MBTA spokesperson Lydia Rivera said examination of the speaker systems would be necessary before the new regulations could be taken to their final stages.

“We would have to ensure that our announcement system is well up to par,” she said early last week.

Fixler said that in principle, he could have taken up an acoustic repertoire. But to do so would have required a compromise of his artistic sensibilities.

“That’s not what I do,” he said. “It wouldn’t be me.”

Come Together

The Middle East meeting drew more than musicians themselves to Cambridge. Concerned activists and subway riders joined the assembled crowd—anticipating an activism effort bubbling up from several sectors of the local community.

And according to executive director of the Community Arts Advocates Stephen H. Baird, who organized the meeting and related activism, the musicians could use all the help they could get.

“It’s not just a musical issue,” he told the crowd. “Some people will become homeless because of this issue. Others will just be silenced.”

Andrew J. Conrad ’05, who recently finished a documentary film about the street musicians’ struggle titled Notes From the Underground, also suggested that the new regulations may have countenanced motives beyond those cited in the MBTA’s explanation.

“It just seemed very interesting that when push came to shove, things were as much dress code-oriented as they were volume-oriented,” Conrad says. “It seemed there was a difference between what the MBTA was saying and the motives behind it.”

Administrators presented the regulations as one component of several recent MBTA responses to safety concerns ensuing from the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Conrad said he did not understand why such regulations should go into effect 793 days after the crisis.

“What do these regulations really mean?” he asks in his film. “Do they mean a woman can’t wear a tie or a man can’t wear a dress? Do they mean you can’t wear white after Labor Day?”

Baird and his subway-musician colleagues didn’t want to find out. During their preliminary organizational meeting at the Middle East, they scrambled to stall the regulations before the Dec. 1 deadline fell. They designated six subcommittees to manage everything from legal action to fundraising.

Next, they worked to bring their grievances to the public forum. Seeking the media attention that could catapult their concerns to the dockets of local leaders, they secured a total of more than 15,000 endorsements for a petition demanding redress and organized public rallies. They left letters and phone calls for MBTA officials and local leaders, and began taking decibel readings in the subway in an effort to disprove the MBTA’s supposition that subway performance was dangerously loud.