David Marchese said something similar at Salon today, so you're not alone. I certainly agree that the premise of the experiment was flawed and the tone of the writer's analysis was the sort of thing that makes people leery of classical music in the first place.

Yeah, I had about the same reaction as you, Kevin. The stoopidest part of the stunt was that they did it in the morning. When I used to ride the underground to work everday, I had zero time at all for buskers and bums on the way in. After work was a different story. You'd think that Weingarten would have caught on to the morning problem when the people who did stop all admitted that they'd stay but had to be somewhere. One more thing: I can't speak for DC, but if they'd set Bell up at the cable car turnaround at Powell & Market in San Francisco at noon on weekday in late June, it would have been a mob scene.

Joshua Bell? who dat?

if Paul and Ringo were there, playing a few Beatles songs, i'd bet a few hundred people would've happily missed their first hour of work.

I didn't read the article and won't, but I do wonder about one thing.

Did Joshua Bell have a hat, or his open violin case, set out for people to toss money into? If so, how much money did he make?

I think this is the question that comes first in the mind of any musician who hears about this.

High-toned cluelessness is a lifestyle.

SecularAnimist,
If you read the article, you'd know he collected about $40.

If Norman Rogers were playing the violin at a Metro stop, people would be throwing him quarters and pointing him to the nearest homeless shelter.

He would have made more if he had a little monkey with him.

It's not surprising most people would pass the violinist by. Even those who might have enjoyed pausing and listening for a while just didn't have that option.

At rush hour, the overriding purpose of most patrons is to get to work on time, not to peruse the station looking for unusually talented musicians or other charms.

The experiment was flawed. Most Americans do not listen to classical music in the first place, and are utterly unable to discriminate between an ordinary violonist and a great one. And the venue would lead most people to assume that the performer was probably not of the first rank, otherwise why would he be busking in a subway?

Yes indeed. Condescending and pretentious is how it struck me. As a federal worker, albeit at a different subway stop, it doesn't surprise me that people were rushing to work. People have to be at their desk, in meetings, answering phones and there is little if any tolerance for late arrivals.

If, on the other hand, he had set up shop at the Navy Memorial, 7th and Pennsylvania Ave., around noon on a nice day I have no doubt he would have attracted a crowd. There used to be this amazing blues guitarist there and people would just stand there gape mouthed, listen, mesmerized, toss in a few bucks, and walk away with a big grin on their faces.

Open case, around $32.

Absolutely on the mark. I'm really glad to hear you make this point. As a resident of the nation's capital, I really thought the article was a cheap shot. Excuse us for not taking vacation time from our jobs to listen to a fabulous violinist play on a weekday morning. That doesn't make us culture-less slobs. Ridiculous!!

to amplify Kevin's point...one or two people, former musicians all, did stop because they could tell a person of rare skill was playing....but the key part was having the training to recognize the skills in the first place.

(on a secondary note, the pieces that Bell played were not obscure...at least not within the classical repertoire)

I haven't read the article yet (I'm lazy-sorry) but did anybody even notice that it was a famous violinist? All those people and nobody knew who he was?

Yes, they should have done the experiment during the evening rush instead and the article was WAY too long.

Kevin, I don't agree that people, even uneducated in the classics, would necessarily be unable to recognize a rose in the manure. But, as with manure, context is everything, and unless the folks behind this tried at least three different locations and times of day, the experiment is even less than anecdotal. Given the wrong circumstances, the exact same thing could happen to Herbie Hancock, Renee Fleming, or Pat Metheny.

YES. YES. A thousand times, YES.

With all the posts I've seen about this article, I was starting to think I was the only one that had that reaction. My main thought, reading it, was about my mom, who's a hospital receptionist. If she's late for work, even by a minute (punches a mechanical timecard, you know) she gets "written up." If she gets written up a few times, she can be fired. She's been there for decades, and she worries that someday they'll take that excuse to get rid of her because of succession of tiny raises she's earned over the years. So she's never, ever late.

I thought it was utterly obnoxious for this (I'm sure) highly paid writer to sadly deplore the state of our culture and humanity based on the fact that people have to, you know, get to work. They don't stop to smell the roses! Not like me, the guy who has a writing job and, therefore, flexible hours. (I have a writing job, I'm basing that supposition on my experience.) The poor, sad, blind philistines!

Even the few people who stop are treated with gentle contempt. They don't know what they're listening to, they don't recognize Joshua Bell, how adorable that the grunts enjoy the pretty music!

Story said a lot more about the writer than the crowd. Condescending twaddle.

I think that the critical piece of information here is comparing how Joshua Bell did to how some random mediocre violinist would have done in the same circumstances. I see buskers every day, and know that most of them do several hours at a time in busy subway stations, and judging by the contents of their guitar cases $32 in just 45 minutes is a remarkably good haul, even for a busy station. Maybe someone with some busking experience can enlighten us.

The ratio of classical music listeners to non-listeners is about 2.5 per hundred based on CD sales (downloading extended classical works is still in its infancy.) Based on the facts of the recent Joyce Hatto CD forgery scandal the proportion of classical listeners (including professional critics) with any listening skills at all is 0.1 out of a hundred. I can't imagine what the Joshua Bell subway story was meant to prove except that NYT feature editors are really desperate for copy.

I didn't take it as a "tut tut" at all.

The exercise simply showed that performing in the subway is a something of a level playing field, no pun intended.

If you don't know anything about classical music or violin playing, that's no reason to get defensive.

Myself, I loved the video excerpts. I had to go over to utube and listen to Heifetz play the Chaconne, just so I could get it all.

