Out in the cold: Busking Copenhagen’s Nørreport Station and the urban affects of music

Abstract

This article is drawn for my experience busking at Nørreport Station, a busy transit hub in the centre of Copenhagen, for one afternoon in the spring of 2016. I use narrative and descriptive writing to express the relationship between myself and the environment as a performative milieu. The article looks at theories of affect, atmospheres, and the influence of sound in the busking pitch. It considers the discourse surrounding busking and how my performance experience contributed to appreciations of its meanings. It has been said that street music performance can create emotions, atmospheres and encounters in unlikely and forbidding urban settings. My experience at Nørreport Station challenged these notions. This article avers that new ways of assessing the success of musical interventions in the city should be considered alongside with appreciating how music can be a subtle and meaningful atmospheric and affective influence on urban space. A link to samples of my guitar playing can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/michael-amundsen-guitar.