Dr. Maya Shankar
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who served as a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science…
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Professional violinist Vijay Gupta grew up performing on the world’s biggest stages in order to fulfill his parents’ dreams for him. But the pressure to play perfectly became too much, and over time he lost his love of the violin.
Then Vijay started performing in homeless shelters and mental health clinics, where audiences wanted something very different from him: not perfection, but connection.
This week, Vijay joins Maya to share how those experiences rekindled his passion for music, and gave him the courage to walk away from his parents’ dreams towards his own.
Check out Vijay’s new book, “Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation,” and learn more about his work with Street Symphony at StreetSymphony.org.
For Fun: Watch young violinists Vijay and Maya on PBS’s Reading Rainbow in 1996, “Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin.”
For more episodes like this, we recommend our conversation with Shira Gabriel, “Why Experiencing Awe With Others Feels So Magical.”
Pushkin. For a lot of my life, I have not known who I am. I've only known how to be that performer who escapes.
00:31
Speaker 2
Professional violinist Vijay Gupta grew up performing on the world's biggest stages in order to fulfill his parents' dreams for him. But over time, he buckled under the pressure to play perfectly, and that eroded his love of the violin. Then Vijay found a new audience for his music, in homeless shelters and addiction and mental health clinics, and that audience demanded something very different of him.
00:57
Speaker 1
And what changed for me in Skid Row? is that the audiences there did not want a performance. They wanted me. They wanted me to be me. And I realized that maybe the thing that I had to do was to say goodbye to dreams that were never mine. You know, what kind of practice would that be? What would that look like?
01:24
Speaker 2
On today's show, walking away from your parents' dreams and toward your own. I'm Maya Shunker, a scientist who studies human behavior. And this is A Slight Change of Plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Vijay and I were actually violin classmates as kids. We attended the Juilliard Pre-College Program in New York City. And while we were there, PBS's Reading Rainbow interviewed us about what it was like to perform in an orchestra. Here's 8-year-old Vijay way back when.
02:09
Speaker 1
If you're careless and you make a mistake, everyone, you're going to bring down everyone back to the drawing board.
02:18
Speaker 2
And here's me with a slightly different take. It's like a puzzle and you have to be one of the little pieces. The conductor is the person who puts all the pieces together. to the puzzle together. I think you can guess who ended up the better violinist between the two of us. Vijay's parents immigrated to New York from West Bengal in the 1970s. His dad first worked in baggage claim at JFK Airport and then went on to build a travel agency. When Vijay's family was building their first home, the construction workers would sing while they worked. One day, they sang the song Danny Boy. And four-year-old Vijay sang it right back to them, perfectly in tune. A crew member turned to Vijay's dad and said.
03:04
Speaker 1
You need to get that kid some violin lessons. And that was it. And so my parents were like, OK, we guess we're going to put him into music lessons. In the meantime, dad made me a violin like out of a Cracker Jack box in a ruler and taped the ruler to the Cracker Jack box, and then pulled a twig off of a tree in the front yard. And I would just babble, sing, and play walking around the house.
03:32
Speaker 2
You obviously took to the violin very quickly. You and I were peers at the Juilliard Pre-College Program. I was nine. I think you were seven or eight. We were both on Reading Rainbow. Fun times, everyone. You were so incredibly gifted. Your father... was a huge driving force in your early musical life, right? He built the Cracker Box. He was also your talent agent. He was your PR person. He drove you hard to excel. Your mom did too, but he was really out there, right? He was your spokesperson. Tell me more about your relationship with your dad and the role music played in that relationship.
04:18
Speaker 1
There was nobody in the world who mattered to me more than him. And nothing mattered more than him expressing love to me in some way. During concerts, the only person I would watch was him because he would stand in the middle of the room and he would mime things to me based on what my teachers were saying, like, do this for a straight bow or like speed up or slow down. He would kind of conduct me behind the conductor. And all I wanted was to see him smile. I don't think he actually was aware of the fact that he was driving me hard. It was just this thing that he was so consumed with that he wrote to Oprah and Sally Jesse Raphael and David Letterman as me. Yeah. You know.
