Dear friends,
This past week, the 10,000th groupmuse was published on our platform. For the 10,000th time, a community member felt inspired to open their home to culture and community, to help maintain musical lineage, to do their part to make their corner of this world more soulful and interconnected.
It’s overwhelming to try to envisage all of the smiles, the convivial conversations, the breathtaking cadences, the rapturous applauses the figure represents. But one thing is clear — our immense gratitude for all of you; every host, every musician, every attendee; this enormous project is a collective expression of all of our desire to make the world more beautiful and more meaningful.
It started in a living room in Dedham, Massachusetts, in January 2013, with works by the great Belgian composer Cesar Franck, and the wild Hungarian genius, Zoltan Kodaly. We’ve now had groupmuses in 4 continents and in more than 50 cities. We’ve earned millions of dollars for musicians. We’ve introduced untold droves to the treasures of classical music — and now jazz music, Indian music, and many other forms of roots music. We’ve built an innovative hybrid model that’s both a musician and worker-owned cooperative and a more traditional nonprofit. And we’ve been written up in a great many prestigious outlets.
But, interestingly, it’s been a while since we’ve gotten major media coverage; the press tends to have a preference for that which is new and flashy, and in the early days, there seemed to be an unending appetite for covering our “whacky trend that has millennials going to classical music house parties”. While the media has a prejudice for the new, our movement grows deeper with each passing week. We’re not here to be a flash in the pan — some funny fad. We’re here to build a lasting community ritual, to fill the gap that declining community institutions (guild halls, churches, taverns) have left in our hearts and our neighborhoods. That’s why this 10,000 watershed feels so significant to us — Groupmuse truly works, and it genuinely makes our lives more colorful and less lonely. We’ve got our sights set on 100,000 and a million beyond that. ❤️
So how can you help us bring this vision to fruition? To keep doing what you’ve been doing — keep hosting, keep performing, keep attending, and, if you’re able, keep donating. During the pandemic, we moved our operation online and had to radically amend our model to survive. We stared a non-profit called The Groupmuse Foundation, that’s now in its 4th year. As the return to the “post”-pandemic world has been fitful for a lot of arts organizations, The Groupmuse Foundation has been absolutely vital to our continued success and presence in your life. So if you want to live in a world where a hundred thousand groupmuses can bring together a hundred thousand neighborhoods, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today, and let’s keep this beautiful tradition alive — for Beethoven and for Miles, for your friends and your neighbors, for your children and your ancestors, and for your own splendid self.
Hope to see you at a groupmuse soon!
With love, devotion, and so much great music,
Sam and the Groupmuse Team
