"Let's hear your 'Hallelujah,'" said violinist Vijay Gupta, inviting thousands of music teachers to join his solo violin and sing the chorus of Leonard Cohen's famous song over his beautiful improvisation.
It was his way of beginning the opening keynote address for an unprecedented joint conference of the American String Teachers Association and the Suzuki Association of the Americas, taking place through Sunday in Louisville, Kentucky, with some 3,500 educators, exhibitors, performers, and supporters participating.
Gupta is a Los Angeles-based violinist. Following a rigorous conservatory training, Gupta won a position in the Los Angeles Philharmonic as its youngest-ever member. He went on to co-found Street Symphony - which brings music to homeless and incarcerated communities. After winning a MacArthur fellowship he chose to leave the LA Phil to devote all his time to Street Symphony.
Gupta challenged teachers to think deeply not just about how we play music - but why we play music.
"I am the musician I am today because of music teachers like you - and I am the musician I am today in spite of music teachers like you," Gupta said.
Gupta started playing violin at the age of four, and "my first years on violin were spent playing two pieces," Gupta said, inviting us to sing along if we knew them. He played "Go Tell Aunt Rhody," and everyone sang along.
Then he played another song - a Bengali folk song - "Baro Asha Kore." This time no one sang along - this one was not instantly recognizable to the audience.
"You can hear the similarities between the songs," he said. Though the audience might not know this one - this was the song that made a connection for his family. His parents had immigrated to the U.S. from India, and they constantly listened to cassette tapes of the folk songs.
"Their hearts were spun from Bengali folk songs," Gupta said.
As a child, Gupta would bring his violin to family and community functions and play his Suzuki songs, "but none of my aunties and uncles responded to those songs." But at a certain point, even when he was as young as four years old, "I knew I could translate that music from the cassettes that my parents played into music that could make them weep."
Gupta studied in New York City with Louise Behrend at the pre-college program at the Juilliard School, and as he said, "her lessons were cutting." For example, when his parents commissioned a violin for him from India, she made the withering comment, "chubby boy with a fat fiddle." But at the same time, she danced and sang "and it engaged me."
Gupta loved music. When he was 13 and his parents told him that he was to become a medical doctor, "part of me was shattered." Nonetheless, he tried. "I fell in love with the stories of doctors," he said. In particular, his work with a doctor who was researching the effects of music on the brain had a lasting impact. The doctor was working with stroke patients, and he discovered that while the patients could not form sentences and speak them, the patients could form the words if they were accompanied by song. In other words, they could sing them. The doctor was able to teach them hours of songs, and that helped them regain their language.
This was a huge revelation for Gupta: "The music had literally re-wired their brains."
At the same time, Gupta could not shake the fact that all he really wanted to be doing was playing Brahms' Fourth Symphony. That very research doctor gave him some pivotal advice: "Vijay, you have to do what makes you leap out of bed in the morning," he said, and furthermore, "the violin will not wait for you."
That was when Gupta went back to the violin, and he got into the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But while he was playing at Walt Disney Concert Hall, he was nagged by the knowledge that it was so close to Skid Row, and that some 80,000 people were homeless, sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles.
This feeling grew stronger when in 2008 he met Nathaniel Ayers, a Juilliard-trained double bassist who had fallen into homelessness. Ayers gained notariety as the subject of numerous columns in the LA Times and then in a 2009 film called "The Soloist." Ayers wanted a violin lesson, and Gupta was called upon to teach him.
"At first I thought I would have nothing in common with him," but they actually had much in common because "both our hearts were spun from music," Gupta said. The more they worked together the more they found that commonality, whether they were meeting on Skid Row or at Disney Hall. "The music had created a space more sacred than the space where we performed."
Gupta wondered, could the streets of Los Angeles be his new laboratory? Thus the start of Street Symphony.
Of course, it took a while for those on Skid Row to accept the idea that music could do anything for them, with the people facing so much trauma and need. But Gupta persisted, and the connection grew deep. While playing a Beethoven quartet, a woman suddenly held up her hand, and kept it in the air for the remainder of the performance. Afterwards she said, "How did you know that this music was my story?" and then she related a very traumatic story indeed. Later, a social worker told Gupta that she'd never heard this woman speak.
On another occasion, Gupta was playing the Bach Chacconne for a group of prison inmates, and he actually felt like it was going pretty well. But when he finished, there was silence. Crickets. No applause. Finally a man in the middle of the room stood and said, "Son, don't you know how to play any songs we know?"
Then the man started to sing "Jesus on the Main Line."
"What he was saying," Gupta said, "was 'Do you see me?'"
Street Symphony, at that point, was an "outreach" project. But sometimes when you reach out, people reach back. "We hadn't been prepared to be met on the other side."
Gupta likes to think about works that start with "com" - community, compassion - to suffer with, accompany - to walk with, "compromiso" - to share a promise.
"It's a decision, to nurture the beauty that exists in each person," Gupta said. "Music allows us to live in a place of possibility, to be so much more than our pain."
It is important to ask, "Who do we see in our audience, when we make music for them?"
Gupta finished with a call-and-response song written by his wife, the composer Reena Esmail. Here are the words:
Take a moment, Take a breath, Take time, Take care
Take heart, Take hope, Take a step, Take a chance
Take courage, Take charge, Take a stand, Take pride
Take joy, Take pause, Take a moment, Take a breath
Take what you need
