then we wonder why the genre is “dying.” Bach is great, so you should be moved. Mozart is great, so you should be grateful. Beethoven is great, so sit there, shut up, turn off your cell phone, and take in “the culture.”

But what happens when you aren’t moved?

Classical music has no good answer for that. It leaves the listener alone with a private shame: Maybe I didn’t understand it. Maybe I’m not educated enough. Maybe the failure is mine.

But maybe the turkey is just dry.

Has anyone actually stopped to say:

“I made this with love. I made it for you. I don’t know if it will nourish you, but my intention is to feed your soul.”

There is plenty of crappy Mozart. There are dead performances of Bach. There are Beethoven performances so bloated with self-importance you need to open a window to let the smell out. Bach would probably be astonished that we play him at all, and even more astonished that we play him like scripture.

Beethoven was not sitting around praying for urtext police. At the premiere of the “Kreutzer” Sonata, the violinist sight-read from Beethoven’s manuscript with no rehearsal while Beethoven played from memory. When the violinist improvised a flourish, Beethoven was so delighted he jumped up, embraced him, and later wrote the flourish into the score.

So much for perfection.

Genre has nothing to do with it.

There are days I want Bruckner. There are days Bruckner sounds like a numeromaniac counting leaves under trees (which is something Bruckner actually did). There are days I need Katy Perry to get me through my workout. There are days I need to crank Kendrick’s “DNA”.

Let’s stop asking the question of “the right kind of music” and focus instead on the “why” of music: the intention, the offering, and whether the offering is truly alive: was it made with care, was it made for the people in the room—rather than at them?

Whether the offering is hiding behind prestige, or if it is truly intended to nourish people?

For seventeen years, I have made music on every kind of stage—concert halls and cathedrals, clinics and county jails, shelters and showrooms. And while the notes of the music don’t change, the quality of the offering does.

The ingredients may not change, but the table does. Whether I like it or not, I play differently when I am listened to with love—and when I play with love.

On Skid Row, whether music nourishes someone is not a metaphor. People are hungry. Exhausted. Grieving. Detoxing. Waiting for housing, waiting for court, waiting for a bed, waiting for someone to say their name without suspicion. Into those rooms, music does not arrive as an argument for civilization. It arrives as an offering.

I want to love them. And the best way I know how to love someone is with music.

Are you hungry? Let me feed you.

{My book, Restrung, is now available wherever books are sold.}

The girl was dying, and yet she sat bolt upright in her hospital bed, conducting us. My bow moved in sync with sixteen other children playing through Suzuki Book Five. As I played the Vivaldi Concerto in G minor, I stood facing Ms. Behrend and, for a split second, dared to take my eyes off my teacher, who conducted us with a hawkish glare and the whirling swish of her bow. The girl seemed older than me, ancient almost, though she couldn’t have been more than twelve. Her body was worn thin, her skin gray. And yet her eyes blazed. She was carried by the music, lit from within by something that did not belong to her body. I felt it move through her and back into us, the same current passing between us.

I had never seen someone so possessed, so alive, in music. It was as if she had become the very music I was playing.

A few weeks earlier, Ms. Behrend had taken our troop of Suzuki eight-year-olds to the stage of Carnegie Hall to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of her academy, the School for Strings. We had prepared for months, playing our Suzuki tunes, and a composer named Bruce Adolphe had been hired to write a piece called Gut Feeling—the first time I played in mixed meter and stood with a living composer in the same room.

As we rehearsed, Ms. Behrend had to remind us how to perform, because the audience stretched out before us in rows of red velvet seats. “Remember, people listen with their eyes,” she said. When the spotlights came up, I couldn’t see a single one of them, and because I couldn’t see them, I had to perform at them. I didn’t know how I’d played until Dad took my brother and me to the Carnegie Deli and bought us pastrami sandwiches bigger than our heads.

After the Carnegie performance, Ms. Behrend took us to the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitative Medicine at NYU to perform for children with terminal cancers. In this room, I could see my audience. I could see them laughing and applauding, some with canes, some in wheelchairs. I could see that they were so much like us, and so different from us.

On the car ride home to the Mid-Hudson Valley, my brother asked Dad why some of the children were bald. Dad wasn’t his usual cheery, chattering self. He tapped the ash of his cigarette and said in our mother tongue, “Ekdin tora bujbi.”

One day you’ll understand.

My first practice room was Mom’s kitchen. I stood on a square of green construction paper and squeaked through “Mississippi Hot Dog” and “Run-Jimmy-Run-Jimmy” while she stirred fried onions in ghee and roasted cumin at the stove. She’d read Nurtured by Love and taken Dr. Suzuki’s recommendation that parents practice with their children to mean supervising me with a turmeric-stained spatula.

I had a Suzuki practice journal, wire-bound, with a cartoon duck that shouted the method’s aphorisms at me: beautiful tone, beautiful heart; listen, listen, listen; every child can learn. Only practice on the days you eat.

My kitchen sessions only ended when Mom placed a steaming plate of bhaath, daal, and thorkari in front of me and called me to the table in Bengali.

“Ai shona, kha.”

On the days I practiced extra, I made sure to eat extra too.

But the Mid-Hudson Valley was not a place for the round syllables of my mother tongue. When a teacher poked fun at my curled r’s and t’s, she threatened to hold me back a grade, to put me in ESL. After my brother and I got into Juilliard Pre-College, another elementary school teacher said we “might be good at music, but we would never be good at math.” So we stopped speaking Bengali at home, and Mom taught us algebra four years before we’d encounter it in school.

Home was not a safe place either. My brother and I, caught between our parents’ arguments, learned early that the air could change without warning. Once, in the middle of one of those moments, a hand snapped my bow, which burst into white horsehair. I understood, without being told, that if I kept playing, the world might hold together.

A year after I got into Juilliard, Dad pulled me from Ms. Behrend’s studio. He had seen how music had taken me to Carnegie Hall, and now, he had his eyes set on even bigger stages, which meant that my Suzuki days were over. I now had teachers who sneered at my bow grip from behind desks, or made me wait in a fifth-floor hallway for four hours, only to eat a fried chicken dinner during my lesson.

I still practiced the same way I had as a child in Mom’s kitchen—repetition—but without listening. I copied Itzhak Perlman’s fingering for the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante or played along with Isaac Stern’s Symphonie Espagnole, repeating each passage until it could be executed by rote. The music I once loved now hollowed into muscle memory.

There was still a love for music I could not reconcile with what was being asked of me. I was still chasing that current I’d felt at the Rusk Institute—in Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert—the moments where I felt most like myself, and also beyond myself. Where I could become music.

