What we are

Groupmuse is a worker- and musician-owned cooperative seeking to uplift artists and strengthen broader community bonds through live, intimate performances of historically-rooted music.

At first glance, Groupmuse is an online platform where hosts and musicians organize concerts (which we call "groupmuses") in non-traditional spaces, such as living rooms, backyards, church basements, and public parks.

But ask any long-time groupmuser, and you’ll learn that Groupmuse is about so much more. It’s about building real, in-person community. It’s about bringing friends along and making new ones. It’s about giving and receiving gifts seen and unseen. It’s about closing your eyes and being transported during a particularly powerful passage of music. It’s about feeling connected to yourself, your local community, and the world.


What’s “historical music?”

For much of Groupmuse’s life, our focus was exclusively on western classical music. In the wake of the BLM protests in 2020, we decided to broaden our focus to encompass all historical-rooted music traditions of the world. A groupmuse is powerful not because the music comes from Europe—but because these musical lineages are too powerful, too beautiful, too alive to be lost to the ages. It’s through the connection to humans in space (packed together on a living room floor) and through time (maintaining glorious centuries-old musical traditions) that Groupmuse’s wholesome and transformational community-building power shines.

Of course, every piece of music has historical roots. What’s important to us is that the performers be in conscious relationship with the history of their instrument(s) and their musical tradition(s) and we hold our musicians to that standard.


Why cooperativism?

Integrity for us starts from the internal structure of our company and propagates out. Our small team of core staff are organized as worker-owners in a cooperative. We collectively decide our own leaders, we determine our budget collaboratively and transparently, and we work through hard decisions together.

We recognize that musicians are inherently community builders, that Groupmuse depends on them to develop our shared cultural infrastructure. As such, we needed a structure that invites, meaningfully rewards, compensates, and celebrates our own exquisitely skilled practitioners of these ancient arts. In 2021, we invited a Council of musicians to develop our internal structure for musicians, the keystone organizers of our community. In October 2021, the Council launched our musician-ownership program in the coop, and we welcomed our first ten musician-owners. (You can learn more about that in our article "Become a Musician-Owner at Groupmuse".)

When we dream, we dream of a massive network of Groupmuse cooperatives, each run locally by musicians and hosts, federated into a global ecosystem for live art, all depending on shared infrastructure built and maintained by a central administrative and product team. We’re not there yet, but we have the vision, and the structure as it ripens into reality.


Our values

At Groupmuse, we use these three values to guide our work. By talking about these values and reinforcing them through our work practices, we hold ourselves in alignment around the way we want to show up in the world.

  • Listening: To oneself; to others; to the world. Presence, availability, and connection.
  • Heart: Manifesting love, thought, care, empathy, and honesty in your work and relations.
  • Impact: Commitment to cultural transformation on every scale, from the smallest to the most grand.

Origin story

Groupmuse's origins can be traced back to the Boston apartment of pianist Cristian Budu, in 2010. There, musicians from the New England Conservatory would gather for chamber music house parties that would rattle the rafters with the sweet sounds of Brahms late into the night. Groupmuse founder Sam Bodkin was lucky enough to be invited to these concerts, developed the idea while working for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and put on the first groupmuse in 2013.


Funding

Groupmuse is organized into two distinct legal entities:

  1. The Groupmuse Cooperative is a worker- and musician-led business entity which carries out our daily operations supporting musicians and hosts, delivering successful events, growing the community, and developing revenue streams. It supports itself through event income, community revenue, ticketing partnerships with other concert presenters, and more (and was profitable until the pandemic hit). If you’re interested in investing in the Cooperative, we offer preferred stock in the form of Investor Shares with limited voting rights and capped returns. If you're interested, please contact team@groupmuse.com.
  2. The Groupmuse Foundation is our parallel 501(c)(3) nonprofit, stewarded by a generous board of arts patrons, which fundraises and supports much of the musician-first work we do. Compensating musicians for their performances and administrative labor is important to us, so initiatives that are musician-first are funded by grants from the Foundation. Anyone can support Groupmuse’s model of keeping live music accessible while guaranteeing musicians a minimum payment, by making a tax-deductible donation to the Foundation. If you’re interested in getting involved with the Foundation, please contact foundation@groupmuse.com.

This dual-structure path was carved through many years of challenges and exploration. Groupmuse has always operated along an awkward middleground between a non-profit and a for-profit entity, making it difficult to find aligned capital. In the arts world, we didn’t follow the traditional arts non-profit playbook and structure. In the for-profit world, we weren’t interested in extractive capital. However, with a small seed round in 2014 and a successful community Kickstarter campaign in 2015, we were able to develop a sustainable business model by 2016. With the launch of the Groupmuse Foundation in 2020, we’ve been able to source different capital from different sources, each aligned with the work they’re funding.



