The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 115 Vijay Gupta: Vital Musical Connections

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger podcast, episode number 115. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now, your host, violinist, teacher, and high performance coach for musicians, Dr. Renée Paul Gaultier. Hi, everyone. I hope you had an amazing holiday season. It was not as smooth sailing as we all wanted it to be, I think, but I hope you were still able to enjoy time with family, some good food, and moments of calm and relaxation. I took lots of time off to relax, rest, and gear up for

Starting point is 00:00:55 2022. And that was amazing. And even though we're still not over this whole pandemic, I'm convinced that there's tons of potential for it to be an incredible year. At least that's what I want to believe. I'm so excited about the guests I have for you in the coming months, and a lot of fun events are ahead as well. I'll be continuing the weekly live Q&A sessions in the Mind Over Finger Facebook community. So make sure to join us every Friday at 11 a.m. You can find us at facebook.com slash mindoverfinger. And I'll have that link in the show notes as well.

Starting point is 00:01:33 Also in 2022, I'm really excited to say that the Joyful Practice Challenge is coming back. And I know a lot of you really enjoy this. The Music Mastery Experience is also coming back. And I have a few surprises coming your way. I'll have more details on all of this in the coming weeks. I also want to try something new and fun this year, which is going to be a Try It At Home series. If you've listened to the Mind Over Finger podcast for a while, you know that in each

Starting point is 00:02:03 episode, I ask my guests to share an actionable tip with you. They're so good and so valuable. Some of them I use already a lot. Some of them I wish I used more. and others I've never even tried. So let's unpack these awesome actionable tips together in 2022. Every other week, I'll be revisiting the actionable tips shared by my guest in the previous episode and offer some suggestions on how you can try this at home and make it your own. And that's going to start next week with the tip from today's guest. And speaking of today's guest,

Starting point is 00:02:44 This month on the podcast, I'm bringing you artists that are profoundly impacting their community with their work, using music as a unifier and a powerful force of transformation. And I cannot think of a better way than to start the year with the incredible citizen artist Vijay Gupta. Vijay is a violinist and speaker dedicated to creating spaces of wholeness through music. His work embodies his belief that the work of artists and citizens is one, to make a daily practice of the world we envision. He leads a fluid career as a thought leader, performer, collaborator, and communicator, and he was held by the New Yorker as a visionary violinist, one of the most radical thinkers in the unradical world of American classical music. Vijay is the founder and artistic director of Street Symphony, a community of musicians creating spaces of connection for people in re-entry from homelessness, addiction, and incarceration in Los Angeles.

Starting point is 00:03:55 He's also a co-founder of the Skid Row Arts Alliance, a consortium dedicated to creating art for and with the largest homeless community in America. For this work of bringing beauty, respite, and purpose to those all too often ignored by society, Vijay was the recipient of a 2018 MacArthur Fellowship. An active speaker, Vijay has shared his work with dozens of organizations and communities across America over the past 10 years. In his 2010 TED Talk, Music is Medicine, Music is Sanity, has garnered millions of views. V.J. has performed as an international recitalist, soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral musician for over 20 years, and he was a member of the first violin section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic for 12 years. A dynamic recording artist, he has released several albums and is currently working on tracks to be released later this year, which you'll hear all about in our conversation. In today's interview, Vijay talks to us about his multifaceted holistic career, his role as citizen artist, his meaningful approach to bringing a work to life, his advice on how to serve our own communities as musicians, his definition of success and how he goes about creating the best version of himself, and a powerful actionable tip, which as you'll see, left me speechless for a minute.

Starting point is 00:05:31 this conversation was deeply inspiring for me vj is a truly exceptional human being with an extraordinary vision a big heart and a brilliant mind and i'm so happy to be able to share this conversation with you today make sure to share with everyone you know and tag me and vj on social media i'm going to have all the links in the show notes for you so get in touch with us let us know what you think of the conversation and let's keep the discussion going. Let's go to the show. Vijay Gupta, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to speak with you. From the outside, you seem to have created a multifaceted career, what I would call a holistic career. And you have an impact that

Starting point is 00:06:33 reaches outside the scope of just the music world. I've loved following what you've been doing for the last few years and hearing about your story, I feel it can be such a great source of inspiration for so many. So before we get into the nitty gritty details, can you please tell us about you and how your musical journey has unfolded. Well, thank you. First and foremost, I am a musician and I happen to play most of the music that I make on the violin, but I feel like I have been making music with my whole body and my whole spirit for as long as I can remember. One of the first stories that my parents ever told me is that I used to not be able to contain myself so much when they played music in the house that I was growing up in that they

Starting point is 00:07:27 just had to take me to a local music teacher because they didn't know what to do with me. And I grew up in the mid Hudson Valley of New York. And the only two instruments that were made available to me were either a piano, which apparently, I looked at and immediately started bawling uh or a violin and i guess i could keep moving with the violin to a certain and so i started with a with a suzuki teacher who happened to also be an apple farmer uh her name was mrs christ and she used to have uh big baskets of apples red beautiful apples um at the end of our lessons um waiting for all of her little students i must have been three or four when i started playing the violin. And then I was very lucky to start studying with a pedagogue who