When the twin disasters of September 11 and Priceline.com caused Dad’s travel agency to fail, my parents pressed me toward medicine. After a few years of ruining Western blots and pretending to care about putative kinases, I returned to what had become the Gupta method: memorize and perform orchestral excerpts. A concertmaster told me I had to become “bulletproof.” I learned to play that way—armored, exact, nothing risked. I practiced until each piece became a series of athletic feats. Absolutely nothing could go wrong.

And nothing did, and then, everything did. I thought that winning my first orchestral audition at nineteen—becoming the youngest violinist to join a major American orchestra—would return me to that current. Instead I found myself a section violinist, playing full symphonic programs week after week, learning music just to survive. Within months, I felt a burning in my ribs that would become bursitis. Within a few years, I had become one of the orchestra’s professional drinkers.

I was numbing the pain of playing, yes—but also something I couldn’t yet name. Onstage, in the spotlight, on tour across the world—I drank to close the distance between what I was playing and what I felt. The beautiful tone. The beautiful heart. I had stopped believing they had anything to do with each other.

When I first started cold-calling clinics and shelters, I didn’t quite know why I was doing it. I had been playing for audiences in VA hospitals and chemotherapy wards across LA County, trying to move beyond the Philharmonic’s outreach concerts, which too often felt like photo ops—safe enough for a few movements of a Beethoven quartet, one donor, and a group of executives scrolling through emails.

My first attempts were no better. People fell asleep in shelters. I bombed in a state hospital. I got heckled in a county jail. I had come in assuming that training, pedigree, and profession made me the only consequential musician in the room, only to find that the room was already full of people who had made music their entire lives—not as a form of entertainment, or prestige—but as a lifeline.

The other thing that mattered in Skid Row was that I could see my audiences again, the way I’d been able to see them at the Rusk Institute. I could see what they carried, how they bore the burdens of their lives. And they could see me—more honestly than I could see myself.

“What’s eating at you, baby?”

A woman asked me this after a performance of Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet. I had no idea what she meant. Another man told me to keep walking my steps.

I wasn’t aware yet that I was becoming addicted to alcohol, or that I was using food to disappear into myself. I was using the spotlight of Disney Hall to hide my shadow. But under the fluorescent lights of clinics, and shelters, and county jails, I couldn’t hide my shadow from people who had walked through their own darknesses—who had survived the shadows of addiction, poverty, and homelessness. I had thought I was bringing the joy of great music to people surviving their darkest moments.

But after some time, the slogans of recovery—keep coming back, one day at a time, keep walking your steps—started to sound like the cartoon duck in my childhood Suzuki journal, asking for repetition and return, asking to be nurtured with love—asking me to do the unthinkable work of healing myself in order to truly heal the world.

In Skid Row, I understood something I had first felt at the Rusk Institute and then spent twenty years trying to find again: that music cannot hold the world together because of the domination of talent, imposed upon by an infallible expert—but rather, in precious, utterly fleeting moments of transcendence, shared reciprocally between musicians and their audiences.

In Skid Row clinics, shelters, and county jails, I began to learn, again, how to begin.

What was Dr. Suzuki’s hope, working with children one generation after two bombs, and still insisting on the audacity of simple, beautiful music, a soul-shaking sweetness? The more time I spent in shelters, clinics, and jails, the more I began to think that this, too, had always been part of the method, though no one had explained it to us as children.

Suzuki’s method was never only a system for producing good little violinists with high fingers and a perfect V-foot stance. It was a wager on the human being—on the possibility that attention, repetition, and nurturing love might restore dignity where the world had shattered it. The destination was never Carnegie Hall. The destination was within: in the restored relationship between a child and her own capacity, between a sound and the person it reaches, between the musician and the room. What my parents misunderstood—what I misunderstood—was that the method was already complete the moment the music passed between us and the girl in the hospital bed, her eyes blazing, conducting us home.

Perhaps our work now is to restring ourselves between these poles: from the Carnegie Halls to the Rusk Institutes, from the Skid Rows to the Disney Halls, and to find the song that happens in the tension of those broken places between us, and within us.

Beautiful tone, beautiful heart.

Originally published in the Suzuki Association of the Americas Journal, earlier this month. Deep thanks to Suzuki editor Andrew Braddock, and my friend Dr. Erik Elmgren, for their insights.

My book Restrung is finally here!

It’s surreal to imagine the content of years of old notebooks and countless Google Docs and dozens of drafts finally existing in a physical form someone can hold in their hands and put on a shelf.

(At Vroman’s Bookstore—my hometown bookstore!—in Pasadena)

Restrung grew out of wanting to tell the story of bringing music into shelters, clinics, and county jails across Southern California through my organization Street Symphony, which I founded when I was a member of the LA Philharmonic.

The book started as a guide for creating a Street Symphony “in your community”. I thought I’d be writing something about citizenship and artistry, about service and justice, about the power of music to heal and connect and transform others.

The last thing I wanted to write was a memoir.

(At the launch party of Restrung, held at Unlikely Collaborators in Santa Monica, CA)

Ernest Hemingway wrote: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

But the terrifying thing about writing just one true sentence is that once you write that truth, you can’t hide from it. That truth begins to work on you, transforming you, guiding you into a deeper sense of yourself.

Writing the truth is a lot like learning how to play in tune. And once you hear something “in tune”—the way an instrument finally sings freely in its own resonance—you can’t hide from it. The song of you has a life of its own.

And now your work, as a writer, as a listener, is to let the truth guide you into a new song of yourself.

(Signing books! From an Instagram story of my amazing colleague and mentor La Marisoul!)

“Restrung” comes from a poem by the Bengali playwright and polymath, Rabindranath Tagore, whose songs and poems I learned from my mother.

“I have spent my days in stringing and unstringing my instrument, while the song I came to sing remains unsung.” (from Gitanjali).

This song is an invitation for us to restring ourselves. I’m so honored to share it with you all.

With love,

Vijay

Nineteen years ago this week, I won my first ever orchestral audition — for the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

I was 19 and just finishing my master’s at the Yale School of Music. At the time, my parents wanted me to be a doctor. They wanted me to put money on the table in a reasonable and guaranteed profession. I knew that joining an orchestra was the only way I was going to be able to convince my parents that a life in music was worth it.

I remember begging my dad for the money to buy a plane ticket. His first reaction was total dismissal and contempt. “We trained you to be a soloist,” he said. “Now you’re going to sit in the back of an orchestra like some bum?”

At the time, I wanted nothing more than to play that music. I wanted Mahler and Brahms and Schumann and Mendelssohn and Mozart. I wanted nothing more than to be in that music.