One thing we probably agree about: the article was overwritten in the breathy adulation typical of classical music journalism. However lightly people make take violin playing in the subway, violinists will always get a bigger response than any critic. And that's a good thing.

What if he had set-up a tee-vee showing NASCAR reruns?

I'm a huge fan of Gene Weingarten (the writer), and liked the article a lot. I didn't get the sense that he condescended towards the people who didn't stop to listen to Bell. I think he drew two conclusions: that we're too busy, too distracted, to pay attention to what's around us, and also that we're far more subject to context than we think we are. There's a great illustrative example given by an art curator in the piece... people react to the value of something, not based on its inherent value, but because of what clues its context gives us about what we supposed to think. I also noted that the only people who really stopped to listen were people familiar with classical music and, specifically, the violin... they knew exactly how difficult Bell's playing was. Again, not surprising... but it does say something about our own (and the Washington Post's) expectation of what's valuable, what's Good. An interesting and provocative article.

I'm with Kevin. The conclusion to be drawn from this experiment is not that ordinary DC-ers have no appreciation of beauty, but that Gene Weingarten has no appreciation of reality.

one person recognized him.

he was somewhat disguised though (I think he would have been recognized by more people here in NY...Bell, although immensely talented, has engaged in plenty of self-promotion).

the article did note the "if he's playing in the subway he can't be that good" effect. well, duh.

of course, the real point is simply that only a small fraction of even classical music fans have the ability to discriminate between merely competent and superb playing. the differences are too subtle for most of us to discern. (thus the classic conundrum that a heralded performer can give a mediocre performance and still receive a standing ovation while a merely competent performer can give the best performance of her life and receive mostly polite applause.)

put differently, I know a lot more about wine then the average Joe but my palate loses its ability to distinguish degrees of quality at about the $100+ range...the number of people who actually can distinguish between a great first growth and a great second growth Bordeaux is exceedingly small...it doesn't mean that there's not a difference...just that not even most oenophiles are capable of distinguishing it.

Same reaction.

I consider myself a classical music lover, but when I'm riding the metro to work in the morning my mind is basically mush and is thinking of anything but highbrow music. This was a poorly thought-out stunt that proves exactly nothing. If Joshua Bell gave an announced free concert on the Mall, I'm sure he would attract a substantial crowd.

I can't get the video clip to load, but as far as I can tell most of the Metro passengers were within reasonable listening range of Bell for only a few seconds as they walked past. No doubt ambient noise was considerable. Given the little time in which the passengers could hear Bell's playing, most probably couldn't appreciate his talent even if they were knowledgeable about music.

I haven't read the article yet (I'm lazy-sorry) but did anybody even notice that it was a famous violinist? All those people and nobody knew who he was?

What were they supposed to do, anyway, if they recognized him? Point at him and shout "Hey! You're Joshua Bell! And you're playing Beethoven's Sixth Violin Sonata!"

Is Joshua Bell the famous violinist who snorted his father with the cocaines?

Forty Bucks an hour. That would give him an income of about $80,000 a year. Considering that the test was given during the worst time of the day, you can probably estimate that he would average around $60 per hour or $100,000 per year. I bet that is more than most classical musicians normally make. Nearly all the musicians I know have to supplement their income by teaching.

What you're reacting to, I think, is that the piece (as you describe it) isn't so much about classical music as class (socio-economic). It doesn't sound "high-toned" to me -- it sounds snooty.

Virginia Dutch:

um, that was the point of the article.

Take a chill pill, Kev.

I have one or two albums of Joshua Bell's; I listen to classical all the time. I'd like to think I would have recognized Bell had I walked by. That's not to say I would have had time to linger, but I would have tried to give him something in recognition of his skill.

Street musicians are quite common in the NYC subway and even more common in Paris, where they actually have to audition in order to receive a street performer's license. Part of the problem in DC is that hearing quality performances on streetcorners is unexpected.

I think the article is meant to be a lighthearted way to raise the question about the role of beauty in our everyday lives. In Barcelona you can walk right over Miro and Picasso tile designs embedded in the sidewalk. In Paris and in dozens of other cities throughout Europe you walk by grand architecture, sculpture, murals.

It's uplifting to be surrounded by beautiful art and music. The article is superficial in the sense that it doesn't explore the impact of Bell's playing on the people who couldn't stop -- maybe some of them did recognize Bell and the quality of his performance, they just had other obligations.

Imagine what a nicer place Washington DC would be if it got a reputation for quality artists performing inconspicuously around town. You might actually look forward to fighting the traffic.

I think artists need to do more of this to keep the tradition of quality live performance constantly revitalized. Use it or lose it. Especially classical -- we almost lost classical radio in DC thanks to Dan Snyder's banal sports talk radio.

I had the same reaction as Kevin, not because of the type of music or acoustics of the venue, but because people were trying to get to work.

I'm retired now, so I find myself stopping to enjoy a number of things that I didn't during the years when I had no freedom to linger. I needed the paycheck that would surely have been withheld had I showed up late for work with the explanation that I had run across a wonderful violinist on my way. I think more people fall into the category of not having flexible work hours than those who do.

My bad, $60 per hour would put him at $120,000 per year. Not bad for a classical musician not named Yo-Yo Ma.

Sorry, but there's just no way I am going to notice him unless he's on the wrong side of the escalator.

But if he's holding up my walking on the left side? I'd probably notice him as I tossed him over the side with the rest of the tourists.

