Notes from Below: Classical Music in New York City's Subways
By Qainat Khan, who works as a radio producer in Boston.
This is from Somersault’s spring music issue. You can read it, along with other essays, in a lovely pdf magazine here!
The underground system of tunnels and platforms at New York City’s Times Square station is vast, stretching for city blocks. More than 58 million people passed through this particular stop in 2011, making it the busiest transit point in the entire Metropolitan Transit Authority system. It is not a pleasant place to linger: moldering and drippy, and overrun with rats. But it is here that Nick Moyer, a mechanical engineering student at Columbia University, willingly spends his time.* He doesn’t descend into the subway for his studies. Moyer is a one-man band of accordion, trumpet, and improvised percussion — a busker.
The tall and wiry 22-year-old balances the accordion on his lap and pushes its buttons with his left hand to make chords. With his right hand, he plays the melody on his trumpet, using his feet to beat out a rhythm on his suitcase. “I have to put in another dollar!” calls out a guy in a deerstalker hat one December afternoon as Moyer launches into the Gershwin classic “Summertime.” “That’s amazing!” adds the newly converted fan before boarding his train.
There are 468 subway stations in New York City, and 1.6 billion people rode the trains. Nearly all of them, at one point or another, encountered a musician along the way. So while the subway system may be noisy and smelly—even, sometimes, frightening—it is also home to moments of unlikely spontaneity and beauty. Who would expect to find classical music—what many consider the highest of art forms—in the lowliest of places?
Just across town from Times Square Station, Grand Central Terminal blesses its bored and frustrated commuters with a ceiling dotted with glittery constellations, marble halls lit by chandeliers, and, occasionally, tunnels echoing with classical music. On this particular afternoon, the strains of James Graseck’s violin mingle with the hurried footsteps and random chatter. Those with any knowledge of classical music will recognize the precise counterpoint of Bach. Dressed formally in black concert attire, Graseck is deep in conversation with a small blonde boy whose backpack is enormous on his tiny frame. The boy is telling the older man about the Paganini capriccio he’s in the process of learning with his private teacher. The two try to figure out just which of the master’s 24 caprices it might be, Graseck eventually playing the last note of the fugue with a flourish, then handing his instrument over to the boy.
In a time where music has come to be mostly a solitary experience, recorded music heard via headphones, subway musicians remind us of the vital, spontaneous and participatory aspects of music making. For the art form isn’t just an aesthetic experience, it is a social one as well. And the social is where we learn how to be well-adjusted human beings—to engage with each other and our environment.
According to anthropologist Susie Tanenbaum in Underground Harmonies, her 1995 ethnography of the city’s subway musicians, when New York opened its first subway in 1904, performers weren’t legally allowed to play inside (though many did it anyway). It wasn’t until the 1930s, under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, that the rules against underground performance began actually to be enforced. Much of the increased prosecution had to do with the conflation of street musicians and panhandlers. (Panhandling is illegal.) People continued to play despite the rules against it, and over the decades, enforcement was haphazard at best. A series of cases in the 1980s finally codified and decriminalized the act of making music in the subways; artistic performance in public spaces, the court decided, was protected as speech under the First Amendment. To its credit, the subway has been a launching point for some commercially famous acts, including the indie band the Freelance Whales.
In New York City, it’s legal for subway musicians to perform on any platform at any stop. There are certain caveats—musicians need to stop during announcements and they can’t sell CDs or play inside the subway cars. Lydia Bradshaw, who conducts the MTA’s MUNY program, says that musicians are expected, along with everyone else who rides the subway, to adhere to the MTA’s Rules of Conduct. The MTA, in fact, sponsors a program called Music Under New York (MUNY), in which artists audition to get access to some of the most-trafficked spots in the system—like specific platforms in Times Square and Grand Central. Those accepted into the program go through a scheduler to reserve times for the desirable locations. Otherwise, musicians are free to set up anywhere they like, though those without the banner that comes along with MUNY membership tend to get harassed from time to time by police officers who don’t always know the rules regarding freelancers, and may make arbitrary decisions about who can play where and when.
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