05:12
Speaker 2
Pitching you. Yeah.
05:13
Speaker 1
Yes, pitching me, right? And then when I would go on these shows, I didn't even think to ask or wonder why am I on these shows? Because all that mattered was I'm doing it because dad wants me to do it. I'm doing it for dad.
05:31
Speaker 2
So much I want to dig into here. First of all, I mean, I'm just struck by the complexity with which you describe this relationship. When you said... I just know dad wants this. I'm doing what dad wants. What did your dad want for you, for your family? What did your violin career represent to him?
05:56
Speaker 1
I think my talent and my being out on stage made him matter. And I think it made him matter to his parents, who kind of always saw him as the one who never really got a real education. All of our uncles have not only one, but sometimes two PhDs. And my dad hadn't graduated high school in India. He was busy playing cricket on the street. He was kind of a knucklehead, a little bit of a hustler. And he had so much charm and so much panache. And yet underlying all of that was, I think, a deep anxiety issue. It was a chain smoker. He was constantly picking at his nails. He was, I think at times, deeply depressed, always wondering if he was enough. And then I think I was his secret weapon, his way of mattering. And I'll never forget when we actually performed. Now I'm catching myself saying when we performed. It was me on stage.
07:06
Speaker 2
Yes, how wild.
07:07
Speaker 1
Performing.
07:08
Speaker 2
So revealing.
07:09
Speaker 1
It's 100% because I still have it in my mind of being like, we did it together. But I went and played in a stadium in Kolkata. And the next morning there was a headline in the Kolkata newspaper. And I remember dad took the newspaper and brought it to his parents and just laid it on the table. Bam, there you go. I'm enough now. I'm enough now because my kid did this. I will not deny there was also a fierce love that consumed him and a fierce protection that he had of me and my brother of making sure, like I'm sure every immigrant parent does, to make sure that his kids had opportunities he would never have, you know?
07:57
Speaker 2
Yeah. It's a lot of pressure to carry when you are trying to live out your parents' dreams. One thing I was not aware of as a kid who was just jealous of you, I was like, he gets to be on Oprah. Oprah's not calling me up to play the violin. So I was always just marveling at all these amazing opportunities he had and was just, again, super jelly. One thing I was not aware of, and this is why it's been so edifying as an adult to just consume your story, is that You had a really challenging home life, Vijay. There was a lot of toxicity there. And I'm wondering if you can share a bit more about that.
08:35
Speaker 1
Yeah. I've been thinking a lot about the difference between conditional and unconditional love. And there was an or else to my dad's fierce love. And it could manifest in a lot of different ways. It would often get violent physically. There were times where I was so afraid of him that I would pee my sweatpants around him and be in my room practicing and holding out the violin like a shield so that I wouldn't get hit. And this was also something that happened with my mom too. And there becomes this kind of negative feedback loop cyclone where I remember being called into the kitchen just casually and always feeling like I had done something wrong, like I was about to get hit or there was something that was about to happen that I had to apologize for. Yeah.
09:40
Speaker 2
When you talk about the conditionality of love, was it, I love you unless you fail at this music thing, unless you're a perfect Indian son? Help flesh that out for me so I understand what it was contingent on. Hmm.
10:00
Speaker 1
Comes up for me is don't let me down. Like be a big boy, like grow up, grow up faster than you're supposed to. Like, but there's also this, this other piece too, of like, you have to do it because we weren't able to, you have to do it for us. And so in a way, there's also this constant feeling of, you know, if I've made a single mistake, actually, like what I said in the Reading Rainbow interview, if you're careless and you make a mistake, you'll bring everyone down back to the drawing board. Which, you know, as one of 32 violins in an orchestra, maybe, maybe you will, maybe you won't. But as the eldest son of a Bengali household, you do make one mistake, you bring down everyone. Yeah. Yeah.