I had a similar reaction as well, even though I thought the article was kind of interesting. It made me think, though, about the way we expect some music (and some performers) to be treated as So Important We Should Stop Everything We're Doing And Stand In Awe.

I'm with you.

The fatal mistake I think was a.m. at L'Enfant Plaza. Had it been in the afternoon, when people have more time -- the outcome would have been different.

Musicians routinely play outside the DuPont metro entrance on 19th Street, particularly on Fridays. A lot of people hang out at nearby tables. If the musician is good, I've seen people just lingering and listening. The musician gets a lot of tips. Joshua Bell should play there. He'd do well.

Also any lunch hour, any warm day, in any park. A good location.

Kevin, you're a philistine, with cats.

If the experiment had lasted a week, let's say, and Bell had played both the morning and evening rush hours, there would have been a cumulative response.

Beautiful music is beautiful music, in spite of the high-culture dorks who write about it. That station's commuters would have come to "own" their new performer, having change ready for donation and making time available to listen.

And Kevin, ask any busker. You can find amazing acoustics in the most unlikely places.

I enjoy classical music very much, especially works by Mozart. However, violin solos are like a nail gun to the temple as far as I'm concerned. Not to belittle a musician's dedication, but something about the high pitched squeals and rubbing of the strings sends me running for mute button. I'm afraid I would have hurried by him also.

Kevin, yes, I fully agree with your reaction. I'm also a classical music lover, with several amateur musicians and one professional in the family.
When I first saw the link via www.aldaily.com, it sounded like a great read. But the arrogance and condescension, and sheer wordiness, of the prose was a huge turn off. And then in the midst of it the writer describes Joshua Bell in the shallowest of terms ("hot," etc.), which makes the whole thing a farce.
This was a neat idea, although doomed from the outset by the reasons already mentioned by other commenters. But the writer of this article is an pretentious adolescent who needs to grow up, while shedding the patronizing tone.

Mr. Bell is a much better musician than I am, but he is no Aiman Mussakhodzhayeva.

Here's a minor scoop for Kevin Drum --- this isn't the first time Joshua Bell has done this sort of thing. My wife and I heard him play the very same Bach Chaconne in the atrium in front of the Harvard Co-op in Cambridge. This was 20 years ago, though, before he was famous.

What's more than bizarre as that the author, Gene Weingarten, in his weekly humor column in the back of WP magazine, plays the Dave Barry neanderthal, giggling uncontrollably over fart jokes. But in this article he's a culture buff who can't stop telling us that he was actually in the same room with Joseph Bell. You heard me, Joseph Bell! He let me hold his violin! Then we went out for drinks and talked for hours! It was fabulous!

say one thing positive for the story. it did fill the news hole.

What were they supposed to do, anyway, if they recognized him? Point at him and shout "Hey! You're Joshua Bell! And you're playing Beethoven's Sixth Violin Sonata!"

No, they were supposed to walk by and shout "Freebird".

Yes, I had exactly the same reaction. I am a classical music fan--I go to numerous concerts, and have a massive CD collection--but if I were rushing to work in the morning I'd go sailing right by Joshua Bell too. At most I might think as I walked by, he's pretty damn good to be playing in the subway. Rush-hour commuters are single-mindedly focused on getting to their offices--what an astonishing revelation. It was an incredibly silly article, and incredibly long too.

The article is long winded, and the philosophical asides a bit, well, sophomoric, but the story is a good one. If you play the video clips, the sound is actually amazing, even if acoustically challenged. I would like to think my attention would be caught...The best line (and the most telling) is from the shoeshine lady. Its the only time she hasn't called the police on a street performer invading her territory. She might not have known what she was listening to, but she was enjoying it well enough.

I thought it was interesting that the children all wanted to stop and listen to the music. I did think the article was kind of pretentious, but I wonder sometimes if we squish the joy of little things out of our kids in our rush to move along.

As another DC resident I had somewhat conflicting thoughts. I'm an opera subcriber and a fan, and would like to think I would have stopped, but who knows if it was during rush hour. That's really the cheap shot, doing it during rush hour. How about doing it during lunch, where people might have time to think about it and listen.

Although I disagree that the tone was "tsk tsk". Perhaps the most aghast reaction came from the single person who actually recognized him. She was horribly offended that people through quarters at him like Phillistines.

People are busy. Even people who like classical music are busy. Putting an internationally known musician of any kind wouldn't necessarily get noticed.

One unrelated note: A friend of mine was a guitarist for a platinum-selling rock/pop band. He swore that the BART (San Francisco Area) train stations had great acoustics and used to go there to noodle out new tunes. He said people always through money down, even if he didn't have a hat or case open.

The L'Enfant Plaza station does in fact have marvelous acoustics. I haven't read Weingarten's article yet, but I used to commute to the L'Enfant metro and it has one of those very long escalators. Even if you walk up (huff huff), it takes a while. And the street musicians very often had it staked out, because the sound is quite beautiful. The stone walls and the long narrow space are like a cathedral, with a long decay.

I know my classical music, and I can say in all honesty that if I had heard *any* violinist playing the Bach Chaconne, which Bell started out with, I would have stopped in my tracks and listened through to the end. That is one of the most cosmically stunning works in the entire repertoire.

The irony here is that for years, Joshua Bell has spent more time on crossover albums and fluff than he has on pieces like the Bach Chaconne. Classical musicians doing crossover middle-brow albums and concerts is an artistic compromise and a silly attempt to increase CD sales, but in this case is doesn't seem to have made him any more recognizable. For horror movie fans: the Chaconne is the piece played (on the piano) by the severed hand in Peter Lorre's "The Beast with Five Fingers," (1946).

