Music is a fabric that holds together the generations through joyous communion. Let’s feel together.

Groupmuse is a platform enabling communities to come together around great art – an online social network that connects musicians directly to audiences through sociable and connective chamber music gatherings. Share the great masterpieces of music with old and new friends — in your home and throughout the world. Because art is better with your friends. Because music can't hear itself. Because we need to feel together.

Groupmuse’s origins can be traced back to the Allston apartment of pianist Cristian Budu, in 2010. There, musicians from 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 January of 2013.

Before COVID-19, Groupmuse would organize hundreds of chamber music concert house parties (called groupmuses) every month. Over the years, we’ve brought tens of thousands of people closer into their communities and tens of thousands of new listeners to chamber music, we’ve raised millions for young musicians, and our work has been featured in TIME, the Guardian, the Boston Globe, NPR, and many others.

When the Pandemic struck, we quickly moved all our operations online — giving musicians a container with which to hold their live-streamed performances in a socially connective way.

We believe that heartfelt performances deserve more than an odd flick-through on a Facebook Newsfeed. A live streamed performance is a performance and we’re building a new ritual around shared listening so that this art form can thrive during socially isolated times.

The virtual scene is not the living room scene — it’s something totally new, unbound from the confines of space and time zone, and the work is more important now than ever.

When we feel it’s safe and responsible, we’ll start gathering in living rooms again — but our virtual groupmuses have been such a success that they’re not going anywhere.

Till then - as before and forevermore, we're here to support professional musicians who have poured their lives into making great music, and we’re here to bring people together in nourishing and affirming ways.

Thank you for joining!

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? They called their evenings Schubertiads, and we totally ripped off their idea.

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.