Music out of doors

UNESCO Courier, April, 1992 by Francois Bensignor

He is below my window now, at noon. With the coming of the fine weather he has returned to his old haunts, like the swallows. He takes up his pitch at the crossroads in the sunlight, cranks the handle of his barrel-organ and sings the songs of old Paris, songs of the Commune and the people and love affairs that go wrong. I find myself almost unconsciously singing along with the choruses, as if I had always known them. But in fact who does still remember these old songs now, if not some inner voice or this anachronistic street musician?

Down there on the pavement, people are wrapped up in their own problems. Few stop. Some smile as they pass by; others walk on with their heads down, scowling. The singer is unfazed. He just puts another perforated strip in the machine and goes on singing. Sometimes he is off key, but never mind. ... Cars pass, office workers head for lunch, gangs of children form and disperse. Sometimes someone even stops to put a join the cup fixed to the barrel-organ.

But in the age of the Walkman, the street musician is playing not so much for the money as to keep alive a culture attacked on every side by the modern world of property developers and traffic jams. His long hair and red scarf, the ragamuffin's cap pulled down over one eye, may look like fancy dress, but they are really a way of letting passers-by know that Paris still belongs to the people who live in it. For the old street-songs are part of its soul, and that soul will never die as long as the melodies of the past can still be heard.

From street-singer to rap artist

In the old days when the wireless was just a hobbyist's plaything, street-singers served as loudspeakers, popularizing the latest songs and selling the sheet music that went with them. At home after Sunday dinner, families learned the tunes by heart. Paris used to sing.

In Jamaica, the sound systems of the 1950s and '60s served a similar commercial function. Perched on trucks parked strategically at crossroads, in markets or shopping streets, they boomed out the latest hits. A disc jockey would improvise a sales pitch over the microphone to the beat of an instrumental number. Although the original intention was to sell records, several musical techniques grew incidentally out of this custom, notably "toasting" - improvised rhythmic monologues spoken over the instrumental sections of a record - and talkovers, in which the disc jockey completely reworked the track, substituting his own rhythmically stressed words in place of the lyrics of the original recording. Toasting demanded the skills of the fairground barker or street hawker; talkovers were spoken art, rhythm turned into music.

These two Jamaican inventions served as models for "rap", today's street music par excellence. Like other musicians before them, rappers developed their art in the street before they had access to production facilities and commercial outlets. In New York, in the Bronx and Harlem, the first rappers began in the mid-1970s to organize "block parties" in the streets for the inhabitants of blocks of flats. A sound system would be installed on the pavement or maybe in the window of an apartment. Disc jockeys challenged one another over the turntables, rappers competed in verbal virtuosity, dancers devised wild movements, graffiti artists brought colour to dirty walls.

Urban soundscapes

Shut up in a club, street music loses its special identity. In a recording studio, even when simply relayed by microphone, it has to pass through the Caudine Forks of electronics, which rob it of some of its vitality. Street music can never really be replicated, for it is an art of the moment, inseparable from everything that is going on around it at the time of its creation. It needs space.

Some groups have found ways of integrating this urban dimension into their music. Anybody who has attended one of Urban Sax's performances will recall how this troupe of saxophonists, dehumanized behind their white masks, literally take over the venue in which they are appearing. They have played from gondolas in Venice, slid down from the roof of the town hall of Groningen in the Netherlands, taken possession of a square in Stockholm and conjured up strange water effects for the Neptune Fountain in the park of the Palace of Versailles.

Their strategy is that of the spider weaving its web. Groups of saxophonists move among the crowd, playing repeated phrases in harmony with one another. The audience is wrapped up in a strange world in which sounds come from far and near, some so close as to brush up against the listener. As the performance continues, the spectators' sense of musical space becomes more precise. However well they may know the spot where the performance is taking place, it soon starts to feel unfamiliar. Its volumes stretch or become fixed. The music makes the street breathe, gives it body.

Before the development of this kind of modern participation art, brass bands, parades and traditional processions (themselves often sources of inspiration for artists) provided - as they still do - a similar sort of social theatre for the cities. In this case, however, the surrounding architecture shapes the soundscape more than the movement of the sound-source.