Music in the streets: the example of Washington Square Park in New York City

Music has always been part of street life. Taking it off the streets and bringing it into enclosed spaces is a relatively recent experience but 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 discouraged by the new sonorities that appeared with the Industrial Revolution and the new comfort of home-reproducible music, street music has not disappeared: on the contrary, it is tending to reinvade the urban scene, in forms both old and new.