Starting point is 00:08:17 I later learned had really made the Suzuki method very famous in the United States, and especially in New York. Her name was Louise Berend, and she was a student of Louis Persinger, who was also the teacher of Yehudi Menuhin. And in the 1940s, Miss Berend chose to become one of the first teachers at Juilliard Pre-College, specifically working through the Suzuki method. And she had started a school in New York City called School for Strings, which, you know, I, which is where I met her and where I started studying with her. And I remember, you know, she used to dance in her lessons, you know, she'd be teaching something of you know the veracini or uh vivaldi or tartini that would be in like suzuki book four

Starting point is 00:09:04 or five or six and she would literally waltz around this you know like industrial carpeted room with peeling paint you know in in new york city and i was just swept up with wonder when i was around her and i realized now that i i teach and i talk and i move like she does so she was one of the most important mentors and pedagogues I ever had. But, you know, I was very, very lucky to start studying at the Juilliard School in the pre-college department very young and then started playing, you know, touring as a soloist. I was very lucky to solo with the Israel Philharmonic when I was young and played all over Europe and Asia and in my parents' homeland of India. and, you know, I started my sort of college education quite young. And I'm sure we'll get

Starting point is 00:09:59 into that in our conversation. But I was 13 when I started going to college. It wasn't entirely my choice. But when I was 15 and 16, I was actually doing two undergraduate degrees at the same time. I was studying music at the Manhattan School of Music, violin performance, but I was also doing a degree in biology, which is actually the undergraduate I have in biology and pre-medicine with a focus on microbiology and later on neuroscience. And there was a point in my life where I was getting a lot of pressure from parents who had previously dedicated so much of their lives to my musical life and suddenly seemed as if they were making the switch to putting a lot more pressure on me shifting away from music and having a, quote, responsible career as someone

Starting point is 00:10:50 who could put food on the table and maybe play music as a hobby. But I remember thinking that there was no way in which music could ever be a hobby for me. It was more of a language and a vital connection to truth and honesty and humanity than anything else could possibly be. and so you know my journey kind of continued I finished my undergraduate in in in science in biology and then I thought I was going to just have my last hurrah my last sort of round as a musician and I went to study at the Yale School of Music with Anika Vafian and I kind of threw myself in the deep end I played new music I played baroque music I played I was the orchestra librarian. I was a TA for a music theory class. I really thought these were my last two years being

Starting point is 00:11:42 a musician before going off to medical school. And then I thought, oh, you know, what the hell? I have never taken an orchestral audition before. And I should say, you know, when I was studying at Manhattan School of Music, I was studying with Glenn Dichterow, who was at the time the concertmaster of the New York Phil, one of the most decorated violinists, you know, gorgeous. I remember looking at him and feeling like, ah, I know how to play because I can just tell what he wants me to do from how he plays, right? And that's probably why he was such an amazing concertmaster. So I wanted to be like him. I wanted to sound like him.

Starting point is 00:12:16 And so I took an orchestral audition. And I'm always cautious to tell this story to my colleagues because I know that it's somewhat unfair that I played and happened to win the very first audition that I ever took. but I was 19 when I auditioned for the LA Philharmonic and that really was my first audition and when I joined the orchestra I realized that I was joining an orchestra that Glenn had not only played in when he was a kid but that his father Harold Dichterow had been the principal second violin of the LA Phil for over years and so I was joining a family you know I was joining a group of musicians who, you know, immediately understood not only my pedigree, but I think more importantly understood my potential. And early on in, you know, when I joined the LA Philharmonic, I had

Starting point is 00:13:07 a group of colleagues who said, you know what, we're going to read through all the Beethoven string quartets, you know, over the course of a year. And what I realized now is, you know, they were teaching me the sort of orchestral attack, you know, how to start detache from the string, how to cue, how to listen, how to be, you know, listening with your eyes, all those various different kinds of things that we learn in orchestra, but, you know, that I sort of hadn't yet experienced in my body yet, you know. And so from those relationships, from those musicians came this deep desire and passion to just play more chamber music. And, you know, I'll pause here because that sort of is like the opening of the next step of my story, which eventually became wanting to play

Starting point is 00:13:56 chamber music for the kinds of people I wasn't seeing in the concert hall. And for audiences that, you know, have really radically redefined the way that I think about my role in the world as a musician and as a citizen. I love how it says on your website that you're a violinist, speaker and citizen artist dedicated to creating spaces of wholeness through music. Tell us more about that. How did that process look like for you? Because you describe winning a position with the LA Philharmonic at the age of 19, which is the dream of so many musicians to win a position in a top orchestra so early on. And as you're about to tell us, you stepped away eventually. Can you talk to us a little bit about this and what drew you into this

