Do you have time for beauty?
BlogKing April 28th, 2007
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
…while passing thru a Washington DC subway station during morning rush hour.
The Washington Post did an experiment to see if commuters would be entranced by the music from a world class performer (violinist Joshua Bell) if they did not know who was performing. Would they stop en mass and cause a commotion or would they be oblivious?
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.
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?
This is a suberb piece of writing by Gene Weingarten. Maybe there is hope for the nation’s newspapers. Instead of trying to compete with TV for sound bite reporting and the race to banality, this example of long form reporting (over 7000 words) is just the ticket to endear the paper to new readers eager for a return to cilivilized exposition. It is an entralling read interspersed with video clips - like an anthropology study for the rest of us.
IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?
It’s an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?
The Post was kind enough to post the complete audio of Mr. Bell’s 45 minute performance. Even with the background noise the playing is still a treat.
Take the time now to read this article. Appreciating Beauty is worth your time.
Yes, I always have time to stop and listen to subway musicians - I think they are amazing. At least, here in NYC they are.
One of them, the ‘Saw Lady’, wrote about the Joshua Bell experiment in her blog http://www.SawLady.com/blog - her point of view is interestingly different. It takes a busker to know busking, I guess.
Personnally I think Bell did this experiment as a publicity stunt - it got everybody to talk about him, even people who have never heard of him before, like me!
Thanks for the comment Michelle. I didn’t know how important busking was to street performance. Obviously he has no aspirations to be a street musician, so that could explain it. I admire his courage to give it a shot, whether he was motivated by publicity or curiosity.