“It was a Wednesday night in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, and 40 people—mostly millennials—sat cross-legged [in] a cramped living room, drinking craft beers,” writes Charley Locke on Friday (10/14) at Wired.com. “Sam Bodkin stood to announce the night’s entertainment: two violinists, one cellist, and a violist playing selections of quartets by Haydn and Brahms. Bodkin, the founder of Groupmuse [heard] Beethoven’s Große Fuge Opus no. 133 in college [and] he was hooked…. Bodkin realized how much more powerful chamber music was when performed live.… So in 2013, Bodkin started Groupmuse, a company that has hired over 1,200 young classical musicians to play small concerts in living rooms across the country…. ‘We’ve had Dvorak and then string quartet arrangements of Guns and Roses, we’ve had Chopin on the piano and then Brazilian choro music,’ says Bodkin…. 70 percent of ‘musers’ were born in the 1980s and ’90s. That’s wildly attractive to organizations like the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, where half the audience is over 65…. Says Katherine Johnson, director of communications at the New York Philharmonic, ‘Bringing 30-somethings and 20-somethings into the concert hall—they’re the future.’ … Groupmuse has begun offering discounted tickets in partnership with both outfits, as well as other classical music institutions.”
Posted October 18, 2016
Pictured: A string quartet performs for a small audience at a Groupmuse concert
