Vijay's Story

Music has been part of my life since I was four years old. When I was a Suzuki student, my teacher took us to perform at a children’s hospital soon after I had played at Carnegie Hall. I still remember the quiet in the ward and the way the room changed when we began to play. That experience showed me that music could reach people in ways words could not.

I made my solo debut at eight years old. Even then, I sensed that music would be more than a profession for me—it would be the way I understood and engaged with the world.
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I grew up in the Hudson Valley in New York. My parents had immigrated from Bengal in the 1970s and wanted me to become a doctor. With a last name like Gupta, that expectation was clear. I was enrolled in advanced science classes, but I was also studying violin seriously at the Juilliard School’s pre-college division, performing in competitions and concerts around the country.
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At age eleven, I made my orchestral debut with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta. At fifteen, I entered the Manhattan School of Music to study violin performance, while also pursuing a degree in biology and pre-medicine at Marist College.
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My scientific training took me into neuroscience labs at Harvard Medical School, where I worked on projects studying spinal-cord regeneration and the biochemical pathways of Parkinson’s disease. Under the mentorship of Dr. Gottfried Schlaug—a neuroscientist and musician studying the brains of stroke patients—I saw how music could literally change the brain. Melodic intonation therapy helped patients who had lost speech begin to form words again through singing. Those experiences convinced me that music and medicine were not separate disciplines.
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I was also deeply inspired by Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains and by Dr. Paul Farmer’s model of medicine rooted in justice and accompaniment. At that point I thought I would become a physician. But the more I studied neuroscience, the more I felt drawn toward the human connection that music created.
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In 2007, I auditioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and joined the orchestra at age nineteen, becoming the youngest member in its history. For nearly a decade, I performed on stages around the world under conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Zubin Mehta. Those years taught me discipline, collaboration, and excellence at the highest level.
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But I also began to ask who we were not playing for. In 2010, I founded Street Symphony to bring live music to places where it was rarely heard—homeless shelters, jails, clinics, and transitional housing sites across Los Angeles. What began as a small effort among friends has grown into more than 3,000 performances and workshops led by professional musicians, community choirs, and artists who have experienced homelessness and incarceration.
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Each December, we present Handel’s Messiah on Skid Row, performed by people from both the professional and the Skid Row communities. It has become a yearly gathering that celebrates dignity, recovery, and belonging.

Through this work, I’ve learned that music can be a bridge between worlds that rarely meet. It can invite dialogue, healing, and empathy. My path from science to symphony to Skid Row is one story about what that bridge can look like.

Today, I continue to perform and teach internationally as a violinist and as the co-founder of the Darshan Piano Trio with pianist Dominic Cheli and cellist Yoshika Masuda. I also write and lecture about the intersection of music, healing, and justice. My forthcoming memoir, Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation, explores these themes through my own story.
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Music has shaped every part of my life—from my earliest lessons to my years with the orchestra to the work I continue through Street Symphony. It remains a way of asking: how can a musician serve what matters most?