Cristopher Rodriguez has been screamed at.
He has been threatened with violence and confronted by the police.
All for daring to practice his bagpipe in America’s most densely populated city.
“New York is crowded, and people are in each other’s space at all times,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “Being that the instrument is very loud, I know it can be pretty annoying.”
Mr. Rodriguez is not some kind of sociopath. These confrontations over the years have come despite his best efforts to distance himself and his abnormally loud instrument from his neighbors.
Musicians in New York City rarely have the luxury of practicing at home. Those unwilling to shell out for private rooms are driven, often, outdoors, to any sliver of public space that might serve as rehearsal space. Sonny Rollins, the pioneering jazz saxophonist, famously practiced in the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge.
Bagpipers like Mr. Rodriguez, though, are perhaps the most dedicated and creative of the city’s al fresco instrumentalists, charting the hidden corners and unseen margins of the five boroughs — in cemeteries and junkyards, along highways and waterfronts — to hone their craft.
“Any piper who lives in this city is eventually going to find a spot where nobody’s going to chase them off,” said James Felder, who for years practiced on the waterfront near the Meatpacking District, within sniffing distance of an incinerator operated by the Department of Sanitation. “If the wind blew a certain way, it smelled like trash.”
That neighborhood’s transformation a few decades ago brought new hordes of people to the area and eventually forced Mr. Felder, 55, a professor of screenwriting at New York University, to Central Park, where he discovered an enormous rock that he could balance upon and keep bystanders, if not odors, at bay.
“When it was hot, it smelled like horse poop,” he said.
New York needs its bagpipers. They are the unsung performers elevating the city’s parades, funerals, weddings and other less conventional occasions into moments of emotional resonance.
John Henderson, 62, a piper from Park Slope, Brooklyn, was hired this year for a St. Patrick’s Day job — between performances that weekend at four separate parades — at a strip club in Manhattan. He and four colleagues took the stage a little after midnight, where they were joined by two gyrating dancers and “two little persons dressed up as leprechauns.”
The quintet split $1,250 for a just a few minutes of work — “a little pipe music goes a long way in these situations” — and nobody was kicked in the face with a skyscraper heel.
“If they call back, of course I’d do it again,” Mr. Henderson said.
Bagpipers, in this way, are like any struggling musician: They rarely turn down a gig. Another piper, John McCarthy, 64, was hired by an anonymous, apparently wealthy patron years ago to play outside an apartment building on Central Park South for 15 minutes every Monday morning at 7 a.m. The person’s secretary paid him every few weeks with an envelope of cash. He maintained this gig for three years, receiving $150 each session, and to this day does not know why he was summoned to that specific spot.
“I think someone just loved the bagpipes and wanted to start the week with it,” said Mr. McCarthy, who was more than happy not asking too many questions. “Or maybe they were trying to annoy somebody.”
Pipers are aware their beloved instrument has the capacity to irritate. Bagpipes, historically used to rally troops across a battlefield, were fundamentally designed for expansive, outdoor spaces.
The high-pitched wail of a great Highland bagpipe — a sound known as the skirl — can hover around 100 decibels, comparable to the revving of a motorcycle.
“People will say, ‘Can you lower it a bit?’ And I’m like, ‘It only has one volume: 11,’ ” said Jerry Dixon, a Verizon technician from Forest Hills who carries his bagpipe with him to jobs, in case he sees a secluded spot to play.
Bagpipers, wherever they live, need to practice. It is a physically demanding instrument. Performing it at a high level requires hours of unseen woodshedding.
Mr. Henderson has found solitude on the fringes of a Lowe’s hardware store parking lot in Brooklyn, within earshot of a clangorous scrap metal yard across the Gowanus Canal and the F train passing on a trestle above.
Other times he ventures to Friends Cemetery, a historical Quaker burial ground hidden deep inside Prospect Park, where an abundance of discarded snack wrappers and a persistent skunky aroma clued him in to the other borderline antisocial activities often occurring there.
“I was teaching a student there once, and a man and woman came up and flatly announced, ‘We’re just here to smoke pot,’ ” Mr. Henderson said. “We were like, ‘OK, cool.’ ”
Pipers have selfish reasons, too, for seeking privacy outside. In New York, anyone playing music in public runs the risk of drawing an audience, which produces potentially lofty expectations on one side and a level of self-consciousness on the other.
After moving to New York from pipe-friendly Nova Scotia, Liam Coleman-Aulenbach, 28, tried practicing at Battery Park, near a war memorial that felt relatively remote. He did not account, though, for the sightseeing ferries that periodically deposited tourists nearby.
“People would come up and just hand me money — I wouldn’t have a hat out or anything,” said Mr. Coleman-Aulenbach, a software engineer, who has since settled on a spot in Long Island City, a stretch of road beneath “a dingy little overpass” near his apartment.
There is at least one New York bagpiper bold enough to play at home.
John Macpherson, 62, of Inwood, in northern Manhattan, rushes back from work each weeknight to get an hour of practice time in his apartment. He tries to be “as considerate as can be,” he said, never playing before noon or after 7 p.m.
But while he insisted no one has ever directly complained, he acknowledged seeing evidence once of neighborly resentment.
“Someone spat on my door,” he said, “and I can’t figure out who it is.” He paused. “I have a feeling I know who it is.”
Most pipers, hoping to avoid that fate, tend to be more enterprising explorers of their neighborhoods.
Mr. Rodriguez’s confrontations — the cursing, the threats — occurred in public parks with apartment buildings he mistakenly assumed were out of earshot. A woman who called the police on him was angry that he had awakened her baby. Mr. Rodriguez has better luck playing atop the hills of the Evergreens Cemetery in Bushwick and on a hidden, dead-end street overlooking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in Elmhurst.
Others described playing at Riverside Park, amid the hum of the West Side Highway, or facing out toward the waves on Coney Island.
This roving and wandering remains the burden of the New York piper.
“Violin players don’t go through this,” said Joe Korber, 62, a piper and recently retired park ranger from Richmond Hill, Queens.
It is no surprise that many daydream about decamping to the suburbs and all that open space. And yet New York, against all odds, has remained a hotbed of bagpiping, a place where a piper’s talents can be expressed and appreciated. So ultimately these musicians remain as devoted to the city as they are to their instruments.
“I’ve lived in New York City my whole life,” Mr. Korber said. “I’m very provincial.”
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