The article made me sad, as did your reaction to it. Granted, I was a music performance major and I love classical music, but as the article showed, you don't have to be a trained musician to appreciate the beauty of the performance. Sure, as a scientific experiment, it sucked, but it's still a depressing comment on life in DC. Take the time to smell the roses, people!

Every experiment is flawed without a control.

Weingarten needs to run it again with Paris Hilton standing around without any underwear on, and compare commuter reactions.

The Supreme Court placed an incompetent and corrupt dwarf in the White House in 2000, and seven years later major figures in American media haven't yet noticed.

A violinist busking going unnoticed? He hasn't EVEN invaded a Starbuck's on immoral justifications.

I loved the article and didn't think it was snooty at all. In the article, the author notes Kant's belief that appreciation of beauty depends completely on context and that Kant himself would have probably just walked by-- whereas children were the only demographic that consistently tried to observe. America's work ethic is quite different than what you find in other parts of the world. I didn't take any of that as condescending.

I enjoyed the story, but I didn't think much of the conclusions drawn. The sound was amazing.
Going to work on time was obviously the most important thing for these people. To do a fair test, Bell should have played in the evening.
By the way, whether they recognized his face was totally beside the point. No one would need to see Pavarotti's face to recognize an amazing voice. Likewise, listening to that music would have clued any one familiar with violin music that this was a world class player. He played in tune, for god's sake! Do you realize that there are probably only a handful of people who can play the violin reliably in tune, let alone make wonderful music?

Come on guys lighten up.

To me the article was talking about how busy and driven we Americans are not how poorly educated in the arts we are. While I can agree that as a scientific experiement it left a lot to be desired, are all of you complaining because you really think the article was bad or because you feel a little guilty knowing you would run by without giving him a second look as well.

Yes, we are slaves to our jobs and for some of us the consequences of being late can be catastrophic, so we put on our blinders and get there as soon as possible. Yes, picking the morning commute is harder than the after work commute, but isn't that the point. Do you really think the French or Itlians would have been so quick to brush past him without a second glance? Yes, they are better educated in classical music than we Americans are, but they also have a totally different approach to work than we do. I love my country and all that we are able to accomplish, but you have to think about the quailty of life issues as well. We live in a society where someone's mom can be fired for being a few minutes late to work on more than one occassion regardless of the quality of work she does while on the clock or if she makes up the time by staying late. This article shows the problems Americans have with relations to our jobs and work not problems recognizing beauty.

We are a nation that lives to work instead of a nation that works to live. Maybe if we started to change that a lot of the problems in our society would begin to heal. People would have time to listen to great works of art in a subway station and kids would have parents that spend more time with them than on the "Jones Account". I am not tryiong to make a judgement on any one person's life or reasons for working hard, I am just saying as a nation we are more obsessed with what we can afford to buy than what we are offered for free.

The most obvious point ignored by the article was that almost every true music aficionado passing by would have had an ipod on and so wouldn't have heard the virtuoso.

But I have to disagree with the gist of Kevin's post and the comments. The fact that only one person was aware enough to notice something extraordinary and then flexible enough to spare a few moments out of his day to pay attention is a sad commentary, if not on our levels of taste then on our level of busy-ness.

The truly salient point, while it may be an annoyingly easy point to score, may have been the point made by the woman from Brazil quoted in the article as saying that in Brazil a huge crowd would have gathered without a doubt. I think that's probably true.

The weirdness that the article discovers may not be the weirdness that it thinks it discovers (lack of good taste) but something more insidious: how our urban workers are plugged into the clock and into their own streams of media in ways that prevent them from responding authentically to events in the world around us.

Sort of like the SCLM!

I enjoyed the article, and agree completely with pj in jesusland's post above. I didn't really find it condescending, just an interesting case study in musical sociology.

Also, Kevin is completely wrong to take the angle he did by dissing the acoustics. Just from the crappy lo-fi video footage, it is quite obvious that the guy sounds AMAZING in there. Which is not to say that I would have recognized it if I was in a hurry to get to work. But that's kind of the point.

However, On the other hand, If it was Disney's Goofy playing the violin, badly, The crowd would have been enormous.

Gene Weingarten is another symptom of the Post's terminal condition, living proof that pomposity may make one ridiculous, but ridiculous is not the same as funny.

Hell, I payed 50 bucks to see Joshua Bell last year. And he only played for 30 minutes. I could have seen him for free for an hour. He's good but he's no Itzhak Perlman, or Stephane Grappeli, for that matter. And Midori is cuter.I wonder if Bell preened at the subway like he always does on the concert stage.

When I came across the part where this experiment was being run in the morning rather than the evening rush, my instant reaction was 'game over.'

In the morning, as at least two commenters have already pointed out, people are half-awake, and just trying to get to their jobs on time; they don't have the freedom to take notice of that violinist on the platform. In the evening, they're awake (if tired) and are more likely to be able to spare a few minutes to hang around and listen to the music.

If they'd done this experiment in the evening, that might've been interesting. Morning? Not so much.

I didn't get the impression that they actually expected anyone to recognize Bell (even though one person did) so I don't know if that is a totally fair criticism.

I am also not sure it is really a commentary on America's lack of interest in or knowledge of classical music.

To me it is more of a commentary on how busy everyone is that for those without cellphones/ipods that the music didn't even seem to register with most people much less that people could (have the time) or would bother to stop and actually listen. Saying that, people zone out in the Metro system I know I did when I rode it. For many it is their time alone - no boss, spouse, kid, or other demand on their time/attention - for others they just are in a hurry to get where they are going.

