On busking

Symposium on Public Space: Part I

I’ve been thinking about public and private space a fair amount recently (in essays here about pubs and dinner parties and a forthcoming piece for Comment on private property, and of course in reading Tara’s wonderful dispatches from the Met Museum). One of the delightful—and infuriating—things about living in Manhattan, the densest place in the US, is the necessity and vitality of public space.

I have always loved the beauty and variety of Central Park, but the Park became a haven for us in the pandemic, as we were able first to get married just before the lockdown began and then to gather with friends outdoors after the lockdown ended but restrictions were still in place. In the years since, at least in warmer months, we have kept our pandemic tradition of weekly picnics there, in the same grove of cherry trees, by the reservoir, where we married. It is always a joy to watch dogs and children romp in the open space and to mark the progress of the seasons by observing the trees, which have now become familiar companions.

Matters are less happy elsewhere. While the subways remain safe (and crime, in general, is down in New York City), public disorder underground is on the rise—in part due to the critical lack of psychiatric care for those experiencing mental distress and illness. Fare-jumping is, likewise, widespread, to which the predictably polarized responses of increased policing (on the political right) or getting rid of fares altogether (on the political left) are equally unsuited. Fare enforcement that involves paying NYPD officers overtime is likely to cost more than it recoups while also leading to racial discrimination in police stops; at the same time, a system that doesn’t charge for entry is liable to widespread abuse.

The underlying intellectual difficulty for both of these approaches is that they view public order simply in terms of lack of crime. If instead we see public order in terms of solidarity, we will recognize that neither approach can succeed. It is reasonable to expect most people to pay for the subway (while providing reduced-cost fares to low-income people, as New York City does through its Fair Fares program), as a small contribution to maintaining and valuing a public service. Policing, especially discriminatory policing, takes its own toll on solidarity, however.

The impoverishment of public space in recent years—as more people work from home and, more broadly, are fearful or reticent about interacting with their neighbors—is something we should all be concerned to oppose. As I see it, an important part of the answer to this challenge is to make public spaces not only orderly but inviting—indeed, beautiful. And that is why, twice a month, I busk on the streets of New York.

Troubadour, Saint James's Factory (British, ca. 1750–55)

Busking, as it is now commonly understood, is strongly associated with public performance for money, for tips from the audience, in other words. But street performance—from medieval minstrels, troubadours, and jongleurs to modern buskers—has always had a variety of aims. One of them is the expression of belief and sentiment, artistic and sometimes even political, through music and song. Another is to bring a beauty that is too-frequently reserved for paid and private spaces to a wider audience. This last motive is the primary one for the group of singers to which I belong, The Renaissance Street Singers. We do not accept money (and from time to time we have to chase someone down who leaves a bill as they walk away), not even for our annual sit-down concert (which comes with a free dinner for guests, provided by the singers!) in March.

I wrote about being a member of the Street Singers in 2020 in an essay for Plough at a time when the pandemic made rehearsals and performances impossible. In the years since, I have come to think more about how eccentric our enterprise is. From time to time, friends and family (and those on our email list, though most are kith or kin) come to listen to part or all of one of our street performances, which last around 90 minutes and consist of 15 or so motets and portions of mass settings, usually from the 15th and 16th century. But our audience is mostly made up of people who pass by and hear a few seconds or a few minutes of a single piece. Occasionally a stranger will be captivated and stay for a while, asking questions about what we are singing. But our encounters are largely ephemeral.

I have come to feel that we are singing primarily to the City. Since we sing in public spaces—street corners, parks, and in the subway—members of our audience may live around the corner or come from a long distance. What we do knits people together in attention, even when that attention is limited to a distracted glance or a half-heard bar of music. Unlike instrumental music, the human voice does not carry very far. We do not therefore have the capacity to transform the space we are in, as some buskers can. Moreover, we are not trying actively to overcome the noise that surrounds us, though it makes tuning and timing difficult. We choose where we sing knowing that the acoustic landscape is unlikely to be favorable (though I miss singing in the cathedral-like resonance of the Graybar Passage in Grand Central Terminal, a regular pre-pandemic indoor location for us in the winter).

Still, our efforts are not dissimilar to those of other street musicians. As Susie Tanenbaum writes in her 1995 book on subway buskers Underground Harmonies,

While local government attempts to upgrade the “quality of life” in New York through policies that encourage strangers to trust one another even less, subway music scenes demonstrate, to the contrary, that a meaningful sense of social order is achieved when strangers have opportunities to encounter each other face-to-face and feel strengthened by their shared experience (xi).

What makes the Renaissance Street Singers unusual is the repertoire we perform, which is almost exclusively confined to chamber music concerts and, to a lesser extent, churches. This music is genuinely astonishing to encounter ‘in the wild’, as I myself felt when I first passed a Street Singers outdoor concert in October 2018 and took one of the yellow cards that John puts out for passers-by to find out more about us. I duly wrote to him, auditioned, and have been a member of the group since.

It is hard to explain what is so special about the music of Palestrina or Ockeghem or Tallis. I grant that its beauty may not be self-evident or compelling to everyone. Then again, the first time I ever really listened to such music, a chance encounter while listening to the radio when I was a senior in college, I found it so arresting that I immediately wanted to know more and, indeed, to learn to sing so that I could sing such music. I will never forget the experience of singing Thomas Tallis’s If ye love me at my first Evensong a few months later as a graduate student at Balliol College, Oxford, where I had joined the chapel choir and received my initial choral training ‘on the job’. However remarkable it was for me to first listen to this music, it was entirely transformative to sing it with others.

Balliol College Chapel, photo by David Iliff, used under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-SA 3.0).

I learned enough in my year at Balliol to become a useful member of the choir (as anyone who has sung in such groups will know, there is usually a shortage of tenors!), and, in the years since, to become a useful member of various amateur groups. As much as I enjoy working on the music with my fellow singers or talking about it with fellow enthusiasts in the early music scene, nothing is quite as special for me as bringing it to the streets of New York.

Beyond language and analysis, the music offers a source of primordial connection. The amusement, delight, and even gratitude that our audience feels, and often shares with us, is a reminder of a world that lies beyond our instrumental purposes—the urgency to get where we are going, the demands on us that occupy our attention even between tasks. That is a world where simply being with one another has value: being present, face-to-face, unhurried. In addition to being convenient and pleasant, as it should, it is a matter of urgency that public space can still afford this experience. It is, in fact, its highest function.

Note to our readers: This essay is the first in our new symposium, or series of essays on a connected theme, on the subject of public space. We welcome pitches for a guest essay of roughly 1500 words that explores some aspect of the topic in relation to the overarching themes of our project, for which we can offer a modest honorarium. Pitches may sent to us by email at thelineofbeauty.substack@gmail.com.