...Berkley Students Ask

-- by Mac Daniel, Reprinted from The Boston Globe, April 8, 2006

	A musical interlude, courtesy of Berklee students, greeted T commuters yesterday at the New England Medical Center stop. (Boston Globe Photo / Josh Reynolds)

T commuters have raised ignoring their surroundings to an art form: They hurry to work, head down, noses buried in books, ears plugged by iPods, achieving as little human contact as possible.

But yesterday, things were different, even friendlier, at the Orange Line's New England Medical Center stop.

By the turnstiles, one student pinged a triangle and blew a toy whistle. In the passageway, another student used a drum to make the sound of a crashing wave. At the foot of the stairs leading up to the street, a third hit two sticks together.

They were seven Berklee College of Music students in white lab coats, calling themselves the Sound Underground and playing instruments to the beat and step of the passing crowd.

Their goal: to snap people out of the commuting doldrums, interact with them, maybe even get some smiles.

The event, from 8 to 10 a.m. and 4 to 6 p.m., started off slowly. People weren't reacting at all. Organizer Penny Korff worried that they would misunderstand the objective and start throwing quarters at the students' feet. Then the station cleaning crew tried to sweep up the red, blue, and yellow markers delineating each student's musical zone.

"There aren't a lot of smiles out there," Korff said as one man in a Red Sox hat rushed by without a glance up. "And this is a little touchy-feely for people on their way to work."

But as the morning progressed, more passengers smiled and asked what it was all about.

When Dottie Delorey, 40, of Lunenburg realized that student Michelle Westfall, 21, of Bristol, Va., was tapping on a pair of sticks to mark Delorey's walk up the steps, she stopped, looked back, and playfully ran the rest of the way.

"It kind of woke me up a little bit, actually," she said.

The music also caught the attention of Roderick Harris, 37, a medical worker from Revere.

"I think it's refreshing, as opposed to walking up to nothing," said Harris, who had just passed by.

Others were less kind:

"I was just trying not to laugh," said Jen Collins, 26, of Somerville. ''I just thought it was a poor form of street performance."

The idea is the brainchild of two graphic artists, Korff and Lorelei Grazier, who started the project when a graphic artists conference came to the city last year. Theirs was one of three projects given $1,000 grants by the American Institute of Graphic Arts to promote the creation of art for public, not corporate, good.

"Part of the joy of city life is encountering the unfamiliar," Grazier and Korff wrote in their proposal. ''It's how we are challenged; it's how we grow. People expect this above ground, so naturally, below ground is the perfect setting."

Danny Lundmark, 22, of Los Angeles played a 12-string guitar and a different chord for each person. He bopped when he played, as the other students stood robotlike in the echoing orange-brick hallway.

"To some degree, people are smiling," he said. ''And people usually never smile on the T."

In an e-mail to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority after the performance, Grazier wrote that her favorite moment was when a girl, probably around 2 or 3 years old, was walking up the stairs with her father.

"You could tell this was her new favorite thing to do and there was no way she was going to take the escalator," she wrote. ''So she walked up two feet on each step, one at a time resting at each step. When she entered my 'zone,' I started to mimic her steps with my instrument. She realized right away that there was a connection, and she lit up. It was an instant reward for her efforts. It was amazing."