Maybe using Joshua Bell was his control. Next, he's going to have Keith Richards play at the metro, and see what happens.

If he wanted folks to take notice he should have used Hilary Hahn.

I'm just sayin'....

Gotta tell you though............if this were a metro station in Kiev or elsewhere in eastern Europe there would have been a crowd around him. People would have stopped and they wouldn't give a shit if they had to get to work or not. I know...I have seen it happen with just unknown but good musicians over there.

I slept last night in a good hotel
I went shopping today for jewels
The wind rushed around in the dirty town
And the children let out from the schools
I was standing on a noisy corner
Waiting for the walking green
Across the street he stood
And he played real good
On his clarinet, for free.

Now me I play for fortune
And those velvet curtain calls
Ive got a black limousine
And two gentlemen
Escorting me to the halls
And I play if you have the money
Or if youre a friend to me
But the one man band
By the quick lunch stand
He was playing real good, for free.

Nobody stopped to hear him
Though he played so sweet and high
They knew he had never
Been on their t.v.
So they passed his music by
I meant to go over and ask for a song
Maybe put on a harmony...
I heard his refrain
As the signal changed
He was playing real good, for free.
- Joni Mitchell

This is just an example of how context is important in the whole world of art. If the Mona Lisa was hung in a garage somewhere without it's fancy frame, odds are the average person would not recognize it as a "masterpiece". Take the art out of the context of the museum or the theater or whatever and odds are people will not recognize it for what it is. That's not a commentary on American civilization but on human nature.

I have to disagree completely here. There may have been parts of the article that came across as condescending, but the subject matter is inherently pretentious.

It may have tsked-tsked a little bit, but let's face it: the world would be a better place if people took a little time to smell the roses on the way to work. When I lived in NYC, I loved seeing the performers in the subway stations and now I miss that dreadfully. The article may have had its faults, but I think it had a point.

Hmm. I don't get the negative reaction. It was a "stunt" (as both Bell and the story itself admit), not intended as a scientific experiment. No claims or estimates are given as to the prevalence of people who in a different circumstance would have recognized Bell or his competence. That it was done at rush hour was entirely appropriate - when else should they have done it? When the platform was empty? I found the article quite interesting, particularly for the observations of the former or current amateur musicians ranging from beurocrats to deli employees, all of whom recognized that they were in the presence of something special. The video vignettes are great as well.

The point of the article wasn't that the great unwashed can't appreciate beauty, it was that the circumstances of our lives make even the extraordinarily beautiful difficult to discern.

Some seem to feel that the article as an overly precious attempt to prove that we choose not to "stop and smell the roses." If so, it succeeded. If you want to refute the premise by arguing that people are busy during rush hour, then you've conceded the point.

If Bell were in Kiev, he'd have been shot by Putin.

Kevin,

It proves nothing, of course. But I'm certain I would have recognized that the violin playing was superb even under the circumstances. Any decent musician would.

Whether I would have stopped for any length of time is another story. But when I do hear good music playing in the subways in NY, I always give generously. l

Having never used public transportation, I can tell you that this approximates what I believe to be true--it is only the cogs of society that use public transportation. No one with the means or the education to recognize a fine violinist would be caught dead trying to stuff coins into the slot of some Metro train thing or whatever. Anyone with the capability of recognizing this performer was driving to work in a fine automobile or was being transported by a vehicle with a paid driver and security. Perhaps they were listening to a recording done by Mr. Bell on their way past the Metro stop! Ha! Wouldn't that turn the tables? I think so!

And which Metro stop does he claim all of this took place at? Some of those stops in Washington DC are in decidedly liberal areas of high crime and gunplay. I am told that some people have to carry mace and body armour just to get to the Treasury building.

Im not a philistine, but this is not a town where people are deterred from work because they encountered a good musician. It's not common for musicians to engage in urban free lancing around the metro stations at least partly because this is a hyper scheduled town that gets to work earlier rather than later. If they had set him up on the mall on a nice Saturday at 10:00 am or later, well, maybe the result would have been different. Certainly, you can see musicians at choice spots at night and on nice weekends and while they might not attract a crowd, people do stop and give money. You would think someone who lives around and writes about Washington D.C. would have figured all of this out.

Yeah, I was all ready to have that same indignant reaction to the article, but after reading it (and I imagine very few commenters actually did) I found my rage dissipated.

My three remaining reactions are:

1. Sadness that I missed it.

2. Gratitude -- I'd never heard the Chaconne before, and now I know about it. It's like finding buried treasure.

3. Amusement at the savage anti-anti-elitism here on display.

I had a similiar reaction; however, I took the article's use of Kant and Hume as almost a tongue in cheek way of alluding to how extravagent the idea was.

I second this. Weingarten is a great writer. His "The Great Zucchini" deserves a Pulitzer. He is not at all condescending (as you or perhaps Atrios put it). Lighten up, Kev.

I've never heard the name 'Joshua Bell'.

How the hell would I recognize his face or his music?

I just thought the article was way too long. It had the sense of a guy who had a certain amount of space he needed to fill.

No one cared much about his music because probably no more than five people out of a hundred enjoy classical music at all — and fewer still recognize the difficult pieces he decided to play. What's more, 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.

Well, yes, that was part of the point.

of course, the real point is simply that only a small fraction of even classical music fans have the ability to discriminate between merely competent and superb playing. the differences are too subtle for most of us to discern.

Even more yes.