Starting point is 00:14:46 new facet of your career? When I first encountered the community known as Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, it was an absolute shock to me. Los Angeles is the epicenter of the crisis of homelessness in North America. There are, you know, people who sleep on the streets or who experience chronic poverty or homelessness, you know, upwards of 80,000 people on any given night. And the majority of people who are unhoused living in Los Angeles County live in a 50 square block area of downtown LA known as Skid Row. And this is a part of downtown that is literally just a little over a mile from Walt Disney Concert Hall. And at the time that I joined the orchestra, there was a gentleman from the Skid Row community who also happened to be from

Starting point is 00:15:44 the Juilliard and classical music community named Nathaniel Ayers, who was attending rehearsals, attending concerts, and he eventually had a book and a movie created about his story called The Soloist. And so Nathaniel was actually attending rehearsals and concerts at Disney Hall. And at the same time, my colleagues and I were performing chamber music events at, you know, benefits for homeless shelters and mental health clinics, kind of like playing in a church for a little fundraiser. And, you know, these two things happening in parallel were really important for me because on one hand, I was discovering this newfound love and connection through chamber music. And I was also realizing that there was a way to show up to the world through performing chamber music

Starting point is 00:16:32 that could engage and reach more people like Nathaniel. And I had a number of experiences with him where he kind of introduced me to Skid Row. You know, when I first saw Skid Row, I felt as if someone had literally punched me in the gut. You know, I felt shame. I felt disgust. I felt, you know, guilt. I had this question in my mind of, you know, what did it matter? Why did it matter that I loved playing music so much that I was going to dedicate my whole life to, you know, at that time, practicing excerpts and learning repertoire? How would that make a difference in the lives of people who maybe were housing insecure, food insecure. If I ever had the possibility of, quote, helping people as a physician, which my parents wanted me to be,

Starting point is 00:17:28 then was this the wrong profession? Was I in the wrong place? And this was this overarching kind of existential question. But at the same time, the way that I started asking the question was by reaching out to clinics and hospices and hospitals and veteran centers and just saying, can I come and play? And I would bring my colleagues from the Phil with me and sometimes, you know, bribe them with, you know, sandwiches and, you know, later on with beer. And, you know, if you feed and take care of a musician with food and drink well, you know, you have their hearts, they'll do anything for you. And so it was just an invitation to my friends to say, hey, do you want to go to this place and play? And I realize now what an incredible gift it was that

Starting point is 00:18:18 every one of my colleagues said yes. So they would come down to Skid Row with the great instruments that they were playing on stage at Disney Hall, you know, Strads and Del Jesus, and they would play in a Skid Row shelter. And what immediately happened in these spaces was this was no longer a concert. This was no longer a place where the musicians were a product, but rather we were seen as people with stories, you know, people with experiences that our audiences were hungry to learn about. And it kind of also was an incredibly freeing place to play, you know, not only the great dramatic music of Beethoven and Schumann, but then to think about the context of the places where Schubert and Mozart were writing chamber music. They weren't writing for a performance

Starting point is 00:19:16 in a grand hall. They were writing for their friends. They were writing to create this sense of community and belonging and conversation. And somehow playing for an audience that was three feet away, you know, even if they were people who didn't have a place to sleep that night, or, you know, eventually, when we started playing in shelters, and in county jails and prisons, people who were wearing jumpsuits, people who couldn't leave those spaces, a very different kind of economy of engagement happened in those spaces i remember one time we went into twin towers jail and we're playing the schumann opus 41 number one string quartet and you know the opus 40s are really really important for schumann because you know the opus 45 i think

Starting point is 00:20:01 is the really famous you know it's either the piano quintet or piano quartet and then somewhere along the opus 40s is when he had his first suicide attempt when he tried to jump into the Rhine because he started hearing choirs of angels in his head. And then, you know, Schumann spent the last nine years of his life living in an asylum where he eventually passed away. He died in an asylum. And, you know, his wife, Clara, who had the bigger career than him his entire life, had to start playing recitals again, you know, and this is why young Brahms had to come in and start taking care of their kids because Schumann was literally in the asylum. So we start playing, you know, setting up for this Opus 41 No. 1 Quartet and an inmate in the audience, a man

Starting point is 00:20:39 sitting right in the very front row he said oh what are you what are you all playing today what music are you playing today and i said oh we're playing some music by a guy named robert schumann and he says oh that's fitting i thought what really what so why is it fitting i asked him why is it fitting he said oh no no schumann died in a place like this so it's really fitting that you're playing his music and immediately like this man was no longer like the other right he wasn't someone who was just someone who i was doing something nice for doing something charitable for it this was soul food right and so in that moment not only did he radically recontextualize himself i radically recontextualized the role of the musicians right it wasn't just our role

Starting point is 00:21:26 to entertain someone and leave our job was soul food right our job was to nourish something and And at the same time, I felt that Schumann was recontextualized, right? Because Schumann wasn't just this, you know, stentorian marble bust of a dead white guy on a shelf somewhere, right? He became this living, breathing, fragile human being, right? Who used music to metabolize grief and pain and describe those choirs of angels he was hearing, right? And so when I think about the work of community engagement, especially through my organization, Street Symphony, I think about three stories being braided together at the same time.