Staff

Ben Ross

Groupmuse Foundation
Baltimore

Katherine Kyu Hyeon Lim

Events, Musician Relations
New York City

Mosa Tsay

Groupmuse Foundation, Community Manager
New York City

Erica Joos

Community Manager
Boston

Alfredo Colon

Planetary Music, Social Media
New York City

Sam Bodkin

Steering Committee, Community Manager
Los Angeles

Bree Nichols

Email Marketing
Dallas

Kyle Schmolze

Steering Committee, Product
Oakland

Alexander Dubovoy

Steering Committee, Product, Press
Berlin

Brie Martin

Community Manager
San Francisco

Bexx Rosenbloom

Partnerships, Host Support
Philadelphia

Adrienne Baker

Steering Committee, Muser Experience
New York City

Dara Hankins

Planetary Music, Community Manager
New York City



Musician Council / Musician-Owners

Ian Scarfe

Pianist Ian Scarfe enjoys a busy career as an advocate for music. He manages a busy performance calendar that includes solo, ensemble, and orchestra appearances, which take him across the United States and Europe. An entertaining and articulate speaker, Scarfe finds himself equally at home in formal concert venues, halls of higher education, and casual events such as house concerts and jazz clubs.
Scarfe is the founder and director of the Trinity Alps Chamber Music Festival, an adventure-based touring festival that has brought musicians from all over the world to scenic rural Northern California. Since 2011 the festival has presented over 500 public concerts free and open to the public, with a special focus on rural communities and unexpected outdoor venues in scenic wilderness areas.
Scarfe makes his home in the Presidio of San Francisco with his wife and two cats. His sports career was short but spectacular - he enjoyed a position as the starting pianist of the San Francisco 49ers, performing in the stadium club restaurant in Candlestick Park from 2010 until the stadium was demolished a few years later.

Jay Julio

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Daniel Colalillo

Daniel Colalillo is a highly regarded classical pianist based in New York City. He is renowned for delivering powerful and distinctive performances with a high level of musical integrity. He has received critical acclaim from "The New York Times" and has established himself as a sought-after soloist. He has given solo recitals at prominent venues such as Carnegie Hall, Steinway Hall, Bargemusic, Symphony Space, Columbia University, Princeton University, and has performed in several cities including Philadelphia, San Francisco, Nashville, Toronto, Montreal, and more. Daniel also serves as the Artistic Director of "Classical Keys," a concert series held in Morristown, NJ and NYC where he actively performs chamber music. As a dedicated educator, he operates his own private studio and was awarded "Top Piano Teacher" by Steinway & Sons in 2022. Recently, he became a Musician Owner and serves on the Council of "Groupmuse," a series of chamber music house concerts in the US and abroad. Daniel graduated with a Master of Music from Mannes College: The New School for Music and began playing piano at the late age of 15.

Melanie Chirignan

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Stephanie Ray

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Meriette Saglie

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Staff emcees

These amazing people facilitated our virtual events during the pandemic.

Alfredo Colon

New York, NY

James Jaffe

San Francisco, CA

Simon Linn-Gerstein

Los Angeles, CA

Ianjoe Chang

New York, NY

Mann-Wen Lo

Los Angeles, CA

Eric Silberger

New York, NY

Lily Press

Los Angeles, CA

Dara Hankins

New York, NY

Katherine Kyu Hyeon Lim

New York, NY



Special Thanks

Emily Chiappinelli

Creator of the Massivemuse

Mike Gallagher

Special Adviser, New York City


Additional Thanks

  • Ben Miller
  • Emma Lynn
  • Ari Borensztein
  • Sebastian Bäverstam
  • Cristian Budu
  • Yannick Rafalimanana
  • Nicolas Hugon
  • Brian Dixon
  • Alex Hugon

Groupmuse would not have been possible without the help of these generous folks.







The painting that appears around the website is of Franz Schubert, one of the great artistic geniuses in human history, sitting at the piano, surrounded by human warmth. In the early 19th century, Schubert's friends, supporters and fans would gather in Viennese homes and listen to him and other musicians perform his compositions, interspersed with sounds of laughter, excited conversation, and glasses clinking and being refilled. Seem familiar?

This tremendous masterpiece was painted by Gustav Klimt, a great Viennese artistic genius of a century later. And here we are, a century after Klimt's Schubert at the Piano, keeping alive the vision of these two heroes of culture.