Kevin, you really are an idiot. The pretension here is yours in that you evidently are so stuck in your own pre-conceptions of what point someone writing an article about a famous violinist playing anonymously in a Metro station would be trying to make that you utterly failed to grasp the openended nature of Weingarten's experiment. It was a meditation on all the issues that you raised without definite conclusions. My respect for you just dropped about 95%.

For those who raise the issue about why L'Enfant was used, apparently for legal reasons it was the only station that could be used.

If you want to hear a violinist play the Bach Chaconne, go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_1hS5LeBm0

Somebody needs to feed the inferiority complex that drives many voters into Rush Limbaugh's anti-intellectual embrace.

"And which Metro stop does he claim all of this took place at?"

The station at the L'Enfant plaza. This fact was easy to miss, buried as it was in the first sentence of the piece.

See my above remarks about how few of the torch-and-pitchfork crowd here gathered bothered to read the article.

(also, scratch one "anti" from above)

I tried making money while playing the dangling sax at the Farragut West Metro Stop.

I didn't make any money, but I did get propositioned by Al.

Norman, nice try, however people pay top dollar in the D.C. Metro area so that they CAN use its metro system with minimal inconvenience. It's not hyperbole to state that being within walking distance of metro probably adds $200,000 to the value of a three bedroom house.

Well, I thought it was a nice piece, and I think your reaction is incredibly irritating.

From the article: "cute elides into hott [sic]"

? ! ?

And a lot of this is based on the assumption that ordinary street musicians suck.
That's simply not true. They run the gamut from terrible to amazingly good. So Joshua Bell on a street corner is not the framework-shattering event they think it is.
And nobody busks morning rush. If you were giving gourmet meals away, with the proviso that you had to sit down and eat it, most people would pass you by.
My reaction would be, in this situation, to make a mental note of how good he was and come back to the station at lunchtime to see if he was still there. Of course, nobody checked for that.

Nobody recognized Joshua Bell cuz he ain't on the cover of Us magazine. I like him, but wouldn't know him from Snoop Dog.

I am an amateur violinist so probably would have stopped and listened. The article made me a little sad, but I do agree, it was stupid to have him play during rush hour. I agree with the post that said he should have stayed for a week and built up a buzz. In NYC he would have attracted attention right away I bet!

I am told that some people have to carry mace and body armour just to get to the Treasury building.

It must be wingnuts carrying the body armor, since most rational human beings understand you have to wear the armor for it to be effective.

And I'm sure the only driver Norman's had is his mother.

Putting your last two posts together, let's all pay much more attention to public utterances, particularly of the cell phone kind. If we listened, commented, took notes, recorded, grinned and elbowed the person next to us...maybe the yappies would cut it out. On the other hand, two people I wanted to hear from called me yesterday...both while standing in line, one at an airport, the other at a buffet. As for the charming and talented Mr. Bell, he wouldn't get much of a crowd for a concert hall appearance on Friday at 8 a.m. Buskers and panhandlers could have told him the best times and places.

On any level, we have taste in our ass, pressed for time or not... (Kincaid,Serrano,Warhol,Hockney).
You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.

I've listened to classical music all my life and my kids (horrors) are serious violin students who've met and heard Josh Bell. I will tend to agree that the experiment wasn't capable of making any sort of scientifically sociological findings, but if you read today's online discussion at the Post website, you'll find out more about the conditions that tended to force the date/time/place they chose (HINT: DC's Metro System bureaucracy didn't cooperate).

That said, I think there's a big bunch of overreaction here, by Kevin and others. Heaven knows DC's culture and atmosphere needs a break from the Jersey Barrier Mentality that has become a staple of the War on Terror (TM). Like the lady from Brazil, I also wonder how this would have "played out" in other countries such as Venezuela or Brazil (or China for that matter) which have growing classical music activity and general knowledge on a level that does make americans seem pretty clueless about it.

Had they run this experiment during the rush home, you would have undoubtedly seen more people stop and listen.

The article's writer clearly has the attitude of "you dumb plebes", much the same as the talk-down tone of the media to bloggers.

I think it was an interesting idea, really. And I'm sure that most people would be familiar with Ave Maria, even if they couldn't name it. It would probably make more sense to have him do it at the end of the day, when people would have more time to stop, but it looks like most people didn't even give him a glance. If it says nothing else, it is a comment on Americans' fear of street/homeless people. It might say a lot of other things about people not having time to enjoy something like that, the lack of interest in classical music, and the preference for home entertainment rather than a live musician, etc. It wasn't perfectly done, but I thought it was an interesting sort of experiment.

That isn't how I took the article at all. I don't think they were expecting anyone to recognize him, that wasn't the point. I took it more that Bell is considered a brilliant artist, and in our modern world, where we are all very busy and have to get to work on time, is there any rare and unexpected beauty that could override our daily grind? And isn't it sad that our society is structured like that? I am not a classical music fan at all, but it left me wondering if there are people who are talented enough that they transcend their listeners' usual tastes.

The article also made me think about how we don't appreciate beauty until we are told by experts that it is beauty. Like if he is charging $100 a ticket, he must be good, but we wouldn't appreciate a busker. I wondered how many talented musicians have for whatever reason not had the breaks that Bell has had, and instead end up down and out as street musicians. Would we still appreciate the beauty of their music?

I found the article thought provoking.

