I had as much music, sun, walk­ing and row­ing as a man can stand dur­ing Make Music New York yes­ter­day, the first offi­cial day of sum­mer, and it was worth the drop-dead exhaus­tion at the end of the day. Every kind of music was made by every kind of per­son, and if the tech­ni­cal pol­ish wasn’t as fine as you’d find in a con­cert hall, the music mak­ing was great every­where. Peo­ple got together to make music, as indi­vid­u­als and en masse.

I mostly stuck to Cen­tral Park due to both the con­cen­tra­tion of events in geo­graph­i­cal space and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of the free pianos. I heard the pleas­antly ram­shackle Hun­gry March Band, com­plete with dancers perambulating:

a middle-aged guy came off a bench and played the shit out of ‘Date Dere’ and ‘My Favorite Things,’ sound­ing like a cross between Bobby Tim­mons and McCoy Tyner:

a mass of flutes played under the Bethesda Ter­race, musi­cians com­ing and going freely:

and as I was wind­ing it up, I stum­bled on a hand­ful of sax play­ers, lay­ing down Jaco Pas­to­rius’ arrange­ment of ‘The Chicken,’ which was hip and cool in equal measure.

The big event was Xenakis’ Persephassa played by six per­cus­sion­ists on and around the Cen­tral Park Lake; three spaced out on the shore, the oth­ers each on their own impro­vised barge. We, the audi­ence mem­bers, were on our own row­boats which we rowed out to the per­form­ing area (I had the plea­sure of row­ing Anthony Tom­masini around).

The expe­ri­ence was really quite won­der­ful (there’s a video of it here), not just a musi­cal one (and musi­cally there are prob­lems in lis­ten­ing to a piece where musi­cians play­ing together end up sound­ing like echoes of each other), but an aes­thetic, social and envi­ron­men­tal one as well. It is always a sim­ple and pro­found plea­sure to be out on the water, and it’s a spec­tac­u­lar sight to see the tops of the grand apart­ment build­ings to the west of the park float­ing over the trees, as you your­self float. We got to know our boat-mates a bit, spoke with peo­ple pass­ing by, and enjoyed the calm silence of all the lis­ten­ers while the music was spin­ning around us, com­ing and going in space. Beyond the notes and the rhythms, peo­ple gath­er­ing together on a day like yes­ter­day, to wit­ness a per­for­mance amongst them, is why we’ve ended up with great cities like New York. Music made civilization.

I put together some sam­ples of audio I recorded dur­ing the day, with a bit of edit­ing — you won’t hear all of Persephassa but you’ll get an impres­sion of that and some of the other things I heard.