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NEW YORK (WABC) — Spending a day with Kristopher Hull is a little like stepping into a movie.
As he pushes and plays a 500-pound piano through the streets of New York City, Hull offers a different view of the city, where the weird, the wonderful and everything in between become part of the performance.
“It looks crazy and dangerous. But it’s really not,” Hull said as he maneuvered the piano down a Manhattan street.
“Feels like an adventure,” said Joelle Garguilo.
For Hull, that’s exactly the point.
“Yeah, Elton John, yay,” he joked when asked about playing in the middle of the street.
“Yes.”
Garguilo summed up his mission simply: “You are a piano player for the people.”
“That’s exactly right,” Hull replied.
A pianist, philosopher and one-man force of nature, Hull has spent the last several years pushing his piano through the streets of Manhattan, performing classical music for anyone willing to stop and listen.
“I had this thing inside me that had always been bothered by the fact that classical music has been confined to the gilded walls of the concert hall, where if you don’t have $179 for a ticket to go to a hall, there’s no Mozart for you,” Hull said. “And this is just something that is not right.”
Rather than waiting for audiences to come to him, Hull brings the music directly to them.
“I think that I’m a conduit, maybe sometimes to allow New York to express itself,” he said. “And it just gets expressed through the piano, which is just like a magical instrument. It is a magnet for all the craziness and beauty.”
And a magnet it certainly is.
As Hull rolled through the city, strangers stopped to listen, ask questions and even take a turn at the keys.
“Come, let me help you out,” Hull said to one passerby who sat down to play.
“I’ll play an excerpt,” the man responded.
“Yeah. An excerpt is all we need,” Hull said. “And you are now at a 1964 Baldwin.”
“Oh wow.”
“That is seasoned by the street, man.”
“You’re bringing music to the people,” Garguilo said.
“And there’s this, like, it can be a homeless dude. It can be a stressed-out finance bro. It can be all sorts of different kinds of people,” Hull said. “And they’ll come up to me, and they’re like, ‘How? What is this?'”
One stop on the journey was the historic Chelsea Hotel, a place that holds special significance for Hull.
“I moved to New York in order to study with a concert pianist who lived in the Chelsea Hotel,” he said. “I came straight here. There’s my backpack, and that was all I owned.”
Hull’s enthusiasm is contagious, his curiosity seemingly limitless. He believes classical music has a unique ability to connect people because it requires no translation.
“Nobody here had any idea there was going to be a piano in their life today,” he said. “A lot of people feel intimidated by it. The thing about classical music is that there are no lyrics. From a little baby to somebody who’s 99 years old, all you have to do is feel it.”
The moments he witnesses while performing are what keep him going.
“When I’m playing and I can see what’s going on around me, and I see people stop in their tracks, or I see two people just kiss on the bench because they’re hearing Chopin,” Hull said. “And why wouldn’t you kiss?”
“And if you change somebody, say, one degree, maybe over the course of their life, they’re like, ‘You know what? Beauty is something that I care about.’ So all you need is just that little bit of change.”
Asked what his unusual journey has taught him about New York, Hull didn’t hesitate.
“It has taught me that New Yorkers are cool,” he said. “There’s no one kind of thing that happens. And that’s the gift of New York. The gift of New York is that it has everything. It’s the broadest canvas imaginable.”
“So you go out to make your little box of art, and on this huge canvas, it will get filled in. Kate will show up. Kanani will show up. You will show up.”
For Hull, the piano is more than an instrument. It’s a way to bring people together.
“We’re all connected doing this crazy piano thing,” he said. “This is what I’ve been given. I’m just the prism in the middle that turns that ray of light into the rainbow. And that’s something that I’m very grateful for.”
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