Muzak?

The semester is over and I have two and a half months to apply myself to my own personal interests talk about applying myself to my own personal interests. When I haven't been maintaining my pile of social networking sites, I've been playing music.

There's a socio-musical dynamic in Freiburg that seems unusual to me, at least unusual in that Americans such as myself can participate with absolutely no trouble.

Performance and jamming are very common here. Between the jazz club, concert hall, street musicians and open mic nights, you can find something worth hearing and someone worth jamming with on a daily basis. Sometimes the opportunities are more impressive than others: I know of one American student who currently plays with the top academic orchestra in the city. For those of us without a music major and extensive classical training, there's social jamming. Right now I play very different kinds of music with two groups of people: an eclectic mix of bluegrass, modern folk, dixieland, and silly rock/hip-hop covers with the guys from the Thanksgiving video, and funky jazz/latin music with Lukas, an upright bassist from Cologne.

While we generally play for our own amusement, there's an pleasure in public performance that jam sessions lack. Freiburg takes care of bridging the gap by providing a huge number of informal performance venues. There are at least four open mic nights per week and if we're too impatient to wait until evening we just play on the street, which is always fun. It's not unusual, either: when the weather is sunny and warm, you can hear didgeridoos, exotic percussion, mariachi bands, and maybe three American students singing in three-part harmony. It's a global city, and the music scene reflects this. In such an internationally musical and extremely public setting, we actually have a place. In a weird but definitely direct way, we contribute to Freiburg's culture.

While I do it for fun, street performance is surprisingly lucrative, with an average total income of 10 Euro per person per hour. I have to say that's an unusual figure; jamming outside with Lukas only brought in about 6 Euro each in two hours. I think the all-American group has a frenetic energy and sense of humor that the good people of Freiburg aren't accustomed to seeing, and they really seem to love participating in the performance by being our audience - admittedly an easy part to improvise.

Sometimes we attract a crowd of young people who talk with us, sometimes it's just one tremendously old German who silently stands there for ten or fifteen minutes. Parents stop and tell their kids the names of the instruments we're playing; apparently they're excited that their children have the opportunity to hear what we play because their monetary contributions are pretty substantial. We have fun; they have fun; we have fun because they have fun and so on. We love the music, and we love the people who love our music.

At this point the line between selfishness and philanthropy becomes a dotted one.