So I did the only thing I thought I could do: win one of the highest-paying orchestral jobs in the country.

I thought that would show them.

By all accounts, it was a dream job. And for many, it still is a dream job. But just a few weeks into that dream job, I was starting to live a nightmare.

The love I once felt for music that made me weep sacred tears felt like a chore, rote and calcified, a source of terror and not awe. I felt betrayed by my body, by myself, and worst of all by this music I had once loved.

It took me 12 more years to feel brave enough to leap into the void and leave that dream job.

I still want to play Mahler. I still want to play Beethoven. I still want to play all that great music.

There are times I think: could I have managed my energy differently when I was in the orchestra? Could I have handled that one colleague who was being a terrible pain in the insert-body-part-here differently?

There is a feeling of regret, and sometimes guilt and shame, around whether I could have just handled it better.

But it’s okay for your motivations and your dreams to change.

I think back to that 19-year-old kid, 19 years ago. All I want to tell him is: go for it.

And it’s okay for your dreams to change.

You can always find your way back to what you love.

My book Restrung comes out on Tuesday. You can pre-order it here.

I first encountered Skid Row by mistake, as a teenager learning to drive in downtown LA under the rather terrifying auspices of my Dad. Because I was too afraid to make left turns, I kept taking rights, and ended up driving past tents and tarps and eventually, thousands of people living the worst days, months, and years of their lives.

At first, I saw only squalor and poverty. But after years of making music in clinics, shelters, and reentry centers in Skid Row, I came to realize that this was a place where the most broken and fragile among us had a real chance to start over, to begin again, to practice the possibility of possibility.

And Skid Row is where I would, myself, begin again.

Here is my editorial, in full. You can read the full piece here.

I tell the complete story of how I started making music in Skid Row in my forthcoming book, Restrung, which comes out June 9.

Please pre-order it today.

“Thank God someone is doing something for those indigents.”

Across an elegant Bel-Air dining table, a real estate developer raised his wine glass. Not daring to say a word, I tapped mine against his. I knew his firm had just bought up land in downtown Los Angeles, tightening the noose around vital social services, the last lifeline for his so-called “indigents.”

At the time, I was the youngest violinist ever hired by the L.A. Philharmonic, groomed from childhood to perform and excel for the city’s wealthy elite. Just blocks from Walt Disney Concert Hall, tens of thousands of people slept outside on Skid Row — the largest concentration of unhoused Americans in the country.

For the last 17 years, I have made music between Disney Hall and Skid Row — performing Beethoven for billionaires on Grand Avenue, and playing for those living on San Julian Street — surviving the worst days, months and years of their lives.

Yet, on that street somehow named for the patron saint of hospitallers and fiddlers, amid people recovering from addiction, incarceration and generations of crushing poverty, I’d encounter some of the most incredible human beings — and musicians — I’ll ever meet.

A homeless combat veteran — and an excellent tenor — once told me that Skid Row is the end of the line, where “people come to die.” This is the Skid Row that comes to mind for most: acute crisis, newest arrivals, tents and tarps, the Skid Row of news conferences and poverty porn.

When candidates in the L.A. mayoral race mention “Skid Row,” they’re referring to the visible crisis. They have plans for that Skid Row — sweeps, shelter beds, Inside Safe, encampment clearances. We’ve seen similar plans from previous mayors fail again and again — public spending on homelessness in L.A. has surged into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually over the last decade, while more than 75,000 people across L.A. County still remain unhoused.

What almost nobody running for the mayor’s office says is that Skid Row is not simply one of America’s largest homeless communities, and a crisis that needs to be solved. It is also one of America’s largest informal systems of rehabilitation, recovery, psychiatric triage, reentry and mutual survival that needs to be sustained.

A clinical outreach worker told me that Skid Row can also be the beginning of a new life. When I first started cold-calling clinics and shelters in 2010, wanting to put on concerts for people who would never be able to afford a ticket to see the Phil play at Disney Hall, I was overwhelmed by what I found: the Midnight Mission, the Union Rescue Mission, the Downtown Women’s Center, the clinics and reentry programs — organizations doing this work long before the current generation of politicians held office, all staffed largely by people recovering from their own years on Skid Row.

I’ve watched every mayor in L.A. run on homelessness, and I’ve seen hundreds of millions of tax dollars dissolve into lawyer fees, bureaucracy and craven photo-ops. The truest integrity I have found in this city lives in its underpaid social workers, security guards and shelter staff.

And then there is the Skid Row nobody campaigns on: the one that keeps people from ending up on the street, and the one that keeps people from returning to the street once they’ve left. The people in a 400-square-foot apartment with the Skid Row Housing Trust, a Section 8 unit east of Interstate 110, a sober living facility in South L.A. — whose stability depends on a housing voucher, a medication refill, a counselor who still answers the phone. One missed paycheck, one psychiatric break, one hospital visit from San Julian Street.

This is where L.A. keeps failing — and has been failing longest, because it is the least visible. Homelessness is not a crime. It is collective apathy made flesh. This is the consequence of a city that looks away: The poorest are left to carry the weight of a failure that belongs to all of us.

A woman I once met was living on that third Skid Row. She rode three buses a day across L.A. just to keep her name on a housing wait list, and still made time to sit in the front row of every Street Symphony concert at the Midnight Mission, in a freshly laundered pink tracksuit, calling me “Sugar.” Between movements of a Brahms Quintet, she told me how the clarinet sounded like light coming from the ground.

After the concert, she took my hand and told me how she’d lost her job when a corporate merger eliminated her position, and then she had lost her apartment.

“Homelessness is a full-time job,” she said. At the end of concerts, this woman would sometimes slip a folded $20 bill into my pocket. It was money from her General Relief — a mere $221 per month. Meaning, it was $20 she’d have to do without, for the rest of the month. I would plead with her to take it back. She never did. “No, baby” she’d say. “This is my concert.”

That is the part of Los Angeles I wish more people understood. Not just the suffering, but the humanity that survives inside it. Not just the tents, but the fragile ecosystems of care holding thousands of lives together every day.

The man with the wine glass is still out there, raising a toast to “doing something” for the “indigents” from a room insulated from the consequences — and the city has been governing from that same remove for 50 years. We criminalize and displace the people whose suffering makes us uncomfortable, because their fragility mirrors our own, and that is easier to clear than to confront.

The next mayor gets to decide whether L.A. protects the ecosystem that has spent decades doing what no policy has managed. That ecosystem doesn’t solve homelessness, but it refuses to let the people inside it disappear. The future of this city will not be determined by how effectively we hide suffering. It will be determined by whether we can build a Los Angeles where fewer people disappear from one another in the first place.

