Mr. Lionel Okoye, 34, Originally From Lagos, Plays Rhapsody In Blue On Clarinet For Forty-Two Minutes, Takes Home 847 Dollars In Tips
Filed for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, whose human interest desk has been on this beat for a while but rarely gets a story this clean.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – A subway musician named Mr. Lionel Okoye, 34, originally from Lagos by way of Bed-Stuy, performed a forty-two-minute clarinet rendition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at the Times Square-42nd Street station on Tuesday morning between 8:14 and 8:56 a.m., during which commuters, in numbers that music journalists in New York have since described as “statistically impossible”, paused to listen, took no photographs, wept intermittently, and placed a total of 847 dollars into his open case. The performance was, eventually, filmed by a bystander and has, as of Thursday, been viewed 2.8 million times.
The Performance
Mr. Okoye, who has performed in the subway system for eleven years, said he had selected the Rhapsody for “no particular reason” and had not been expecting the response. “I played it. I played it as it is written. I did not do anything special. The people stopped. I played. They stopped more. I played some more.” He played the piece through from the opening clarinet glissando to the final cadenza without a break, with the single accompaniment of a quietly wheeling luggage cart that appeared, at the halfway point, to be keeping time.
Commuter Reaction
Ms. Elena Vargas, 47, a speech therapist from Astoria who was on her way to a patient in Midtown, said she had arrived at 8:22 a.m. and had not moved until 8:57 a.m. “I missed my appointment. I texted to reschedule. I do not know what came over me. I did not know this was a thing that happened in Times Square.” She was still, when interviewed twenty minutes later, visibly moved.
The Tip Jar
Mr. Okoye emptied his case at 9:03 a.m. and counted 847 dollars in currency ranging from singles to a single hundred-dollar bill. He said the hundred had come from “a man in a suit who did not make eye contact and who placed it face down”. He did not see the man clearly. He thanked him anyway.
A Parallel Noted
The performance is not, strictly, unprecedented. The Washington Post has covered similar events over the years. The contrast with ordinary subway performance is, per Mr. Okoye, “the selection, not the playing”. The London Prat’s Gregory piece noted that the right person in the right place with the right tune can hold up whole systems. Mr. Okoye, on Tuesday, held up Times Square.
The Future
Mr. Okoye returned to the same platform at the same time on Wednesday and played Brahms. The response was, per his own report, “quiet but nice”. He said this was appropriate.
For more: The Onion. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/