10:49
Speaker 2
It's interesting to reflect because I, you know, obviously I'm the child of Indian immigrant parents, but thankfully for me, my parents did not have that expectation of perfectionism. And they knew I was always going to be my harshest critic. So they tried to go easy on me of anything. But it's so funny to even think about our respective reading rainbow comments because I'm sitting there being like, an orchestra is like a puzzle and all the players are the pieces and the conductor brings them all together. And you're just like, if you screw up, everyone's screwed over, you know, so. I can see it even like mirrored in our childhood selves. I honestly think this is because my parents just had lower expectations of me. They were like, damn, our kid got into Juilliard. Didn't expect that. And yours were like, my kid should absolutely be at Juilliard. He needs to be the best at Juilliard, right? But that is a different weight and responsibility to carry. Yeah.
11:42
Speaker 1
A couple of months into my classes at Juilliard, I started to, for the first time, feel really scared about how I played the violin. It was almost as if I was starting to unlearn joy at Juilliard. And a lot of it had to do with the kinds of people who I would be playing for in my lessons. And sometimes these were people who would fixate on every single flaw and every single note. And would just stop me and say, no, no, no. And every time that they would say no, I would hear not enough, not good enough, not good enough, not good enough. And with my parents sitting in those lessons, I remember mom at one point just like burying her face in her hands. So it was just shame. So the lessons were shameful. And then at home, my practicing became severely policed so that once again, I would not let anyone down. Yeah. And so I totally lost my love for the violin and especially practicing because I wanted music to be fun. But any time that I tried to sense some joy in my Mozart concerto or Mendelssohn, my parents would yell across the house, no, your teachers told you to practice that much slower. What are you doing? And it just sucked the joy out of every note I was playing. And so The other thing that's worth mentioning, I think, that I'm learning about myself is that I was and am a deeply rebellious person. I'm a punk. And so what I would do when I was a kid is I would hide novels behind my sheet music.
13:26
Speaker 2
Calvin and Hobbes for me.
13:27
Speaker 1
You know? Yeah. It was like Goosebumps and it was Tolkien later on and Harry Potter. And I would just zone out.
13:35
Speaker 2
I'm so, so happy to hear you did this, too. Oh, my God. Because it's a formative part of my childhood. Hey, at least I was reading, right?
13:44
Speaker 1
Exactly.
13:44
Speaker 2
How lovely and old school the rebellion we had.
13:46
Speaker 1
A hundred percent. I mean, like, I read, like, you know, C.S. Lewis, and I read such great stuff. I will say, though, that I had a couple of saving graces with regard to music. And one was that I lived for performing. It's almost to the point where I become a different persona now. when I'm on stage. I just know who to be and I eat it up. I love the lights. I love people applauding. I just love that contact. And later on, that became something I used to hide from myself. But as a little kid, I would live for being on stage.
14:24
Speaker 2
Totally. Well, I want to dig into that too, because when you are so burdened by shame and the feeling of not good enough, never enough, Performance is a form of escapism. You can become whoever you want to be in that setting. And that's what I'm hearing from you is that when you were performing, there was actually no expectation of you even being Vijay. You just, I mean, you Sasha Fierced it in a way, right? I mean, you just had an alter ego that you just became on stage. But it sounds like you were almost more comfortable playing a fictional version of yourself than you were embodying your genuine self.
15:02
Speaker 1
One hundred percent.
15:04
Speaker 2
You eventually climbed to the top of the classical music ranks. You got a tenured position with the L.A. Philharmonic. You were regularly playing in Walt Disney Concert Hall. Tell me about what your life looked like and how you felt achieving this massive thing, maybe more than your dad could ever have dreamed of for you, and what that felt like.