Vijay Gupta, a violinist, is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, the founder of Street Symphony and the author of “Restrung, A Memoir of Music and Transformation.”

I was a teenager with perfect pitch, a nearly perfect memory, and somewhere around fifteen thousand hours of practice living in my hands — hours that had not, it turned out, immunized me against that word. He didn’t say wrong. He didn’t say bad. He said approximate: you are always just missing the thing you are reaching for.

I spent the next twenty years trying to close that gap by becoming bulletproof.

A famous concertmaster once told me I had to become “bulletproof” before I could survive an audition for a professional orchestra.

The “bulletproof” framework does address tangible, important issues critical to a performance career: auditions do demand near-perfect performances of excerpts, in extremely competitive, high-stakes environments. Soloists do have to be infallible. An orchestra’s principal trumpet needs to have nerves of steel to start Mahler 5 from complete silence. Performers collapse under pressure because they haven’t trained for the conditions of performance. The science is legitimate. The practice strategies work. I am not arguing with the research.

I am arguing with the metaphor.

“Bulletproof” means impenetrable. You have sealed yourself against whatever might get in. And the tragedy of that image — the one I lived for two decades inside a major American orchestra — is that what you seal out is not just fear and doubt and the shaking hands before a concerto. You seal out feeling. You seal out the audience. You seal out the music itself, which needs a permeable surface to pass through you and reach the people in the room.

I became bulletproof. I won the audition at nineteen, the youngest violinist hired by a major American orchestra at the time. And within a few years I was one of the orchestra’s professional drinkers, because the armor that kept me from falling apart onstage also kept me from feeling anything while I played. Twenty-five thousand hours of rote, mindless practice had made me formidable.

They had not taught me, however, how to be present.

The Latin root of confidence is confidere — con, an intensifier, plus fidere, to trust, from the same root that gives us faith, fidelity, fiduciary. To be confident, in the original sense, is not to be impervious. To be confident is to place full trust in something before you know whether that trust is warranted.

That is softness. That is the willingness to remain open to an outcome you cannot control, because your fidelity to the work — and to yourself inside the work — runs deeper than your need for protection from failure.

There is a difference between practicing to prove something and practicing to know yourself. The first is armor. The second is the slow, unglamorous work of learning what you actually sound like — not what the teacher demanded, not what the audition committee needed, but what lives in you when you stop performing and start listening.

I didn’t understand this until I was in my thirties, playing chamber music in county jails and shelters in Los Angeles — rooms where credentials meant nothing, where the music had to arrive honestly or not at all. In those rooms I couldn’t be bulletproof. The people listening had already been through whatever I was trying to armor myself against. They could see straight through performance to the person holding the violin, and what they were waiting for — what they responded to, every time — was not technical perfection but genuine contact.

One woman asked me, after a performance of the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, “What’s eating at you, baby?”

She wasn’t asking about my intonation.

I don’t want to be bulletproof anymore.

I want to walk onto a stage having practiced not toward impermeability but toward intimacy — with the music, with the people in the room, with the specific, irreducible, approximate version of myself that shows up on any given night. Confidence in the fidere sense: a deep fidelity with oneself, steady enough to stay open, curious rather than defended, a permeable membrane transparent to the music itself.

The bulletproof model asks: how do I make sure nothing goes wrong?

I am asking a different question now: what becomes possible when I stop trying to shield myself against my own humanity?

Let every note be approximate. Play anyway.

Sixteen years ago today, I gave a TED Talk that changed my life. I was twenty-two, delivering this speech before a roomful of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, artists and filmmakers—some of them later friends and funders who encouraged me to launch Street Symphony, an organization dedicated to making music for more people like Nathaniel Ayers, the subject of my talk and the subject of the book and movie The Soloist, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx. This talk also launched me into a life as a professional speaker, and over the last sixteen years, I’ve been lucky enough to share the power of music with communities, companies, and campuses all over the world.

But the truth is, I’ve never been able to watch this talk all the way through. Even now, even while creating this post, I’ve cringed at how cocky and sure I seem, how much I needed myself to believe the words I was saying, how hard I was looking for the standing ovation I got at the end, how hard I was trying at everything: to be good, to be loved, to be enough.

I wish I had said more in that talk about how, when I started playing for Nathaniel backstage at Disney Hall and he began having a manic episode, part of me knew exactly what to do. I wish I had been brave enough during that talk to say that I had grown up around instability and turbulence, how there was rarely a moment of peace or quiet in the chaos of a demanding, often violent family life—and that always, my solution, ever since I had been a small child, was to put my head down and play the violin. And so, when Nathaniel scared me—by talking about chlorine gas and setting his Skid Row bedroom on fire—all I did was what felt completely and totally natural to me: to play Beethoven.

Nathaniel became my guide to Skid Row, one of my life’s greatest teachers. Because of him, I started looking for more people like him. I thought there might be hundreds, if not thousands, of Nathaniels living in LA. I told myself that I wanted to find more people like him—people living in shelters and clinics and county jails and state hospitals—people grappling with the untold horrors of poverty and incarceration and homelessness. People I saw as “the other.” People I thought I could help.

But in searching for the thousands of Nathaniels, I actually encountered thousands of “my-selves”: thousands of talented, aching, dedicated musicians who wanted to find a sense of meaning through their art. Musicians who knew that music was more than entertainment, who knew that music could be a lifeline of connection, belonging, and hope. And it was those musicians—from Skid Row and Disney Hall and the world in between those irreconcilable poles of society—who became my new family, my friends, my lifelines, who taught me how to restring myself and how to begin again.

This is the reason I wrote my book Restrung: that in trying to make something beautiful happen for other people, we find what we have been looking for for ourselves.

If you’d like to watch the full talk, you can do so here. Forgive me if I don’t join you.

If you’d like to pre-order my book, Restrung, please choose from a bookseller of your choice at this link.

Why I make music:

All music making is really prayer.
All we are really doing, when we practice, is to practice on ourselves: to pull our attention inward, toward the holy within us, and to welcome the Listener, whether incarnated in the individual, or in the collective audience, or, as was so often the case for Bach, the divine Listener for whom he wrote and dedicated his life’s work.

Practice is not just the application of skill upon the body of an instrument. It is to become oneself the instrument. It is to be the field of change on which attention can manifest a greater will or purpose. And it is our calling to be open to that will, to be receptive to that Geist, the guest, the ghost, to guide us.