Starting point is 00:22:13 The story of the performer, the story of the audience, and the story of the composer all coming together to create a new conversation. And that's why we have struggled to think about these events as concerts. And over the last 10 years of Street Symphony, we've presented well over a thousand of these events. You know, we've played in shelters and clinics and county jails and state prisons. We've done workshops and lessons. We've created music with our audiences and eventually have branched out to other genres of music like jazz and mariachi and reggae and West African drumming. And always these multiple stories come together to create a new conversation about the longing and what our role is. So the long, very, very long winded answer to your question of what is citizenship is, how do we create belonging through music? How do we create belonging and new conversations through the artistic offering? Because what I get back from my audiences in a shelter or a clinic or a county jail is a tremendous gift.

Starting point is 00:23:21 You know, I think that we as performers often take for granted the fact that we're often the ones on the receiving end of the greatest possible gift of humanity, period, which is another person's attention. What we're really asking for, what we're really always searching for is someone else's attention, you know, and attention is love. attention is currency. Attention is what we're all fighting for right now, especially in our social media world. It's an attention economy. So if you're a performer, you're literally asking for someone to pay attention to you. And that is so much more valuable than a dollar sign. It's also so much more interesting and human to me than anybody else's definition of perfection. So I will end by saying that making music in this kind of new economy of engagement, this attention that comes with so much love from people who would otherwise never have access to a concert hall, it's changed the way I play. I focus so much more on the communication of the offering of the music as opposed to somebody else's voice in my head of what's right and what's wrong and what should I be saying.

Starting point is 00:24:47 Tell us more about that because that's really interesting. How does that translate into the way you approach a work from start to finish? So it always boils down to the very specific intentions, these specific intentions behind the context of the composition or the specific intention of what I, the performer, want to communicate. So I'll give you two examples. You know, one of our most beloved pieces of music in existence is Handel's Messiah. And every year at the end of the year, Street Symphony creates a performance of excerpts of the Messiah, which we usually present in the gymnasium of the Midnight Mission, a 12-step recovery shelter and clinic in Skid Row. they've been our partners for the last 10 years and we've done you know as of last friday as a week a week since we are recording this um uh our sixth annual messiah project and so you know messiah is presented in concert halls it's one of the most overplayed pieces of classical music ever um but the very first performance you know hendel was broke he had had a stroke he was going blind

Starting point is 00:25:53 he was facing debtor's prison um and he was effectively cancelled like no one would hire him in London to have his operas in Italian be performed anymore. So he had this text of Messiah and he wrote in this frenzy from a place of despair. And the first performance raised enough money to release not only Handel from his own debts, but Handel paid the money forward to release 142 men from debtor's prison. And then when the concerts happened in London, they never happened in a hall, right? They always happened in the orphans hospital, the foundlings hospital. So the question is, what is the intention of this work, right? In my mind, my interpretation of that is the intention of this work is to create belonging. When we think about the passions of Bach, we fail often to talk about the fact that every single person in that audience knew the Lutheran hymns and they were invited to sing along, right?

Starting point is 00:26:49 So every chorale in the Passions was something that everyone in the audience sang, right? And so the idea of spectator and performer was much more blurred in the context of where this music came from, right? So I always, I think, you know, we talk a lot about historically informed performance practice, which I love. I love playing on gut strings with a baroque bow. I feel like we don't talk enough about socially informed context. What was this music supposed to accomplish?

Starting point is 00:27:16 So that's one very specific intention. You know, when we get later on to the romantic composers, you know, we see like, ah, right, this work was meant to, you know, wow audiences, but it was also meant to do something and open a new window to how someone thinks about what an instrument is capable of doing, right? And that virtuosity drives innovation. Right. Like when Glenn Gould was recording himself playing the Bach Goldberg variations, it created a new ecosystem in his mind of what he wanted to say. So the other intention specifically is the intention of the performer. Like, what do I want to say? If I want to communicate something related to grief, well, then I'm going to be continuously looking through that lens of what is it that makes this music feel so sad or what is it that communicates grief that I can then have a conversation about that emotion with my audience, right? And perhaps even use them to tell me what they're feeling so that when I go back to my practice room, I'm not just thinking, what's a good fingering, but rather what's the most expressive fingering, right? What's the thing that allows me to communicate most clearly what I want to say?

