A friend in The WELL pointed to a story in the Washington Post by Gene Weingarten: Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.
The setup: World-famous violinist Joshua Bell set up like any other busker in Washington’s L’Enfant Plaza metro station and played his Stradivarius for 43 minutes during the morning rush hour, while Weingarten observed. A video camera captured the whole event; Weingarten contacted various eyewitnesses afterwards, revealed the experiment, and published this wonderful article.
I loved it. I’m a professional musician (I call my stuff “psychedelic country-folk”), and although I usually work in more formal and satisfying performance spaces, one of my favorite gigs is at the Farmers’ Market in my neighborhood. And one of my favorite things about that gig is that is a zero-pressure affair; I can leave my ego at home. No one is there to hear me perform, so I can do whatever I want. I have been exposed to thousands of people who wouldn’t have heard me otherwise, sold quite a few CDs, collected modest but serviceable sums in the tip bucket (and email addresses for my announcement list), and provided an awesome new experience for uncounted toddlers who were seeing a live musician for the first time in their lives. So this story had a particular attraction for me.
No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
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A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston’s stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.
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Bell’s been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview magazine once said his playing “does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live.”
Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master’s “golden period,” toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection.
Bell participated in exactly the right spirit:
“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.
Weingarten did his homework for this piece. He talked about some of the music Bell played, most notably this one:
… “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It’s a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won’t be cheating with some half-assed version.”
Bell didn’t say it, but Bach’s “Chaconne” is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It’s exhaustingly long — 14 minutes — and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.
Weingarten and Bell reviewed the tape afterwards. There was much to learn from this experiment, and the writer shares some observations.
There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.
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Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don’t take visible note of the musician, you don’t have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you’re not complicit in a rip-off.
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For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.
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Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
This piece works the way John McPhee’s pieces in The New Yorker do: he tells a fascinating story and sheds light on a number of interesting things along the way.
There are a few video clips along with the story. It’s a great read.
Thanks for posting that. I’ve thought a lot about that over the past few days. Like, what is considered ‘great art’? Do you have to go to school for it? Is it measured in how many years you studied it and from whom you learned it? Are you more worthy if you manage to earn money and make a place for yourself, as an artist or as a commodity, in the community?
When I met Renee, I asked her where she danced and she said “everywhere”. Gandhi said “my life is my message”. To live one’s muse. To me, that’s great art. I have no idea who Joshua Bell is. It sounds like he lives his muse. I would hope I would hear that, in a theater or on the street. I live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There is great art all around me, every day. Some of it costs millions of dollars and is considered priceless; some of it is free and is considered worthless. And sometimes the expensive shit is just that, and the finds on the street are golden.
One of my favorite GD moments is while the band was playing at Winterland, some woman works her way onto the stage and asks Jerry to give her banjo lessons!
The conversation, with Jerry being extremely judicious in regard to a stranger next to him on stage – and in the interupption of his performance is surreal.
Now, taking the performance to the streets is another matter. But I always admired the way Jerry dealt with that one!