A NYC subway musician and musical saw player tells what happens when she plays in the subway

• Ode to a Musical Saw
• How Do You Deal?
• Presidential “Gold” Dollar Coins
• Musical Saw Lecture/Demonstration at Lincoln Center
• Working on Co-existing

• Aaron: My wife showed me this article that she had to read for a wr...
• Christopher Waldrop: Maybe this is naive of me, but it would seem to me that busk...
• Key: hello natalia, how've you been? i've just heard about you...
• Claudia: Thanks to your comment in my blog, I HAD to come and see wha...
• Vintage Kids' Books My Kid Loves: I took a quick snapshot of the singing saw page.... http...
• laurie: wheat pennies are cool, too....
• Moof: Wasn't there also a short film about you premiered at the To...

open all | close all

• 59th street & Lexington
• Music Under New York
• Shuttle
• Times Square
• Uncategorized
• Union Square

Every now and then I come across interesting poems about either the musical saw or street musicians. Well, imagine my happiness when I discovered a poem about the musical saw which also mentions street musicians!

Ode to a Musical Saw/Dave Bonta

No longer walking
the straight & narrow,
no longer restricted to the harsh
amens of service,
now it’s your turn to be held still

for the sawing of some
effete bow, generations removed
from any kinship with arrows.
But you’re free!
And this song of yours

might otherwise
never have been heard.
You put your whole body
into it, still ascetic,
but now for the cause of art.

There’s a sweet spot, the street
musicians say, & they find it
in you. Where the heart might be,
systole & diastole in perfect balance,
if you were more than cartilage.

The pure tone floats up
through two octaves of rejoicing
at your deliverance
from lumber.
Or is this grief?

© Dave Bonta
Printed with permission.

Photographer: © Visakh Menon

Buskers’ conversation:

Django guitar player: “I recently had an encounter with another busker at 6th Avenue and 14 street (’L’ train platform). He’s a burly guy who plays acoustic guitar. I was in the middle of playing, and he wanted the spot. When I told him I was just getting started, he verbally attacked me with a tirade of hate/racist epithets.
Do you know who this guy is? Have you had to deal with him or have you found yourself in a similar situation? How did you deal with it?”

Saw Lady: “I’m sorry to hear of your unpleasant encounter.
I don’t think I know who that guitar player was.
I have had similar encounters, but I am happy to say they are rare these days. Most buskers have respect for one another. However, when this does happen, you have to hold your ground, or they will learn that you fold easily and then will proceed to bug you whenever they see you. I try to be firm but always polite, treat them with respect, but not show fear and definitely not fold. This has enabled me to gain the respect of such people, who then stopped harassing me.
You are lucky this guy only attacked you verbally. There is a group of hip-hop dancers at 34th street who are physically violent. They destroyed my friend’s amplification equipment and they drew a knife on my other friends who were busking there.
I had a Russian keyboard/singer try to destroy my equipment. This was a particularly violent incident, so I yelled out ‘police, police’ and that made him go away…”

Django guitar player: “Another busker told me that this guy is totally nuts, and if you try to set up on him, he’ll kick your money into the tracks.”

Saw Lady: “Setting up on people is a bad thing to do anyway.”

Django guitar player: “Yeah, I know.. I’ve had people do that to me. I guess I’m trying to find out if there’s a way to contact the police immediately when down on the platform.”

Saw Lady: “The police hates it when a busker calls them for a buskers’ dispute… that has been my experience, anyway.
This may sound funny, but it’s true - there is a violin-busker in the subway who actually brings a body guard with him…”

Django guitar player: “A paid body guard??!!”

Saw Lady: “I would think so.”

Django guitar player: “What station?”

Saw Lady: “I saw them at Times Square.”

I love coins. Whenever anybody puts a unique coin in my donations bucket I am very grateful.
I have a collection of the “state” quarters and now I am starting to collect the presidential dollar coins. I already got George Washington, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson.

The oldest coin I ever got is a penny from 1917. I also got an Indian head nickel. Just holding these coins transports my imagination to times of yore - the ‘good ole days’ when playing the musical saw was a popular form of entertainment.

I’m not a real coin collector. For me, coins are vehicles for thinking about the daily life of the past. Like old-timie music, they’re little windows, in the palm of your hand, through which you could see in your mind’s eye what the person who held this coin long ago might have seen through their eyes.

I also have old subway tokens (replaced by the Metrocard):

I was invited to give a lecture/demonstration about the musical saw at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. My lecture was part of a series about unusual musical instruments (the other instruments in the series were the theremin and the glass armonica).

Alexander Calder’s statue ‘Le Guichet’ (The Ticket Window), 1963, sits in front of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center outside Avery Fisher Hall.

At the lecture I talked about the history of the musical saw, different saws for playing (regular carpenter saws versus saws made for music), prevalent misconceptions about the history of the musical saw, the musical saw in contemporary compositions, in movies, etc.

I was accompanied by pianist Margrit Zimmermann (who’s hair color matches mine

To demonstrate the use of the musical saw in contemporary music, baritone Seth Gilman joined us in playing ‘The Undeterred’ by composer Scott R. Munson (the piece I played at Carnegie Hall last November, but with different pianist and baritone).

The lecture was followed by questions from the audience. People asked me about the connection between the musical saw and the theremin, whether I play other musical instruments, about the musical saw in folk music, etc. One little boy asked me if playing the saw is similar to singing.

After the lecture many people from the audience stepped forward to talk with me.
One older lady told me that the last (and only) time she had seen/heard the musical saw was in London at Piccadilly Circus - an older gentleman was playing the musical saw in a restaurant. A little boy asked me how when I put a screw-driver through the hole at the tip of the saw, to use as a tip-holder, the screw driver doesn’t fall.

Right after the lecture I was filmed for an educational video for children, and immediately following that I went downtown to the Bowery Poetry Club, where I performed at the Flarf Festival. This is an annual poetry festival. In it I accompanied poet Mitch Highfill reading his poetry. The theme of the evening was poetry inspired by Google - the poets were to google certain words and use only what Google gave as the few lines on the results page as material for the poetry. Amazingly, this actually worked.

The poems are particularly focused on the notion of inappropriateness. Mainly, Flarf is funny. It’s like a cross between poetry & satire, with theatrical elements mixed in.
What I accompanied was a series of poems based on a news story about tear-drinking moths in Madagascar. the sound of the musical saw actually went very well with these poems. How could it not work well, when the poems had fabulous lines such as
“and you hasten to where there is nothing at all
nothing but moth music from outer space.”