Starting point is 00:28:32 And I think that that really stands as a counter to what so many of us grapple with in our minds of there's a right way, right? Because often the right way is the thing our teacher told us to do, right? We have that constant narrative tape in our mind of, there's a right way, I'm crap, there's a right way, I'm not doing it right, there's a right way. And that loop is not only so self-deprecating, it's also self-annihilating when it comes to creativity, right? And so I feel this great thrill at being subversive and radically recontextualizing the intention behind which I make music. So I hope that that answers your question to a certain extent. Thank you so much. I love these powerful words that you use. You said vital connection. And I feel that especially in the light of what is happening with COVID, how the world is changing,

Starting point is 00:29:32 There's this incredible opportunity for all of us to redefine or to use your amazing term, recontextualize what we do, what our intention is, how organizations work without rebuilding the entire music world. What are some ways that each and every one of us could go out there and do a little something in our community? Is there some sort of little how-to guide to have impact in your community that you could share with us? I feel that our role as musicians is first and foremost to serve. You know, I think about serving the intention of the composer. I also think about serving the instrument. You know, like I am a steward of the violin, you know, and she will always be more perfect and more wonderful and more everything than me. Right. I can only try to be in absolute service to making the instruments sing and understanding the intention of of the of the composer or of the creator of the work.

Starting point is 00:30:38 And so I feel like that is an incredible lesson that musicians have to share and a lens through which we can look about, you know, look through how we engage the world around us. So, you know, when I started Street Symphony, I had no idea of what this was going to look like. And I just cold called people and I said, can I come and just simply play for you all? But I think what I would ask now is, could I come and be part of doing whatever it is you're doing? Right. And so if I were to go to a shelter, the first thing I would do is say, you know, Can I volunteer and serve soup or serve food? Can I meet people? Can I show up on a regular basis?

Starting point is 00:31:21 Because the truth is the currency of relationships, the currency of love is trust, right? And trust, I feel, is really developed by showing up, right? And we as musicians, as artists, we know how to show up. We know how to show up every day, possibly with more questions and fewer solutions than we have even our imagination, even than we can imagine, right? And so that's what practicing is, right? Practicing is not about conquering things. It's about showing up with questions and showing up with our hands open. And I think the very same way we can show up to the world around us, even if we're looking our neighbor in the eye and saying good morning, right? That's a

Starting point is 00:32:04 way to show up to the world in a way that becomes restorative, right? So if we open ourselves up to possibility by showing up with the intention to serve and make our world whole, I feel like that's maybe the most amazing first step. The way that that ends up looking, I think, is radically different, but we've seen so much creativity throughout the pandemic. So many of my colleagues started playing concerts from their porches, and they created conversations with their neighbors that they hadn't had for decades. How cool is that? You know, or of course, you know, to see what I'm so inspired

Starting point is 00:32:46 about what so many young people have created through sharing their practice journeys on Instagram, you know, to create community and how wonderful it is that artists like Hilary Hahn will often comment on a young musician practicing their scales and say, hey, try shifting this way or try this thing, you know, 100 days of practice hashtag, right? You know, a hashtag is a community.

Starting point is 00:33:07 and a hashtag is a culture. And it's an interesting thing for us to think about ways to create belonging and community simply by putting ourselves out there and serving. So I guess the question is, what do you serve? You know, what values, what values do you serve, right? And the values of justice, the values of belonging, the values of connection.

Starting point is 00:33:30 I think we can all find ways to serve that in a myriad of different ways. beautifully put i'm gonna veer off a little bit towards the playing part of your career but i feel like it ties into everything that you just said you were mentioning how all of the work that you do with street symphony with the people of skid row has transformed your playing and you have some amazing recordings out there it was so wonderful to read for the past couple of years about you know on social media you were sharing the experience of making the videos and recording the works there's some really great pieces too in strings magazine and violinist.com and of course

Starting point is 00:34:14 on your website and I just love learning about this process that you had to learn these pieces select the pieces then perform the pieces please tell us a little bit about those yeah certainly So I'm currently in the process of recording all six of the Bach sonatas and partitas. But instead of recording them all in just one go, I really wanted to take a moment to, again, recontextualize and redefine Bach. You know, it is last year was literally, you know, to the to the date, 300 years from the time that Bach penned the sonatas and partitas. And, you know, he did a very strange thing in the autograph. He actually marked the year, which is something that composers did not do specifically during that time because they could always recycle work. And there's so much work that Bach recycled throughout his lifetime. And, you know, for example, the E major prelude that we all know and love and fear is also the symphonia of the BWV 29 cantata. So he was recycling music all the time. But he wanted to attribute the year, I think, specifically to these sonatas and partitas because it was also the year that his beloved wife, Maria Barbara, passed away.

