For New York-born musician Vijay Gupta, success came early, and it came fast. “By the time I was 11 years old, I was performing as a soloist all over the world,” the Grammy-nominated violinist, now 39, told us last month.
He was living the dream, or at least someone’s version of the dream. The problem was that it wasn’t his own.
Gupta’s father, Vivek, was a scrappy, first-generation immigrant from the Indian state of West Bengal. He’d moved to New York City in the 1970s, working in kitchens and later as a baggage handler at JFK Airport, before building his own travel agency from the ground-up. Vivek had also been grooming Vijay, his eldest son, for success from birth. “Like a lot of immigrant parents, he wanted to fulfill his greatest dreams through his kids,” Gupta said.
As a result, the young Gupta had a violin bow in his hand by age three. It was soon clear that whether through nature, a heavy-handed nurture, or a combination of both, the boy was a preternaturally skilled player. But his father was savvy enough to realize that it wasn’t just how talented you were or how hard you worked, but how willing you were to ingratiate yourself to those in positions of influence and power. So Vivek began a marketing campaign on his son’s behalf.
“He basically started writing letters to famous people, pretending to be me,” Gupta said. “He wrote to everyone from Oprah to Yehudi Menuhin, Zubin Mehta and Coolio and Stevie Wonder, and he got me in front of these people.”
His father’s phony letters paid off. Before hitting puberty, Gupta had received extensive press coverage, and was training and performing with the best musicians in the world. By the age of seven, he had enrolled in Juilliard's prestigious Pre-College program. He played Carnegie Hall at eight, went to college at age 13 for pre-med, and then netted a master’s in music from Yale. In 2007, aged 19, Gupta became the youngest violinist in history to join the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
On paper, he had every box of a musician’s dream life checked off. He had the natural talent, the formal education, the world-class mentorship, and the worldwide fame, and he had it fast. But he wasn’t fulfilled.
“I was on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, with [Gustavo] Dudamel and Yo-Yo Ma and all these great musicians, but feeling completely empty and broken,” Gupta admitted. “It was as if I had been betrayed by music, or even worse, that I myself was betraying music.”
It might sound like ingratitude, but Gupta couldn’t help but feel he was living a lie. He struggled with a strange combination of ennui and identity fraud. He’d won the bowling match, but he’d had bumpers on his lane, another hand guiding his own, the whole time. The success felt hollow. He was a living success story, but was it his own story, or someone else’s?
“I'd never had a job before, and yet here I was playing four concerts a week for tens of thousands of people,” he continued. “Even though I had what was, on the surface, an incredible life, I felt like the joy and passion of music had just disappeared from me.”
Finding Resonance in the Dark
Gupta wasn’t sure what was missing in his life, but he knew he couldn’t find it in the concert hall. So he began to look elsewhere. He started trying to give back. “I started reaching out to shelters and clinics and county jails and VA hospitals and prisons, with the idea to play music for people under the guise of outreach,” he said.
At first, he thought the efforts would be a nice break from the buttoned-up, stuffy crowd he was used to performing for, but what he found in these places were the most intimate and discerning audiences he’d ever interacted with, ones who both cared about the stories behind the music, and Gupta’s own story, in a way that no other audience ever had.
“Those people were the first people to say, ‘What's your deal? Like, who are you, really? Why should I listen to you?’” he recalled.
“The people in those rooms came alive in a way that I was taken aback by,” he said. “Also the music we played changed. It wasn’t about playing Beethoven perfectly. It was about playing Beethoven. Who was Beethoven? What was his deal? Who was Schubert? Who was Schumann? What were the human stories?”
During one visit to a county jail, the inmates asked Gupta what he would be playing. He told them that it would be a string quartet. The men looked at him blankly. “They're like, ‘Yeah dude, duh. There’s four people here,’” he recalled, laughing.
Gupta then explained that he and his companions were going to play music by a German composer named Robert Schumann. The inmate responded, “Oh, that’s fitting. Schumann died in a place like this.” Gupta was shocked. He began to realize that the archetype of the typical classical music appreciator isn’t always accurate.
