This has been bothering me…
I commute everyday from Stamford, Connecticut to New York City. It’s a 50 minute train ride, and truth be told, I enjoy it. In the mornings I write, and in the evenings I work or sometimes read. The time on the train is not only productive, but it gives me time to ramp up for, or wind down from, the day.
Each morning my train arrives in Grand Central, typically on track 102, which is on the lower level of the station. We exit the track by the food court, and just a few feet from the officially sanctioned Grand Central Station street musician of the day. Sometimes it’s a person playing a piano and singing, sometimes a guitar, once even a harp.
Today, the busker in question was a violinist. And that’s what got me thinking.
Seeing this man scratch a bow across his strings reminded me of this Washington Post story from way back in 2007.
Click here to view the embedded video.
The main thrust of the article, which became something of an Internet meme when it was first published, was this:
The Post paysid one of the best violin players in the world, Joshus Bell, to stand in a busy Metro station during rush hour and play the classics of classical music on a 300 year-old Stradivarius. It’s a sociological experiment to see how people will react. Will they recognize beauty in their midst? Will they walk by Bell as they would any other street performer?
The answer is the latter. Almost no one stops to pay attention or give money. Bell plays for 45 minutes to an empty house, only it’s not empty. It’s full of people who just don’t seem to care.
When the story was first published, I was blown away. I saw it as a stunning example of humanity’s incapacity to appreciate art, and a devastating critique of how isolated and alienated we had each become.
Then as two strange things happened:
1. I had kids. Two of them, two years and five months apart, both boys, each a mini universe around which my love and devotion now orbits.
2. I started commuting. When the story was originally published, I was a car commuter — 35 minutes each way, usually listening to college radio, NPR, or sports talk.
The point is, my perspective has changed since 2007. Now I think the Post article kind of sucks.
Where I might have once sympathized with Bell and with the Washington Post brains behind the stunt — and yes, it was a stunt not an experiment — I now find myself looking at them with derision.
I was reminded of all this when I passed by the violinist in Grand Central this morning. I wondered for a second if he was, like Bell had been, an incognito virtuoso. Was I missing something? But here’s the thing. I didn’t care. I didn’t have time to care.
I leave my house as late as I possibly can each morning so I can spend the maximum amount of time with my boys. When my feet hit the ground at Grand Central, they’re practically running. Which, if you look around, seems to be true of pretty much everyone else. (There’s a reason for that expression, “It’s like Grand Central Station in here.”) I am not, as I step off my commuter train, in a frame of mind, nor do I care to be, to evaluate the proficiency of the street musician in question. It could have been Itzhak Perlman, and I wouldn’t have known, wouldn’t have cared.
The commute is a means to an end, but not an end itself. We are in transit because we have someplace to be. The reason no one appreciated Bell’s brilliance in DC is because no one listened. And honestly, that’s okay. Is it indicative of a sickness in our culture where work-life balance is out of whack? You betcha. But I’m not sure the Post article really helped.
And there’s something else that bothered me, too. Even if I had stopped, I wouldn’t have had the skill set to know that Bell was “all that.” Really, there are some damn good street musicians. Are any as gifted as Bell? Likely not. But I doubt that the average listener could tell the difference between the best street fiddler and the best concert violinist.
The whole thing was really an insult to buskers everywhere. “See, people ignore you, poor dumb busker, because they should. You’re no Joshua Bell.” Not nice!
And while I’m ranting, how many people still listen to Classical music anyway? I’m a musician so don’t get me wrong, I understand and appreciate that Bach was a genius, an uber genius. I’ve even bothered to teach myself one Bach piece on the piano, and I don’t even play the piano. But he’s dead. Has been for a long time as I understand it. Had Bach been playing today, he might be writing rap songs. But I digress.
The point is, how are we supposed to know if the music is especially good if there is no baseline in our knowledge against which to judge it? Most of us wouldn’t know beautifully rendered classical music from adequately rendered classical music.
So I found myself today thinking about that Post article, and now want to formally distance myself from my original opinion. If in 2007 I forwarded you the link with a “how cools is this? caption, I apologize.
Maybe I can atone by giving a buck to a real street musician rather than some classically trained savant who just happens to be slumming it.
And hey, you want me to stop and listen? Next time get Bruce to play Growing Up acoustic.