15:28
Speaker 1
Yeah, I was 19. And I have never had a job before. I'll never forget my first concerts on stage at the LA Phil. I didn't own Tuxedo Tales, so they gave me the Tuxedo Tales of the second trombone guy. And I'm like swimming in the Tuxedo Tales and the concerts being live recorded to iTunes. And it's like within two weeks of my first season at the Hollywood Bowl, I knew I was in the wrong place. I knew that this is not... the kind of music making that I had wanted to sign up for in my life. I'm just flying by the seat of my pants, sight reading every single program. And I'm like, wait, oh my God, I have never played this before. I've only played it on recordings. What am I going to do? And so I'm in this constant place of absolute terror and fear because now my tenure in the job is contingent upon not letting anyone down. But it's also that the music that I used to love is now a chore, an obstacle. I start to feel this burning sensation in my rib cage and in my shoulders and in my chest. And I learned that the instrument through which I make music is not the violin, but it's my body. And my body is breaking down. But I also had no way of even thinking about leaving this job because the LA Philharmonic salary is more than my dad has made in the last three years combined. I'm paying two family mortgages. So now I'm stuck in golden handcuffs in a job that I'm being told is a dream job, but I'm quickly realizing is becoming a nightmare. And look, nothing against the Hollywood Bowl, but people in the front row, they're not there for a concert, right? They're having a great time drinking Malbec and eating ribeyes and talking the whole time. This music is clearly entertainment. But I think there was something in me that knew that I wanted music to feel sacred. I wanted a contact. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but something about this new job felt so empty to me.
17:48
Speaker 2
A couple years into your time with the L.A. Phil, you met a musician, a guy named Nathaniel Ayers. Can you tell me about him? What made him different from the other people you were playing with every day?
18:02
Speaker 1
Nathaniel was a student at Juilliard in the 1970s when he started having hallucinations brought on him by paranoid schizophrenia. And apparently he was a genius double bass player, principal bass of the New York Philharmonic, But he had spent 20 years living in a 50 square block area of downtown LA called Skid Row, the epicenter of the crisis of homelessness in America today. And at the time, a number of LA Philharmonic musicians, a lot of them had become friends with Nathaniel. And so we would get together and he would talk about music with the same kind of burning, nerdy, no apologies love that I wanted to talk about music with. You know, it was like, oh my God, we could just geek out about Beethoven was like feeling this when he wrote the fourth symphony. Can you believe this? You know, this kind of thing. And we would just talk and talk. And so Nathaniel eventually asked me for violin lessons. And he wanted music, like capital M music. And then I would drive around LA and I'd see him pushing his shopping cart on the street. I don't know, Maya, like something would take me over and I would just pull over, park the car and I would hop out with my violin. I'd like, I waved to him and then he would like have his violin out and then I would have my violin out. And we would just be playing for each other.
19:33
Speaker 2
On the street.
19:34
Speaker 1
And this happened on the street. Wow. And then eventually this happened at the place he was living in Skid Row. And Nathaniel was the person who opened my eyes to the fact that in one... of the most devastating geographical areas in any American city, that there could be this fierce insistence on beauty. And like Nathaniel had transformed the place that he was living into his own little concert hall. And it was like, oh, I get it now. Something about this music makes sense here. Something about what I know about Beethoven's life and Beethoven's suffering. Something about this music needs to be expressed in this place where people's humanity is on full display. So a bunch of my L.A. Philharmonic colleagues were doing outreach concerts online. in churches, hospitals, and something about those experiences felt closer to the truth for me. That was when I started cold calling shelters and clinics and saying, can I come play for you all?
20:59
Speaker 2
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans. Vijay started bringing his violin to shelters and clinics on Skid Row. At first, he approached these performances with the formal etiquette of a classical musician. But that didn't last long.
