A visionary Los Angeles violinist makes music with the homeless.

By Alex Ross

Three years ago, Brian Palmer, a forty-three-year-old native of Beaumont, California, was a homeless man struggling to overcome heroin addiction. All he owned was a bag containing some clothes, a blanket, and a pillow. He sought assistance at a recovery center at the heart of Skid Row, the dismayingly large tent city in downtown Los Angeles. One activity that helped him through the skittish early period of sobriety was singing. As a kid, he dreamed of becoming a professional singer; he was a member of the church choir and appeared in musicals at school. In 2015, he encountered the Urban Voices Project, a choir made up of Skid Row residents and allies. This led him to Street Symphony, a group of professional musicians, mostly from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the L.A. Master Chorale, which works with homeless, mentally ill, and incarcerated populations. In February, Palmer began taking voice lessons from Scott Graff, a member of the Master Chorale and of the Street Symphony Chamber Singers. Graff told me, “I gave Brian some tips on vocal technique, and he taught me life lessons. I got the better end of the deal.”

A few days after Thanksgiving, Palmer sang in a musical workshop at the Midnight Mission, a charitable institution on Skid Row. He had been studying “The People That Walked in Darkness,” a bass aria from Handel’s “Messiah.” In ten days’ time, he would sing it with Street Symphony, which presents an abridged “Messiah” at Midnight each year. At the workshop, five string players accompanied him; a few dozen members of the Skid Row community were in attendance. Before performing, Palmer shared with the audience some thoughts about the music. A tall man with shaggy hair and a drawling voice, he was dressed in jeans and a “Rule Your Own Destiny” T-shirt. He told his story with the practiced directness of someone who has attended many twelve-step meetings. “When I came here, three years ago, I didn’t know where my life was going to take me,” he said. “I just knew that I needed to change, and that I needed help. When I was walking through my life in addiction, and the darkness and the hell I had created for myself, it was like the phoenix coming out of the darkness and seeing the light.”

Palmer then sang the aria. The text, from the book of Isaiah, is as follows: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.” Handel’s “Messiah” is such a fixture of the repertory that it takes some effort to focus on the words and register what they mean. In that respect, Palmer surpassed any singer I have heard. He performed well for one who has been studying vocal technique for less than a year, and in the lower end of his range he had a round, full tone that can’t be taught. More important, he made the text sound as though it had been taken from his own life. 

Street Symphony is a group of professional musicians, mostly from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the L.A. Master Chorale, that works with homeless, mentally ill, and incarcerated populations. Each year, the group performs an abridged version of Handel’s “Messiah” at the Midnight Mission, a charitable institution on Skid Row. Photograph by David Black for The New Yorker

There are about fifty-eight thousand homeless people in Los Angeles County. To walk through the streets of Skid Row to the Midnight Mission is to feel shame for the state of the city and the state of the country. Block after block, the sidewalks are crammed with tents, boxes, broken furniture, and shopping carts full of possessions. To enter the mission, you have to step over people in sleeping bags. It is, however, a different experience to visit the Midnight Mission with Vijay Gupta, an L.A. Phil violinist, who, in 2011, founded Street Symphony. He greets both residents and staff with smiles, handshakes, banter, and an explosive laugh.

Gupta, a barrel-chested, lightly bearded man of thirty, is one of the most radical thinkers in the unradical world of American classical music. With Street Symphony, he has created a formidable new model for how musical institutions should engage with the world around them. One ubiquitous buzzword in classical music is “outreach.” It signifies attempts to bring music to underserved communities, public schools, medical facilities, and prisons.

“I’m really bothered by some forms of outreach,” Gupta told me, at a coffee shop in Echo Park, where he lives. “You have to wonder who it’s actually for. A bunch of musicians show up, play their beautiful music, and leave. For people on the inside, maybe it brightens their day a little, but . . . Look, Thanksgiving just happened. Ten thousand people got fed on Skid Row. I was there the day after Thanksgiving, and the street smelled like you couldn’t believe. All that turkey had become trash. Who’s doing the cleanup? If you’re going to make any difference, you have to show up a lot more often, and not just when you feel like it. This community is one defined by trauma. In their lives, someone didn’t show up. We gotta fucking show up.”

Gupta is a riveting speaker, at once jovial and intense. He talks rapidly, precisely, and with startling candor. “I know a little bit of what some of these people have gone through,” he told me. “My parents disowned me. I was fortunate enough to have great people around me who supported me. But I think about the very dark places my life could have gone, particularly with depression.”

The son of Indian immigrants, Gupta grew up in upstate New York, showing prodigious musical and intellectual abilities from an early age. He entered Juilliard’s pre-college program when he was seven, and graduated from Marist College at seventeen, with a degree in biology. He considered a career in neuroscience before turning to music full time. In 2007, he beat out more than three hundred applicants to win a seat in the L.A. Phil; he was nineteen. His parents supported him in his early career, but their relationship fell apart around the time he married, despite their objections, the psychologist and activist Samantha Lynne.

