Music
The Situation: In Washington, DC, at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.
After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule.
About 4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.
What has been repressed, no matter how forcibly and thoroughly, often finds a way of resurfacing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Anglo-American culture was struck by an outbreak of "hysteria" or "mania" described by alarmed observers as obscene, disruptive, and even criminal. Neither the United States nor England was, in the mid-twentieth century, a likely site for such unrestrained behavior. Both societies were heavily burdened by the puritanical legacy of the sixteenth century; each had contributed to the suppression of festive and ecstatic traditions among colonized -- or, in the case of the Americans, enslaved -- peoples. But it may be that their very success in expunging "foreign" ecstatic traditions heightened their vulnerability to the call, when it came, to get up and move and dance and shout.
Peter Sarstedt - Where Do You Go to My Lovely Video (4min 54sec). Sarstedt was born in India but his family relocated to England in 1954. He is the younger brother of the 1960s pop star Eden Kane for whom he briefly played bass and the elder brother of pop singer Clive Sarstedt.