Starting point is 00:35:27 And I wanted to take each of these works, and I'm first recording the three sonatas, and pair them with works by contemporary composers and with existing commissions. So the very first CD is the G minor sonata. And the CD is called When the Violin. And When the Violin is a piece of music written by an amazing composer named Rina Esmail, who is amazing because I love her music and also amazing because I get to share my life with her. Um, and this piece is actually based on a poem by the 14th century Sufi mystic Hoffies. And it's a poem on forgiveness and about how when the violin can forgive every wound caused by others, the heart starts singing. And this idea of the violin as a singing heart and the violin as the instrument of forgiveness was so resonant to me, um, especially because throughout the pandemic, I was playing for people who were in reentry from incarceration, who were paroled from life sentences in California

Starting point is 00:36:30 state prisons. We had a lot of conversations around the difficulty of forgiveness and the difficulty of choosing a new identity that wasn't based in the very worst things that have happened to us or the very worst things that we may have done to another person. And so, you know, I also wanted to find a new voice through Bach. And I found a new voice through playing Rina's music, which is based in Hindustani ragas. And the other work on the CD is Esa-Pekka Salonen's very daunting work, Lachen Verlernt, which means laughter unlearned. And so that is the first kind of musical offering in this work.

Starting point is 00:37:06 And the second CD that's about to be released in mid-January, probably as this episode is entering the world, is going to be the second sonata of Bach alongside a work of the Finnish composer Kaja Sarjaho called Nocturne. And another work of Irina's called Darshan. And this CD will be about the transcendent, transformative quality of night and the kind of sinking in the idea that night gives us this moment of metaphor and metabolism. And then the next offering will be the Bach C major sonata alongside this amazing work

Starting point is 00:37:41 by the French composer Eric Tanguy called Sonata Breve. And it'll be about light and reentering the world. And so the idea of kind of creating these narrative arcs through this music that so often, especially in the music of Bach, we just kind of take Bach for granted. You know, we take Bach as the basics, the things that we have to learn. And of course, Bach is our basics. But Bach is sort of the basics for us because it has been so interpreted and so reinterpreted that in a sense, Bach kind of becomes the blank slate again, right? It really becomes the mirror in which we look at ourselves and we not only challenge ourselves with every single technical and human imperfection that we have as violinists or as artists, but also it becomes a very clear vehicle for us to communicate what we're trying to say. And so, you know, in that way, again, I come back to the thing that I learned from making music through street symphony settings is that, well, maybe how would you play if this wasn't about right and wrong?

Starting point is 00:38:44 How would you play if you had something you were very clearly trying to say? And I'm also playing with the awareness that maybe 20 years from now, we won't be, hopefully, we won't be in a global pandemic. and the way that we play Bach or the way that I think about Bach will be radically different than the way that I play Bach now. And one of my favorite violinists is Nathan Milstein. And I love comparing Milstein's recordings from like 1955 to 1966 and how his playing changed from those years, you know. So it's also to say, you know, we change and our music changes with us. So beautifully said. And then the violin becomes that instrument of vital connection that you were talking about. And not only between you and your audience, but between all of these works and different composers together. Yeah, yeah, you know, I've been thinking constantly how the violin for me, during the pandemic, especially has become like a mirror and a lens, right? It's a mirror through which I mirror, you know, through which I see the health of my soul, right? I know how I'm doing based on what I hear coming out of my instrument, right?

Starting point is 00:39:55 I mean, not only technically left of right, I got to really work on left hand articulation and like woodshed this. So, OK, then let me pick like the E major prelude and like the double of the B minor courant, you know, and like really get the articulation right. You know, or there is also the health of like, well, am I really saying what I'm trying to say? Am I really, you know, making this phrase as elegant as it could be? But, you know, the violin also then becomes a lens, right? It becomes a lens through which I see the world, right? That expression is like a two-way, it's like a two-way lens, right? It allows the world to see me as well and what my values are and what I care about.

Starting point is 00:40:35 Oh, this is incredible. Vijay, I want to keep you here all day, but how about a round of rapid fire questions before I let you go? But then I always say that they're never that rapid anyway. So I'm keeping you around for a while. I'll try to be concise. and i can't wait to hear your answers because i resonate with so much of what you're saying so i think that there are some particularly amazing bits of wisdom coming our way what is the habit that you have that you think contributed to your success and we all know that success will look

Starting point is 00:41:09 different from one person to another you know i actually want to talk about success uh for something totally out of left field than violin playing, which for me is actually my physical health. For me, for a long time, I didn't take care of my health. I didn't take care of my body. And certainly when I was in the Philharmonic, I had developed chronic overplaying issues. And I wasn't not only working out correctly, I wasn't eating correctly. And so over the last several years, I've begun a pretty intense fitness regimen and diet regimen. And so, you know, for me, success kind of comes down to the possibility of committing every single day to the smallest possible step that I can take, you know, breaking down what not only success, but like my absolute

Starting point is 00:42:00 wildest dream vision of who I could be. And, you know, what my health goals were to say, okay, well, what does this look like today? What does this look like in this moment? And one of the things that I would recommend for everyone is a book called The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. And it's a book, you know, she describes something called morning pages, which is like this creative habit. I see you looking behind yourself for your bookshelf. I think I have it here behind me in my Zoom setup here. You know, it kind of becomes this sort of creative Bible of what is a creative practice that you will take every single day towards a goal that you may not be able to even name right now, but how will you take the next step to create the world that you envision?

