Encountering Beauty

Buskers are usually a nuisance. They sing bad versions of already bad music, made a thousand times worse by the invention of the amplifier (which I'm convinced has done as much damage to the beauty of our environment as the car).

Yet today I heard the most wonderful busker. She was performing in a busy, commercial seaside high street, the sort of place where beauty is usually made unwelcome. She was from China and played a four-stringed plucked instrument called a 'pipa', which she described as the Chinese lute.

I heard her from across the street and there was something familiar about the music. As I approached and listened more closely I was ecstatic to realise that I knew what she was playing. It was the most unlikely of things: an almain by one of the great English lutenists. I had that extraordinary feeling wherein my whole body seems to tremble excitedly, as if an angel had just tickled my spine. For it felt like the impossible had happened, almost a miracle. What are the chances of hearing such an obscure piece on any instrument in any high street, then for a passerby to actually recognise it? And to hear it such an unlikely and unattractive town centre, on such an unlikely instrument?

She was improvising on the melody with great skill and musicality. I imagine Dowland, Bacheler, Johnson et al. would have done the same. The pipa had a very beautiful and characteristically Chinese tremolo, which was all the more impressive as she was not using a plectrum but rather her fingers. Any classical guitarist will tell you how hard an even and lyrical tremolo is to execute.

This really is the kind of multiculturism I can get behind. More pipas and Renaissance music, fewer pizza-kebab-burger shops. It was not some tasteless, hollowed-out crossover music, but a sincere and beautiful communion of traditions.

I have a particular love of music for solo instruments. I adore the Bach violin sonatas and partitas, the Weiss sonatas, the Milano fantasias, the Scarlatti sonatas, the Telemann fantasias (I could happily go on -- and on). It is the intimacy of one woman and her instrument. Particularly if it is an instrument one can hold or cradle, like the gamba or guitar (or indeed the pipa). They are quiet, reflective, so unlike most of modern life. They do not shout at you or compete for you attention; rather, they draw you in to their soundworld. This is why I was so affected hearing this busker. She was wonderfully out of place, such an unexpected reprieve from the noise and bustle that surrounded her. Her music was perhaps the one thing in that town that didn't repulse me, the one thing that drew me in. It was quiet and so fragile, yet by virtue of its exceptional beauty, which so clearly differentiated it from its surroundings, any sensitive person would have found it capable of penetrating even this, the most loud and viscous of aural landscapes.