In the last couple weeks in White Plaza, a setting usually devoted to tables of people beckoning to the passing bikers, a piano entered the scene. Whatever its origin, it allowed spontaneous live music to mix with the usual chatter. Random acts of music like this liven up the routine and give musicians on campus additional purpose. We need more of it.

White Plaza has a share of musical events throughout the year, from the occasional musical guest at a community group’s event to a full-blown concert on Dink’s outdoor stage. But performances in White Plaza aren’t the most surprising acts to see and don’t even occur very often.

So I racked my memory for times outside of White Plaza when an unexpected musical gift lit up the area. Mostly, it seems that the musical events on campus are scripted: concerts, a jazz night at the CoHo, the rush of student group shows in the spring, the occasional band at a party or a special dinner. Performers prefer scheduled shows because you can tell people to show up and expect some amount of audience. When there is a lot of equipment to set up, you want to make sure the effort is worth it. But does that mean all “performances” on campus should be planned?

There’s the case of those who live in dorms with good rehearsal spaces — they get a taste of music occasionally. I know that Roble listens to Calypso for four hours every week, though I suppose the surprise and charm can get lost in the routine.

Except I’m not quite asking for that either. If you’ve ever been to a decent-sized city for long enough, you know the joy of being interrupted by a street performer who has something awesome to say on her trumpet or on his buckets and trash cans. It’s a burst of expression amid the robotic functionality of cars and subways and cell phones.

So we should drop everything, becoming poor street musicians struggling to make ends meet, scraping for coins in subways by day and scraping leftover linguine off plates outside kitchens at night, right?

No. Stanford has to fashion its own version of spontaneous music. We’re a suburban university of overachievers with 25-hour-a-day schedules. We’ll have to find a different way to squeeze musical whims into this dominant mold.

I figure that amidst all the student music groups and closet musicians, there are thousands of hours of people practicing. Even if only a few of those people and groups decided to randomly, occasionally, practice in unusual places on campus, it could open up much of daily life to some tonal variety.

Just imagine wandering into Terman one evening to work on a project, hearing a French horn player practicing from the balcony. Or picture biking past Encina toward the gym while an a cappella group works on its harmonies. This kind of thing happened to me once as I biked through the quad one evening and heard someone playing a saxophone. Musicians need to practice anyway — we should do it somewhere beautiful.

The thought occurred to me to even start a little e-mail list for these kinds of guerrilla musicians, where they talk about cool places to play, courtyards that resonate well, or unexpected audiences that showed up. But isn’t that too organized? Isn’t the point of all this that we create a new culture of music popping up everywhere?

There are times and places where some live music would clearly get in the way, like in a lecture or during the conference you’d been planning for months. Luckily, Stanford campus is one of the largest in the world. I’m sure if a handful of square footage is occupied, we can find spots to whistle.

Bigger musical groups with cumbersome equipment to carry should also feel free to play gigs in busy places once in a while. During the summer jazz workshop, lunchtimes outside Tresidder feature some astounding jazz pros playing a few tunes for fun.

Essentially, I’m not talking about the LSJUMB’s (predictable) traditions and your housemate practicing on the dorm piano; I’m saying that Stanford needs more random acts of music around campus. Too many of us bunker up in practice rooms to mask the “wrong” notes. Don’t keep your playing to yourself — complement the Farm’s stunning visuals with some melody. We’ll applaud as we bike by.

Other guerrilla music ideas? E-mail Lucas at [email protected].