One rush hour morning in January, the Washington Post ran a little experiment: having renowned violinist Joshua Bell play at a Metro station with his open violin case in front of him, like any other street musician, during a weekday morning rush hour. They wanted to find out what would happen. Given that Bell (who was raised in Bloomington, by the way) is a masterful violinist and an international star who can command hefty ticket prices, and that Washington DC subway riders are a fairly sophisticated audience, you might guess that word would spread and a crowd would gather; those who planned the event even wondered what they would do if enough people gathered to disrupt pedestrian traffic and cause a ruckus.
I’ve heard Bell play three times here in Bloomington, and I can vouch for the technical beauty of his playing and the richness of his emotional interpretations. I’d like to think that if I’d been in the Metro station that day, I’d have stopped and enjoyed the music. But if I’d been riding the Metro on a weekday morning, particularly if I were a regular, I’d probably have been just like almost every one of the nearly 1,100 people who passed through the station: rushed, focused on the day ahead, and too busy to stop and listen. Amazingly, only a handful of people stopped, and many of the people who passed through paid little attention at all. One man, who passed within four feet of Bell, was wearing his iPod headphones and didn’t even know a musician had been playing there at all. This article from the Post describes the experiment and the results, including interviews with some of the people who passed through that morning; there are three video clips.
This story raises a number of questions. One interpretation of what happened is that people need the proper context to recognize and appreciate great art, and the setting just didn’t give most people what they needed. This in turn raises questions in my mind about the relevance and purpose of art. On the one hand, if it’s beautiful, shouldn’t it reach people in and of itself? One man who did stop to listen said the music made him “feel at peace”, and another, who showed the most striking reaction to the music (staying and listening for nine minutes), said that hearing Bell play was “a brilliant, incredible way to start the day.” On the other hand, maybe art is often a little (or a lot) beyond our ordinary everyday life, and while it has the power to enlarge and enrich our worlds, it often can’t do so unless the conditions are just right. (Of course classical music is probably not exactly the universal language that I feel it is, and not everyone reacts strongly to it. But still, out of a crowd that big in a city like DC, you’d expect more people to at least pay attention.)
And how much are we ourselves responsible for providing the context that makes it possible to enjoy or appreciate art? The only demographic group that unfailingly responded to the music with evident curiosity and a wish to stop was children, and they were all hurried along by their parents. That suggests to me that part of the correct context for appreciating beauty is flexibility and openness to experience on the part of the listener or viewer. There are obvious reasons that we need to learn when and how to shut down a certain amount of our curiosity and openness as we grow into adulthood, but is it really necessary to shut down to the extent that we can pass by a superb musician playing superb music without even pausing? Evidently being in a hurry, heading to a meeting or planning a hectic day or dropping the kids at day-care, doesn’t put most people in a frame of mind that allows much attention to something sweet and unexpected that appears in the midst of the rush.
So this story also says something about the way we have chosen to live. The article mentions the movie Koyaanisqatsi, which I happened to see for the first time recently and which struck me as essentially an indictment of western industrial society’s artificiality, monotony, and sterility. There are some things about western industrial society that I like very much (being able to blog, for example), but it does seem very sad that it creates conditions in which such beautiful music could be offered and largely ignored. This story haunts me for that reason. I’m not going to wax nostalgic for bygone days when the pace of life was slower, because life was also a lot more physically laborious back then for most people, and I wouldn’t really want to live in another time or place (visit, maybe, but not live in). I enjoy the incredible wealth that we have right now, which stands in stark contrast to what people in previous times had, or even what people in some other parts of the world have right now. But one of the most valuable riches we have is the incredible availability of books and music, not to mention the instant, easy global communication that brings us access to performances and art that originated far away. And what’s the point of having all these cultural riches if people in the capital of the richest country on earth don’t have the time to stop and enjoy them?
There is a great response to the Joshua Bell article by a NYC subway musician in her blog: http://www.SawLady.com/blog
She interprets the situation differently from the Washington Post reporters… I thought you might find it interesting.
Very interesting, thanks! I knew there were other angles to the story than the ones I covered, but that particular take on it hadn’t even occurred to me. I wonder if the results would have been any different if he had gotten advice ahead of time from a savvy street musician.
Thank you Michelle — that is exactly what I was going to point out. They ignored the control group, the “only average” street performer. It is not great skill which makes great music, it is the way that the music interacts with your mental state. Using this metric, I saw lots of great music in the Times Square subway station every rush hour, and there were crowds watching some of the performers. But me, I was trying to get from A to B in a busy train station, so I learned to tune them out. I thought many of the performers were great, but I still never stopped.
When busking, it doesn’t matter if the musician is better than other musicians, it matters if the musician is great in that particular setting. That is all a commuter audience would measure.