Soon after Gupta moved to L.A., he got to know a homeless musician. Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, had been writing about a man named Nathaniel Ayers, who had been a star double-bass student at Juilliard in the early nineteen-seventies before paranoid schizophrenia forced him to drop out. Ayers ended up living on the streets of downtown L.A., playing for passersby on a broken two-stringed violin. In 2005, Lopez approached Adam Crane, then the director of public relations for the L.A. Phil, with the idea of bringing Ayers to a rehearsal at Disney Hall. Ayers went, and continued visiting Disney. Gupta began giving him informal violin lessons. In 2008, Lopez published a book about Ayers, “The Soloist,” which subsequently became a film. Although Ayers has been in and out of an institution in the intervening years, Lopez, Crane, and Gupta remain in touch with him. Ayers attended Street Symphony’s first “Messiah,” in 2015, and followed along with the score. 

From left to right: David Allen Moore, a bassist for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Dahae Kim, the assistant principal cellist, during a rehearsal at the Midnight Mission. Photographs by David Black for The New Yorker

“I was down on Skid Row on my twenty-second birthday,” Gupta recalled. “Steve and Adam had brought out a cake, and Nathaniel was playing ‘Happy Birthday’ on his violin, and I was trying to blow out the candles when I saw this man looking out at me from a tent, staring me down. That look got to me. It was a joyous thing and a really shitty thing at the same time.”

Gupta was soon performing at shelters, hospices, clinics, and prisons. At the end of 2010, he launched Street Symphony, in league with Mitch Newman, another member of the L.A. Phil violin section, and several other colleagues. “When we get back to the Phil, we’re different, better musicians,” Gupta told me. “One time, we were doing Schumann in a mental ward at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, the huge jail downtown. A guy who’d studied music at a Cal State school said to me, ‘You know, these guys had real shit happen to them. Bach was an orphan. Beethoven was beat by his dad. Brahms had to play in brothels. And Schumann—he died in a place like this.’ That still gives me chills. I’ll never play Schumann the same way again.”

The first performance of “Messiah,” in Dublin, in 1742, was, according to a contemporary announcement, presented “for the Relief of the Prisoners in the several Gaols.” Proceeds from the première helped the Charitable Musical Society to free a hundred and forty-two people from debtors’ prison. Street Symphony’s “Messiah” therefore comes closer to the original spirit of the piece than most modern versions do. The first “Messiah” attracted a “most Grand, Polite and crowded Audience”; the performances at the Midnight Mission draw Skid Row residents, charitable workers, benefactors, and musicians’ friends. People may start dancing during the “Hallelujah” Chorus or shouting out encouragement during the arias. Zanaida Robles, who has been conducting the Street Symphony “Messiah” since 2015, welcomes such friendly interruptions, often turning around to acknowledge them.

This year, the ensemble also offered “We Need Darkness to See the Stars,” a new choral-orchestral composition by Benjamin Shirley, who lived at the Midnight Mission from 2011 to 2013. Shirley had been a bass player in a successful rock band before entering a downward spiral of substance abuse. Once he got sober, he became interested in writing film and concert music. For the past year, he has been working with Reena Esmail, who is Street Symphony’s composer-in-residence. Shirley has a keen ear for harmony and instrumental color. “We Need Darkness” ends with sunny uplift, but along the way it dips into pungent dissonances and rougher textures. Shirley, a grizzled man with a tattoo on his neck, waxed self-critical after hearing his work, as composers do. “I need to trim it more,” he told me. But he looked overwhelmed. “In 2011, I was one of these guys on the edge. Now I’m here as a composer. How did that happen? It’s not a one-man show.”

Spiritual homilies, whether in the form of venerable religious texts or recovery literature, have a way of seeming corny until a crisis arrives, at which point they take on the force of breaking news. That explains why line after line of “Messiah” felt especially acute on Skid Row. In the soprano-and-alto duet “And He Shall Feed His Flock,” Christina Collier, who sings alongside Brian Palmer in Urban Voices, gave a plaintive torch-song quality to the first verse. Tamara Bevard, from the Master Chorale, answered with a classically immaculate second verse, ending with a caressing delivery of the phrase “Ye shall find rest unto your souls.” Throughout, Handel blended easily with Urban Voices’ more modern selections—“Beautiful City,” from “Godspell”; Kirk Franklin’s “I Smile.” Mariachi and Afro-Cuban bands played before the main performance, and reggae tunes were spun afterward.

The spell dissolves when you leave the Midnight Mission. The people that walked in darkness are still there. Hard stares greet you as you proceed to your car. This feeling is, if anything, even worse than the one that hits you going in. The entire experience is at once exalting and crushing, luminous and bleak. “We get to leave,” Gupta said. “That’s the source of our shame. The only way to deal with it is to go back.”