21:37
Speaker 1
So I had put together a string quartet of L.A. Philharmonic members... And I completely lied to them about where we were going. I did not say that we were going to be going into Skid Row and that we were playing for a department of mental health clinic where the people who would be in our audience were probably homeless, probably seeking mental health intervention or social work help for their cases. And we were going to put on a classical music concert, our typical outreach concert. We even showed up wearing full-on concert black. And we're in the windowless basement conference room of the clinic, sitting on creaking plastic chairs. And the first row of the audience is less than four feet away from me. I can reach out and touch them. which is way too close for a typical classical music experience. And we kind of make a brief introduction, like, hey, we're going to play some music for you. It's still very stilted and formal and stodgy. And we start playing this very dramatic string quartet by Beethoven. And in the front row, halfway through the first phrase, a woman punches her hand in the air. six inches from my face and I'm terrified. This is not supposed to happen during a concert. People are not even supposed to applaud during movements. WTF, what is happening right now? And I almost fall off my chair and I look over at her like while playing. Now I see like there are tears streaming down her face. And I'm like, what is going on? And I see my colleagues kind of look up at her and then look at me nervously. And I don't know how to get us out of this situation. And then once we finish playing, she explodes out of her chair. And she just is like this Niagara of emotion. She's like, oh, my God, how did you know this music is my story? And this is the sound of my dad beating us when I was a child. I used to hide my little sister. And then she starts singing. little tiny bits from the piece we've just played. Like, da-da-da-dee-da-da-da. Oh, when you played that, that was me making up a game with my sister and hiding. And then, you know, I'm just looking at her and she's completely transformed. She tells us her story. At the moment, I'm like, this is a shit show.
24:05
Speaker 2
Sure.
24:06
Speaker 1
Right?
24:07
Speaker 2
And Mr. Perfectionist is thinking- If you interrupt me, I won't play the G sharp with perfect intonation or what have you, right?
24:14
Speaker 1
Exactly. And I'm bringing this totally perfectionist standard and kind of imposing my perfection upon people who may have never even heard a violin live before. And I'm just looking at the back row at the social workers and the security guards. And dude, they're all crying. They're all crying. They told me later on that they had never heard her story before. And that she had been coming to the clinic for years. If she were to say anything, she'd just snap at people. She wouldn't want to talk about a case. She didn't want to take any care. And then this woman started inviting other people to tell their story. And when they start saying how the music made them feel, honestly, I felt humiliated. Because that wasn't something that my colleagues and I had talked about in rehearsal. All we had talked about was like, oh my God, I keep fucking up. Oh my God, I'm so out of tune. Oh my God, my bowing doesn't match. No, like all of that just went out the window. And these people were hearing a very different music than the music I had ever been trained to give them. The one question in that time was like, well, what was the person who wrote this music going through? What was happening in their life? And then when I finally like Wikipedia-ed it for the first time, I'm like, oh my God, this is opus 18, number four. This is the time when Beethoven wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament, which is essentially his confession to his brothers that he's deaf and that he wants to take his life. And that somebody in our audience in Skid Row was hearing Beethoven's Humanity. when all I was hearing was the mistakes that I had made. So who was actually hearing the music?
26:11
Speaker 2
I was equally moved by another story you shared in your book around how you noticed when you were playing, people were falling asleep.
26:21
Speaker 1
I was playing at this place called the Midnight Mission, and there was a dude in the front row who would just fall asleep during concerts, full-on, head tilted back, snoring, mouth open. And I would talk to the coordinator, this amazing woman named Georgia. And I would say, Georgia, can we maybe find another spot for him? Because I've got LA film musicians. We shouldn't have people falling asleep during our concerts. And she was like, oh, honey, you do not understand that this might be the first time that this person has felt safe enough to close their eyes in public in years. And the fact that he trusts you To close this, I mean, I'm going to cry talking about this. And it's this thing where the metric of what we as musicians came to do very suddenly changed. Because now it was about comfort and about dignity and a moment of sweetness and respite. And, you know, it took me a while to understand, like, oh, wait, that's what the point of this engagement is. Maybe it's not about how perfectly we're playing. Maybe it's about the quality of connection that we're offering to people.
27:35
Speaker 2
How did it maybe change even the role you felt you were playing as a musician?
27:43
Speaker 1
For a lot of my life, I have not known who I am. I've only known how to be that performer who escapes. And how much of performance in our lives is a lie, is a construct? And what changed for me in Skid Row is that the audiences there did not want a performance. They wanted me. They wanted me to be me. And there was another person very early on who said to me, well, what's eating at you, baby? People in Skid Row would be able to see right through me. Another person said, oh, it's good that you're coming to walk your steps. Keep walking your steps. You're an addict just like the rest of us.
28:26
Speaker 2
Hmm.