Starting point is 00:42:47 And so for me, it was, I will walk for 60 minutes every day, no matter what. I will work out every other day, no matter what, even if the workout absolutely sucks, right? Even if I just get in there and i'm just tired and awful i will just stand there holding the free weights you know um and of course the moment you stand there and you put on some music that pumps then you like okay maybe i can lift this right so that's what success looks like i think i think we often think of success as grinding it out i would love to again recontextualize success as what can what's your win what's your win for today i love this so much and i feel that you and i would have a lot to talk about in this department because i'm coming out of a period

Starting point is 00:43:36 of a few weeks where i completely neglected my what i call my virtuous cycle of meditation of self-coaching i strongly believe in coaching i'm a coach i have a coach i'll never not have a coach and one of my most helpful practice is to sit down every morning and do the morning pages do what we call a thought download, and then pick some thoughts, examine them, and really get insight into myself through this process. And my morning walk, I do, I try to do three miles every morning. And I had neglected this for various reasons. We fall into bad habits. And I just did not feel as in tune with myself. And to get back into this habit and rededicate myself to this habit of daily meditation of daily thought downloads and walking transforms everything

Starting point is 00:44:31 and so i'm so glad you shared that because i think we have that in common and i'll add one more thing to that is that look i mean one of the things is that you know for well for me as well it's it's so easy to fall off the wagon right you know i haven't done my journaling in the last couple of days right and i can i can feel it i can feel the antsiness inside myself so instead of coming back and saying okay i will do what julia cameron prescribes of like writing three pages? Well, maybe I'll just do half a page, right? What is the smallest possible way that you can have? And it's still a win. And how do we also like schedule those wins in, in the first hour of the day, right? Like that's the thing too, of like, okay, my win today is going to be,

Starting point is 00:45:09 I'm going to wake up and I'm not going to check my cell phone until I've been awake for two hours. Okay. That's the win. And, and just call that, that, you know, and then we develop a habit of winning as opposed to, you know, and feeling what winning feels like, as opposed to saying, oh i lost oh i've made this mistake oh i wasn't good enough you know that kind of thing yeah we see eye to eye the this is why i love having these conversations is i find so many kindred spirit from all over the world i could talk about this with you for hours but let's go let's keep moving for now what skills do you think young musicians should acquire in addition to learning to play their instruments. One thing I would say is so important that I feel myself sort of aching to

Starting point is 00:45:56 be better at now is, you know, the ability to stay curious, the ability to learn how to learn, right? To continue learning how to learn, right? And I think that has a lot to do with being in spaces of um questioning as opposed to being in spaces of confidence right i think there's a lot of very young people who are so talented and so good and so dedicated and just you know are on the track to keep doing what they're doing and then when it comes to entering the quote real world you know and learning how to fundraise or write a grant you know so many young musicians who i talk to say well i can't do that i'm just a musician right and i'll shake them by the shoulders sometimes physically and say, if you were studying law for as long as you are playing

Starting point is 00:46:50 the violin, well, not only would you be partner at a firm right now or have your name on the door, you would not think of yourself as incapable of doing anything, right? So if you have spent this much time dedicating yourself to playing your instrument, not only the way you're playing it, but with the dedication with which you play, you can do anything, right? And playing the instruments we have, you know, and playing the instruments that we play is so difficult that I truly feel that we are capable of doing anything, right? So yes, you can learn how to run a nonprofit. Yes, you can learn how to fundraise. Yes, you can learn how to speak. And the way that we learn all those things is the same way we learn our instruments. And so the other

Starting point is 00:47:34 sort of thing I would say is get comfortable with the feeling of failure, right? You're going to be much, much better at playing the violin or playing the instrument because you've been doing it since you were four or five or six or 10 years old, right? You're going to be much worse at learning how to work out or learning how to write grants because you haven't been doing it for 20 or 30 years. And that's something I have to continuously tell myself is I sometimes have it way too easy in terms of expertise because I've been playing the violin since I was four years old, right? But everything else that we learn is going to be much harder. So learn how to ask for help, stay curious, get comfortable with failure. Amazing insight. I'm really curious about the next question because

Starting point is 00:48:18 the answers are not always what we expect. Do you have a favorite tool in the practice room? Yes. Yes. My timer. My timer. Because I started during the pandemic doing a kind of practicing that I call procrastinate practicing. So instead of answering email, oh, I'm so bad at email. Oh, my God. I can't even tell you. My staff and my wife give me so much crap about this. But I would be like, oh, no, no, no. You know what? I'm going to learn the Bartok Sonata first movement, right? And I'm going to spend three hours doing this. And I'm just avoiding the world practicing because I want to. And I have also done that opposite, you know, where I've been avoiding practicing.