I was a professional violinist for 40 years and have performed the Chaconne myself a few dozen times, a few of them in unconventional places (like a crowded bar in the middle of a blizzard). Acoustics or not, one of the things that listening to music like that is that details matter a lot, and that is why classical concerts are silent except for the playing. One violin, unless amplified to the point of distortion, will be mostly swallowed up in a busy underground station at rush hour and most of what makes a performance "great" as opposed to "good" or just "adequate" will be lost even to a discerning ear. Not to mention that the experience that such music provides the listener is like meditation --- in its inwardness --- as easily try to find enlightenment in a mosh pit! The whole thing is foolish.

Anyway, in my estimation, Joshua Bell is not the most compelling performer on the violin...like many he has a surfeit of chops and a deficiency of soul. Mostly I suspect he was just exercising his not-insignificant ego. Maybe he learned something.

He should try it at Times Square.

Someone asked how this compared to your average busker. It's a good question, but one that depends greatly on the city.

In SF, where playing in the BART/MUNI station is well respected, competition for the good traffic/acoustic spots is brisk. Though mornings are always worse (your point about people needing to get to work is true), one can average anywhere from $20 to $60 per hour for the two hours between 7:30 and 9:30. At nights, it's higher, and noon at one of the places people like to sit and eat lunch can be as much as $200 for a two hour "performance," which is pretty good money by musician standards.

In DC, you're not supposed to be allowed to play in the Metro. An indication of Mr. Bell's skill is that nobody asked him to leave. People may not have known what he was playing, but they knew he was good. They might not have put it in those words, but their actions tell an important story.

I confess that, though I play a half dozen instruments and have played professionally, I don't much care for all that many classical pieces, and my knowledge of them is therefore basically limited to the few I do like and the few dozen I taught myself to learn how to play the violin, bass and cello. As such, it's unlikely I would have stopped for more than a few minutes.

That said, I do try to toss something into anyone's case if s/he is busking. Whether or not they have great skill, and I've heard every level of skill on the street, from terrible novice to innovative virtuoso, it's hard to play the street. You have to keep smiling, keep trying to make a connection with people who are trying to get through their own lives. But when you do, it's a beautiful thing.

I agree that the article was pretentious, and unaware of the reality of busking for most musicians, espcially here in DC. But I, unlike the author, was impressed by the taste of the listeners to not kick the artist out, and not at all disappointed with $40 or so in an hour.

I live in San Francisco and go through the Montgomery street metro station, which often has several clusters of musicians in several different generes playing to the passersby. There's on guy who plays clarinet who I always look forward to, even though I only slow down a little as I pass by. One morning he was playing Naima by John Coltrane and I got goosebumps. On one other occasion, somebody walked up to a different jazz player, this guy was on a standup bass, I think, and gave him several dollars and said "you're a life saver."

Even more interestingly, a string quarter often plays in the same station and almost always they draw a cluster of people who seem to have been physically arrested by the music.

Whenever I see these onlookers, I feel some envy toward them. Even at live performances, the music doesn't always inhabit me the way it seemed to inhabit these people. But when I make the choice to stop and look and listen a little while, I start to pickup on what they're experiencing.

One thing I'd also point out is that the montgomery street station's open area is significantly larger than the one in the bell video. If you only give people about 4 seconds to demonstrate their ability to recognize the grandeur of an expression of art, they're not going to do well.

Sorry, in my post just above I meant "Finland", not Brazil. Those two countries are *so* much alike!":-o

This was my first taste of Gene Weingarten's work, and I loved it. It made my morning. And most t of the objections that I've read by people here were actually dealt with in the article, leading me to wonder how many people read it all the way through.

This is the kind of thing you're supposed to read liesurely over coffee. Spend some time with it. He wasn't pointing fingers at anyone of deriding anybody's taste. He simply had a thought and the wherewithall to pull off a magnificent prank and then spend some time musing about it.

Perhaps its the framing, or perhaps it's that we're all so serious and upset at the state of world affairs, but it looks to me as if just as many people passed by this article in a rush to get somewhere else as passed by a superb musician making superb music.

I have no doubt that if performers of the artistic stature of Julius Cheeks, Archie Brownlee, or William Edgar John returned from the grave to perform in the same spot at the same time as Joshua Bell that Gene Weingarten would walk on by utterly clueless to the artistry he was ignoring and/or dismissing.

I have never understood the argument of so-called "classical music" fans to think what they appreciate is of a higher quality than all other forms of music, by all other cultures, from all the eras of mankind's evolution.

I'll second the 'Powell & Market turnaround.'

There is always someone there - the Tap Dancing Guy, or various steel drum player.
The BART station below often has 2 or 3 performers of varying quality. For the most part, it OK but not great. If I stop to listen, it has to be something out of the ordinary, and standard classical music is less likely to stick out.
If one person out of a hundred stops to listen, that is a good catch, IMHO.

Sounds to me like Joshua Bell did pretty good. I know a lot of very talented, highly skilled, hard-working musicians who would be glad to make $30 to $40 for 45 minutes work.

In Weingarten's defense, he never claims to be a classical music fan, or knowledgeable about it.....in fact he described in the chat how little he does know about the genre. Which is fine from the standpoint of trying to appreciate something.

Try reading the article, folks.

I really enjoyed the article. I think you're
missing the point - I felt it was much more a knock
against the concept of elitist "high art" than a
knock against the inhabitants of DC. Take away
the trappings of fancy clothing, high ticket prices,
and publicity, and is there anything particularly
compelling in the music and performance itself ?
And the answer was equivocal - kids were fascinated,
a few people with serious interest in the violin
or classical music got it; for the rest of us, it's
just noise and we've got other things to do.