28:28
Speaker 1
So there was something about being in Skid Row that, first of all, ended the veneer of performance. Because guess what? When I played in Skid Row, I didn't feel the pain in my body anymore. And there was something about being in those places where I felt free, maybe free for the first time as a musician. And then when I was playing in those places, I felt like I was playing better. And the playing better had nothing to do with playing better in tune necessarily. But of course, because I was more relaxed, because I felt safe, my sound was better. And the technical things were easier. And I wasn't clenching as much. And so something about being in Skid Row actually was teaching me how to be myself for the first time in my life.
29:18
Speaker 2
When the woman said, what's eating at you, baby, what was your reaction? What was your initial reaction? Did you just find it so discomforting? Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop penetrating my soul. This is very uncomfortable for me. And then what did you do with that information? And when did it start to kind of sink in that, hey, maybe I do need to do a little bit of work on myself?
29:38
Speaker 1
Oh, yeah. Oh, at the moment. I felt very insulted, right? I'm here as a performer. And yet here's this person who was just like, oh, but I don't see you as the performer you think you are. It took me years to realize that. You know, and it took me years to realize that, The people who we were playing for in Skid Row were so well acquainted with people hiding from their own suffering, right? And the only way out was through. And so just as Skid Row is a crucible of humanity, it also became my crucible too. And that was when the hard work of starting to go to therapy and starting to understand that in my adult life too. Yeah.
30:24
Speaker 2
Your evolution as a person... was multifold, of course. One of the things you learned from the people that you were playing for was the importance of imperfection, of being open with your vulnerabilities. And I feel like this was so beautifully exemplified by your willingness for the first time to improvise music. Prior to that, you were, nope, I just play notes on a page. I'm not taking any risk here. I'm not going to fail. So tell me exactly how that came to be. Importantly, with improvisation, where mistakes are forgiven.
31:04
Speaker 1
Yeah, where mistakes are forgiven. And in a sense, everything is permissible. Everything is a mistake. Who's to say that there's any rightness? Or if there's rightness, it's a rightness of connection. It's a rightness of intention. Yes. Where are we going? How are we going to get there together? As opposed to, don't let me down. But after we played a handful of concerts in Skid Row, I decided to start a nonprofit called Street Symphony. And we started off playing concerts in shelters and clinics in Skid Row. But then I would get phone calls from like top jazz musicians who had played with Thelonious Monk or mariachi musicians or West African drummers. We'd be like, hey, we hear you started this thing. Yeah. And so, you know, after that time, I started to become much more comfortable with improvisation. Like anytime those musicians would call me and they'd say, hey, we have a gig in a Mexican restaurant in Highland Park. Will you come play? I'd be like, oh, yeah, I'm there. Count me in. And that propriety, the sense of like, well, classical musicians don't jam. I recognized it finally as just fear. When we're improvising, you know, forgiveness is immediate. If there's any kind of mistake, it's immediately forgiven. And sometimes the mistakes are even leaned into. right? They're made into something more beautiful. Like how can we take this moment where we almost fell off the surfboard and pivot? So maybe mistakes are just doors that allow us to walk into a new sense of self.
32:42
Speaker 2
You get to a point in your life where you are living and playing in vastly different spheres. You're playing concerts within this street symphony apparatus, and then you're playing in the Hollywood Bowl for very different audiences. And I love what you said about how it felt like there was more truth to music in the street symphony concerts, that people were really hearing it. And then you make a radical decision, right, Vijay? You decide to leave your position at the LA Phil. Tell me about how you made a choice like that.
33:19
Speaker 1
To back up for a second, there was also... Really falling in love with the wrong person. With the best intentions, with trying to make things work, and it just didn't work. But it unveiled a serious fracture with my family that I was essentially disowned.
33:40
Speaker 2
Just so listeners know, you were engaged to and married to a white woman, and they wanted you to marry a Bengali girl.
