Métro Music

It is no surprise that the music of Parisian buskers is first rate. Since 1997 over 4,000 musicians have auditioned to play on the platforms and in the corridors of Métro stations around Paris. Each year, roughly 350 new artists are accredited, making them sanctioned RATP performers. This is rather tenuous job security, as the only thing these artists are rewarded is the opportunity to practice their art, with a hat, or a jar, or guitar case on the ground to collect a few coins. Many of them aren’t even interested in money, seeking, rather, an audience, and an acoustic chamber as vibrant as any studio in which to play. After several recent encounters with Métro musicians, I find myself drawn more and more frequently into the subway, in the hope of witnessing another virtuoso performance.

My friend Elizabeth lives in the 9th, and I take Line 12 toward Porte de la Chapelle to get to her house. The closest that Line 12 comes to my apartment is Sèvres Babylone, and that’s where I listen to the pan flutist, sometimes missing my train to hear a little bit more. He’s always in the same spot, in front of a billboard for a Belgian restaurant chain, standing with his feet together in a way that reminds me of Charlie Chaplin. Most every instrument I’ve heard in the subway sounds great, but the pan flute seems particularly suited to the ceramic tiles that bounce it’s high-pitched notes around like so many golf balls dropped into a racquetball court.

A few days ago I heard two pan flutes on the same day, one on my way to Elizabeth’s for dinner, and the other that morning at Châtelet, where I changed from Line 8 to Line 12 toward Mairie d’Issy on my way home from looking at an apartment in the 3rd. This first pan flute was half of a duo of Peruvian woodwinds, the other instrument a large recorder. I put some coins in their jar, and shot 30 seconds of video before a middle-aged man in spectacles and a fedora stopped to inform me that filming in the subway is illegal. My ignorance had been bliss, and now I feel self-conscious when I illicitly document music in the Métro.

Even the accredited performers break the rules from time to time. They are not supposed to play music on the trains, but they often do, and no one seems to mind. I, for one, couldn’t be happier, as was the case on Tuesday morning, when I joined Line 10 at Saint-Germain des Prés on my way to the US Embassy. In the middle of the car lengthwise, blocking one of the doors, was a man playing a guitar, which is a gross understatement. He had a German look about him, all blond hair and set jaw in a zip-up black turtleneck. His instrument was a caramel-colored electric, I couldn’t tell the brand, and it was beautiful. He wasn’t so much grinding his axe as making music, with the pleasing contradiction of effortlessness and concentration. He played sweet rock riffs that were somehow loud enough to hear from the far end of the car without being obnoxious, whatever your musical taste. Before he got off the train at Concorde several passengers dropped coins into the little change purse he carried around, a rare compliment from the fickle French commuters. The place where he had been standing was quickly filled by a dozen new passengers, who did as the French do, standing silently and looking anywhere but at each other.