Andrew Talks about his Daily Life and Death of Classical on the New York Times

Andrew Ousley is the founder and artistic director of Death of Classical, a concert series held in spaces like Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the cave under St. George’s Church near Union Square in Manhattan and in the crypt beneath the Church of the Intercession on the border of Harlem and Washington Heights.

“Part of my job is figuring out how we can continue to expand our subterranean empire,” said Mr. Ousley, who also runs Unison Media, a marketing agency for classical musicians. His destination wish list includes Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, Queens, Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles and Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, in Houston.

As a child, Mr. Ousley preferred classic rock, hip-hop, rap and grunge. But when he was 16, his mother, Mary Ousley, an opera singer, introduced him to the soprano Maria Callas. He fell “head over heels” in love, he said. Then, in college, he took a class on Mozart. It made him realize that classical music could be “so much more than the sum of its parts,” he said.

It “speaks to the most universal aspects of the human condition in the most powerful way,” said Mr. Ousley, 39, who lives with his fiancée, the stylist Fay Leshner, 35, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and their Siberian cat, Gizmo. He started the concert series, he explained, “not to hammer the fact that we’re all going to die, but to focus on the preciousness of the time we’re given and the shared moments that make that time so meaningful.”

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