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Music in the streets:the exampleof Washington
SquareParkin New YorkCity
by PAOLO PRATO
Introduction
Non b bello quel che e bello, ma e bello quel che piace
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
(Proverb)
Music has always been part of street life. Takingit off the streets and
bringing it into enclosed spaces is a relativelyrecent experiencebut it
has profoundly changed the way music is perceived and evaluated.
'After art music moved indoors, street music has become an object of
increasing scorn' (Schafer 1980, p. 66). However, although discour-
aged by the new sonorities that appeared with the Industrial
Revolution and the new comfort of home-reproduciblemusic, street
music has not disappeared:on the contrary,it is tending to reinvade
the urban scene, in forms both old and new.
Once, music heard in the streets offered unique experiences. For a
long time it had been the only music which could reach the poorer
layers of society. In VictorianLondon, Germanbrass bands, hurdy-
gurdies, barrel organs and barrel pianos were 'perambulatingcon-
servatoires teaching the masses the most accepted music of the day'
(Chambers' Journal,1881, quoted Pearsall 1973, p. 194). Nowadays,
music in the street is a recycling of what has alreadybecome familiar
through the electronic media. The street changes its function: from
being a workshop of knowledge it has become a testing-ground. In
Jakobson'sterms, music in the street no longer performsreferentialor
aesthetic functions: it performs primarily metalingual, phatic and
conative functions.* Its purpose is no longer that of inventing a code
but rather that of checking it. However, if we take together all
'informal'music practices- those taking place in open public spaces -
as distinguished from 'formal'music practices- those taking place in
enclosed spaces - we are able to establishsome recurringsimilaritiesin
the former, notwithstanding the many changes undergone by them.
* In Jakobson'smodel of communication,referentialfunctions are oriented towards
extrinsicmeaning ('content'),aestheticones towardsintrinsicmeaning ('the message
for its own sake');metalingualfunctionshave to do with checkingcomprehensionof
the code ('do you understand?'),phatic functionswith makingcontact('hello'), and
conative functions with ordering, addressing or instigatingaction ('hey, you . . .').
151
152 Paolo Prato
Urbanspace redefined
Street musicians prospered right up to the beginning of the twentieth
century. Their gradual disappearancewas due to a lowering of urban
soundscape fidelity (the invention of the automobile)and to the advent
of new means of musicalreproduction:this equipmentsucceeds where
innumerable legal actions against them, over several centuries, have
failed. Street musicians did not disappearcompletelybut lost much of
their musical and social relevance until the sixties, when the cultural-
political turmoil, primarilyinvolving the younger generation, led to a
rebirthof the 'folksinger'as a popular stereotype, able to attractmany
of the new anti-conformist expectations. This type, as a set of
behavioural patterns, was popularised by the mass media and the
sociological effects put in motion both a vast process of music
self-education concentrated especially on the guitar (see Prato 1979)
and a 'return to the street'. The sixties was the period in which
nomadism became a way of life appealing to a great number of young
people and the 'folksinger' endowed it with a particulartheatrical
aspect. Throughout the sixties and seventies, however, this figure
graduallybecame normalised and his lonesome, hippie ways became
almost obsolete: street music was evolving towards an increasing
specialisation of performing means.
Contemporaryurbanculturein Westernsocieties is characterisedby
a growing 'aestheticisation'of life and a growing 'spectacularisation'of
urban space. Art and entertainment- among the most productive
institutionalisedpracticesin a post-modernsociety- are no longer tied
to a privileged time and space, but tend to disregardthese categories.*
Put in other words, the Festivitatsgefuhl (feeling of festivity) which
somehow connotates art, play and entertainment activities, is no
longer definable in terms of time - in the sense that there was once a
'sacred' or 'festive' time as opposed to a 'profane' or 'everyday life'
time - but in terms of space: there are spaces where it permanently
dwells (cinema halls, discotheques, shopping centres, private homes
provided with audio and video equipment) and spaces where it is
absent. If, in the ancient and pre-industrialisedcity, public space was
chaotic, its meanings and functions needing to be constantlyredefined
(thus, for example, the market square was used for various
overlappingpurposes), in the modern city, publicspace is orderedand
its meanings and functions are specialised: activities that might
* 'Post-modern'is a term used by Jean-FransoisLyotard(see Lyotard1979).
154 Paolo Prato
formerly have taken place anywhere are now spatially segregated.
This is to avoid possible misunderstandingsin the use of it;the ideal is:
a place for everything and everything in its place (see Lofland 1973).
What I call 'spectacularisationof urban space' is a set of operations
that, in the post-moderncity, tend to transformthe spatialorderingof
urban public space according to aesthetic criteria. Borrowing L. H.
Lofland'sterminology,we can say that such transformationsareof two
types: local and symbolic. Localtransformationsare interventions on
space itself and the bodies and objects which cross it; symbolic
transformationsare interventions on users' behaviour. Examples of
the formerwould be politicalevents, religiousliturgies,festivals, street
theatre and musical performances.Music plays a primaryrole in such
processes of spectacularisation.If, as Levi-Strausssuggests, noise was
associatedin myth-regulatedsocietieswith the sacredand silence with
the profane, modern societies have turned the relationupside down,
to the point that excess noise has everywhere to be controlled by
regulations. Today music, especiallypopularmusic, is associatedwith
a playful and festive characterisationof life and, in the age of its
technical reproducibility,it tends to infiltrateinto spaces which are
traditionallyalien to it, such as spaces of productionor transit-offices,
factories, supermarkets,trains. The diffusion of music outside tradi-
tionally established places and moments is partof a seductive strategy
which aims at rendering any human action desirable or, at least,
bearable. Time of work, consumption and desire tend to amalga-
mate, thus losing their own characteristictraits.