Also interesting were Bell's own comments: that he
felt very nervous performing in a context where
the audience wasn't on his side from the start;
and that he really got motivated to try to get a
reaction. Also loved his comment that he could
actually make a living earning $40/hour like
this.

In full disclosure, I'll say that I play the
violin, have spent a couple of decades hacking
through the Bach partitas in private, and have
played (folk, not classical) in subway stations.
The acoustics are usually quite flattering for a
solo instrument or small ensemble, though of
course a big orchestra would turn to mush from
the excessive reverb.

I have no doubt that if performers of the artistic stature of Julius Cheeks, Archie Brownlee, or William Edgar John returned from the grave to perform in the same spot at the same time as Joshua Bell that Gene Weingarten would walk on by utterly clueless to the artistry he was ignoring and/or dismissing.I have never understood the argument of so-called "classical music" fans to think what they appreciate is of a higher quality than all other forms of music, by all other cultures, from all the eras of mankind's evolution.

Again, it would be wise for those who wish to comment on the article to ACTUALLY READ IT before commenting. If you had read it, you would realize how not all to the point of the article your comment is.

Personally I don't care for classical music, but I wouldn't mind cashing in on it. After reading this article, I can imagine all those pensive erudite folks clogging the metro passageways appreciating music they don't have a clue about. I tell you this town is f..up with showoff wannabees.

I thought the article was a bit of a waste of space. Couldn't help but think, though, that the results may have been a bit different if: a) the violinist was not restrained by the WaPo's selection of music and instead was allowed to select a few more numbers that might have better recognition capability for the masses and b) the act was pulled off during the afternoon rush rather than the morning rush.

m.l.e.: I can assure you that Joshua Bell could pack in concert hall at 8:00 a.m. on a Friday. he is a perennial sellout...and one of the very few classical musicians to actually make a seven-figure income.

J.B...although I'm not a musician myself, I come from a family of string musicians...some of whom make a living at it. the reality is that a violinist (or most other instruments for that matter) of rare skill will be identified as a prodigy at a young age (if they have the parental support to take up the instrument in the first place)...after that scholarships will pave the rest of the way. seriously.

with that said, pulchritude, showmanship and self-promotion make the difference between a mega-selling performer and your average Juilliard grad making a middling income teaching and occasionally performing.

bubba:

on what planet is Ave Maria not about as recognizeable as any piece he was going to play?

It's interesting how many defensive comments there are here, in line with Kevin's own. Kevin admits he doesn't know quite why he's so upset. I suspect the same is true for many other posters. DC's basic fear of culture, and buried sense of its own lack, seems to me what's at play. Yes, we have grand, fancy institutions of high art, which function for senator's wives and others on whom culture is a respite for what's considered important. As many people here have said, many other cities around the world, and elsewhere in the US, have a far greater open-ness to art. They also have Metro systems with lots more music and art allowed within them. But we, in our dedication to business and power, have it socialized out of us. And then somehow get upset when its pointed out.

I read the article yesterday, and as a New Yorker, my only reaction was that it must be something about DC culture. I imagine that there are subway stops in NYC that would be equally filled with people rushing to get to work who wouldn't take the time to stop and smell the roses (Wall Street area, for instance).

But I know for a fact that most people in NYC's subways *do* stop for a moment and throw a dollar or two into the hat.

There seems to me to be a cultural difference in that people in certain lines of work will relate to streeet culture differently than others. In NYC, there's not really a time of day that the subways are empty (except very late at night). Yes, the subways are more packed from 8 to 10am and 4 to 7pm, but they aren't empty the rest of the day. People go to and leave work at all hours, and I see them pause and listen and toss a quarter in the cup all the time.

Maybe it's because the MTA encourages buskers by auditioning them and giving them permits to play. This guarantees lively music and performances of all kinds, and keeps the quality at a certain level.

But I come back to the thing that keeps me living in NYC: people here are different than they are in major cities in the rest of the country.

And I'm eternally grateful for that.

James K. Power: The saddest part of the American music scene is the mindless self-segregation it inspires among listeners. As the child of an opera/classical music obsessed mother, I learned that people who truly love music love a lot of different (not necessarily all) kinds of music. My friends thought my mother was freak because she made them listen to opera if we had to car pool anywhere on a Saturday afternoon. They would ask her: What kind of music do you like best? And she would say: I like good music. And they would say: But what do you consider to be good music? And she would say: Music that I like. She and my aunt developed a crush on Billy Joel (yeah, I know) and went to see him live anytime they could. My mother also refused to buy a stereo until 1975 because she found recorded music to be uninteresting.

Musicians in the metro are rare, but like a lot of other musicians they usually build up an audience over time. A one time experiment doesn't seem fair.

And no one points out the obvious--

Put the execrable Dave Matthews in the tube and have him strum his guitar and sing his sad-sack little tunes and the masses would bow before him and squeal with excitement.

There is an appreciation for beauty in this world; there's just no accounting for taste, you see.

nathan: ave maria was one of 10. The rest were not pieces readily recognizeable.

Yup, Gene, you da bomb. How 'bout a few more needles in DCs bloated sense of self-importance? Can't wait to see what outraged letters there'll be in the Post mag next week.

And if I remember correctly, the piece specifically states that the WaPo intentionally chose most of the pieces to be selections that would not be instantly recognizeable by the masses.

To quote the article: "The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest."

I liked the article, but it would have been better if it had ended with someone beating Bell up and running away with the violin. The fact that it did not made me doubt that humanity has fallen to the depths the media usually wants us to think it has.

bubba: whatever. what they mean was that he didn't play Stairway to Heaven

nathan: really? ar