In Praise of Buskers and Street Performers
Music is best when everyone is involved.
One of the delights of travel is finding something unexpected, and one of the most serendipitous discoveries is music.
I realize that many people disagree with me on this point. There are those who find buskers to be an annoyance. For the kind of person who is forever encased in whatever flavor-of-the-month Spotify is feeding him and who views walking as just an imperfect means of getting between points on a map, a guy with a guitar is an unwelcome interruption in a well-formed plan.
By contrast, I come from a background that’s given me an appreciation for the street musician. In the hipster town of Lawrence, Kansas, everyone is a musician and every building a potential venue. On a fair Friday night, live music pours out of establishments on just about every block. Yet even with so many opportunities, there are plenty of musicians who — due either to necessity or personal choice — opt for the sidewalk corner, the folding stool, the open guitar case.
The biggest times for buskers are events. Crowds are a siren’s song for street musicians — the more people packed into the downtown area, the greater the allure. Lawrence was known to have the occasional event that pulled in people from across the state and beyond, and plenty of those visitors brought guitars. That’s another amazing thing about the buskers: They’re willing to put up with a lot for an audience, even traveling a thousand miles for a fair social climate.
Spend a few years immersed in an environment and it’s bound to change the way you view music and musicians, and that’s a change you’ll carry to farther shores. Music does exist outside of the States, believe it or not — and wherever there’s music, there are buskers.
Busking has become far more accepted in recent years. What cities once saw as a nuisance is now part of the character of those cities, particularly in places geared toward tourism. Many people, eager to prove that they’ve Been There, want to capture video of the colorful street performers they encounter — and the local government is more than pleased to encourage, promote, even subsidize those encounters.
That might be the best explanation for the street performers I’ve seen in mainland Asia. I can’t say that there are a lot of them, at least not in the places I’ve lived. However, I’ve still seen my fair share and then some. Venues aren’t as easy to come by in some places as they were in Lawrence in the old days, and when you can’t find a proper stage, it’s far easier to grab your gear and find a place in a nearby park to set up.
For me, there’s something comfortable about hearing live music in another country. After years of spending every weekend in some dive listening to a procession of bands I’ve never heard of, the sound of a guitar tuning makes me relax like no other sound can. And if I’m being totally honest, I feel a lot more comfortable listening to that music while reclining on a bench than skulking in the shadows of some venue.
There’s also an undeniable thrill in stumbling across one of these impromptu sessions — a feeling that you’re seeing something that few other people have. Of course, that changes a little bit when a hundred people are recording it.
Speaking of which, I’d like to conclude this with a brief video of one of those buskers — part of a performance series near Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul. If you’re thinking of visiting, you might just have something like this to look forward to.
