A Virtuoso ignored, or - it's all about context, stupid!

I was really intrigued by what I am writing about today when I read about it in Julie's blog a few weeks ago, and then I forgot about it. Then, I was reminded of it by a shorter version of the Washington Post article about this "experiment" that appeared in the May 4 issue of The Week.

Here is what this "experiment" - which had been set up by the Washington Post's Gene Weingarten - was all about: On January 12, 2007, the 39 year old, amazingly handsome virtuoso violonist Joshua Bell who, according to Julie, "gets something like $1,000 per minute for solo performances in the world's fanciest halls" performed, for a period of 43 minutes, six classical pieces on his $3.5 million Stradivarius. The one particularity of this performance is that it took place during the morning rush hour (from 7:51 to 8:34) in the L'Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington, D.C.

This experiment was, according to the Washington Post one "in context, perception, and priorities - as well an an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

During those 43 minutes, 1,097 people passed by. "Seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change [note: that is not counting $20.00 given by Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, the only person who recognized Bell.] That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look."

And, by the way, Bell did not play easy little ditties. One of the pieces he performed, "Chaconne," from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor, is "considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master" and "it's exhaustingly long - 14 minutes."

Here is a shortish excerpt of Joshua Bell's performance in the D.C. subway - parts of it have been speeded up, ironically, in Koyaanisqatsi-style, making all commuters look like robots:



So, what happened here? Most of the passersby must have been educated folks - probably midlevel federal employees who are not foreign to classical music and high quality live performances in the most reputable Washington, D.C. venues. But, let's face it. Street performers often fail to make people stop in their tracks and listen to them. This was also rush hour which, as its name indicates, is a time when people are focused on making it to work on time, not on taking in a virtuoso violin performance.

Does this mean, as British author John Lane argues in his 2003 book Timeless Beauty, that there has been a "loss of the appreciation of beauty in the modern world," that "beauty has become irrelevant" because "our priorities have changed"? I am not convinced of that fact.

For sure, the attention span of most folks has become so short that, incapable of focusing on anything for more than 30 seconds, they incessantly switch channels with their remote-controls. And there's a lot of bad art, bad music, bad literature around that sells incredibly well to the masses, but I don't think that this is anything new. Bad taste is timeless, and the failure to appreciate great art did not begin with this generation - although it is true, to a point, that modern life has turned us all into drones. There was this interesting quote in the Washington Post article about this experiment:

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies -

But, basically, what this experiment proved is that, in a banal setting at an inconvenient time, beauty seldom, if ever, transcends, because context is everything.

And, interestingly enough, in a "live discussion with Washington Post writers," Gene Weingarten (April 9, 2007) mentions that, "nearly 20 years ago, Bruce Springsteen did a similar thing in Copenhagen, where he joined a street musician to perform 'The River'," and that "not many people noticed him, either." Frankly, I beg to differ. There is obviously a huge crowd gathered around Springsteen and the street performer and, at the very end of the performance, someone yells out a request for "Born to Run.") Check it out below (and I find it very cool that Bruce would play a song with a street performer, but I believe that it's just the kind of guy he is):



And this reminded me very vaguely of an experiment run years ago, when I was a teenager, on French TV. This was to find out if the words from the famous 1958 Serge Gainsbourg song Le poinçonneur des Lilas stating that the transit authority guy who punches your ticket is "Le gars qu'on croise et qu'on n' regarde pas" ("the guy you walk by and do not look at") were true. The producers of the variety show that had sponsored that experiment had Roger Couderc, a beloved French TV announcer and celebrity, perform the duties of ticket-puncher at the Paris Métro station Porte des Lilas, just to see if anyone would recognize him. Well, hardly anyone did. Again, because: 1. People probably do not pay attention to ticket-punchers, and 2. No one would have expected Roger Couderc to be the ticket-puncher.

And I would like to ask you, as Julie had done it on her blog - what about you? - Do you think that would have recognized an unusually masterful performance by this out-of-the-ordinary street musician? Would you have stopped to listen for a while, and would you have given him some money?