I pray through the violin. Holding the instrument, listening to the voice that flows through it, that is my prayer.

That is the way I pay attention to the world around me: to know the health of my soul, to know not only if I am playing in tune, but if I am being in tune.

Today’s currency is not money; it is attention. It is the most precious resource we have. Listening, praying, attending to the voice that guides us to make music more fully and wholly than ever before: this is the voice that calls us to make, to create, to release the justifications placed on our art, because they are the same as the justifications placed on being holy. We all pray the way we pray. Some pray in words. Some pray in the far cathedral of the mountains. Some listen to the still, small voice in open, empty rooms. Others listen while standing side by side in community with one another.

Komm, Heiliger Geist is the hymn set in this music, a hymn known not only to Bach, but to nearly everyone in his devoutly Lutheran world. In that way, he was not simply creating expression, but bringing music alive in another person. That is our work: to bring music alive in another being, to plant a seed of context within them, even if that context is our own interpretation, and to bring awe alive.

The fugue does not argue this prayer; it enacts it. One voice calls, another answers, and attention is sustained not through force, but through listening.

The sacred exists within us, and it exists in our listener. Our true work as musicians is to bring the sacred alive between us: undefined by genre, undefined by taste or class, undefined by gatekeepers who would hold the sacred at bay in pursuit of the next dollar.

Our art is limitless, because we are limitless.

I do not know if it is true that Bach’s violin music was found in a butcher’s shop, wrapping cuts of meat and cheese. But it is easy to imagine that Bach did not need the adoration of audiences to know his why. Of course he hoped to make more money during his life, but his why was the sacred within, the sacred between. How might we learn from a person so motivated by the sacred? How might life be lived differently knowing that this music we love and study came from someone flawed, hurting, aching, searching for meaning and resonance, hoping to make something that met the majesty of God and the universe, and offered a simple truth: I was here. I saw you. I helped others see you too.

And we expect audiences to simply love what they do?

A few disclaimers right off the bat: I’m not saying “ban auditions.”

I don’t foresee a musical system without a basic test of skill and aptitude. But where do we go after that? Auditions—literally, hearing, listening—should be only one pillar in a series of tests to understand one’s musicianship, and in the case of orchestras—their humanity.

We shouldn’t just be basing our entire profession on how someone plays, but rather, on why they play: on what they have to say, on their human and musical intention, on their ability to tell their story through the transcendent, transformative power of expression.

Since recent posts on this topic, hundreds of you have written to me on Instagram saying that you’re “classical musicians in recovery,” or that you found the system of conforming to the narrow strictures of conservatory education “suffocating.”

But I can already hear some of you asking: Vijay, screw this touchy feely shit. Playing in an orchestra is hard. People have to play in tune, with a good sound, and with consistent rhythm, with an often-unreliable conductor. I’d rather have a slightly unimaginative colleague who can play everything perfectly than some dilettante who thinks they’re an “artiste.” We’re in the trenches here, dude.

I used to think this way. But although orchestras are modeled on military hierarchies, what we do is not a matter of life and death (except for the person taking the audition, that is.)

But, I get it. A certain decorum is necessary. We don’t want a second violinist who flies off the rails and a violist who starts improvising from the 2nd stand. A certain amount of suspending one’s individual agency is required to make music—and civilization—work. Agreements between people matter, and an audition can be a way of understanding whether or not someone is at the level required to join a specific ensemble, school, or elite community. Agreed.

I’ve taken auditions since I was six years old. I won my first orchestral audition for the LA Philharmonic when I was 19. I spent four years on a high-level audition panel, judging literally thousands of applicants for dozens of jobs. I heard plenty of perfect auditions from people who later turned out to be complete assholes. Often, I was willing to put up with their assholery because they were incredible musicians. But other times, the person who played a flawless audition had nothing to say as a musician, and sitting onstage with them was innocuous at best, and excruciating at worst. And other times, the most creative and soulful players were the ones who would get “cut” in auditions, or be unable to win “move-up” auditions, because although they were phenomenal artists and communicators, they were poor audition-takers. And needless to say, the good audition-takers were the only audition-winners.

Classical music has outsourced its own long-term flourishing to a system of ranking and judgment, creating a system of compliance. This leads to long-term burnout and bitterness among musicians. Until we interrogate what auditions actually reward—and what they systematically exclude—we will continue to train obedience where we claim to be cultivating art.

Our culture of compliance, disguised as professionalism and perfectionism, has turned us into human computers. And now, in the world of AI, we’re absolutely right to fear for our own relevance.

If we want ourselves, and our art, to survive, we have to learn how to be authentic, whole people—meaning: we have to learn how to think better, think again, and think together.

What we need now is a culture of collaboration—still possible within the hierarchic structures of an orchestra—in which people work together toward a shared intention.

Goodhart’s Law

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

When we assess qualities in isolation—intonation, rhythm, articulation—and turn them into endpoints, we lose sight of the music itself and begin to judge those matters in isolation. But as Plato said about art and competition in The Republic, if we make music about right and wrong, we lose the spiritual and human impact of the art itself.

Whereas musicians are athletes, music is not athletics.

The truth is, a technical metric is just easier to measure because it’s objective: a “good” sound, a “good” intonation, “bulletproof” technique—all easy to tally onto a page. But ask that musician to tell the panel who else they’re playing with during that phrase?

Once yielding and conforming become the target, the system rewards conformity itself.

Auditions don’t create better musicians. They create better audition-takers.

Auditions are the mechanism through which the logic of compliance is enforced. Instead of asking who listens most deeply, who will be a good colleague, or who can sustain a musical life over decades.

Instead, the one who makes the least errors, who plays the most inoffensively—the one who survives the most rounds—wins. This is trial by elimination, selecting for the lowest common denominator.

This, of course, is mirrored in preparation and training upstream: repertoire is reduced to fragments, interpretation is flattened into “correctness,” and musicians learn to play for a panel rather than for an ensemble or a piece unfolding in time. But with extraction, we lose musical intention: excerpts become nothing more than a technical drill, as opposed to embodying a composer’s intention. A rote exercise, not music.

Auditions do not create better musicians; they produce specialists in surviving auditions, optimized for precision in isolation rather than musicianship in context.

Technique ≠ musicianship, but musicianship is built on technique.

I recently made a reel saying that “Anthony Bourdain never turned down a grandmother’s cooking, because he didn’t want to reject something made with love.” But some of my readers interpreted this as an attack on good technique. Technique matters. Playing with love, with intention, with care is not an excuse to play out of tune. Your grandmother wouldn’t serve you a poorly prepared meal. She’d still sauté the onions correctly, and make sure the seasoning was perfect. One could even say that her skill had transcended technique: in a sense, her cooking was so perfect that all you tasted was love.

