As I waited for a few friends in the Main Concourse at Grand Central Terminal on a Friday evening, I started listening to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. I immediately immersed myself in the tones and rhythms of the piece, a welcome antidote to a feeling that my days are consumed by constant distraction. To focus only on what is in front of me, on a thought, idea, space, or sound liberates me to think deeply. I could feel a connection between myself and my surroundings increasing by the 16th note as I made it through the first 5 of the 57 minutes of the piece. The soaring intricacy of the piece offered a new perspective on the energy, detail, and grandness of the Main Concourse. The focus of these 5 minutes both expanded and contracted time. Then it was time to meet up, thrust myself into conversation, sit down on a train, allow myself to be ping-ponged around for the night, the weekend, the month. I knew I had to go back and listen to the whole thing.

And I also knew that the basic structure of the experience offered an opportunity to examine how we interact with music. Every day we are using headphones to construct a personal identity in a social space. The fact that headphones create an aural experience that happens only in my head means that the space that I inhabit is filtered through something that only I am experiencing. But, I am still a part of forming fleeting communities: the 11th and 1st Street Crossers, the 1st Ave L Stop Impatients. To ignore this physical connection and solely give myself over to my sonic experience is akin to covering my eyes with my hands and believing that because I cannot see everyone else, they cannot see me; that because those that I share physical spaces with cannot hear what I hear, they are not fully a part of my experience.

To coordinate listening on headphones with a group of people would mean that I no longer form a singular relationship between the music I listen to and the space that I inhabit. While there is no way to complete a full reversal and negate my individual experience with the sound and the space, my understanding is complicated by sharing the basic structure of the experience with others. We act alone together. Daily practices are exposed by shifting the basic structure of how people inhabit social space. The group would be recontexutalizing how people use familiar tools. Headphones are often used as a way to disconnect from the world but this reverses that dynamic by using headphones to bring people together. While others would hurry through the main concourse, the structure of coordinated listening would offer us the chance to connect with the space and with each other.

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Music for 18 Musicians contains a high volume of small components that are structured to create different themes and movements. Frequencies, wavelengths, pitches, rhythms, timbres of instruments, and voices slowly evolve into melodic figures and build into gracefully pummeling repetition. This relationship between small components and themes creating a larger whole runs parallel in the Main Concourse with legs, lights, reflections, stone, and fabric, belonging to couples, lone commuters, teenage girls, vaulted ceilings, and sweeping staircases that work together to create narrative themes and subconscious impressions. To experience this seminal piece and this iconic place in conversation with one another over 57 minutes was an opportunity to simply think, see, and listen.

At 7:15 on a Friday night, after standing around chatting and settling into the concourse for 15 minutes, the six of us assembled all push play on our ipods at the same time. Though we all engage the space in different ways over the next hour, we immediately create a sense of intimacy based on a shared aural experience that offers a common structure for where we walk, what we look at, and how we form ideas. For me, this intimacy is heightened by seeing someone in the group from across the concourse, briefly taking note of how he or she engages the space before diving back into my own consideration of fabric, flesh, stone, and light; pitch, rhythm, and orchestration. I feel simultaneously connected to multiple spaces in the hall. I imagine that everyone that I see moving through the concourse wearing earbuds or headphones is a part of the group. And then from that mass, a familiar face emerges that was not part of our initial group and had begun listening to the piece at the same time on her way to Grand Central, arriving at the concourse twenty minutes into the piece.  Through this, she expands the geography of our community, wrapping in a whole other set of spaces and stimuli.

The piece and place build on one another to offer something that neither one alone could achieve. We have situated ourselves to see repetition in actions and emotions that parallel the repetition of Music for 18 Musicians. A xylophone begins playing a single note, slowly cycling over and over adding new notes, a pattern iteratively coming into being. A gaggle of teenage girls, scantily clad, crosses the concourse, giggling, followed 15 minutes later by yet another gaggle crossing in the opposite direction, followed 5 minutes later by yet another.  Voices, a bassoon, pulse on 16th notes keying a shift in chord structure, mirroring earlier passages.  A young man stands and waits, seemingly aimless, until a woman casually approaches him, a bag slung over her shoulder, they embrace and kiss, linger for a moment, then stroll towards the southern exit of the concourse.  A burly man with graying hair, a goatee and a thick work jacket takes their place shifting his weight between his legs, until a man with the same build approaches him and, following a familiar embrace, hands him a bottle of brown liquor which he looks up and down before wrapping the bottle in his newspaper, taking a swig, and guiding them to the lower concourse.

I feel caught between a sense that all of this can only happen now and that these same events will eternally repeat themselves.

Time and attentiveness reveal various ways to interact with the space. I have the opportunity to find new ways to look at the space the 3rd, 4th, 5th time I scan across the eastern stairways, towering windows, and light fixtures, finally peering down the hallway that leads out to Lexington Ave., tiny details popping from shops, taking in the depth of the distance all the way to the street.  Others in the group combine layers of depth, seeing the clock perched atop the centrally located info kiosk without seeing the time.  Eyes strain to use peripheral vision as the central way of visually engaging the space.  Eyes close for minutes at a time opening upon a completely different configuration of people surrounding them.  Some of us wander within the concourse; some wandering into adjacent annexes and around to other floors; one of us stands in the exact same spot for the duration of the piece.

The decisions about how we interact with the space, as well as whether we use earbuds or over the ear headphones, also have a huge impact on how the piece sounds. For those whose headphones don’t let in any outside sound, the visual and aural aspects of being in the space are completely separate from one another. Listening on earbuds allows the piece to dominate what I am hearing while also allowing other elements to creep in. The echo of the high ceiling of the concourse creates a persistent backdrop. A wooshing of a woman’s coat as she closely passes by me accentuates a swell into the next bar. Yells erupting from a party at one of the restaurants perched above and across the concourse add further texture. Later in the piece as I have moved closer to the party, their singing is in tune with the piece, new voices punctuating new pitches.  Through listening in this location at this time, a new iteration of the piece is created.  The piece has never before sounded the way that it did that night.

This was a total experience. It was unavoidable, inevitable to become immersed in only the notes and rhythms of the piece, the people and textures of the concourse, and the sensations of inhabiting the space. The Main Concourse matched every crescendo, texture, and movement of the piece with a new angle and the entrance of someone new and gripping. Before and after did not matter, neither did short or long. The only way to know this was to experience it. But this experience took on a distinctly different character for each one of us. What we shared was that bringing together this space with this composition created an opportunity to look, to listen, to think, to pay attention, and to focus.

Photos by Tom Peyton

Location: http://bit.ly/hUKqtm

Partners:
Eddie Cooper
Jason Karpman
Leo Kremer
Anna Muessig
Ursula Sommer
Alex Young