Gupta founded the Street Symphony in Los Angeles, working with homeless musicians and audiences. He says the audiences “would raise their hands and say ‘Well what was the composer feeling when they wrote that because I heard this.’ And then they would tell us a story or anecdote of their life that exactly reflected where the composer or where we as performers exactly were in our emotional life. … So this was actually one of the most astute and emphatic and engaged audiences that we’d encountered in our lives.”