The crucible of an audition might very well be a good metric for testing how a trumpet player will function when the solo from Petrushka comes around and their adrenaline is pumping so fiercely that they forget their elbow from their…you know. That happens in concerts. And the show must go on, and things must be infallible, and yes, auditions can weed out ones whose nerves aren’t a steel trap.

However, this is a chicken-and-egg scenario. Auditions—and the years of preparation for auditions—can also cause those very same nervous breakdowns in the first place. I have spent years trying to undo the neural wiring caused by teachers who made me feel nervous, mistaking their voices as my own: don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up, don’t fuck up. This isn’t about technique or discipline. For me, discipline now means finding a different why: not to “not fuck up,” but to find a way bigger musical and spiritual reason to be onstage. The technique I practice is a kind of hygiene, a conveyance that helps me transmit a musical intention through my instrument.

Technique is not the same thing as musicianship. It is a means, not an end. When technical mastery becomes the primary signal of value, it begins to crowd out other forms of intelligence that are harder to isolate but essential to the art: listening, judgment, responsiveness, an understanding of one’s role inside a larger whole.

Technique makes music possible. It does not, on its own, make music meaningful.

Winning an audition ≠ surviving the job

I recently saw a Facebook post from a prominent faculty member of an east-coast conservatory (who, to my knowledge, has never played in a professional orchestra) congratulating a number of their students who won orchestral jobs. Good for the students, good for the faculty member—but also, kinda crappy for the rest of the studio. The message is clear: you’re expected to win, and you get the gold star of a mention only if you’re worthy of being mentioned.

But here’s the kicker. I know that several of the young musicians who won jobs didn’t get tenure. Some ended up with overplaying injuries. Conservatories are training musicians to win auditions because that’s the metric that matters to them (and gets those faculty members tenure and recognition and their own version of a gold star)—but what happens when that young musician feels alienated from themselves, from the music they play, and often, from their very bodies?

Winning an audition is treated as the finish line, though it is only the point of entry. The skills required to succeed in that moment—hyper-control, isolation, perfection under scrutiny—are not the same skills required to sustain a life inside an orchestra. Once the job begins, musicians must navigate hierarchy, monotony, politics, injuries and a shifting sense of purpose over decades, often with little guidance beyond an expectation of “professionalism.”

When training stops at audition readiness, institutions inherit players optimized for short-term success but ill-equipped for the psychological, relational, and artistic realities of the work itself.

I won my first audition and within a week, I had a starting salary of six figures, and after 22 months of being the literal nicest guy, I got tenure, a job for life, with benefits and a pension and dental. And I had never been more miserable—or checked my bank account more often—in my entire life. It took me five years in that orchestra to be brave enough to ask myself—“do I feel fulfilled here?”—and another seven years to work up the courage, and the additional income streams, to finally leave. And now, seven years after leaving, I still miss the music, and my colleagues. Leaving felt like betraying both of them. The musicians of the LA Phil, and of countless professional American orchestras, are some of my closest friends—nearly family.

I know I was young, and naive, and that I would do things differently now. There were plenty of other musicians in the LA Phil who knew how to take care of themselves. Some of my colleagues ran ultramarathons and others did yoga vinyasas backstage. Curious percussionists studied the scores during rehearsals, and veteran first violinists would sometimes play the second violin parts from memory during rehearsal, because they had probably played that symphony hundreds, if not thousands, of times. They had found a way to sustain themselves in the job—whereas I had only been taught how to win.

So then what’s the solution?

If compliance creates cultures of obedience, leading to bitterness and burnout, we need a new culture. As I mentioned in a previous post, culture is a series of agreements between people. We’ve agreed to test each other based on auditions. So what are the agreements we can make now to actually improve our field, our experiences, and most importantly, our relationships?

Collaboration creates ownership.

When I was 17, I worked in a top neuroscience laboratory at the Harvard Institutes of Medicine, studying the biochemical pathway of Parkinson’s Disease. I wasn’t a very good scientist. I was impetuous and quickly bored, filled with teenage ennui, far more interested in watching Revenge of the Sith for the umpteenth time than reading the latest article in Nature Neuroscience.

But the scientists who worked around me were masters, not only of their own fields, but of collaboration. They held weekly seminars comparing research and findings—often, their failures. It struck me that they were often failing into the next stage of their findings, failing toward a better understanding of the immensity of Parkinson’s Disease.

And the shared vision of the labs—to cure Parkinson’s Disease—was the great motivator. Everyone, even scientists in rival labs, were on the same journey. I’ll never forget watching one Polish scientist when a rival lab published a series of findings similar to hers before she’d had a chance to get her work peer-reviewed, meaning that she’d lost years of work. She popped a bottle of champagne anyway, celebrating their findings: her goal wasn’t to win, it was to cure paralysis. She knew her why.

I know that some orchestras, and certain sections within orchestras, have much better cultures of collaboration than violin sections. Andrew Bain, the Principal Horn of the LA Phil, once told me that every section in Melbourne had weekly meetings to assess their performance, and principal players had additional meetings. In the LA Phil, I had colleagues who would play for me before auditions, or play with me, and I ended up living for those interactions, instead of the ones I was supposed to be having onstage. And of course, there were certain conductors and soloists who would make me forget that I was even at work—who would make such beautiful music come out of all of us that we remembered what all the hard work was for. All of these moments felt like collaboration: not just where the individual components added up seamlessly, but where the transcendent whole orchestra was so much more than the sum of its parts.

When musicians are invited into shared responsibility—listening, shaping, responding—they develop a sense of self-agency. Meaning emerges through relationship, not by following someone else’s version of success or fulfillment.

True collaboration builds commitment, even through disappointment.

Let’s build “collaboratories.”

If conservatories and institutions of performing art are meant to “preserve culture” (whose culture, and to what end—see my previous post)—then what we need now are “collaboratories”: places where musicians are encouraged to develop self-agency, to fail openly, to identify and advocate for their own taste, style, and yes—technical rigor—toward a better why.

One such example is my own organization, Street Symphony, which brings music into shelters, clinics, county jails, and state prisons across Southern California. I started Street Symphony with musicians from the LA Phil—first as an excuse to play more Beethoven quartets—and later, as a way to understand whether music could be a form of medicine, delivered to people who I thought needed the most healing. Of course, it was me who needed the healing, but that’s a subject for another time.

