Dear John,
The first street musician I ever met was at the horse fair in the West of Ireland on a cold autumn day in 1973 - an old man playing a violin between the horses. It was like an epiphany.
A few years later I started to live in London close to Portobello Road Market.
Street musicians played there frequently and the feeling of being in the presence of something precious stayed with me. The street musicians themselves were often quite lonely men, yet their music lessened the loneliness of the street, the people in it and my own loneliness.
When I heard music in the distance, even before seeing the musician, I would say to myself: "And the music is playing." The Czech photographer Josef Sudek, a great music lover, would say this when putting the needle on the gramophone record, he used to say it almost as a greeting. He was among the people I missed most in my early days in, London.
Some two years after I came to London, my son Matthew was born.
We Czechs believe in the goodness of fresh air for babies. The literal translation of the Czech word ”vozit" is ”to carry", but it has a special meaning in the context of childcare. It means to walk outside with the
baby in a pram. Older siblings, cousins and particularly grandmothers must all take turns with this task. The vibration of the pram’s movement in combination with fresh air is considered very beneficial for babies.
I had no relatives in London to help me, so every day I took Matthew out myself. But I was also a photographer and while pushing the pram I would photograph street musicians, usually on the way to and from the park.
Later on, when my son began to enjoy the musicians and their puppets, we used to skip the park altogether (pages 11, 78-79).
Most photographs in this book were taken while out walking with my baby in the pram, although a few were taken already before he was born, during the first couple of years I was in London and some I took much later on.
There were no street musicians in my childhood in Czechoslovakia in the 1950's and yet I think that one of the things that made a difference for me and helped to make London a home, not a place of exile, was the music in the streets.
Markéta Luskačová
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Dear Markéta,
Fifteen years of watching, listening and responding in the streets musicians.
of London. This is the photo which for me frames your theme of street - And it takes me back eighty years to my childhood (in the 1930's).
when I was disturbed and spellbound by street-musicians I passed and stopped to listen to and watch. The word play had a double-sense for me.
They played instruments or they sang in the street in the hope of getting money, survival money, from the passers-by. And I played games in order to escape and feel that I was elsewhere.
In this double-sense of the word play there was a shared conspiracy: the hope that, despite everything, the playing might provoke, even furtively. a little fun.
The pitilessness of the world was clear, and they were living through a jinx, and so they played with the absurd in order to catch a tune or a laugh.
If they did, it was a momentary triumph. Jinx and triumph. The hunger, the homelessness, the recurring despair remain. But some coins fall into the cap.
What they produce is the opposite of Chamber Music; what they produce is Gutter Music, but within it there are winks and nudges, reminiscent of the philosophers of antiquity.
Listening to Chamber Music, we often close our eyes. Coming across Gutter Music, we stop in our steps and try to catch the player's eyes.
And that, Markéta, is what you have done in your unique book about jinxes and triumphs.
John Berger