Street Symphony | Classical music for the homeless : a story of dignity and human connection.

The Art and Happiness Project

✨This is about the healing and humanizing powers of classical music. I spoke with Dustin Seo, a classically trained cellist and Artistic Director of Street Symphony, a Los Angeles based non-profit that brings classical music to homeless communities to build connection and human dignity.

❤️‍ Street Symphony was founded in 2011 by Vijay Gupta, A highly accomplished and renowned violinist with The Los Angeles Philharmonic. Gupta believed the act of making and performing music was a deeply spiritual practice - one that had the power to heal audiences and musicians alike. In 2007, Gupta was one of the youngest violinists to join the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but his path in music took an unexpected turn when he met Nathaniel Ayers — a Juilliard School-trained double bassist whose crippling schizophrenia ended his professional career and left him homeless. Gupta said the following about Ayers: “[Nathaniel] had a more encyclopedic knowledge of music than my professors at Yale. This was his oxygen, this was his survival. A lot of people on Skid Row turned to self-medicating with drugs, but Nathaniel turned to music.”

After building a relationship and musical exchange with Ayers, Gupta wanted to do more and bring classical music down from the elite stage of the Disney Hall, to Skid Row, one of the largest and most disenfranchised homeless communities in America. So he founded Street Symphony, to bridge this gap.

✨ Dustin spoke to me about the work of Street Symphony, and he also happened to played cello for me, which was a treat! He has a totally different perspective on the power and mission of classical music outside the concert halls and his stories of healing and solace from the hard hit Skid Row community were absolutely heart-rending.

We talked about :

• Music as an equalizing space for human connection, a purveyor of dignity and strength.
• What music can do when it seems that nothing can help.
• The role of music in bridging the gap between homeless communities and the rest of the world
• The contrast between the gilded image of classical music and its potential as a measure for social justice.

👉Find Dustin and Street Symphony here.

💿Flow Like a River

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Sound Engineering: Raphael Pazoumian 🌷🎧