Street Singer
article from Pasadena Star News
by Usha Sutliff, Staff Writer
August 6, 2000
PASADENA -- As most of her fellow Caltech classmates headed off to graduate school or took Silicon Valley jobs, Brigitte Roth packed up her guitar and headed overseas to spend a year as a street performer.
The 22-year-old graduated with a bachelor of science degree in economics last year and was awarded a $22,000 fellowship from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation to come up with a project that incorporated travel and a topic of her choosing.
"The woman (who told her about the fellowship) talked about how you could do any project you wanted to," the Paris-born musician said.
"She said, 'Close your eyes and whatever you feel you want to do, do a project about that. You can do anything for a year, traveling.' . . . It just seemed like an ideal thing."
Michelle Medley of Caltech's Fellowships Advising and Study Abroad Office, said 60 graduating college seniors nationwide were awarded the prestigious fellowships last year, including two at Caltech.
Michael Atkins from Caltech chose to go to places including Morocco and Guatemala to study "different people's perceptions of time and how the concept of time has evolved in different cultures," she added.
For her project, Roth said she bandied about topics that focused on economics but, in the end, turned to her other love -- the arts.
Before committing to a science- and mathematics-based education at Caltech, Roth had studied theater at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.
"When I was at LACHSA, I discovered that I didn't really want to do theater," she said. "There are so many talented people out there who wanted to act and I thought that they were a lot more dedicated to it than I am . . . So I felt like there was no reason why I had to go out and become another one of this big group of actors who just struggle to make it because the industry is so tough."
But during her four years at Caltech, Roth was drawn back into the arts.
"What ended up happening is that I got really into music," she said, noting that she performed with various jazz bands on campus.
During her 12-months in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Roth traveled to countries including France, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Holland and Italy. Armed with her guitar and a small, floppy blue hat (used to collect coins from passersby), she performed songs she had composed and interviewed her fellow buskers.
The result will be a CD of songs about street performers and Roth's travels that includes tracks such as "Children" -- about the way children watched her as she sang -- and "Schizophrenia," inspired by a "crazy" thunderstorm in Florence, Italy. The CD -- which has yet to be released -- will also include an accompanying book of lyrics, photographs and interviews.
"I find (street performing is) a lot more part of the culture in Europe than it is (in America), at least in Los Angeles . . . You don't see as many really accomplished musicians performing on the street here," she said.
Not so for places like Germany, where Roth met a music professor from Russia who spent a month there "busking."
"Within three days of playing music in the streets, he would make the equivalent of one month's salary as a music professor back home," she noted.
"You get really talented musicians who come and do that from Eastern Europe. Just, in general, there are a lot of really talented artists, people who do all kinds of circus-type tricks who will travel and make a living from that.
There weren't many downsides to the trip, she added, except that she got "moved on" from time to time by shopkeepers who shooed her away from their storefronts.
Roth said she experienced a sense of freedom during the trip that she would be hard-pressed to find back home.
"I usually like to plan everything far ahead, so it was interesting for me to be able to say, 'Where should I go tomorrow?' and not to know until tomorrow came along and then (to) say, 'OK, today I'm going to Munich.' " she said.
The young woman also got an invaluable lesson in self-confidence.
"I'd want to interview people or I'd want to perform but I'd feel really shy about it. That's part of the reason I did the project because I didn't think it would come totally easy to me," Roth said.
"What I realized after a while was that if I didn't try, then I wasn't going to gain anything . . . You just have to go out and do it and that's something really important that I've learned."
Now that she's back in America, Roth said she's going to form a record label to put out her CD -- titled "Songs on the Street" -- seek out opportunities to perform in cafes and clubs and look for a job where she can put her analytical skills to work.
"I'll have to see what comes my way," she said.
Roth's Web site, which contains a travel journal and lyrics from her songs, is at www.brigitteroth.net.
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