The story of Joshua Bell in the DC Metro (which I mentioned on Sunday) has been making the rounds. The URL has been passed around among musicians from coast to coast, and talked about on some mailing lists I’m on, and everyone I’ve gotten it from has given it a pretty warm response.
In some other venues, not so much.
Kevin Drum, in the Washington Monthly:
The tone of the story is a sort of artificially mournful tsk-tsking over our inability to recognize beauty in the world around us, take time out to smell the roses, etc. etc.
I’m sorry, but this is just idiotic…. I’d be surprised if as many as one out of a hundred can tell a good violinist from a great one even in good conditions. And despite the claim that the acoustics of the L’Enfant Plaza station were “surprisingly kind,” I’m sure they were nothing of the sort.
Plus, of course, IT WAS A METRO STATION. People needed to get to work on time so their bosses wouldn’t yell at them. Weingarten mentions this, with appropriately high-toned references to Kant and Hume, but somehow seems to think that, in the end, this really shouldn’t matter much. There should have been throngs of culture lovers surrounding Bell anyway. It’s as if he normally lives on Mars and dropped by Earth for a few minutes to do some research for a sixth-grade anthropology project.
I’ve just spent 40 minutes reading the comments on that page, and most of them are even more hostile than that. Over at Salon, David Marchese went off on the piece, too:
The apathy came as a surprise to Weingarten, whose article evinces the kind of elitist snobbery that’s exactly what classical music doesn’t need. From the description of the crowd at one of Washington’s most “plebian” subway stations (“ghosts” with “ID tags slapping at their bellies”) to Bell’s shock at the fact “that people were actually, ah … ignoring me” to the title’s insulting swine allusion, the reader is treated to highbrow condescension of the highest order.
I don’t get it. The article seemed entirely good-natured to me. I don’t know anything about the violinist, Joshua Bell, nor about the writer, Gene Weingarten. But both men seemed to regard this as an opportunity to have some fun and maybe learn something. I learned a lot from the piece – not least of which is that there’s a solo violin composition I need to get hold of – and I did not come away with the impression that either the writer or the musician was being snooty or condescending.
Weingarten did a chat on the Post’s web site on Monday:
In slightly different ways, several people are asking the same question: Was this story intended to be an indictment of the soul of the federal bureaucrat? Was I suggesting that these people, by their nature, are less sophisticated, less open to beauty, less culturally mature, less aware of their surroundings, than the average person?
The simple answer is, no. It was not my intent, nor could anyone reasonably draw that inference from the story. We didn’t have a control group; we had only one shot at the experiment, and you just can’t fairly generalize one way or another. I really believe this.
Weingarten also offered this:
Before we start with questions, I want to give you this link sent by Helene Jorgensen. Nearly 20 years ago, Bruce Springsteen did a similar thing in Copenhagen, where he joined a street musician to perform “The River.” Not many people noticed him, either.
And:
[responding to a questioner] Why was the premise condescending? I can tell you honestly that the premise was nothing more than a zero-based experiment — we had no idea how it would turn out. My suspicion was that he’d be largely ignored (though not THIS largely ignored) but other editors felt just the opposite.
I’d like to know if anyone else found the tone of this story condescending. I really tried to avoid that. Frankly, I was glad that the Kantian scholar said the results implied nothing about the sophistication of the passersby. It would have been awkward if I’d been forced to conclude that these people were Philistines, because, deep down, I didn’t feel as though that was the case.
And:
Bell is a nice guy who can relax and have fun, and he was extraordinarily gracious to me. I don’t think this experienced humbled him, particularly, though he saw the humor in it. He knows it was not a referendum oh his talent.