The sounds slowed or speeded up according to the pace, and they evolved every block or two, sometimes evoking vibraphones or soft electric guitar notes. When a stroller stopped, an electronic organ chord rose up, encouraging the person to move on. Suddenly, at a sculpture featuring sleek bird feeders, a chorus of chirping arose. “This is utterly awesome!” a woman said.
The High Line elevated park does not normally allow group walks or amplified sounds, but it made an exception for “The Gaits,” one of a dozen participatory performances that constituted Make Music Winter.
The event was an offshoot of Make Music New York, a festival of hundreds of concerts that occurs in June on the first day of summer, in public spaces around the city. Modeled after Fête de la Musique, an annual affair in Paris started in 1982, the New York version is in its sixth year.
The founder of Make Music New York is Aaron Friedman, a composer and political activist who decided it was time to add a winter solstice edition. In an interview, he said winter has plenty of musical options, including numerous “Messiahs” and “Nutcrackers,” which “can get a bit predictable.”
He continued, “I like those pieces, but giving people the choice of doing something much wackier and fun and artistically significant is something we ought to be doing.”
The events included a crowd that rang color-coded bells on command; a medley of holiday songs played by percussionists at 1/120th speed while walking the length of Broadway; a sing-along to the songs of Egypt’s favorite pop singer, Umm Kulthum, down Steinway Street in Astoria, Queens; a continuous performance of the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 on F train platforms; an early-music processional with lanterns through Central Park; and a roving brass-band performance in which players read music projected onto buildings. (Four events are reviewed below by Times music critics.)
Arranging Make Music Winter was child’s play compared to the summer version, given that there were only a dozen programs. Mr. Friedman has become a virtuoso of navigating the city’s bureaucracy to gain permission for the events, although it has become much easier now that the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has thrown its weight behind the organization, which exists on a $100,000 budget and plenty of volunteerism.
Mr. Friedman began his organizing career by establishing a group to lobby against car alarms. “I just hated the noise of New York,” he said.
After a brief period in Wisconsin, where he worked on the presidential campaign of John Kerry, he returned. “I realized I really care about music most of all,” he said. “I don’t mind noise. I just mind car alarms.”
“The Gaits” was organized by three composition graduate students at Princeton, Lainie Fefferman, Jascha Narveson and Cameron Britt, with the help of an iPhone app expert, Daniel Iglesia, whom Ms. Fefferman called a “programming ninja.” The High Line gave financial support to the composers, and Make Music New York bought the 50 mini-speakers, which were handed out at the bottom of the High Line near Gansevoort Street. (They were collected at the end.)
Mr. Iglesia designed an app, “The Gaits,” that when downloaded, used the iPhone’s tilt sensor to detect motion and GPS function to pinpoint where the user was. The composers divided the High Line into 18 zones. As each was crossed, the sounds changed.
The composers came along for the walk, but Ms. Fefferman could not participate.
“That’s the irony,” she said. “I’m too poor to have an iPhone. But I’m getting one.”
‘Pilgrimage’
The participants in “Pilgrimage” showed up on Wednesday night outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art all set for a bracing walk and clearly eager to sing. The idea behind this event, directed by the choral conductor Harold Rosenbaum, was to walk north from the museum, across Central Park, then west on 110th Street to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, all the way singing medieval melodies once sung by pilgrims headed to Santiago de Compostela in Spain on a route that covered hundreds of miles.
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