Browse by Keynote Topic Browse by Speaker Speaker News Virtual Events About Lavin FAQ Contact
  • musicians

Music

 

Here at Lavin we represent a diverse group of musicians and music speakers — songwriters, sound artists, composers, conductors, and seminal artists — who’ve helped shape how, and why, we listen today.

5
Music
Speakers
Sort By:
Vijay Gupta

Founder of Street Symphony | 2018 MacArthur Fellow | TED Senior Fellow

Vijay Gupta is a violinist and educator whose efforts to merge music with mental health are changing the world, note by note. Gupta is the founder of Street Symphony—a musical advocacy program that empowers citizen-musicians by engaging with communities experiencing extreme poverty, incarceration, and homelessness. The results have been extraordinary.   
Patti Smith

Punk Rock Legend | National Book Award Winner | New York Times Bestselling Author of Just Kids, Year of the Monkey, and A Book of Days

Named one of the most influential people in the world in TIME Magazine’s TIME 100, Patti Smith is a poet, singer, songwriter, photographer, and fine artist. A seminal American artist, Smith has produced a body of work whose influence branches out through generations, across disciplines, and around the world.  
Jeff Chang

Social Historian, Cultural Critic & Community Organizer | Author of We Gon’ Be Alright and Can’t Stop Won’t Stop

“Culture moves before politics,” says Jeff Chang, who writes on art, multiculturalism, and racial progress in post-civil rights America with the sweeping authority of the best social historians. In We Gon’ Be Alright—his acclaimed essay collection, adapted into a digital series—he explores the meaning of diversity in an era of racial and economic resegregation: telling a lively and tumultuous narrative of modern American life.
 
Hua Hsu

Bestselling author of Stay True | New Yorker staff writer | CBS Sunday Morning contributor

Our collective and individual identities are messy, amorphous, and impossible to define—but New Yorker writer and bestselling author Hua Hsu says that’s a good thing. Telling our own complex stories complicates the narratives that are told about us, and opens up new worlds of possibility. Hua’s memoir Stay True—which turned him into a “literary phenomenon” (The New York Times)—touches on the immigrant experience and growing up Asian-American; but more than that, it’s an exploration of grief, pop culture, being young, and how friendship helps us discover who we are. 
Chuck Klosterman

Renowned Cultural Critic | Author of 12 Books, Including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs

Pop culture, in all its distracting glitz, isn’t just entertainment. It is culture—American culture. And our most insightful guide is Chuck Klosterman. In his bestselling, culture-defining books, he’s pinned down modern America like no one else. And in fun, funny talks, he not only cuts to the bone of our media-saturated moment, but makes it the site of our shared, unlikely commonality.