“I’m pleased for the T, I’m pleased for the artists, and I’m grateful to the public’s support for the issue,” he says.

‘A Repeating Cycle’

Disagreement between the MBTA and local musicians did not begin this November. Rather, the performers’ relations with local authorities have fluctuated broadly over the past quarter-century.

“There has been a repeating cycle of antagonism and appreciation between the subway musicians and the city,” Conrad says.

University of Massachusetts music and ethnomusicology student Lauren Ingram is finishing her thesis on local street and subway musicians. The project, which combines a photoethinography, a CD of subway performance and stories from individual performers, centers on the dynamics of musician-audience interaction.

During her research, Ingram has become well versed in the history of Boston’s subway music.

A police regulation established in the 1970s allowed street performance but made collection of tips illegal, producing a hostile environment for performers such as Baird, who was arrested in the late 1970s—in the company of his audience—for performing on Boston Common.

But the tides were already turning. Michael S. Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, created the Music Under Boston program to fund live performances in the subway and, in some cases, hire musicians from the Boston Symphony Orchestra to perform.

But in 1982 the program no longer funded musicians, and by 1985 it had collapsed entirely.

Two years later, musicians formed the Subway Arts Guild, which set in place provisions for performance. Musicians would receive a free permit every 90 days and would claim venues on a first-come-first-serve basis (excluding the Harvard Square station, for which they vied by coin toss), according to Ingram.

Since then, the musicians’ rapport with the city has been tenuous at best.

The MBTA briefly experimented with playing festive Muzak over the P.A. system in 1989, and by 1993 the organization was looking into placing cable televisions in the subway—a prospect that would have made musical performance virtually impossible.

Today, the MBTA’s apparent perception of subway musicians stands in stark contrast to that of New York City, which, following Sept. 11, sponsored subway musicians to re-enter the subways because of the confidence their presence inspired in commuters, Baird says.

Ingram says that while the compromise between the musicians and the MBTA reached last week represents a positive step in the relationship between performers and local leadership, the musicians still face several difficult standards.

“I think there’s a lot of positive points, but I think there’s some things that need to be changed,” she says.