33:46
Speaker 1
And they were already arranging my marriage, and it was going to be a whole thing. And, you know, I fell in love with a white girl. I then became engaged to her. But the fact that this was a person that I had chosen for myself and that this was the wrong kind of person to my parents, it was an immediate fracture. And my parents essentially told me that I wasn't part of the family any longer. My dad basically said, don't call yourself my son anymore. I want nothing to do with you. Don't use our last name anymore. So I didn't talk to my parents. I grieved my parents. I grieved my dad. And all the while I'm performing on stage at Disney Hall, at the Hollywood Bowl, and I'm also running Street Symphony, and I'm touring all over the world, and I'm trying to be in love with this person, and things are falling apart on every side. And then dad dies. He has a sudden heart attack, and we haven't talked in five years. And when my mom calls me and says that I have to do the funeral rites that the firstborn Hindu son has to do. I buy the plane tickets. I'm ready to go. But my mom says, don't bring her. I don't want to see her. And then I talk to the person I'm married to and she says, but you can't go to this. And so I'm stuck between these two forces in my life and I just freeze. And I don't say goodbye to my dad. And then, Maya, I start to see him everywhere. Like he begins to haunt me. But he's the same person now with a kind of release and a kind of love that I didn't feel he was able to necessarily give me when he was in his incorporated form. And so I start to see him in Skid Row. I start to see him in Twin Towers Jail. I start to see him at Disney Hall. And there was one moment where I realized that I was still living in a world made of his dreams. And that maybe I wasn't there for his funeral rites, but that maybe the thing that I had to do was burn the remnants of my own life to cremate them, to say goodbye to dreams that were never mine. What kind of practice would that be? What would that look like? And one of the manifestations of that was to let go of the job at the LA Phil. And that was also part of realizing that I wasn't going to have the answers. I wasn't going to be totally okay. I wasn't going to have security. But guess what? Who does? Because also when I would play with my LA Phil colleagues in Skid Row, after concerts, they would tell me that they had been in rehab, that they were in recovery. They would tell me about the pain in their own lives that we would never talk about backstage. So it became this idea of stopping the performance and actually starting to begin to live my life, whatever that meant. Yeah.
36:54
Speaker 2
I resonate so much with everything you've said, and it makes so much sense that you would have this reaction. What does it look like for those listening who are in that moment of rebuilding? Yeah. What can that look like when all of your anchors... all of the relationships that you once had, the ones that have been present for most of your life, they just disappear.
37:21
Speaker 1
Yeah. I'll just say that this is one of the questions I continue to struggle with, Maya, because it's more like I'm looking for belonging, you know? And there is a moment where it's like, I think about what Rilke, the poet, said of, you know, let everything happen to you, beauty and terror. And there is a terror being in free fall and falling and just falling. And there's not a trampoline that'll catch you. But there are other people who are falling with you, who are asking the questions with you. And so I was very lucky to find mirrors. And a lot of the mirrors I found were people who I had become really close to because of work in Skid Row. They were asking a lot of the same questions. And some of them are musicians and some of them are social workers. And part of the understanding of how to cope with falling was just making sure that I visited them every so often. And that I could talk to them. And then I found other musicians who said, well, you know what? Why don't we just all jump into the void together? What would that look like? Let's do crazy ass projects. What does that look like?
38:48
Speaker 2
That's awesome. So experimental. So outside your comfort zone.
38:52
Speaker 1
And so now you're just improvising life itself.
38:55
Speaker 2
Yes.
38:56
Speaker 1
You know?
38:56
Speaker 2
You know, as a kid, your sense of wellness was defined by how perfectly you performed on a concert stage. And I just want to understand how that has changed for you. What does it even mean in the context of music to give a good performance?
39:17
Speaker 1
As a kid, I would say, yes, my wellness was contingent on performing well. Frankly, like my safety.
39:24
Speaker 2
Your physical safety. Yeah. Emotional safety. Totally.