My motivations behind Street Symphony—its mission and vision statements—have changed over time: first, it was “music for the underserved,” and later, “music as social justice.” Now, it’s “to share the catalytic power of music,” and I love that word “catalyst,” because it implies something scientific and specific: a catalyst lowers the “activation energy” of a reaction, making it easier for things to connect, whether those things are cells and nutrients in a body or chemical reactions in a flask.

Music is catalytic in that sense, and so are musicians: we bind ourselves to each other, to lower the activation energy of communication, maybe even of transcendence—making it easier for us to remember who we are, what we love, to have access to our emotions and memories and imaginings that leave us more whole, more human.

So instead of performing at our audiences, we think about making music with them: we stop between movements and ask them what they’re hearing, what they’re thinking and feeling. And the way that they respond to us changes the way we play. The music lowers the activation energy of difference between us—with the intention that when we return to make music at The Midnight Mission or the Downtown Women’s Center, we’re returning not to a stranger, to the Other, but to a Friend, instead, to someone with whom we have a relationship.

Another way I think about this is in my piano trio, the Darshan Trio: Dominic Cheli and Yoshika Masuda and I don’t always agree—and that’s the point. We know that the intention of what we do isn’t to assert our own egos, but to allow for each of our musical instincts to be voiced, and then to choose—sometimes in the heat of the moment of a performance—how we wish to collaborate. Even our disagreement is essential to our collaboration: if we were to only seek agreement, we would be complying, and the music we play, the music we love, deserves better.

Of course, I haven’t invented grassroots non profits or chamber music, but these are just two examples of how I practice sharing, and creating a sense of agency and collaboration—not just for myself, but for everyone involved in the process—so that the music itself is more whole, more beautiful, more precious.

Let’s create places in conservatories where musicians are encouraged to develop self-agency, to fail openly, explore various styles and schools of playing, and discover their own voice. Let’s give musicians in orchestras a week of service off in order to intern with the marketing, development, or administrative departments. Let’s add an interview round to auditions. Let’s encourage curiosity and create trust and relationship—through collaboration.

It is not impossible to do this in ensembles. My friends at 45th Parallel in Portland, or at Chatter in ABQ, are self-determining, and self-led. The musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic are encouraged and supported when they form their own ensembles (thinking of the Berlin Phil horns, or cellos.) Adding an interview round to an audition would not take anything away from the test of technical aptitude of an excerpt round. Of course, it would require a bit of coordination, and more time from a hard-pressed committee and music director—but this boils down to a question of values. If an orchestra can organize a performance of a Beethoven Symphony, it can certainly organize an additional round of its audition process to understand a potentially-permanent member of its musical family in a more human, whole way.

Classical music does not suffer from a lack of rigor. If anything, it has perfected rigor. What it lacks is a sustaining reason—a good enough “why”—for that rigor to exist beyond compliance and survival. Without a better why, discipline becomes hollow, excellence becomes brittle, and professionalism turns into a substitute for meaning. A better why does not weaken standards. It gives rigor something to serve: it reminds musicians that the work we get to do is worth inhabiting over a lifetime.

Classical music needs a new “why.”

“I have played many pieces on the piano for over 70 years and it is never the same. That means every time I have played the piece, I have learned something. Maybe a small detail, maybe a small connection. So I play the piece today and I learn three or four elements that I hadn’t seen quite like that before. Therefore, when I play it again tomorrow, I know more, but I have to start from zero because the sound evaporates, the sound is gone. ”

- Daniel Barenboim

There is no such thing as classical music.

It’s a clunky marketing term attempting to peddle the ineffable.

Those of us who are lucky enough to make music—whether or not it’s our profession—know something of what Maestro Barenboim says above: that this music we play is not dead, in fact, it’s not even a thing, but a live-current of emotion and connection that we hope, one day, if we’re very lucky, we will be able to share with people.

But how does one justify selling the ineffable? What is the current why of classical music?

We call it culture.

We call it excellence.

We call it enrichment.

We’re wrong on all three counts. And it’s costing us—not just in the box office, or in the public eye—but because we’ve traded transcendence for some vague notion of “tradition.”

Don’t call it culture.

Whose culture, exactly?

Let’s take the most performed composers. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven: Is our work to preserve their culture? If so, classical musicians would be trained as improvisers. We’d rarely perform in concert halls. Sure, we’d still be constantly hustling for the next gig, and working incredibly hard to make ends meet, but if our work is truly live into the image and likeness of the artists who created the works we love, then we’d be trained as culture-creators, and not just culture-replicators.

In truth, classical musicians are culture-preservers, and in that, we may have a similar role to curators, conservators—essentially, a role of stewardship. But just like the stewardship of nature, or of historical archives, stewardship is not just the act of keeping a thing behind glass, but true engagement. Museum curators create modern-day narratives from ancient things. Archives must be activated and performed for us to learn from history. Nature doesn’t just thrive because we leave it alone.

Culture is an ongoing agreement between people, a quality of systems. Cultures can be toxic or nourishing, but at the end of the day, culture is a decision made by a person, or group of people, in order to accomplish a specific end goal. In conservatory, musicians may learn a culture of rigor and discipline and respect, but really, they’re learning a set of behaviors that allows them to be agreeable and reliable in a field which robs them of creative agency.

One could say that the culture of classical music is stifling, but just like systems, cultures are elegantly designed to generate the outcomes they do. In other words, culture is a choice.

Here’s the thing, though: culture can be created. The Amazon isn’t just a forest, it’s a garden.

Culture is what we cultivate.

Without tending and pruning—culture turns into a cult.

Don’t call it excellence.

Classical musicians are trained for compliance, not creativity. We operate under the fundamental myth that if we keep our heads down, practice our excerpts, and sound like our teachers, that “success” is guaranteed: a job in an orchestra, a top spot in a competition, a Strad, management, and tour dates.

And when we don’t succeed, it’s our fault: we didn’t practice hard enough, or long enough, or well enough. And if we express interest in anything beyond the narrow band of self-defined “excellence,” we’re considered “unserious.”

After my recent Instagram reel on this topic, I received hundreds of comments and DMs that flooded my inbox from students and ex-classical musicians. One wrote to me saying that their undergraduate French Horn professor in a major conservatory dissuaded them from learning jazz harmony, because they would be considered a “dilettante.”

One parent wrote to say that her son, who had been deeply devoted to music his entire life, grew so discouraged in his lessons that he learned to stop asking questions. He decided that curiosity itself was a liability.

To me, that’s utterly tragic: does playing in tune, or with a good embouchure, or a perfect bow grip merit the death of curiosity?