Leaving aside those spaces in which the use of music is more
concerned with a certain 'comforting'function (Muzak)than with a
spectacularisation, the spaces where music intervenes 'live' as a
spectacularelement, so as to reorganisethe perceptionand use of the
spaces themselves, are the areaswhere the ritualof narcissism(public
squares, parks), the ritual of transit (streets, subway stations, under-
ground passages) and the ritualof consumptionare celebrated.This is
becoming common practicein the greaturbancentres, where even the
most habitual behaviours such as transit and rest are susceptible
to spectacularisation.
An everyday remapping of the topography of spectacularisable
scenes, accounts for their ephemeral character. Not only their
localisationis ephemeral:a poetics of the ephemeralaffectsthe modes
of productionand consumption of the spectacularevents themselves,
that is, they are conceived in such a way as to be fully enjoyed in a
situation of haste and distraction.The disappearanceof 'aura'brings
about what Benjaminhas named 'distractedreception'and Gadamer
'aestheticalindifference',which does away with the 'criticaldifference'
Music in the streets:WashingtonSquarePark 155
WashingtonSquareParkas a theatre
WashingtonSquareParkin Manhattan,New York,has been chosen as
an example of open publicspace which regularlypresents a sufficiently
representative range of informal music events (see Fig. 1). The park
and the centralsquare- pedestrianareas- functionboth as transitzone
and rest zone, in a high-density touristicneighbourhood. On a typical
summer afternoon the park square presents itself as a multicoloured
circus-fairwith some fixed numbers, such as the showman who is a
conjurer-cum-fire-eater,the juggler, the stand-up comic, the roller-
skate, skateboardand freesbee virtuosiand the variousmusicians:jazz
and rock banks, folk singers, conservatory students, ethnic music
groups, steel-band players, etc. Besides this 'official'show, there are
individual contributionsto what amounts to a total theatricalisationof
the space, from walkmen, portable radios, cameras. The various
performancesare distributed along the perimeterof the square at an
average distance of fifteen to twenty metres from one another. People
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Conclusion
Music in the streets has different uses in different historicalperiods,
but generally speaking it very rarely claims to be an aesthetic
experience. Outdoor music practiceshave been meant to celebratea
sacred or secular power, by appealing to the population through
highly redundant qualities(processions, funerals, ceremonies . . .), or
to serve as a means of entertainment, or to perform an informative
function as mass-media embodied in such figures as the jongleur, the
minstrel, the cantastorie, the modern folk-singer.
Fromhis viewpoint Berliozis rightwhen assertingthat 'musicout of
doors is nonsense', since most Western practiceof music has been an
attempt to emancipate it from its relations with celebration, body,
meaning, and to preserve an aseptic terrainseparatedfromothers. In a
mass-media universe, however, the strategy is that of breaking
through the various separate sub-universes and homogenising the
ways of experiencing culturalproducts. My view on today's outdoor
music in an urban setting has tried to provide an example of such a
break-throughof the separate codes, which constitutes what I have
162 Paolo Prato
called 'a spectacularisedexperience of music': by speaking of itself,
music advertises the code and controls its users' competence.
The first phase of mass media (radio, TV, Hi-Fi) coincided with a
privatisation of music- the home as a meaningfulmusicalcentreversus a
meaningless public soundscape - which parallelled, according to its
'negative critics', the music's loss of meaning, banalisation, etc. The
second phase (walkman, car-stereo, portable radio, street music)
coincides with a growing socialisaton of music, based on new premises.
The sound identity of public space becomes meaningful again, but
it very often does so accordingto the same modalitieswhich operate
in private spaces, so that today's street music, besides being heir
to the street music of the past, is also, and maybe primarily,heir to
its antagonists (the home media). The experience of Washington
Square Park, for example, has more in common with TV and radio
advertising than with an outdoor performancein VictorianLondon.
On the one hand, today's streetmusic fostersnew listening habits, but
on the otherhand, it repeatsfamiliarmessages;it certainlyenrichesthe
notion of music and redefines that of noise, but it also reduces
creativityto an exercise in good style, and makes popularitycoincide
with effect.
The experienceof streetmusic today not only includes that of 'street'
(the social involvement) and that of 'music' (the aesthetic involve-
ment), but also a review of what is known about 'street' and 'music'
(the code involvement).
Following Luigi Del Grosso Destreri's paradox- 'music does not
exist, . . . what we deal with are a number of musical behaviours'
(Destreri1981,p. 138)- I have been focusing upon the anthropological
ratherthan the musical aspects of outdoor music. In so doing I do not
claim that the various genres of music have no specificitywith regard
to their related behaviours; only that they lose many of their
differentiating features when taken off their 'original' sites and
exhibited in streets and public squareswhere they ultimatelymonitor
social interaction.
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