39:26
Speaker 1
Like whole sense of self, right? So now there's... this voice in my mind that's the adult Vijay. Adult Vijay can talk to the little tiny baby Vijay inside me and say, hey, you know what? Like, actually, I got this concert. You can just enjoy this concert. And so now a concert for me is looks like telling a new kind of story. The thing I'm obsessed with is not just playing music well, but giving the audience new eyes, giving them new ears, giving them a new sense of how this art that they're about to experience can help them see the world in a different way, right? Telling deeper stories and whose story is being told and to what end. So These are the things I think about success as the quality of connection. And also success of how hard can it fail? How hard can it suck, right? And in what way can you do it? So I love creating pilots for myself, pilot ideas and performances. I'm like, I'm going to throw myself off the deep end and see where we go. What does this feel like to be in free fall this way?
40:41
Speaker 2
Yeah.
40:42
Speaker 1
And then to actually use that controlled experiment to ask a series of hypotheses that can get me toward creating a concert program I would have never been brave enough to create. So that just lights me up now.
40:57
Speaker 2
Yeah, I can see it. I can feel it. And it's beautiful to hear you even talk about experimenting with music, experimenting with the story you're telling, because what I see is a reclaiming of your love for music. I actually only learned, Vijay, how much you love music when I read your book. I knew you were a mega talented kid, but I never knew if you loved it. Then I read your book and I thought, oh my God, you are obsessed with with music. You research every composer's backstory and what was happening in their life when they wrote the piece. And you understand music theory and you understand ear training. Like, it's pretty mind-blowing to me how deep that well of passion is. And I just wonder if you can reflect on that, because when I hear your story, I think sometimes kids are thrown into something that they just genuinely hate. And then as soon as they can flee the nest, they flee it and they never do that thing again. They never want to play tennis again. They never want to play music again. They never want to do the thing their parents forced them to do. What's so lovely about your story is that when that builder noticed that you had a thing for music, it wasn't simply a talent. It was a genuine love. And that you still want to do this today, but you derive even more joy from doing it today.
42:36
Speaker 1
Yeah. I am obsessed with music. Yeah. And I'm obsessed with all music, like all the world history and the economy and cultures and the way that music tells the story of humanity. Because, you know, I think... We train people a lot in the athleticism of music, which, of course, when we're starting young people so young, it's hard for us to understand that... Bach was an orphan and that the sonatas and partitas he wrote the same year that his wife died. Like we can't really tell a nine-year-old that, but we can maybe make a nine-year-old play those notes. And I don't know if we should be making a nine-year-old play those notes, but I think we spend a lot of time in the thingness of music, the athleticism of music, but we're also maybe not cultivating what I was always drawn to, which is like, oh, there's a bigger story here. Like there's a Tolkien level story about this piece of music, right? There's a journey that we're on. How do we tell that? So now I'm taking conducting lessons. I'm taking Hindustani music lessons. I'm taking voice lessons again. I'm trying to do all this nerdy shit, right?
43:49
Speaker 2
Yeah.
43:49
Speaker 1
So in a sense, like, that's my job as a musician, too, to be able to connect all of these various different stories back to the story of what it meant for that composer to be brave enough, to be crazy enough to put that note on the page.
44:05
Speaker 2
Yeah, to bare their soul in doing so.
44:07
Speaker 1
Oh, my God. How amazing is that?
44:10
Speaker 2
Oh, my God. Hey, thanks so much for listening. You can learn more about Vijay's work with Street Symphony at the link in our show notes. We've also linked to his book, Breeze Strung, a memoir of music and transformation. And just for fun, our shared Reading Rainbow debut. And one final thing, we would love to hear from you. What's helped you through times of change? Maybe it was advice someone gave you during a major transition, a phrase you still come back to when things feel uncertain, or something surprising you discovered about yourself. Share your reflections with us in a voice memo and tell us why those lessons have stayed with you. You may be featured in an upcoming episode. You can email your voice memo to slightchange at pushkin.fm. or leave us a voicemail at 646-397-8557. That's 646-397-8557. All right, we'll be back soon with another episode of A Slight Change of Plans. I'll see you then. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me, Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner, Alexandra Gerriton, our editor, Daphne Chen, our lead producer, Megan Lubin, our associate producer, Sonia Gerwitt, and our sound engineer, Erica Huang. Luis Guerra wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there. And of course, a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.
46:21
Speaker 1
Ooh, ooh, ooh.
The Host