These experiences were the catalyst for Street Symphony, a nonprofit Gupta founded in 2011 to play music for the underprivileged. To date, the organization has held more than 3,000 music performances and workshops around Los Angeles, everywhere from homeless shelters to jails to rehab clinics. In 2018, Gupta won a MacArthur Fellowship, colloquially known as a “Genius Prize,” enabling him to focus on Street Symphony full-time.
The more he played in these environments, the more Gupta, himself, began to enjoy performing again. Ironically, he was playing better than he ever had before. “All the chronic tendinitis, the bursitis, the fear, the stage fright, the judgment, the ego started to disappear when I was making music in a county jail,” he said. “I was playing in a much more free, open, and human way.”
In fact, Gupta began to realize that his efforts to alleviate homelessness via Street Symphony weren’t dissimilar to the skills he’d trained as a musician.
"That Sisyphean feeling of picking up the violin and sucking forever, that’s just life,” he said. “If you're doing it, it sucks, you're constantly chasing failure, but that’s how we change, that’s how we get stronger.”
Highbrow Music for the Outcasts
It might seem far-fetched that the homeless and imprisoned and addicted would respond well to highbrow violin concertos written by pasty-faced composers hundreds of years ago, as opposed to more popular music—Jay-Z or Eminem, Linkin Park or Metallica.
But Gupta said it didn't take long after he began his work with Street Symphony for the idea that he and his colleagues were bringing culture into these places began to go out of the window. The reality, he told me, is that the culture was already there.
“There are people who walk up to me on Skid Row who are singing Schubert lieder, or the beginning of The Marriage of Figaro (Overture), or even more obscure pieces,” he said. “You never know what someone knows.”
“There is no such thing as classical music,” he added with a wry smile.
The impression of the orchestra aficionado, of the cummerbund and the upturned nose, the white collar job and the million dollar house, is misleading. It might be this person who appreciates classical music in the modern era, but that’s not exclusively who it was meant for, nor is it who it was created by, and this is something Gupta wants the world to recognize.
“Classical music is really a marketing term invented by the Victorians,” Gupta explained. The word classical stems from the Latin classicus, meaning ‘belonging to the highest class,’ but over time, it simply evolved to represent music of enduring value. Classical music is certainly valuable, but Gupta says that overtime, we’ve forgotten its roots.
“The composers who were writing this music weren’t stuck-up rich guys,” he said. “They were punks. They were revolutionaries. These were people who were breaking barriers. This is not music meant to be put as a product on a stage, and sold by a marketing team to blue-haired potential donors.”
There is a popular conceit in modern society that interest in classical music is fading, and thus that the art itself is being lost. Gupta doesn’t agree.
“This argument that classical music is dying is wrong,” Gupta said. “The patrons of classical music just happen to be dying in this generation. The music will always transcend and change. It’s an uncontrollable natural force.”
That’s why Gupta feels it's so important to perform not just for the wealthy and educated, but for the downtrodden.
“When we do [George Frideric] Handel’s Messiah in Skid Row, we're not doing a fancy, prissy Messiah,” he said. “We're doing the Messiah that Handel intended. Because when he wrote Messiah, Handel released 142 men from debtors' prison, and one of those debtors was him. When [Antonio] Vivaldi wrote The Four Seasons, he wrote it for orphaned teenage girls. Man, he didn't write it to be played on NPR.”
“Why are we so quick to forget that [Béla] Bartók died of leukemia, completely unknown in an apartment by himself, collecting butterflies?” he continued. “Here we are, putting his music on a stage, completely devoid from recognizing his humanity. Schubert got syphilis because of an underage teenage prostitute and had to take mercury his whole life, poisoning himself until he died at 31.”
Gupta paused, then smiled. “Man, we’re supposed to be telling human stories. We’ve made art and music into a thing, this inaccessible product, and we have forgotten the story.”
Gupta’s performances, then, are focused on bringing the music back to the story. When he’s played Bartók, he’s seen inmates in county jails, his audience, fist-pumping like they’re listening to Metallica. It may seem incongruous, but to Gupta, that’s what it’s all about. “That's what I feel when I play Bartok,” he admitted.