Starting point is 00:49:03 And meanwhile, I'll be reading Harry Potter or something like that. And so I will set a timer. Even this morning, I was recording some pieces I'm going to post on Instagram later on. and I have, you know, one of those big kitchen time, like an egg timer, but a big one. And I turn it up to 25 minutes. And then the moment it goes off, I have to stop practicing. That's it. And this is actually a law that Tim Ferriss talks about. I think it's called Parkinson's law that you will fill the available time with the task you have to do. I think a better way of saying this is like, if you give yourself 25 minutes to do something, you will do

Starting point is 00:49:38 it within 25 minutes. But if you give yourself three hours to do it, it might take you three hours to do the very same thing. So, you know, what I would say is, you know, I think this is also like the Pomodoro timer technique of to set 25 minutes and to do a Pomodoro of practicing with a very specific intention. So I will work on this one passage for 25 minutes and then that's it. And then you give your brain a break, you get some coffee, you go for a walk, and then you come back and do the next chunk of time. So my timer absolutely is my most important tool right now yes we are cosmic twins that's official now finally how about a quick actionable tip that the listeners can implement today in their musical lives you know my wife

Starting point is 00:50:21 reena has um a series of episodes that she records every week you know and a little series called resonance space and one of her recent episodes was about an experience listening to a concert of new music and she kind of lost track of who the composer was at what time in the in the piece you know what time in the concert and as she was listening she had kind of you know she talks about this very sensitively kind of um made this sort of snap judgments around the pieces based on how she knew the people right and so often i find myself in this really dark place whether i'm like doom scrolling through instagram or youtube or whatever being like ah that player or there's that person and I don't like the way they play. So I'm not even going to listen to that thing.

Starting point is 00:51:03 Or it's kind of very, very judgmental, dark places that we go to. And this is a habit I'm trying to cultivate within myself and I'm not good at it. And I'm saying it as a way of encouraging myself to get better at it is listen to people who you disagree with, right? Listen to people who make you feel angry or make you feel, God, even jealous or all those things that come up, right? Because the reaction is not about that person. The reaction is always about you, right? And if you're able to sit in the reaction for long enough, you learn something, right? You learn something about someone you disagree with, you know, and then you also put yourself

Starting point is 00:51:41 in their shoes and wonder, well, could I have played it or done it or said it or acted it any better than they did? And I think that's actually what humanizes us, right? So I would say spend a good amount of time engaging with people who you disagree with. And I think this is not only about violin playing. I think this is about the world we live in, period, right? I spent 12 years going back and forth between Disney Hall and Skid Row, often several times a day. And sometimes I would go to Beverly Hills or Pasadena for a donor meeting and then go straight to Skid Row and be in a county prison or a county jail.

Starting point is 00:52:19 and be meeting with people on radically opposite sides of the world and realizing that people hurt and ache the same way. People laugh and find joy the same way, right? There's so much more that connects us than disconnects us. And our work as artists and as citizens in the world is to literally stand in the gap, right? To imagine like the poles, like the fact that our string is stretched between like the bridge and you know and the tailpiece and the and the end of the fingerboard like we need to literally stretch across those points of tension and really hold tension for the string to resonate i feel like there's a metaphor there of how we can be in the world if we are engaging on those two poles of agree or disagree right because the truth is

Starting point is 00:53:06 always somewhere in the middle and the truth is where we make the music i'm dropping my mic right now i'm gonna leave that pause in here i just had to replay that in my head beautifully put so great thank you vj where can everyone go to learn more about you or learn more about street symphony maybe even contribute and help in any way sure certainly so i'm very active on social media you can find me on instagram at gupta violin um i also have a number of projects coming out um on bandcamp and on youtube you know if you search for me on those platforms you can find me and you can find and learn more and uh willingly support street symphony at street symphony.org

Starting point is 00:53:56 street symphony is also on instagram and you know now we're very excited that street symphony to kind of be entering into a space where we're going to be engaging the world at large around on how to create projects like this of your own. So please stay tuned, you know, send me questions, ask how you can create community through music in your world. I want to hear from all of you and, you know, just kind of start a conversation around doing more of this work in the world. Vijay, thank you so much for this gift of your time.

Starting point is 00:54:26 I feel like you brought more intention in our day and every listener's day today. And your journey is so inspiring to me. and I'm sure to everyone who is listening. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's a real treat to be here. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed this conversation

Starting point is 00:54:54 with violinist, citizen artist Vijay Gupta. Don't forget to share with everyone you think might benefit from Vijay's insight and knowledge and catch the next episode for a deep dive in his fantastic actionable tip. You can find all the information related to this episode in the show notes by visiting mindoverfinger.com. And while there, explore resources about efficient practice, performance preparation, and mindful music making,

Starting point is 00:55:24 and find information on how you can work with me. That's it for today. Again, thank you and à bientôt. Thank you.

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 115 Vijay Gupta: Vital Musical Connections

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