Under the guise of excellence, talented musicians are drained of their agency, and instead, made to replicate a narrow band of rote technical mastery in order to succeed in a marketplace that, according to this 2024 report from Stanford Economic Review, has rapidly decreasing stability, funding, and impact.

Don’t get me wrong: discipline matters. What we do is incredibly hard. Excellence is essential, and playing the notes—living into their infinite possibility—is a matter of personal integrity.

But it took me years of rewiring myself to realize that practice is a kind of spiritual hygiene of attention, a means to an end: if my audience only hears my technique then I haven’t done my job. The greatest performers aren’t just excellent “re-creators” of the notes, they’re showing with something to say. They move me—buoyed by their excellence—into something I didn’t know I had the capacity to feel.

For all of the technical and musical excellence taught in conservatory, we’ve abandoned the search for our own humanity.

How do we use our excellence in order to make ourselves—and the world around us—better?

Don’t call it enrichment.

Most of you might be coming to this page with the knowledge that for the last sixteen years, I’ve run an organization dedicated to bringing music to shelters, clinics, and county jails. I gave a TED Talk called “Music is medicine, music is sanity.” You might be here because you think I’m the posterboy for the “healing power of music.”

For a long time, I thought I was that, too.

Yes, music heals. Music rewires the brain. Music lowers cortisol. Music gives us purpose and connection and meaning. Yes, experiencing awe makes us live longer.

But you know what else does that? Going to the gym. Eating well. Visiting a national park. Calling a friend.

Sure, music is medicine, but Vicks will always outperform Vivaldi.

The problem with enrichment is the way that it’s been weaponized to justify fundraising dollars where the “culture” argument fails. The stated argument goes like this: “if audiences are just not well-educated enough to come to our hall, we’ll go to them.”

The unstated argument is that poor people need our music. And even after the Mozart Effect was debunked, the “enrichment” argument found a sturdier justification: it may not make people better—but it reliably makes funders feel better about themselves.

The cellist Allegra Montanari, and the founder of Chicago-based organization Sharing Notes calls this “drive-by Beethoven.”

For many performing arts organizations, orchestras, and conservatories, this has quietly become the business model. As ticket sales fall, foundation funding is sustained through programs labeled “social innovation,” “education,” “community engagement,” or “outreach.” These efforts raise real money, but it rarely circulates back to the communities they reference, instead propping up the same operational and artistic structures that exclude them.

This is just “voluntourism” at best, and cultural colonialism at worst.

Accountability check: I know this, because I did this.

When I started Street Symphony, I thought I was bringing the “healing power of music to the underserved.”

(That was literally our mission statement. Gag.)

But the minute I stepped into Skid Row shelters and clinics, county jails and hospitals, state prisons and asylums, I met a very different kind of audience than the passive connoisseurs of culture I had become accustomed to over a life of performing in concert halls.

In Skid Row, people talked to us, and asked question, and demanded to know why we were playing the music we played, why Beethoven’s music sounded the way it did, why it made them feel that way, and why on earth we didn’t know any songs they knew—and then, they’d start singing for us.

In those communities, I felt like I lost control of the music I was playing, and that was the point: because music isn’t something to be controlled, but to be offered.

It’s a mutual, reciprocal exchange of attention. And, as Simone Weil said, “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”

I wasn’t there to play for people. I was there to pray with them.

I wasn’t the expert, the leader, or the healer. I was the participant, the accompanist, the one who was beginning to understand his own wounds, with another person.

And in that sense, I was learning how to practice compassion: com, passio—to suffer, with. To accompany someone, and see myself in them.

Over the last sixteen years of bringing music to Skid Row, my “why” has changed. I realize now that I get to come into a community—or a concert hall—as a guest, because I get to leave. And my question, at either pole of society, is to ask “how do I leave this place a little more whole?”

There are a lot of ways to do that.

I prefer music.

What began as a small group of musicians showing up at shelters and service sites in Los Angeles has grown into year-round work in shelters, clinics, re-entry centers, and county jails. Hundreds of professional artists have taken part. Thousands of neighbors have made music alongside them. There are no stages, no tickets, and no separation between performer and listener. Everything we do is completely free, and completely precious.

The currency of trust is relationship, and relationships can only grow through sustained proximity.

Over the last decade, Street Symphony has returned repeatedly to Skid Row to share Handel’s Messiah at the Midnight Mission. Professional musicians sit beside community members. People sing who were never invited to sing before. The music unfolds through shared participation. Taken together, these performances form one of the most meaningful long-term practices of my life.

Street Symphony’s work is the work of return: weekly music workshops inside county jails and re-entry centers, led by teaching artists who return to the same sites month after month. For us, Skid Row is a place of pilgrimage. In visiting Skid Row, we also visit a spiritual location that exists in the heart of every human being.

Proximity makes us stand in the gap. Building relationships is humbling, and sometimes humiliating. Sometimes, people in Skid Row are far more willing to show and celebrate their joy than I am. Sometimes, they are more willing to lean into their ability to create a song, or art, or life. They have become our teachers.

Street Symphony started as an effort to bring the healing power of music to people I saw as broken. What I later realized was that I was going to Skid Row for my own healing.

This work is slow and relational. It depends on showing up again and again.

I remain deeply grateful to everyone who has supported Street Symphony over the years. Sixteen years in, the work feels more necessary than ever.

(Photos by Mika Larson)

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To learn more about Street Symphony, please visit www.streetsymphony.org

This space begins there.

I grew up inside classical music. It taught discipline, focus, and how to succeed early. Those lessons were real. They were also incomplete. Over time, other rules settled in quietly: that excellence would earn belonging, that endurance signaled virtue, that keeping one’s head down was the price of admission.

I accepted those terms for years.

Over the last sixteen years, through my work as a violinist and the founder of Street Symphony, music has taken me into rooms where those rules stop working. Shelters. Clinics. Jails. State hospitals. Skid Row. In those spaces, obedience has little value. Attention does. Listening does. Presence does. Music becomes a way of being with others.

I began writing thinking I was recording that work. What emerged instead was Restrung: a reckoning with the cost of confusing performance with worth, and with what becomes possible when discipline is chosen.

Vincent van Gogh wrote, “The canvas is afraid of the man who dares.”

The fear does not disappear. The choice is whether to make a mark anyway. The first mark does not solve anything. It begins a relationship.

This Substack continues that practice. It moves between music, education, neuroscience, spirituality, and civic life. The questions remain simple and difficult. Why are artists trained to endure systems rather than shape them? What happens when excellence is separated from agency? What does it mean to practice hope deliberately?

This is not a space for polish. It is a space for attention.

The solstice marks a direction. The work begins with choosing to face it.