Now Gupta is focused on bringing that same irreverence and fist pumping joy back to the stuffy concert halls. Because after more than a decade of serving those society would classify as disadvantaged, Gupta believes that it’s the people who’ve been through hell, not the six-figure salaried, buttoned-up classical music appreciators, who really have life figured out.
“The most disconnected people I meet are in the concert hall, not the shelter,” he said.
It is a philosophy that extends to what he wears on stage. A few years ago, Gupta connected with Coregami, and bonded with the brand over our shared views that high-level violin performance is less an elite academic exercise, and more an athletic endeavor.
“The athletic design helps remind us that we really are athletes,” Gupta said. “We are sweating our asses off on stage. The instrument that we're actually playing is the instrument of our body, you know?”
When Gupta connected with Coregami, he also learned of a strange connection. Our first warehouses were also in Skid Row, right around the time Street Symphony was kicking off.
“The alignment between where Coregami got its start and what [founder] Kevin stands for as a person is what I really care about as a consumer,” Gupta notes. “It’s not just what I’m buying, but who I’m buying from.”
Confronting the Ghost of Success
Beyond his work with Street Symphony, Gupta’s newest effort is to unpack his life through writing. His memoir, Restrung, was published on June 9, a few days after we spoke for this profile. The book is currently the #1 New Release on Amazon in the “Poverty” category.
For Gupta, writing was an adventure in vulnerability. He’s kept journals for 20 years, but never published his writing, and though he’s performed in front of thousands of people, he said that sitting down at his writing desk was, in many ways, far more intimidating.
“No one applauds at the end of a bad sentence,” he said, “and no one applauds at the end of a good one either.”
The book is dedicated to Gupta’s father, who died suddenly in 2017. The pair were not on good terms at the time of his passing, but their bond was deep. “He’d basically been my stage dad since I was four years old,” Gupta admitted.
Gupta’s memoir was less an exercise in sharing his inner thoughts than it was a personal journey of self-discovery, an examination of his relationship with his father. The catalyst to write this book, he told me, was to “come to grips with the ways in which I lived my life on his terms, and in a sense, how much about being called ‘successful’ or a ‘prodigy’ or ‘brilliant,’ has everything to do with shaping yourself into somebody else's version of who you should be.”
When he sat down and started writing, Gupta began to realize things about his upbringing that he’d never considered before. “I thought, maybe the reason I felt so comfortable playing in shelters and county jails is because I grew up in an environment that felt like that,” he said. “Writing made me grapple with my own addictions, the abuse in my childhood, the fact that I had used food and alcohol and validation to hide from myself.” It was the people Gupta encountered on Skid Row, not those in the concert hall, who’d seen through him, not his Yale professors or his esteemed violin tutors. “People recovering from addiction and incarceration were the first to look through me and say, ‘Oh, you're an addict.’”
For Gupta, Restrung is as much a rejection of his father as a tribute to him, an acknowledgement of the ways in which his upbringing damaged him and the irrevocable ties he’ll always have to his father.
“When my dad died, I decided I needed to do something for him that honored his story, and the fact that the way I run my nonprofit and the way I was addicted, is the same way that he ran his travel agency and that he was addicted,” Gupta admitted. “The ways he pushed me to be more, so that he could be more, were the same ways I was pushing people in Skid Row to be more, so that I could be more.”
Gupta wasn’t aware of these connections when he began writing the work. At first, he didn’t even think the book would be about his father, but the more he wrote, the more heavily Vivek’s spectre loomed over the page. By the time he was finished, he knew he had to dedicate Restrung to his dad.
“The book is ultimately saying, ‘I am you because of you and I am who I am in spite of you,’” Gupta said.
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Readers can purchase a copy of Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation on Amazon or direct from publisher Da Capo Press.
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Owen Clarke is an American journalist primarily covering mountain sports, motorcycles, and adventure travel. In addition to his work for Coregami, he also is a frequent contributor to Climbing magazine and a contributing editor for Summit Journal and the American Alpine Journal.
