American Heart: the Music Kitchen Performs for the Homeless

April 1, 2010 — -- The melodies from the world's great classics play all over New York City, echoing from great halls like the ones at Lincoln Center, down to the deep tunnels of the city's subways. People pay to see performers at the top of their field, or they toss spare change at street performers.

But one night last week on New York's Upper West Side, five soloists from the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church Bach Vespers choir gave a very different performance. They sang music from the Renaissance to the Baroque, from Orlando di Lassus to Johann Michael Bach. They ended the night with an American spiritual called "Give Me Jesus."

Their audience? A group of homeless men.

Some of them showed up in the church basement, expecting to be served sloppy joes, not treated to a concert. One man said, "I expected to come in here and eat, sleep and then get tossed."

Instead, they got to listen to the Music Kitchen. Its mission is to bring what founder Kelly Hall-Tompkins calls "the inspirational, therapeutic, and uplifting power of music" to New York City's homeless population.

Hall-Tompkins, a professional freelance violinist who has performed in the New York Philharmonic and is a member of the New Jersey Symphony, wears many hats for the Music Kitchen. She does everything that has to be done as the organization's founder, director, public relations manager, violinist, and chief fundraiser, to name a few of her responsibilities.

"Music Kitchen, I've presented, in five years, 42 concerts, engaged almost 70 of New York's greatest artists on a shoestring budget," she said.

She came up with the idea five years ago. As a professional musician, Hall-Tompkins often did run-throughs of her concert repertoire for friends and colleagues. Her husband, who at the time coordinated volunteer cooks for their church's homeless shelter program, made an offhand suggestion that she run through her upcoming violin concerto for the homeless one time when her friends weren't available.

That got her thinking about many things: her grandmother's weekly commitment to feeding the homeless, her own love of chamber music, and her visceral response to the warmth and informality of her colleagues' yearly chamber music party. She started Music Kitchen a year later.