Busking Practice

(From August 12, 2009)

I miss being able to devote time to practice my guitar. I miss having the luxury to spend time with technical exercises and learning new pieces—Piazzolla’s Otono Portena (youtube it—it’s a cool piece) is now on hold. I also can’t complain. In place of practicing, I learn more about this giant city known as Berlin as well as its inhabitants. I am also improving my writing.

Instead of scales or Sor arpeggio studies, I type daily blogs and focus on writing improvement. Bach’s polyphonic fugues are replaced by sentence length exercises. That’s not to say that I no longer play the guitar. I do—but first, lunch.

……

Lunchtime found me eating a döner kebab (my fifth one in Berlin!) without having to spend a dime of my own money. The seasoned meat and vegetables harmonized into sonorous chords on my taste buds. Orange juice sipped between my giant bites kept my senses alert and precluded hiccups. But wait: how did I not spend a dime? I haven’t gotten to know any of the döner shop owners particularly well. People don’t owe me money. But I do play classical guitar.

......

Earlier this cloudy morning, I got off the S7 train onto the Hackescher Markt station. Down the stairs and outside the station lies a raised platform with chairs. A breeze swayed the small trees planted by the city. Although I can’t practice, it was from this location I sounded the notes written by Bach, Aguado, Mertz, and Barrios. I entered the other world as described in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. In this other place, the day ahead didn’t matter. Visiting a Turkish soccer club, touring a mosque, eating dinner as a group—all of these were on the schedule but none of them crossed my mind. Despite my technique and ability not improving, it was nice to escape reality for even a mere thirty minutes.

My guitar’s sound carried only a short distance, so my playing remained largely ignored. Asian tourists walked by, businessmen passed with a brisk pace. A few got closer and listened—they liked the Bach (smiling and clapping with the final g-minor cadence) and left 3€ in my case. Lunch money and a sense of acceptance (and .50€ left to give to a busker later on). The clouds began releasing their contents but it didn’t matter. The rest of the day would be quite good.