Joshua Bell Flops as Street Performer
Pearls Before Breakfast – washingtonpost.com — A world class violinist pretends to be a busker. What happens? In an unbelievable indictment of the robot-like workforce in America a sick experiment puts the public to the test and they fail miserably. That said I can assure you that if the same test was done in a park or on a college campus the results would have been different. The London subway I suspect would have been different too. This should become a series and a TV special. Not only that but the violinist playing in the street was none other than superstar Joshua Bell. The article describing all this is a little long to read online I should add. Since neither music or art appreciation is taught in school anymore this sort of gag will always show up the public. That said, let’s face it the venue (aka packaging) does count. I bet if Bell went back to this venue and tried other music more in tuned with morning rush hour he’s get a flock of people.
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.
found by Bubba Ray Martin
31. ”Besides basically being about how awesome the author thinks Bell is (seriously, did the author get paid by the word or is the author the president of the Bell fan club? I got sick of reading about how awesome Bell is and how great is violin is, skipped a few paragraphs and the article was still talking about how awesome Bell and his violin was) the entire article amounts to “These savages don’t appreciate fine art!”’
No. This was about how awesome J.S. Bach is. This is about how the finest products of the finest minds go unrecognized. This isn’t as much about a personality as it is the disconnect in minds between thousands of years of human progress and where we are going. It’s about the inability to follow that advancement and arrive at where we are now, fully aware of what it took to get here.
I am one of those elitists who thinks it’s a shame that people don’t expand their horizons to include an understanding of counterpoint and functional harmony. Yes. I am one of the lucky ones and know it.
Wish I didn’t catch this as late as I did. There have been some revealing comments here.
Well, of course, the whole point is to put people to the test at that particular time– who ever really DOES stop when they’re in “gotta get to work, gotta do this and that and the other thing” mode? I’m pretty bad about it, admittedly… but I like to think that (saying I commuted that way) if I passed someone, especially a good looking guy, playing difficult pieces of music that aren’t heard much these days on as fine an instrument as that (I’ve never played a Strad but I’ve gotten up close and semi-personal), that I’d listen for as long as I could spare. The issue is all in what people think they can spare. Yeah, things wou;d’ve been different in the evening, and if it was other, more popular music. But I wonder, too, if they had fewer incidences of pick pocket-ings or anything like that; classical has been used numerous times to lower crime rates in neighborhoods ridden with it. Maybe it drove some people away even more (one person for sure, according to the article); if you don’t like the stuff, you won’t stop. If you time your schedule very strictly, you won’t stop. Why argue about that? We’re all the same, really…